MLN 127(3) April 2012 (German Issue - Benjamin, Scholem, Cohen)

Introduction to the Special Issue❦

Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias

The friendship between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem has long been a subject of scholarly interest, but in recent years critical attention has turned to the influence of the German-Jewish philoso-pher Hermann Cohen on Benjamin’s and Scholem’s approach to religion, history, epistemology, and ethics. As a founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, Cohen represented one of the major trends in German thought at the turn of the twentieth century. He sought to replace transcendental subjectivity with an objectivity formulated strictly in terms of the “fact of science.” Cohen also represented a rational Jewish theology defined by Enlightenment secularization and cosmopolitanism. Benjamin and Scholem encountered Cohen in the final period of his life, when his thought faced challenges from many quarters, including phenomenology and various strains of Jew-ish mysticism. Yet for both, Cohen served as the touchstone for many of their discussions during their early years and remained a point of reference for their subsequent writing.

In fact, it was the shared interest in neo-Kantianism that brought the two friends together in the first place. Both sought to work out a philosophy of Judaism based on a “mathematical theory of truth,” to borrow Scholem’s phrase. In August 1916 the two met to discuss history and the “shape” of time as developed in Cohen’s philosophy. Follow-ing this conversation, they corresponded on language, messianism, mathematics, and the Kantian theory of knowledge. Finally in 1918 they spent the summer studying Kant alongside Cohen’s monograph Kants Theorie der Erfahrung.

MLN 127 (2012): 427–432 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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The Modern Language Notes is proud to publish two sets of notes by Scholem from 1918, which document the progress he and Benjamin made in their study of Kant’s critical philosophy and Cohen’s inter-pretation. The notes have never been published before. The first set entitled “Über Kant” attests to the friends’ interest in mathematics and the questions it raises about the notion of space in the Critique of Pure Reason and Cohen’s discussion of it in Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. The second set entitled “Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes” continues with this theme, albeit with emphasis on Cohen’s response to Kant’s exposition of space in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” in the first Critique. Thanks to Julia Ng’s transcription and translation of the notes, as well as her annotations, scholars can now assess the influ-ence of Cohen and mathematical thought on Benjamin’s concept of history and Scholem’s studies of the Kabbalah.

The articles included in the issue make a powerful case for the importance of Cohen for Benjamin’s reflections on poetry, language, history, and fate and Scholem’s efforts to conceive, and represent, infinity. In her article “Kant’s Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin read Cohen,” Julia Ng provides a critical commentary to the two sets of notes written by Scholem published in this issue. Drawing on contemporaneous fragmentary remarks by Benjamin on the neo-Kantian concept of science, Ng argues that in the months leading up to the end of the Great War, Scholem and Benjamin devote much of their time to studying Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in an effort to work out a response to one central prob-lem: the invented ground of the neo-Kantian concept of experience. In the milieu of the epochal transition from the historical comple-tion of German Idealism to the birth of the influential new school of phenomenology, Scholem and Benjamin position themselves in a contest between the constructibility of being and the fundamental heterogeneity of the material of reality. Taking a cue from Scholem’s mathematical studies, they attempt to formally revise the concepts of infinity, intuition, and concept at work in Cohen’s interpretation of Kant’s metaphysical exposition of space. As a result, Ng suggests, Scholem and Benjamin arrive at an articulation of the relation between “mathematics and language, i.e., mathematics and thinking” that enables them in turn to bring the theory of experience into relation with its own invented ground.

Werner Hamacher’s essay “Intensive Languages” articulates a practi-cal demand for experience that, though unspoken in Kant, precedes every act of thinking and every formal accord between intuition and

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concept. Through close readings of Walter Benjamin’s efforts to under-stand the linguisticality of language—and hence also close readings of Benjamin’s critique and extension of Kant—Hamacher gives us a Benjamin who has arrived, much like Heidegger and in some measure before him, at an ab-original linguistic relation as the basis for what can be thought as being. For Benjamin, and—in a surprising sense—for Kant, the essential and essentially linguistic relation is translatability, which names the motion of intensity that makes all language and all extension possible. Translatability is the infinite demand on language that, as time-ing and space-ing, at once fills and fulfills time and space. This essay thus offers an understanding of Benjamin and Kant that emphasizes the role of translatability as the infinite demand on and for language, its “historicizing” law and essence, and that establishes that language’s “historicizing” force marks and makes the space and time of some god. In a sense, then, Hamacher articulates a rational mysticism, an apprehension of cognition itself—that primordial rela-tion at the heart of each of thinking’s articulations—as the practical and relational coming-to-be of a cognizability that, with Benjamin and (once more, to our surprise) Kant, is translation understood as the godly, world-ing essence of language.

In his article “Diverging Correspondences concerning the Problem of Identity,” Peter Fenves argues that during the First World War a small group of philosophy students, including Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin, found in the idea of tautology and in certain tautological formulations a primary point of reference in their respective programs for the coming philosophy. In the case of Witt-genstein and Benjamin, the idea of tautology is intimately connected with the development of their theories of language, whose completion requires a thorough rethinking of both the concept of identity and the manner in which it is symbolized. Benjamin and Wittgenstein part ways with regard to the quantification of tautology. In the essay Fenves examines this divergence, which is based in the question of whether tautology should be universalized, as Wittgenstein argues in his correspondence with Russell, or singularized, as Benjamin argues in his correspondence with Scholem.

In “The Infinitesimal as Theological Principle,” John H. Smith explores the role that notions of the infinitesimal and the limit, i.e., ideas fundamental to differential calculus, play for philosophical and theological thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The principle of making a difference as small as possible without annihilating it completely, or of approaching a limit without


ever reaching it, discovered by Leibniz and Newton and theorized by Hermann Cohen, has been the basis of the mathematical study of motion and change in the real world. And yet, this principle seems to contain something paradoxical that makes it difficult to represent. Precisely this dual nature—both the source of the real and yet unrepresentable—allows it to function for Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Barth as a way to capture their conceptions of God, nothingness, and the gap between immanence and transcendence.

Paula Schwebel’s article “Intensive Infinity,” looks at two of the docu-mented sources for Benjamin’s interpretation of Leibniz. According to Schwebel, Benjamin was, on the one hand, immersed in Cohen’s interpretation of Leibniz’s monad as a precursor to Kant’s “anticipa-tions of perception,” which, in Cohen’s view, enabled the generation of reality from intensive magnitude. On the other hand, Benjamin acknowledged reading Heinz Heimsoeth, who situated Leibniz at the apex of the medieval tradition of German-Christian mysticism. Despite radically different approaches, both Cohen and Heimsoeth credit Leibniz with having accomplished the reconciliation of the infinite and the finite in the monad. For Heimsoeth, Leibniz’s monad epito-mizes the microcosm of the divine in the created soul. For Cohen, Leibniz’s recognition of the principle of continuity paved the way for grounding the dependent results of knowledge in an infinite method. Schwebel draws on these two competing interpretations to claim that in Leibniz Benjamin found a notion of redemption in the self-enclosed world of profane creation.

Pierfrancesco Fiorato begins his essay “‘Zeitlos und dennoch nicht ohne historischen Belang’” with an analysis of Benjamin’s interpreta-tion of the problem-historical method (Problemgeschichte), as expressed in his dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik and in his later letter to Florens Christian Rang from December 9, 1923. The analysis brings to the fore some of the analogies between Benjamin’s early conception of historical convergence and Hermann Cohen’s view. For the young Benjamin, the appearance of the “pure problem” amounts to a “threshold,” in which an atemporal aspect of the historical dimension is revealed. The overcoming of temporal extension announced in this manner corresponds to the “ideal subla-tion of temporal distinctions” discussed by Cohen in his Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls. Fiorato demonstrates that the “sublation of temporal distinctions” leads both Cohen and Benjamin to conceive the deep structure of history as monadic.

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In his article “Eine geheime Verabredung: Über Walter Benjamins Umgang mit Theologie,” Gérard Raulet proceeds from Scholem’s assertion that religion remained for Benjamin the highest order till the end of his days. Numerous statements by Benjamin support this claim. Nevertheless if, as Benjamin asserted, there exists a “secret appointment” between historical materialism and Judaism, then the connection between the two must be situated in the context of the debates regarding Germanness and Jewishness in the early 1900s and traced back to Hermann Cohen. Both the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” which likely originated in 1920, as well the “Critique of Violence,” written in 1921, respond directly to these debates. Leo Strauss’s autobiographical confession that he was “at that time a young Jew, raised in Germany, who was confronted with the theological-political problem,” can easily be read in connection with Benjamin. The essay explores the historical context of Benjamin’s work and in so doing avoids the pitfalls of a reductive reading of Benjamin’s sup-posed “messianism.”

In “Messianisme et philologie du langage,” Marc de Launay revisits Benjamin’s attempt between 1916 and 1920 to elaborate a “theory” of language aimed at reconciling mystical aspirations and properly aesthetic concerns in order to justify a new conception of “experi-ence.” Benjamin outlines a conception of language that relies on a very inexact reading of Chapters 1–3 of Genesis. In a parallel investi-gation, Gershom Scholem, who had direct access to Kabbalistic texts, avoids a mystical conception of language and defends instead a critical point of view that he aligns with that of the historian or philologist. After 1921, Benjamin would not develop his initial metaphysical or mystical conception of language further. Instead he would carry over his critique of conceptual reason to his literary texts. Benjamin’s initial “messianism” becomes a literary work on remembrance and memory. Meanwhile, Scholem’s philological work on Jewish mysticism is unleashed at the moment of an “irrational” decision: to emigrate to Palestine. The question of a common language for each of them thus generates a chiasmus.

Lastly, in “Irreconcilable: Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin,” Rochelle Tobias notes that Benjamin devotes a significant portion of his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities to an event, which by his own admission never comes to the pass. The protagonists of the novel never reconcile with each other, nor with themselves, as Benjamin repeatedly underscores, especially in the final section of the essay, where he compares the novel to the novella embedded


in it. Why Benjamin nonetheless gives such weight to the notion of reconciliation in his reading of Goethe’s novel is the subject of this article. In remarking that “true reconciliation” occurs only with God, Benjamin situates reconciliation in a religious domain. He draws on Hermann Cohen’s reflections on Ezekiel and the Jewish Day of Atonement in Religion of Reason to demonstrate that this domain is immanent in experience, even if it “can scarcely be represented in the work of art.” In the Goethe essay, Benjamin relies on Cohen to claim that in reconciliation aesthetics reaches its limit. It yields to ethics, which in this essay is identical with religion or, to use Cohen’s phrase, ethical monotheism.

Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s Reading Group Around

Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in 1918: An Introduction

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Julia Ng

The documents that follow represent the most complete record to date of Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s joint study of Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in the summer of 1918. Composed by Scholem, they consist in reflections on science, history, mathemat-ics, and (neo-)Kantian concepts of system and critique, many of which originate terminologically and thematically from Benjamin’s own writing and thinking at the time. Containing in nuce the preliminary stages of Benjamin’s attempt to transition from a theory of knowledge and language to a systematic political theory, they attest to the shared appreciation of Kantian philosophy and similar inclination towards a “mathematical theory of truth”1 qua theory of history that brought the friends together in the first place. They provide the quintessential outline of how mathematics, ethics, and Kant intersected for the two friends in a way that would continue to shape their respective itinerar-ies far beyond their early work.

Benjamin was twenty-three when he first made the acquaintance of the seventeen-year-old Scholem in Berlin in July 1915, some days after Scholem participated in a discussion hosted by the Freie Studentenschaft


1Cf. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) 63–4 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Freundschaft).

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in which he criticized the Nietzschean denunciation of history that Kurt Hiller had advanced in an earlier lecture. During their very first conversations they discussed, contra Hiller, the concept of history as an ineluctable process of life, which then led them to speak of the solutions that the Zionist, Socialist, and anarchist movements defin-ing their milieu presented for the antinomy between the event and history.2 They also discussed Kantian epistemology and the theory of mathematics, with particular consideration of contemporaneous developments in the philosophy and history of science: in his diary, Scholem outlines a conversation he had with Benjamin on July 24th about Kant, “synthetic judgments and mathematics,” during which “much of interest was said” with reference to the mathematician and philosopher of science, Henri Poincaré.3 By this time, Benjamin had spent several years studying under neo-Kantian philosophers including Ernst Cassirer and Benno Erdmann in Berlin and Heinrich Rickert in Freiburg. Scholem, for his part, had been reading Kant in his intro-ductory philosophy courses in Berlin that semester, though he was primarily a student of mathematics and history; his diaries from the period are interspersed with remarks in which he relates what he found interesting in the lectures he heard on Kant to the mathematics and the concept of science at the center of his studies. It seems, in fact, that Benjamin befriended Scholem for his knowledge of contemporane-ous mathematics, especially the mathematics whose development had raised the question of whether or not Kant’s view that the structure of space can be known a priori, and be considered a formal condition of our possible experience, can still hold true given the discovery of other consistent structures of space—the so-called non-Euclidean geometries. Moreover, Scholem’s command of mathematical reasoning was fortuitously complemented by a similar interest in investigating the concept of historical time, which was expressed in terms of the possibility of Zionism in particular and political movements at large. As their exchanges over the following years attest, their exploration of issues pertaining to Zionism and Judaism was philosophically and meta-mathematically inflected from the outset and led them to reflect

2Cf. Freundschaft 14; also cf. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000) I: 123 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TB).

3Cf. TB I: 134. In the field of geometry, Poincaré was known for his “conventional-ism”: his insistence that (a) all geometric systems, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, have the same logical and mathematical legitimacy, (b) no system of axioms may claim to be the one true geometry, and (c) geometric axioms are therefore neither synthetic nor analytic a priori judgments, but “conventions” or languages of definition.

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on concepts that, in their view, resonated at the intersection of their interests: language, history, and experience.

By late 1917, Benjamin had moved to Bern to commence his doctoral studies with Richard Herbertz. Scholem was studying mathematics and philosophy at the University of Jena, where he participated in the seminars of Gottlob Frege—who, it seems, betrayed none of his anti-Semitic tendencies in this context. The correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem during this period reveals a remarkable inten-sification of their personal as well as intellectual relationship. In a series of letters written to Benjamin in September,4 Scholem outlines a rudimentary objection to Kant’s critique of metaphysical thinking as presented in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, arguing that there must be something amiss with a theory of metaphysics whose fundamental categories, which are epitomized in the Prolegomena by the cognitions of pure mathematics and natural science, are presumed to be meaningful only to the extent that they “make experience pos-sible.” Pointing out that Kant’s yoking of experience to the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition erroneously relegates any “metaphysics,” present or future, to that which is impossible, Scholem insists instead that he “knows” that metaphysics, and thus Zionism, are possible if only because science itself, when “truly apprehended,” leads towards them—“this last center of doctrine” (TB II: 44). Scholem’s relative unfamiliarity with Kant’s texts and their interpretive controversies notwithstanding, Benjamin takes his friend’s charge seriously, with one important caveat: in his response on October 22nd, he points out that a more scientific and up-to-date theory of mathematics than the one presented in the Prolegomena might indeed show a corresponding weak-ness in Kant’s critique of metaphysics, but that, therefore, a Kantian metaphysics might “emerge” for the first time, were one to investigate, transform, and universalize its foundations in view of the contention surrounding the place of intuition in mathematical knowledge since the latter half of the nineteenth century. For Benjamin, Kant himself represents “the most profound ‘typic’ of thinking doctrine”—a concept of the laws of nature so independent of intuition that it may model thinking on the sensible world—which might be construable if only one “comprehend[ed] him by the letter with the greatest reverence as a tradendum [. . .] however much one has to transform him later.”5

4The contents of these letters, now lost, may be reconstructed from Scholem’s diary entries between September 25 and 29, 1917; cf. TB II: 39–40.

5Benjamin, Briefe, 2 vols. Ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966) I: 150 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Briefe).

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Benjamin’s own “prolegomena to a future metaphysics,” which he develops on the basis of the letter from October over the course of the next several months under the title “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” further specify that a “new and higher type of experience that is still to come” might be allowed to “adequately appear” if Kant’s program were overhauled with a theory of language conceived from the standpoint of a rigorously logistical view of mathematics. Such a theory of language regards the symbolization process in philosophical cognition not as a matter of arbitrarily assigning signs to things, but as uniquely and ineluctably bound up in cognition’s linguistic expression.6 From the end of 1917 until April 1918, Benjamin’s and Scholem’s exchanges and individual writings reflect an intense engagement with the nature of philosophy’s “linguistic essence,” bearing out the “language-theoretical observation of mathematics” that Benjamin had not yet felt himself to be in a position to handle when he composed the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” at the end of 1916.7 They eventually culminate in Scholem’s acceptance of Benjamin’s invitation to visit Bern in the summer semester of 1918, where they would discuss at length the work each had been pursu-ing on the topic that had been opened up by Benjamin’s language essay: “mathematics and language, i.e., mathematics and thinking, mathematics and Zion” (Briefe II: 128).

Scholem arrived in Bern on May 4, 1918; soon after, he and Ben-jamin decided to study a philosophical work together. The work they selected was Hermann Cohen’s book, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung—an understandable, if ultimately “disappointing” choice,8 given that they framed their reading of Cohen with discussions of the concept of experience proposed by Benjamin in his “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy.” As the leading figure of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, Cohen had long been important for both Benjamin and Scholem: in Berlin, both had attended lectures by Cohen, who according to Scholem had left a deep impression on them (Freund-schaft 78). Benjamin had engaged with Cohen’s writings to varying degrees since 1912 and tentatively planned to write his dissertation on the “infinite task in Kant” as he was working on his “Program”

6Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-penhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) II: 168 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as GS).

7Benjamin, letter to Scholem, November 11, 1916, in Briefe I: 128–29.8“Disappointing” is, of course, Scholem’s choice of word to describe the outcome of

their summer of study. Cf. Freundschaft 78.

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essay, which itself explicitly refers to the Marburg school. Scholem had recently composed a brief text in memory of Cohen, the “great Jew” who had traveled the “rigorous path from the Talmud and Bible and Maimonides to Kant and Plato and back to Talmud and Bible and Maimonides,” upon hearing of his death in April 1918 (TB II: 189–90). From the beginning, however, Scholem had reservations about Cohen as a philosopher of Judaism: as an anarcho-Zionist with strong anti-war inclinations, Scholem was suspicious of Cohen’s assimilationist vision of a German-Jewish “symbiosis,” which had led him, right at the moment of war, to plead for a greater “Germanity” among the Jews in the name of the rational evolution of European mankind. Already in 1916, moreover, Scholem had shown skepticism towards Cohen’s philosophy of mathematics, noting in his diary, for instance, that an explanation of the coordinate axes in Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis was no better than “idle chatter” from the point of view of a mathematician (TB I: 275). In late March and early April 1918, Scholem casts similar doubt on Cohen’s Princip der Infinitesimal-methode, calling it “nonsense” that “confused” mathematical proofs with the metaphysical interpretation thereof as necessary reality (TB II: 163; 169). In the “Program” essay and related supplements, Benjamin expresses a similar sentiment: that had Cohen properly grasped the “linguistic essence” of philosophical knowledge, he might have also grasped that Kant’s critical project places “religion” firmly out of grasp, thus requiring the reader of Kant to systematically incorporate this “highest” region of knowledge into the schema of philosophy, rather than assume that philosophy has a grasp on the absolute. It was with the intent of reprising this project that Benjamin and Scholem revisit the nexus between “mathematics [. . .] and [the] critical altercation with Kant and Cohen” (Briefe I: 180) between June and August 1918, in the form of their reading group on Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung.

What follows are the transcriptions and translations of two docu-ments that are preserved in the Scholem Archive at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. The first, “Über Kant,” is a two-sided manuscript containing a critique of neo-Kantianism with specific reference to Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung and contem-poraneous mathematics. Written in Scholem’s hand in black ink on a sheet that may have been torn from a notebook similar to those Scholem used to record his youthful diaries, it appears to have been given the date “1918” (in different ink on the upper left corner) and its title (in pencil in more recent handwriting) at a later time. The style of the handwriting (Scholem wrote in a mixture of Sütterlin and

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modern script just as he does in his diaries and university notebooks) and terminological similarity to entries in Scholem’s diaries help date the composition of the manuscript most likely to sometime between April and August 1918.9

The second document, “Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes,” is a six-page typescript based on a manuscript containing remarks on the metaphysical exposition of space in the Transcenden-tal Aesthetic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the corresponding discussion in the first chapter of Cohen’s book.10 The document is dated “1918, Bern” in the upper left corner of the first page and cites a phrase that Scholem attributes to Benjamin in his diary entry of June 24, 1918.11 Despite their fragmentary state, the notes proceed in a discernible order and articulate a coherent argument that Benjamin and Scholem appear to have worked out that summer while discuss-ing Kant and Cohen’s interpretation of Kant’s concept of science. As such the notes substantiate the criticism levied against the neo-Kantianian “abuse” of mathematics towards which Scholem gestures in the manuscript “Über Kant.”12

Taken together, these two documents detail Benjamin’s and Scho-lem’s joint reflections made in the milieu of and directly pertaining “to the critique of Kant’s syllogisms in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and to the proof of their untenability, which [Scholem] wrote up after a few sessions” of their reading group on “the foundational work of the Marburg School” (Freundschaft 76; 78). In turn, the notes uncover an undeniable dimension to one of the most consequential relation-ships in twentieth-century German-Jewish history, one that has been hitherto underanalyzed due to the inaccessibility of its textual record to both German- and English-speaking scholars. As Scholem himself put it while looking back in the year 1975, the summer he spent in Bern in 1918 was, for both personal and intellectual reasons, the “highest point” in the story of his friendship with Walter Benjamin (Freundschaft 62). It is against this statement, of which the following

9In the manuscript there appears the word Inzest, somewhat unusually for the context, which Scholem employs in several passages in his diaries. Cf. TB II: 203; 221; 303; and 326.

10The page numbers in the typescript refer to the second edition of Cohen’s book, which was published in 1885. In turn, Cohen refers to Karl Kehrbach’s second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig: Reclam, 1878).

11The “Prinzip der Wälzer,” which Scholem cites on page four of the typescript. Cf. TB II: 254.

12It is for this reason alone that “Über Kant” precedes “Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes” in the following dossier. I do not wish to imply that one was necessarily composed before the other.

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notes on mathematics, philosophy and language provide a unique illustration, that one might measure the true nature and extent of their impact on one another.

Grateful acknowledgement is given to Suhrkamp Verlag for grant-ing permission to print and translate these documents. Thanks also go to Rachel Misrati of the Department of Manuscripts and Archives at the Jewish and National University Library, Jerusalem, for helping me navigate the collections and providing me with research support during my visits to the archive and beyond. In my transcriptions, I have preserved as much of the original orthography, punctuation and syntax as possible. My own editorial insertions are indicated by square brackets. I am grateful to Rochelle Tobias for lending me her careful eye, helpful comments and overall support during the editing process. Last but not least, I am indebted to Anton Dochtermann, Markus Hardtmann, Mareike Massow, and Carsten Schultz for sharing their insights into the mathematical background of these documents and for giving me invaluable suggestions for revision and clarification during the preparation of this dossier.

Northwestern University

Über Kant1

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Gershom Scholem

(1918, über Kant)Es gibt heute viele Menschen die sich Kantianer nennen, und die in Kantischer Terminologie—Kantische Sprache ist es selbstverständlich nicht—Erkenntnisse zu haben vorgeben oder wirklich haben. Daß diese Menschen, auch nur irgend einer von ihnen, diese Terminolo-gie versteht ist ausgeschlossen. Worauf beruht aber, die Möglichkeit des Kantianismus? Er hat einen Funken echter Mystik in sich. Tra-dierbares ist nicht im Kantischen System, denn sonst müsste es zu verstehen sein was eidetisch nicht der Fall ist, vielmehr aber hat es eine Art von Tradierbarkeit schlechthin und eben auf ihr beruht der Neukantianismus. Der erste der ohne vom absoluten System auszugehen diese Begriffe näher ansehen würde würde sie auch keine Sekunde länger gebrauchen, aber die blosse Tradierbarkeit der Terminologie ist es die den Anschein des Lebens aufrecht erhält. Diese Mystik ist aber unfruchtbar, denn es ist nur ein Funken. Die Umfassung der Tradition in der die Mystik gefördert wird, entspricht hier positiv nichts. Irgendwie ist zweifellos das Kantische System eine ungeheuere Angelegenheit, aber die einzige Möglichkeit zu ihm zu gelangen ist sich explizit davon abzuwenden bis man es umfaßt und von dem neuen Gesichtspunkt aus die Tradierbarkeit legitimieren kann. Außer diesem


1Grateful acknowledgement is given to Suhrkamp Verlag for granting permission to publish and translate Scholem’s handwritten notes on Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung from 1918. The original is a two-sided manuscript in gothic handwriting located in the Gershom Scholem Archives at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem under the reference number, Scholem Arc 4º 1599 File 277/I #14.

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einen Funken ist der Neukantianismus der reine Kultus eines Mysti-zismus ohne Gegenstand, dessen Zeremoniell sich in Verbeugungen vor dem Transzendentalen (das heute nicht mehr legitim gebraucht werden darf) erschöpft, und dessen ganze Leistung es ist alle paar Jahre den Psychologismus zu widerlegen. Die Neukantianer treiben Magie, aber eine missbräuchliche weil äußerliche.

Der Wissenschaftsbegriff des Kantianismus ist ein Inzest. Er umschleicht die formale Logik durch den Missbrauch der Mathematik. Er ist auf Stringenz aus anstatt auf Freiheit. Er begründet das Erkennen letz-ten Grundes nicht in Denken. Ihr Systembegriff ist radikal anders zu begründen und überhaupt ganz anders zu fassen. Er ist eine große metaphysische Kapitulation vor dem Pragmatismus. „Nur das ist Erkenntnis was der Erkenntnis nützt.“ Dieser Satz um den keiner herumkommt enthält das radikal Unsinnige der Meinung. | Kritisieren kann man nur gute Werke, das ist der Grund warum noch niemand die absolut negative Kritik der Cohenschen „Kants Theorie der Erfahr- ung“ geschrieben hat. Dies [sic.] Buch beweist nur eins absolut: daß es unmöglich ist, heute Kant zu verstehen.

Äquivalenz aller Strecken, im Euklidischen System klar. Wie aber ver-hält es sich in der nichteuklidischen Geometrie, in der durch einen Punkt mehrere (∞) Parallelen zu einer Graden möglich sind? Da wäre doch allermindest die 1 deutig : umkehrbare Beziehung aufgehoben.

Der Strahl durch P und A braucht ja CD— nicht zu treffen. Wenn aber A dem unendlich fernen Punkt entspräche, wie verhält er sich dann mit dem ∞ fernen Punkt von BB'? Beantworten die Mengentheore-tiker diese Frage?

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1) endliche Menge von Zahlen2) Menge aller natürlichen Zahlen3) „ „ rationalen „ 4) „ „ algebraischen „ { [ad 2), 3) + 4)] sind äquivalent5) „ aller reellen „ nicht abzählbar6) Menge der reellen Zahlen zwischen noch so wenig unterschiedenen reellen Zahlen (4 u. 6 zusammen !!) nicht abzählbar, äquivalent der Menge aller reellen Zahlen.7) Menge aller eindeutigen Funktionen f (x), 0≤ x ≤1, nicht äquivalent der des Kontinuums. ∈ dagegen Menge aller stetigen 1 deutig F. u.s.w. äquivalent der Menge der reellen Zahlen.

Transcribed by Julia Ng

On Kant1

❦

Gershom Scholem

Today there are many people who call themselves Kantians, and who profess to have—or actually do have—cognitions in Kantian terminol-ogy. Obviously, such terminology is not equivalent to Kantian language. It is out of the question that these people, or even just one of them, understand this terminology. But on what does the possibility of Kan-tianism depend? It has a spark of genuine mysticism in it. There is nothing transmissible in the Kantian system, for otherwise the system would have to be understandable, which is eidetically not the case. Rather, the system has a kind of transmissibility as such and neo-Kan-tianism is based precisely on this. The first person to look more closely at these concepts, without taking the absolute system as a starting point, would not use them for a second longer. But the mere transmissibility of terminology is what maintains the semblance of life. This mysticism is unfruitful, however, for it is only a spark. The comprehension of the tradition in which mysticism is supported does not correspond positively to anything here. Somehow the Kantian system is without a doubt a tremendous matter, but the only possibility of arriving at it is to explicitly turn away from it, until one comprehends the system and can legitimize its transmissibility from a new perspective. Apart from this one spark, neo-Kantianism is the pure cult of a mysticism without an object. Its ceremonial protocol consists in nothing other than bowing before the transcendental (which today can no longer be legitimately used), and whose entire accomplishment is to refute psychologism every couple of years. The neo-Kantians practice magic, but it is an abusive one because it is external.


1Published with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.

444 GershOm schOlem

The concept of science in Kantianism is incest. It creeps about trying to approach formal logic by abusing mathematics. It aims at stringency rather than freedom. When it comes down to it, it does not ground cognizing in thinking. [The concept of science as a system] has to be grounded in a radically different manner and grasped in an altogether different way. [The Kantian concept of science] is one great metaphysical capitulation before pragmatism. “Cognition is only what is useful to cognition.” This sentence, which no one can get around, contains what is radically non-sensical about the opinion. | One can only critique good works [;] that is the reason why no one has yet written the absolutely negative critique of Cohen’s “Kant’s Theory of Experience.” This book proves only one thing absolutely [:] that it is impossible to understand Kant today.

Equivalence of all segments, clear in the Euclidean system. But what happens in the non-Euclidean geometry in which several (∞) parallels to a straight line are possible through one point?2 In that case at the very least the bijective3 relation would no longer hold.

2In Euclidean geometry, there exists the axiom that “to a line and a point there is exactly one parallel to the line through the point,” whereby lines are “parallel” if they do not intersect. This statement is usually called the Parallel Postulate, and it is equivalent to the fifth postulate in Euclid’s Elements, which states that whenever a line segment intersects two straight lines, the sum of the interior angles on the same side is less than two right angles, if and only if the two straight lines are not parallel to each other. Non-Euclidean geometries are geometries in which the parallel postulate does not hold. In elliptical geometry (i.e., on a sphere), for instance, any two straight lines intersect. In hyperbolic geometry (i.e., on a concave surface), which appears to be what Scholem has in mind, there are infinitely many parallel lines through any point off a fixed line.

3In contemporary terms, eine eindeutig umkehrbare Beziehung is a bijective function, in which every element of one set (X) is paired with exactly one element of a second set (Y), and every element of Y belongs to exactly one of these pairs. This implies that an inverse function mapping Y to X must exist. The sets X and Y are said to have the same cardinal-ity—the same number of elements in the set—if there exists a bijection from X to Y and, implicitly, vice versa. For finite sets, the existence of a bijection means that the two sets have the same (finite) number of elements. The cardinality of sets is the topic of discussion in points 1) through 7) that follow. Here, in the geometric context, Scholem seems to be interested in the case of a bijection or one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the segments BB' and CD. In the Euclidean case, one can draw a line from P, intersecting BB’ at a single point (call it A) and extending to a unique point of CD (call it f(A)). In the non-Euclidean case, this process breaks down because, as Scholem notes in the next paragraph, the line from P that goes through BB’ does not necessarily intersect CD on a hyperbolic plane. Scholem’s diagram would look as follows, if redrawn in hyperbolic space:

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The ray through P and A does not in fact need to meet CD—. However, if A corresponded to the point at infinity, what then happens to the point at ∞ of BB'?4 Do set theorists answer this question?

1) finite set of numbers2) set of all natural numbers5

3) “ “ rational6 “ 4) “ “ algebraic7 “ { [ad 2), 3) + 4)] are equivalent8

5) “ all real9 “ not countable6) set of real numbers between real numbers however little differentiated (4 and 6 together !!) not countable, equivalent to the set of all real numbers.10

4Given the fragmentary nature of these notes, it is difficult to tell exactly what Scholem has in mind here, but he may have been considering the following: The ray P need not intersect CD, or it may intersect CD at infinity. These two facts tell us that the construction that works to place points on the segments BB' and CD in a bijective correspondence in the Euclidean plane fails in the hyperbolic plane, although the sets of points that constitute each of these segments are of the same cardinality. Scholem wonders whether the two segments are in fact of the same cardinality, given that the bijective correspondence between them fails in a different geometry.

5The natural numbers are 1, 2, 3, … 6The rational numbers are the fractions. 7The algebraic numbers are the numbers x for which there exists some polynomial

with rational coefficients, which gives you 0, if you insert x into the polynomial.8These three sets are indeed countable, and are “equivalent” in that they have the

same cardinality. 9Real numbers are values representing quantities on a continuum, and in classical

terms may be thought of as points on an infinitely long number line. The realization that a more rigorous definition of real numbers was needed marked a major devel-opment in mathematics in the nineteenth century. Here Scholem seems to refer to the first such definition of real numbers by Georg Cantor, who in 1874 gave a proof demonstrating that the set of all real numbers is uncountable.

10The set of real numbers between two other real numbers, however close (e.g., between 0 and 1), is uncountable, and its cardinality—the number of elements in the set—is equivalent to the set of all real numbers.

446 GershOm schOlem

7) set of all injective11 functions f (x), 0≤ x ≤1, not equivalent to that of the continuum.∈12 on the contrary the set of all continuous injective functions etc. equivalent to the set of real numbers.13

Translated and annotated by Julia Ng

11Scholem’s phrase eindeutige Funktion is likely shorthand for linkseindeutige Funktion, which means an injective function, in which no two elements of one set (X) are mapped to the same element in the other set (Y). An injection from X to Y does not have an inverse function from Y to X, as each element in Y is mapped at most to one element in X. The set X is said to have a cardinality greater than or equal to that of set Y, if there is an injective function from Y to X, or X has a cardinality that is strictly larger than that of Y, if there is an injective but no bijective function from Y to X. In other words, injection is a way to assign one element of one set uniquely to an element of another set in order to show that the cardinality of one is equal to or greater than that of the other. Whatever Scholem had in mind, the point is clear: the set of all functions from [0, 1] into the real numbers is of a strictly larger cardinality than that of the real numbers (i.e., the continuum).

12In the manuscript, Scholem uses a mark that closely resembles ∈, which in set theory denotes “is an element of the set.” Since there is no pair of terms given whose relation might be symbolized by this mark, however, Scholem appears to use the ∈ as shorthand for “it is the case” or “that is,” which recalls the origins of the symbol in the Greek letter epsilon (∊), which is also the first letter in the Greek word for “is” (εστίν). —I thank Markus Hardtmann for suggesting this possible interpretation.

13Here Scholem elaborates on the point he makes above: if you put the restriction on the collection of functions that they should be continuous, then you have a set—the set of all continuous functions from [0, 1] into the real numbers—that has the same cardinality as the set of real numbers, i.e. the continuum.

Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes1

❦

Gershom Scholem

(1918, Bern)Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes sind die Haupteinwände zu erheben:I. Kant verwechselt Wahrnehmung und Anschauung.Der Raum der Wahrnehmung, der der Anschauung und der der Mathematik werden konfundiert. Der R. der Wahrnehmung ist Fläche „ „ „ Anschauung ist überhaupt zu bestreiten „ „ „ Mathematik bildet das wirklich R.-Problem.II. Die ganz willkürliche Verwendung von „vorstellen“ und „Denken“ im Zusammenhang des Arguments in Satz 2.2 Kants Satz beweist nicht.


1Grateful acknowledgement is given to Suhrkamp Verlag for granting permission to publish and translate Scholem’s notes on the discussions he and Walter Benjamin had during their joint study of Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in the summer of 1918. The original is a six page typescript based on a manuscript in gothic handwriting, both of which are located in the Gershom Scholem Archives at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem under the reference number Scholem Arc 4º 1599 File 277/I #11.

2Cf. Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ) A24/B38-9 (hereafter cited as KrV): “2) Der Raum ist eine nothwen-dige Vorstellung a priori, die allen äußeren Anschauungen zum Grunde liegt. Man kann sich niemals eine Vorstellung davon machen, daß kein Raum sei, ob man sich gleich ganz wohl denken kann, daß keine Gegenstände darin angetroffen werden. Er wird also als die Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Erscheinungen und nicht als eine von ihnen abhängende Bestimmung angesehen und ist eine Vorstellung a priori, die nothwendiger Weise äußeren Erscheinungen zum Grunde liegt.”

448 GERshom scholEm

Man kann sich nicht vorstellen, dass kein Raum sei obwohl man sich vorstellen kann, dass keine Gegenstände darin seien. Für den Raum der Mathematik ist dieser Satz falsch, weil der

Raum der Mathematik überhaupt nicht vorgestellt werden kann. Für den Erfahrungsraum ist er falsch, weil man sich nicht

vorstellen kann, dass keine Gegenstände in ihm sind. Daher konfundiert Kant beide, und setzt im zweiten Teil des

Satzes „Denken“, womit nichts bewiesen wird, weil eine Equivokation stattgefunden hat.

III. Die Verwechslung von Begriff und Anschauung durch eine falsche Terminologie. „Raum und Begriff des Raumes“ sind zwei verschiedene Dinge.

Kants ganze Argumentation in Satz 33 und 44 ist also gegenstandslos. Er beweist nur, dass Begriff vom Raume nicht Begriff von einem Begriff ist, was von selbst klar ist.

Resultat: auf Grund der kantischen Bestimmungen ist die Untersu-chung des Problems unmöglich.

Das Transzendentale tritt bei Kant und Cohen als magischer Begriff auf. // Bei Gegenständen a posteriori ist es, sofern sie gegeben d.h. wirklich sind, nicht möglich anders als unter der Bedingung einer Antwort in einem analytischen Urteil die Frage nach ihrer Möglichkeit zu stellen. (Dagegen ist es selbstverständlich möglich mit einem syn-thetischen Urteil auf die Frage nach dem „Wie“ dieses Gegenstandes im Sinne von Wie beschaffen ((Quale)) zu antworten. Bei Gebilden a priori ist die Frage des Wie im Sinne des Quale wie beschaffen ganz sinnlos, dagegen besteht hier im Sinne Kants die Aussicht, auch nachdem die Wirklichkeit solcher apriorischer Gebilde mittels einer metaphysischen Erörterung aufgewiesen ist, noch mit Aussicht auf eine Antwort in einem synthetischen Urteil die Frage nach der

3Cf. Kant, KrV A24-5/B39: “3) Der Raum ist kein discursiver oder, wie man sagt, allge-meiner Begriff von Verhältnissen der Dinge überhaupt, sondern eine reine Anschauung. [...] Er ist wesentlich einig, das Mannigfaltige in ihm, mithin auch der allgemeine Begriff von Räumen überhaupt beruht lediglich auf Einschränkungen. Hieraus folgt, daß in Ansehung seiner eine Anschauung a priori (die nicht empirisch ist) allen Begriffen von demselben zum Grunde liegt. So werden auch alle geometrische Grundsätze, z.E. daß in einem Triangel zwei Seiten zusammen größer sind, als die dritte, niemals aus allgemeinen Begriffen von Linie und Triangel, sondern aus der Anschauung und zwar a priori mit apodiktischer Gewißheit abgeleitet.”

4Cf. Kant, KrV A25/B39-40: “4) Der Raum wird als eine unendliche gegebene Größe vorgestellt. [...] Also ist die ursprüngliche Vorstellung vom Raume Anschauung a priori und nicht Begriff.”

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Möglichkeit solcher apriorischen Gebilde zu stellen. Indem Kant nun diese letztere Frage ebenso wie die Frage nach dem Quale durch das „Wie“ bezeichnet, gewinnt er die Möglichkeit zur Erschleichung des Transzendentalen durch folgende Quaternio terminorum:

Jedem Gebilde gegenüber kann ich nach dem Wie fragenDie Frage nach dem Quale (Wie beschaffen?) ist bei apriorischen Gebil-den sinnlos.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Die einzig sinngemässe Frage nach dem Wie gegenüber apriorischen Ge-bilden ist die: wie ist es möglich, die transzendentale.

---S. 139 bei Cohen der Gipfel des Unsinns.5 Verbindung von Logik und Ethik: das Gesetz soll sein !!! Warum schimpft er auf Rotbart!? Und warum soll es sein? Nicht etwa wie in der Moral, sondern—wegen des „Faktums der Wissenschaft“ also wegen Newton soll der oberste Grund-satz bestehen! Weil die Sonne die Erde umgeht! Der ganze Abschnitt ist bodenlos. Wir „wollen“ Notwendigkeit anerkennen—als ob es ein logisches wollen gäbe, wo es nicht einmal ein logisches Müssen gibt.6

Cohen will behaupten (S. 77), nur die Fragestellung des a priori sei zeitlos gültig, der Inhalt dagegen: welches denn nun die Grundbegriffe seien, sei von der „fortschreitenden Kultur des Geistes“ bedingt. Daher soll die metaphysische Erörterung nur in ihrer Tendenz gesicherte Geltung, in ihren Ergebnissen aber nur relative besitzen.7

Hier ist also die mystische Unklarheit aufs deutlichste bezeichnet. Dem Positivismus wird ein kritisches Recht zugesprochen. Die Denk-barkeit solcher Evolution, wenn sie überhaupt ernsten Sinn haben soll, ist unverständlich.

5Cf. Hermann Cohen. Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd, rev. ed. (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1885) 139: “Was ermöglicht den obersten Grundsatz? Nichts, ausser ihm selbst. [...] Nur das allein kann der Leitstern des Gesetzes sein: dass ein Gesetz walten solle in dem Gebiete der Erfahrung. [...] Dieser Gedanke, der Ausgang von der Anerkennung des Factums der mathematischen Naturwissenschaft, im Unterschiede von der Metaphysik der Moral, macht sich zum obersten Gesetz und sucht die Mittel, zuerst dieses oberste Gesetz als solches zu formuliren, und alsdann aus der Formel desselben die einzelnen Grundsätze zu gewinnen.”

6Cf. Cohen 102: “So lasse denn der Metaphysiker, einem Kopernikus gleich, die Dinge sich um den Geist, sich um die Begriffe drehen.”

7Cf. Cohen 77: “Dass Grundbegriffe da seien, muss angenommen werden; welche, darüber wird die fortschreitende Cultur des Geistes wachsende Einsicht bringen. Daher ist die metaphysische Erörterung in ihren Ergebnissen von relativem provisorischem Werthe; nur ihre Aufgabe und Tendenz ist unbedingt nothwendig und hat gesicherte Geltung.”

450 GERshom scholEm

Die metaphysische Erörterung geht auf die unanalysierbaren Tatsachen des Bewusstseins im Erkennen. Sie ist eine phänomenologische, und eigentlich die, die mit Hume’s Fragestellung Verbindung hat. Sie fragt:

Was meinen wir, wenn wir vom Raum sprechen.Was ist das Eidos Raum?

Die transzendente Erörterung fragt dagegen (eine Frage die Hume gar nicht interessiert):

Was leistet dieser Raum für die Wissenschaft.

Wie die Ergebnisse einer eidetischen Untersuchung relativ sein sollen, erklärt Cohen nicht.

In der Wissenschaft wird das metaphysische a priori zum Transzen-dental - a priori. „So reift Leibniz, von Hume gereinigt, zu dem in Newton befestigten Kant.“8 (Stil !!)

---

Die Grundbegriffe der Wissenschaft vermittelt laut S. 78 der litte-rarische Nachweis.9 Schlimmer kann die Verkehrung eines tiefen Gedankens zum Faktizitätsschwindel sich nicht enthüllen. Das ist purer Unsinn. Zu diesem ganzen Abschnitt:

„Siehste wohl, da kimmt er / Grosse Schritte nimmt er“!10

Die Kluft des Mittelalters!11

8Cohen 78.9Cf. Cohen 78: “Soweit schien es zweckdienlich, im Voraus die Methode zu zeichnen,

nach welcher Kants Entdeckungen vollzogen sind. Wenn man jetzt noch fragen sollte, wie es denn zugehen mag, dass diese doppelten Analysen so glücklich stimmen—, so wäre dies eine Frage an die Geschichte der Wissenschaft wie an ein Märchen. Weil eben und sofern die Wissenschaft kein Märchen ist, daher gelingt es, in ihren Grundbegriffen, die der literarische Nachweis ermittelt, jene keineswegs wunderbare Uebereinstimmung zu finden mit den allgemeinsten Wahrheiten der Logik, die von jeher die speculirende Vernunft aus dem Gewirr des Denkens herausgezogen hat. Nein—nicht aus dem Gewirr des Denkens, sondern aus den jeweiligen Ergebnissen und Problemen der wissenschaft-lichen Gedanken hat die Logik ihre Allgemeinheiten abstrahirt.”

10Scholem refers here to the text written by Alfred Schmarsow to accompany the “Berliner Kreuzpolka,” composed by Rudolf Daase in 1887. See R. Daase, Op. 494 (Berlin: E. Wehde, 1887). The words that follow the ones cited varied through the years. Most variations retain some version of these words—“Siehste wohl, da kimmt er schon, Der versoffne Schwiegersohn”—and go on to describe the son-in-law’s avarice and selfishness (“Sachertortn isst er, Schokolade frisst er, seiner Muatter gibt er nix, weil er halt a Geizkragn is”) and philandering nature (“Drah di amal links um, drah di amal rechts um, links an Schritt und rechts an Schritt, und ums Madel umadum”).

11Cf. Cohen 78: “Diese wissenschaftlichen Gedanken führen von den Griechen, letztlich von Archimedes, über die Kluft des Mittelalters hinweg zu der Renaissance

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Die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes hat 3 Stufen, die sich aber nur scheinbar (nicht wie Cohen erweisen will wirklich) steigern. Prinzipiell kann man bei jedem Satze beginnen.

Vorstellung = Bewusstseinsinhalt = jeder intentionale Gegenstand (bei Cohen in präziser Bedeutung).

1. Der Raum, d.h. das Eidos, das wir Raum nennen, ist kein empirischer Begriff, besser: der Begriff von Eidos Raum ist nicht Begriff von etwas empirischem. Dem Raum kommt Priorität zu.

2. Der Raum ist eine notwendige Vorstellung a priori, er ist Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Erscheinungen.

3. Es gibt eine Eidosart „Begriff“. Der Raum gehört nicht zu ihr, sondern zu einer andern, „reinen Anschauung“. Der Raum ist eine Anschauung a priori.

Dies alles wird nun in der denkbar grössten Unklarheit und Ver-wirrung auseinandergesetzt. Cohen fördert an vielen Stellen diese Unklarheit mehr als dass er sie beseitigt. Seine vielen Mystizismen (z.B. S. 81, Z. 12!12) können nicht aufgezeichnet werden, sind auch völlig unfruchtbar. Abschnitte lang folgt Cohen dem „Prinzip der Wälzer“13 um den Leser aufs kommende neugierig zu machen, in der unklarsten Weise.

S. 84 unsinniges und falsches Gleichnis vom Gerät.14

der Wissenschaften. Es ist sonach kein Wunder, dass in Galilei und Newton dieselben Grundgedanken arbeiten und Früchte bringen, die schon die Griechen bewegten und ihre Anfänge von Mathematik und Mechanik hervortrieben.”

12Cohen 81, with the words appearing in line 12 in italics: “Indessen auch ohne diese historische Beziehung war die Untersuchung der Begriffe von Raum und Zeit für die transscendentale Methode nothwendig. Diese bedarf ja, wie wir sahen, der metaphysi-schen Erörterung als ihrer Vorbereitung; denn nicht wissenschaftliche Sätze sollen etwa als angeborene Ideen proclamirt werden, sondern der Grund jener Sätze soll in den Grundzügen des wissenschaftlichen Bewusstseins, mithin in Grundformen unserer geistigen Art nachgewiesen werden” (emphasis added).

13Cf. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995-2000) entry from 24 June 1918, II: 254 (hereafter cited as TB): “Nach Walter gibt es vier Prinzipien der Wälzer: 1.) Das dau-ernde Reden über die Disposition. 2.) Das Definieren von Dingen, die nach der Stelle, an der sie definiert werden, nicht mehr vorkommen. 3.) Man denkt sich irgendetwas aus, was es nicht gibt, und untersucht, wie es sein könnte. 4.) Die Reklame für die paar Sätze, aus denen das Buch eigentlich besteht. So entsteht Wilhelm Wundt, aber selbst Cohen ist nicht frei davon.”

14Cf. Cohen 84: “Wenn man Gefühle und Empfindungen als die Elemente und das Material des Bewusstseins betrachtet, so giebt es einen Ausdruck, der den complicirten Vorgang des Bewusstseins, die Verbindung von Empfindungen bezeichnet. Und es ist psychologisch unerlässlich, die Zusammensetzung der Elemente des Bewusstseins ebensosehr durch einen Terminus auszuzeichnen, wie das Auftauchen der Elemente selbst. Diese besondere Eigenthümlichkeit des Bewusstseins, dass [sic.] in demselben

452 GERshom scholEm

S. 114 die Instruktion des Problems der synthetischen Urteile a priori ist Kant nicht gelungen, als eine notwendige nachweisen zu können.15

Der erste Satz16 der metaphys. Erörtrg. des Raumes besagt:1. Wir meinen mit Raum etwas Bestimmtes und näher zu

Bestimmendes2. Das was wir mit Raum meinen, kommt in reiner Ausprägung

in der Wahrnehmung nicht vor.3. Es kommt aber etwas räumliches in der Wahrnehmung vor

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Folglich muss der Raum vor der Wahrnehmung bestehen. (Die

Priorität in irgendeinem Sinn wird behauptet)Kritik beginnt bei Satz 3.)Es ist zu bestreiten, dass in der Wahrnehmung etwas Räumliches

im Sinne von 1.) vorkommt.-------------S. 191. Die Konstruktion der Begriffe ist der mystische Terminus, der die Lücke bei Kant ausfüllen soll. Weil sein Begriff von Mathematik schwächlich ist, flüchtet er sich in eine absolute Unbestimmtheit.17

Zusammensetzungen und Verbindungen sich gestalten können, als wäre das Bewusstsein ein Geräth, an welchem Zusammenfügungen herstellbar sind, diesen Verbindungs-Charakter des Bewusstseins mag der Terminus ‘Vorstellung’ vertreten.”

15Cf. Cohen 114-15: “Dieser Gegensatz trifft die gesammte [sic.] Auffassung von der Möglichkeit und dem Werthe einer Erkenntniss. Aus diesem Gegensatze erhebt sich die grundlegende Unterscheidung der ganzen Kritik: diejenige zwischen ‘analytischen und synthetischen Urtheilen’. Mit diesem Unterschiede, der die ganze Sache und alle Einzelfragen der Kritik angeht, können wir hier nur eine einleitende Bekanntschaft machen. Auch Kant hat nur eine solche Instruction seines Problems bezweckt, da er diese Unterscheidung voranstellte.”

16Cf. Kant, KrV A23/B38: “1) Der Raum ist kein empirischer Begriff, der von äußeren Erfahrungen abgezogen worden. Denn damit gewisse Empfindungen auf etwas außer mir bezogen werden (d.i. auf etwas in einem andern Orte des Raumes, als darin ich mich befinde), imgleichen damit ich sie als außer und neben einander, mithin nicht bloß verschieden, sondern als in verschiedenen Orten vorstellen könne, dazu muß die Vorstellung des Raumes schon zum Grunde liegen. Demnach kann die Vorstellung des Raumes nicht aus den Verhältnissen der äußern Erscheinung durch Erfahrung erborgt sein, sondern diese äußere Erfahrung ist selbst nur durch gedachte Vorstellung allererst möglich.”

17On page 191, Cohen cites Kant from the second section of the “Transcendental Analytic’s System of All Principles of Pure Understanding,” entitled “On the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments,” to illustrate where he thinks Kant proclaimed “jene völlige Hinfälligkeit der Form [der Erscheinung]. The passage from Kant reads: “Selbst der Raum und die Zeit, so rein diese Begriffe auch von allem Empirischen sind, und so gewiß es auch ist, daß sie völlig a priori im Gemüthe vorgestellt werden, würden doch ohne objective Gültigkeit und ohne Sinn und Bedeutung sein, wenn ihr nothwendiger Gebrauch an den Gegenständen der Erfahrung nicht gezeigt würde;

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Die metaphysische Erörterung ist mit folgendem vernichtet:1.) empirisch mathematisch a Man kann sich nicht vorstellen, b aber man kann es sehr wohl dass kein Raum da sei denken, ohne Widersinn

2.) Man kann sich den Man kann ihn sich sehr gut Raum nicht ohne so denken

Gegenstände vorstellen

Die Verbindung ist natürlich völlig unerlaubt, und die erlaub-ten besagen natürlich garnichts. | und |

a b1a und 2b machen Kants Argument aus. Der reine eidetisch ein-

sichtige Irrtum, der ihn die beiden andern nicht hat erkennen lassen, ist der Grund, dass auf diese Bestimmung eine Theorie aufgebaut werden konnte. Diese 4 Sätze machen all das unmöglich.

Cohens Erörterung S. 103 ist gänzlich falsch.18

Was sind anschauliche Gegenstände ohne Kategorien? Hier ist alles Mystik der „Konstruktion“. Aber vor allem:

(S. 124) Nicht Sätze, sondern Sachverhalte werden geschaut.19

Alles, was Cohen über die reine Anschauung sagt, beruht auf die-ser Verwechselung: nicht der Satz, dass a + b > c ist im Dreieck, kann

ja ihre Vorstellung ist ein bloßes Schema” (KrV, A156/B195). The result, for Cohen, is that “die apriorische Form des Raumes” turns out to be “ein Hirngespinnst, wenn sie nicht mit den reinen Formen des Verstandes zur Synthesis der Erscheinungen als Erfahrungen verbunden wird.”

18Here Cohen discusses the second proposition of the metaphysical exposition of space (KrV, A24/B39), calling it “bereits positiver” than the first. Cf. Cohen 103: “Nicht blos [sic.] das örtliche Verhältniss, die Lage der Gegenstände setzt den Raum voraus, sondern der Gegenstand selbst wird durch die Vorstellung des Raumes bedingt. [...] Nach dem ersten Satze war von dem Raume nur eine relative Priorität aus den einzelnen Localisierungen geschlossen worden. Jetzt wird der Raum nicht nur allgemeinhin als ‘die Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Erscheinungen’ bezeichnet, sondern ausdrücklich: ‘und nicht als eine von ihnen abhängende Bestimmung.’ Damit ist von der Art, in welcher die Vorstellung des Raumes ‘zum Grunde liegt’, eine Bestimmung wenigstens gegeben: in den Dingen werde ihr Grund nicht gesucht. Nur dadurch vielmehr wird sie zu einem a priori, dass wir sie in Dinge legen.”

19Cf. Cohen 124-5: “Zugestanden, dass die einzelnen Räume nicht Bestandtheile, sondern nur Eintheilungen seien: entsprechen nicht dennoch, nicht gerade desshalb [sic.] den subjectiven Theilungen objective Theile? Machen wir diese Einschnitte nur in unserem Kopfe? Setzt nicht unsere einige Anschauung eine Welt nach Aussen? Sie selbst setzt sie zwar; aber steht diese darum minder als eine gegebene Grösse da? Correspondirt nicht vielmehr der einigen Anschauung des Raumes eine unendliche Räumlichkeit? | Diese Frage bildet den Inhalt des vierten Satzes, den man nicht als einen besonderen Satz, sondern nur als die Bestätigung des dritten ansehen darf.”

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geschaut werden, der nur in den Kategorien20 sich erzeugt, sondern der Sachverhalt. Cohens Wissenschaftsschwindel fällt also auf ihn selbst zurück.

z.B. S. 117 schon, wo der Irrtum einsetzt: die Anschauung, die a priori gelten will, muss in der Entdeckung geometrischer Sätze diese Apriorität erweisen.21

S. 123 sollen synthetische Sätze a priori aus Konstruktion hervorge-hen. Das ist die absolute Unklarheit. Bei Kant vertritt der mystische Begriff „Konstruktion“ die Kategorien der Anschauung, die, zugege-ben, sein System zerstören.22

Dinge überhaupt = Erscheinungen im 1. SinnZu 4.) Verhält sich also Tisch = Möbel anders wie Dreieck zu Raum? Wenn, was Cohen gegen Überweg sagt, richtig ist, so ist aberKant damit erledigt.23

Satz 3 und 4 beweisen nur eidetisch einsichtiges. Im übrigen herrscht eine so grenzenlose Begriffsverwirrung in ihnen, die Cohen

20The original reads “Kategaren,” which I have taken to be a typographic error. 21Cf. Cohen 117: “Die rechtmässige Wirksamkeit desselben ist eine weitere Frage,

deren Lösung von dem Nachweis abhängt: ob jenes im Geist Entspringende im wis-senschaftlichen Verfahren sich fruchtbar macht und vor dem Verdachte speculativer Willkür sich zu wahren vermag. So muss die Anschauung, welche a priori gelten will, in der Entdeckung geometrischer Sätze diese Apriorität erweisen. Aber diese Entdeckung erfolgt als Anschauung, und nicht aus Begriffen. In diesem Unterschiede bekämpft Kant seinen Vorgänger Leibniz, in diesem Unterschiede besiegt die transscendentale Kritik die alte Metaphysik.”

22Cf. Cohen 123: “Den Raum kann man sich selbst nur als ‘einen einigen Raum vorstellen.’ Viele Räume, von denen man redet, sind nur Theile des Einen Raumes, aber diese Theile sind nicht Bestandtheile, ‘daraus seine Zusammensetzung möglich’ würde, denn solche Zusammensetzung wäre nur eine logische, und jene Räume wären die Theilvorstellungen oder Merkmale; vielmehr sind sie wissenschaftlichen Zwecken entsprechende willkürliche Eintheilungen. Der allgemeine Begriff vom Raume beruht lediglich auf ‘Einschränkungen’ der einigen Raumesanschauung, durch welche ein Mannichfaltiges in dieser auseinandertritt. Dieser ihrer intuiven Natur gemäss werden all geometrischen Grundsätze mit apodiktischer Gewissheit aus ihr abgeleitet, nämlich als die echten Musterbeispiele der aus Construction hervorgehenden synthetischen Sätze a priori.”

23Cf. Cohen 127: “Ehe wir nun zu der transscendentalen übergehen, wollen wir die auch für die anderen Sätze kurzen Anmerkungen [Friedrich] Ueberwegs be-rücksichtigen, in denen wir, wie zu den ersten beiden, Zusammenhang mit [Adolf] Trendelenburg erkennen. ‘Das Argument nimmt’, sagt Trendelenburg, den ‘Grund aus dem Verhältnisse der objectiven Dinge. [...] Dessenungeachtet wird dieser von den äusseren Dingen entlehnte Grund mit der Ansicht verflochten, die Raum und Zeit alles äusseren Daseins entkleidet.’ Der Unterschied, auf den allein es ankommt zwischen Anschauung und Begriff, wird hier also vereitelt. Ebenso bemerkt zum dritten Satze Ueberweg: ‘Wobei freilich auffallend ist, dass Kant in der Ueberschrift doch den Raum als einen Begriff bezeichnet.’ In der Ueberschrift steht nämlich: ‘Metaphysische Erörterung dieses Begriffs.’ Und die metaphysische Erörterung ergiebt, dass der Raum

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(gegen Wundt S. 12724) noch bis zur Paradoxie treibt, dass jede Ein-zelverfolgung unfruchtbar ist. Falsche Begriffe von Wahrnehmung, Mathematik und dem Begriffe selber ergeben zusammen wohl kaum einen richtigen Begriff von Erkenntnis. So bleibt die Fragestellung gross, aber ungelöst.

Transcribed and annotated by Julia Ng

dem Begriffe nach—Anschauung ist. Die Einleitung zur zweiten Ausgabe sagt, wie nahe es liege, Anschauung und Begriff zu verwechseln, ‘weil gedachte Anschauung selbst a priori gegeben werden kann, mithin von einem blossen reinen Begriff kaum unterschieden wird.’ (S. 37) Der Unterschied liegt eben in der methodischen Bedeu-tung der Anschauung.”

24Cf. Cohen 127-8: “Der Unterschied liegt eben in der methodischen Bedeutung der Anschauung. | Dies hat auch [Wilhelm] Wundt übersehen, der Kants Unterscheidung des Raumes vom Begriffe aus dem ‘logischen Vorurtheil’ ableitet, welches alle Begriffe auf Gattungs- und Artbegriffe einschränke. Das Wesen des Begriffes bestehe vielmehr in den ‘allgemeinen Beziehungen zu anderen Begriffen.’ Diese Beziehungen fehlen dem Raume allerdings nicht, der eben ein Fundament in dem Bau der Naturkörper bedeutet. Aber wegen dieses Fundaments allein und dessen Sonderbedeutung wird der Raum vom Begriff unterschieden und als Anschauung ausgezeichnet. Consequenterweise ist selbst die reine Anschauung nach Wundt ein Begriff, nämlich ‘der philosophische Begriff des leeren Raumes oder der reinen Anschauung.’ Auch Wundt meint, der Raum liesse sich nicht definiren, wenn er ‘nicht auch begrifflich gedacht’ werden könnte: als ob der Raum in der metaphysischen Erörterung nicht auch begrifflich gedacht würde. Aber dass Kant nicht reine Anschauung und leeren Raum gleichsetzen könne, muss doch ausser Frage sein, dieweil er den letztern ausschliesst.”

Against the metaphysical exposition of space1

❦

Gershom Scholem

(1918, Bern)Against the metaphysical exposition of space, the following main objections are to be raised: I. Kant mixes up perception and intuition. The space of perception, that of intuition and that of mathematics are confounded with one another. The s[pace] of perception is a plane. [The space of] intuition per se is to be contested. [The space of] mathematics forms the real space problem.II. The entirely arbitrary usage of “represent” and “thinking” in connec-tion with the argument in proposition 2. Kant’s proposition does not provide proof. One cannot represent that there is no space though one can rep-

resent that there are no objects in it. This proposition is false for the space of mathematics becausethe space of mathematics per se cannot be represented. It is false for experiential space because one cannot representthat there are no objects in it. Thus Kant confounds the two and puts “thinking” in the secondpart of the proposition, which proves nothing, because an equivoca-tion has taken place.


1Published with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.

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III. The mixing up of concept and intuition through false terminology. “Space and concept of space” are two different things. Kant’s entire

argumentation in propositions 3 and 4 is therefore without substance [lit.: without object]. He only proves that the concept of space is not a concept of a concept, which is self-evident.

Result: an investigation of the problem is impossible on the grounds of Kantian determinations.

The transcendental appears in Kant and Cohen as a magical concept. // In the case of a posteriori objects, to the extent that they are given, i.e., real, it is not possible to pose the question of their possibility other than under the condition of [giving] an answer in [the form of] an analytic judgment. (By contrast, it is of course possible to answer the question of the “How” of this object, in the sense of what properties it has (Quale), with a synthetic judgment. With a priori entities,2 the question of How in the sense of Quale (what properties does it have) is completely meaningless; rather, there is here the prospect in the Kantian sense that, even after the reality of such a priori entities has been demonstrated by means of a metaphysical exposition, the ques-tion of the possibility of such a priori entities may still be posed with a view towards getting an answer in [the form of] a synthetic judgment. Now by designating both this last question and the question of the Quale with a “How,” Kant gains the possibility of deviously acquiring the transcendental through the following quaternio terminorum [fallacy of four terms]:

[major premise] I can ask “How” of every entity.[minor premise] The question of Quale (what properties does it have?) is meaningless in the case of a priori entities.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[conclusion] The only meaningful question of How with regard to a priori entities is this: how is it possible, the transcendental question.

---Page 139 in Cohen is the height of nonsense. Link between logic and ethics: the law shall be!!! Why is he grumbling about Barbarossa?! And on what grounds shall it be? Not along the lines of morals, but rather—

2Scholem is comparing a posteriori “objects” [Gegenstände] with space construed as their a priori counterpart, but he is also quite consistent in designating these a priori counterparts with the word Gebilde, which can mean “thing” or “object” as well as “shape” or “structure.” For this reason I have rendered Gebilde as “entity” to differentiate it from Gegenstand, while noting that Gebilde also carries a formal sense.

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the highest principle shall exist because of the “fact of science” and thus because of Newton! Because the earth revolves around the sun! The entire passage is groundless. We “want” to recognize necessity—as if there were a logical willing where there isn’t even a logical must.

Cohen wants to claim (on page 77) that only the posing of the question of the a priori is timelessly valid, but that the content, on the other hand—[the question of] which ones are the fundamental concepts—is determined by the “progressive culture of the spirit.” For this reason, the metaphysical exposition is supposed to possess irrefutable validity in its tendency alone, but only relative validity in its results.

The mystical obscurity is illustrated most distinctly here. A critical right is granted to positivism. The conceivability of such an evolution, if it is to have serious meaning at all, is unintelligible.

The metaphysical exposition aims at the unanalyzable facts of con-sciousness in cognizing. It is a phenomenological [exposition], and in fact the one connected to Hume’s investigation. It asks:

What do we mean when we talk about space.What is the eidos space?

By contrast, the transcendental exposition asks (a question that does not interest Hume in the least):

What does this space achieve for science.

Cohen does not explain how the results of an eidetic investigation are supposed to be relative.

In science, the metaphysical a priori becomes transcendental—a priori. “In this way Leibniz ripens, purified by Hume, into the phi-losopher reinforced in Newton: Kant.” (Style!!)

---

The fundamental concepts of science are, according to page 78, pro-vided by literary proof. The reversal of a deep thought into a bogus facticity cannot prove any worse. This is pure nonsense. With respect to this entire passage:

“You see now, there he comes /Big steps he’s taking”!

The chasm of the Middle Ages!

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The metaphysical exposition of space has 3 stages that only appear to build on each other (and do not really do so, as Cohen would like to show). In principle one could begin with any one of the propositions.

Representation = content of consciousness = every intentional object (in its precise definition in Cohen).

1. Space, i.e., the eidos that we call space, is not an empirical concept, or better yet: the concept of the eidos space is not a concept of something empirical. Priority is to be given to space.

2. Space is a necessary representation a priori, it is the condition of possibility for appearances.

3. There is a type of eidos called “concept.” Space does not belong to it but to another type, that of “pure intuition.” Space is an intuition a priori.

All of this is now discussed with the greatest obscurity and confu-sion conceivable. At many points Cohen advances this obscurity more than he eliminates it. His many mysticisms (e.g. page 81, line 12!) cannot all be noted down; they are also completely unproductive. Section after section, Cohen follows the “principle of large tomes” in order to make the reader curious about what is coming in the most obscure manner possible.

On page 84 absurd and false comparison with an apparatus.On page 114 Kant did not succeed in demonstrating that the pre-

scription of the problem of synthetic a priori judgments is necessary.

The first proposition of the metaphysical exposition of space states:1. By space we mean something determined and to be further

determined.2. What we mean by space does not appear in perception in its

pure form.3. Yet something spatial appears in perception.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Therefore space must exist before perception. (Priority in some

sense is claimed.)Critique begins with proposition 3.)It must be denied that something spatial in the sense of 1.) appears

in perception.------------Page 191. The construction of concepts is the mystical terminus that is supposed to fill in the gap in Kant. Because his concept of mathemat-ics is weak, he takes refuge in an absolute indeterminacy.

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The metaphysical exposition is annihilated by the following:1.) empirical mathematical a One cannot represent b but one can very well that there is no space think it without absurdity 2.) One cannot represent space One can think it very well without objects in such a manner

The link is of course completely impermissible, and those that are permissible of course say absolutely nothing. | and |

a b1a and 2b comprise Kant’s argument. The pure, eidetically intel-

ligible error that prevented him from recognizing the other two is the reason why a theory could be constructed based on this determination. These 4 propositions make all of that impossible.

Cohen’s exposition on page 103 is entirely false.What are intuitive objects without categories? Everything here

amounts to the mysticism of “construction.” But above all:(Page 124) It is not propositions but states of affairs3 that are being seen.Everything that Cohen says about pure intuition is based on this

mix-up: it is not the proposition that a + b > c is in the triangle—a proposition generated only in the categories—that can be seen, but the state of affairs. Cohen’s bogus science thus falls back upon itself.

e.g., page 117, where the error is already introduced: the intuition that wants to be valid a priori must prove this apriority in the discovery of geometric propositions.

On page 123, synthetic propositions are supposed to proceed a priori out of their construction. This is absolutely obscure. In Kant, the mystical concept of “construction” acts in place of the categories of intuition that admittedly destroy his system.

Things in general = appearances in the first sense Ad 4.) Is the relation table = furniture different from the relationof triangle to space?

3A technical term that gained philosophical currency in the years leading up to the First World War, Sachverhalt is generally translated as “state of affairs.” Both “Sachverhalt” and “state of affairs” derive from a juridical context in which one speaks of a “state of affairs” or “state of things” (status rerum) in reference to the disposition of events or circumstances at a given time or place (as it pertains to a case or matters raised in a trial). For a history of the philosophy of Sachverhalt, see Barry Smith, “Logic and the Sachverhalt,” The Monist 72:1 (January 1989): 52–69.

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If what Cohen has to say against Ueberweg is correct, then Kantis finished.Propositions 3 and 4 prove only what is eidetically intelligible. More-

over, the two of them are marked by such a limitless conceptual confu-sion, which Cohen (against Wundt on page 127) pursues to the point of paradox, that every individual pursuit is unproductive. Together, false concepts of perception, mathematics and of the concept itself will hardly result in a correct concept of cognition. Thus the question remains great, but unresolved.

Translated and annotated by Julia Ng

Kant’s Theory of Experience at the End of the War:

Scholem and Benjamin Read CohenA Commentary

Julia Ng

I. Kant “Today”

At the end of one side of a manuscript entitled “On Kant” and housed in the Scholem Archive in Jerusalem, one reads the following pro-nouncement: “it is impossible to understand Kant today.”1 Whatever it might mean to “understand” Kant, or indeed, whatever “Kant” is here meant to be understood, it is certain, according to the manuscript, that such understanding cannot come about by way of purporting to have returned to or spoken in the name of “Kant.” For “[t]oday,” so the document begins, “there are many people who call themselves Kantians, and who profess to have—or actually do have—cognitions in Kantian terminology.” Whatever the degree of truth or falsity to such cognitions, however, neither those who produce these cognitions nor a philosophy consisting in these cognitions have a right to call themselves “Kantian,” since it is “obvious” that “such terminology is not equivalent to Kantian language” but is abstracted from “language” as innovations towards the better description of the world. Were cognitions reducible to the use of certain fundamental concepts abstracted as terminol-


1Gershom Scholem, “Über Kant,” Scholem Arc 4° 1599 File 277/I #14, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. Reproduced in the present volume in transcription and translation under the titles “Über Kant” and “On Kant” (hereafter cited parentheti-cally in the text as “On Kant”).

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ogy, philosophy as such would be reducible to the trials and errors of philosophers who seek cognition but can only hope to approach it from the standpoint of invention—such that no philosopher will have ever attained an understanding of the cognitions denoted by the name “philosophy” until the end of philosophy. Thus, the manuscript continues, “[i]t is out of the question that these people, or even just one of them, understand this terminology.” Reduced to the future comprehensibility of the cognitions transmitted in terminology, as “Kantians” would have it, philosophy itself is impossible to understand “today” (“On Kant” 443–44).

Coming from a twenty-six-year-old Walter Benjamin who had only recently decided on the topic for his dissertation, and his twenty-year-old friend Gershom Scholem, who knew less of Kant than of mathematics as he jotted down these notes detailing their joint study of Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in the summer of 1918, these pronouncements certainly smack of the hyperbole of youth.2 Nonetheless, such soundings of the death knell of Kantianism were far from isolated fantasies of two friends disenchanted with the academics and politics back home.3 In a lengthy obituary written a few years later for the “last” of the neo-Kantians, Alois Riehl, Heinrich Rickert—with whom Benjamin had studied in Freiburg—also proclaims the death of neo-Kantianism by accusing it of “misunderstanding” and “misusing” the terms of its own name.4 The name “neo-Kantianism” has been abused, Rickert argues, because thinkers call themselves “neo-Kantian” who have no inclination of returning to Kant’s discov-eries in the context of his own time. The only right they have to be called neo-Kantian comes from the fact that they returned to Kant at

2Scholem was a student of mathematics at the time, and by his own estimation had only started to “gain access” to Kant when he read the Prolegomena for the first time in September of the preceding year. Cf. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000) II: 43 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TB). —As I have pointed out in my introduction to the documents “On Kant” and “Against the Metaphysical Exposition of Space” in the present volume, these notes were written in Scholem’s hand but represent the outcome of his discussions together with Benjamin on Cohen’s work. In the following discussion I will refer to the author of these notes as Scholem, with the understanding that their content derives from the thought of both Scholem and Benjamin.

3Scholem had just joined Benjamin in Switzerland after being medically certified as unfit for the draft. While in Bern, the two decided to found an imaginary academy, which they named the “Universität Muri,” under whose auspices they began to study Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung together. Cf. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) 68; 76 (hereafter cited paren-thetically in the text as Freundschaft).

4Heinrich Rickert, “Alois Riehl,” in Logos 13 (1924–25): 162–85; 164.

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a time when Kant was all but forgotten or no longer understood, all the while as they drove philosophy forwards as a science in pursuit of their own agendas. The neo-Kantian insistence that Kant’s writings may be abstracted into certain fundamental concepts that anyone capable of philosophical reasoning should be able to understand, so Rickert, is thus made possible only by the fact that what Kant intended or achieved with the concepts “has become difficult to understand in our own time” (ibid.). Neo-Kantianism is thus a philosophy of the future to the extent that its leading ideas derive from debates that Kant had, in fact, already settled a hundred years earlier; its futurity is exclusively a function of the belatedness of its own ideas vis-à-vis “Kant” in his “own” epoch. To the extent that the neo-Kantians seem united in their individual pursuits only on the use of a few fundamental concepts [Grundbegriffe] abstracted from Kant, neo-Kantianism appears to be little more than a movement of idiosyncrasies, which, though “new” to the extent that they depart from Kant, attain the character of a historically contingent, one-time phenomenon announcing nothing other than its own end.5

Rickert’s obituary for “the last of the neo-Kantians”—written, incidentally, just three years before another one-time student of his, Martin Heidegger, would publish Sein und Zeit (1927)6—thus takes exception to the neglect of the historical origins of Kant’s technical innovations, which are irrelevant for the “neo-Kantians” to the extent that Kant’s critical philosophy is for them a “theory of science” that is continuous with the positive sciences and whose “terminology” is comprehensible in principle. From a macroscopic perspective, the

5The sentiment that philosophy must grapple with historical concept formation in order to grasp the “heterogeneous continuum” viz. material of reality that exceeds con-cept formation as it occurs in the natural sciences, is already expressed in Rickert’s Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung: eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften (Freiburg und Leipzig: Mohr, 1896¹; 1902²).

6Two years after that, of course, in 1929, was when the infamous debate between Hei-degger and Cassirer took place in Davos, Switzerland, which in popular mythology has taken on the significance of a battle between two epochs: one between a cosmopolitan liberal humanism as represented by the neo-Kantian Cassirer, and a growing and ulti-mately victorious nationalist irrationalism as represented by Heidegger. Cf. for a seminal account of the debate on its own philosophical terms, beyond the reductiveness of this mythology, Peter Gordon’s Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). —Heidegger was quite explicit about the influence that Rickert’s book on Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung had on the de-velopment of his own thinking. Cf. Heidegger’s letter of March 15, 1921, to Rickert, in which he tells his former mentor that he intends to teach a seminar on his book; and his letter of February 15, 1928, in Martin Heidegger and Heinrich Rickert, Briefwechsel 1912 bis 1933 und andere Dokumente (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002) 54; 58.

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“death” of neo-Kantianism had been a long time in the making: since 1914, the logical and epistemological horizon dominating neo-Kantian interpretations of Kant’s critical philosophy had been increasingly supplanted by the priority of the fundamental heterogeneity of being, attention to which had been brought to the fore by the collapse of optimism during the war and effected in the name of a “Lebensphi-losophie” derived from the reception of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It is clear from the manuscript “On Kant” that this general atmosphere of philosophical conflict—which may be characterized roughly as a contest between the constructibility of being by the principles of sci-ence, on the one hand, and the insistence that the material of reality exceeds any such concept formation, on the other—was not lost on the two friends, Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, as they studied Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung at a distance from the war from their Swiss refuge. Rather than unequivocally devote themselves to the investigation of the “irrational” or the “material” per se in response, however, they pursued “the possibility of Kantianism” as a function of that which Scholem calls in his notes “transmissibility as such.” For Scholem and Benjamin, according to the manuscript, “transmissibility as such” replaces the “Kantian system” as the “absolute” from which the “life” of terminology and thus the possibility of Kantianism originates.

As such, the “Kantian system”—which Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfah-rung had sought to establish as the unity resulting from the uncovering of principles that construct being in the manner that mathematical objects are presumed to be constructed—is revealed in relation to its own historical constructedness as a “mysticism”: “transmissibility as such” is the name for system’s relation to itself, a relation that can-not be encompassed within the concept “system” per se, and which must therefore be considered as the utterly unscientific, “magical” or “irrational,” invented ground of neo-Kantian scientificity. For Scholem and Benjamin, everything—that is, everything that the neo-Kantian project sought to establish through the “fact of science”: world, real-ity, being—hinges on the possibility of providing alternative grounds for objectivity such that it is not reduced to a “life” of “terminology” or mere “semblance” of scientificity, or, as Scholem notes in a diary entry on July 25, 1918, to “nominalistic ontology” with whose “nominal definitions [Cohen] perpetuates a bogus method and reality” (TB II: 276). By inventing their own terminology, and typographically mark-ing its inventedness by underlining the nominalizing suffix “-ity [-keit]” in the term “transmissibility,” Scholem and Benjamin announce their intent to pursue their own investigation into an alternative concept

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of the transcendental named “transmissibility as such.” Their inves-tigation is one through which “transmissibility” might be uncovered not as a merely “nominal” or arbitrary assignment of signs to things in philosophical cognition, under which aspect objective reality, and indeed Kant’s entire critical enterprise, threaten to dissipate into “mysticism” qua lifeless scientificity, but, rather, as a systematic rela-tion—and systematic bringing-into-relation—of concept to its own “mystical” ground. Such an investigation, which would presume nei-ther to generate the possibility of experience on the terminological “semblance of life,” nor that philosophy, reduced to systematicity, has a grasp on the absolute, would be “legitimately” transcendental: more transcendental, in any case, than the “ceremonial protocol” with which Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, one of the founding texts of the Marburg school’s view that science mediates life, perfunctorily and systematically “bows” before the “transcendental” without ever attaining the “object.”

II. Drohwort, Erfahrung

The concept of “system” at work in Cohen’s Kantianism hinges upon its self-stylization as a philosophy oriented towards the future: Kant’s discovery of the “transcendental method” as he exposed space and time as a priori forms that ground our cognition of nature. According to the historical introduction to the second edition of Kants Theorie der Erfahrung,7 Kant’s “new method” had always been the future to come, portended by three figures corresponding to three stages in a cumulative defense against psychologism: Leibniz, Hume, and Newton. In this narrative,8 Leibniz is the originator of a method that allows for extension to be grounded in an inextensive yet positive moment of thought—“force [Kraft]” conceived as “intension [Intension]”—which

7Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1871¹, 1885²) (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as KTE).

8Cohen borrows the results from his recent investigation of Leibniz in Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1883). As Andrea Poma points out, Cohen’s incorporation of results from his investigation of Leibniz, as well as his account of Kant’s place in the history of philosophy, represent two of the distinguishing features of the reworked sec-ond edition of Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, and thus two aspects that mark this second edition as a step towards the establishment of Cohen’s own philosophical voice—his neo-Kantianism—as opposed to an explication of Kant in the manner of the first edi-tion. Cf. Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen. Trans. by John Denton (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997) 37–8.

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he equates with the infinitesimal, a non-sensible and thus pure con-cept of thought borrowed from mathematics (KTE 37–8). In making mathematics prior to sensible cognition and logic prior to mathemat-ics, however, Leibniz “overestimates” logic’s capacity to determine material (KTE 39–40), and loses the essential mediation to the real that for Cohen is provided by mathematics.9 As a corrective, Hume asserts that the representation of the connection between things by the concept of causality is a function of habit rather than an axiomatic concept of cause as such (KTE 52). But in asserting that “space” arises from the repetition of sense impressions, Hume presupposes the prior existence of points of whose impressions the fundamental concepts are the copy (KTE 72). Cohen then invokes Newton’s proof of gravity “by means of phenomena and [ . . . ] through speculations that are made about these phenomena” (KTE 54) as the privileged example of a method that investigates science itself as already containing the fundamental concepts upon which phenomena depend, thereby lay-ing the ground for a theory of possible scientific cognition (KTE 67). In spite of the title that Newton himself gave to his principal work, the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, there is no priority in the relation between mathematics and metaphysics, as both are prin-ciples a priori and represent “two wings” that supplement each other to form one system (KTE 65).

By asserting that Newton was in fact a “systematic scientist,” Cohen makes Newtonian physics into the model for Kantian transcendental philosophy to the extent that it points towards the necessity of a metaphysical foundation for a transition to physics. Invoking the Opus postumum, Kant’s own incomplete attempt to “transition to physics” in the absence of an adequate metaphysics (KTE 63), Cohen argues that Kant turns to “examining the cognitive value and ground of certainty in Newtonian natural science” (KTE 66) because Newton articulates a difference to the representations we give to ourselves of our sense impressions that is internal to our production of knowledge (KTE 73). It is the articulation of this internal difference that Kant achieves with his use of the “threatening word [Drohwort]”: “experience [Erfahrung]” (KTE 66). “The word experience” (KTE 72) thus has a terminologi-cal character specific to Newtonian scientific method, invented to

9That is, in “taking a law of logic to be sufficient as the principle for the grounding of the physical nature of things” (KTE 52), Leibniz bypasses mathematics’ “inner rela-tion to sense impression” (KTE 44) and the “inner, productive relation” (KTE 49) that mathematics has to nature.

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“fortify” (KTE 78) Hume’s “sensualist weapons” by “weakening the critical prejudice [das kritische Vorurtheil]” that presumes that we may infer the existence of “things” from our sense impressions (KTE 73). For as Cohen argues, the fundamental elements of cognition are each inevitably accompanied by a “general expression of consciousness”: we cannot conceive of consciousness without remainder (KTE 74). Were science not rooted in foundations of consciousness that we regard as inaccessible to analysis—that is, as a priori intuition—science would be in danger of falling prey to the whims of the arbitrary combinations of our perceptions (KTE 76). “The word experience” sets the “general expression of consciousness” that must accompany any thought as the limit to (psychological) analysis: in scientific cognition, what we take to be a “final element of consciousness” must be a function of how we take it to be, an assumption of its scientific groundedness—“Every ens must be a quale” (KTE 74).

By extension, the task of determining the elements of the human consciousness must be regarded as constitutively incomplete in order to ensure that the concepts used in the theory of cognition correspond without prejudice to the elements of consciousness they are meant to represent. In the interest of limiting the pretensions of analysis, Cohen declares that the outcome of the metaphysical exposition of a priori intuitions is only of “relative” value, and that we can only assume that the “fundamental concepts [Grundbegriffe]” of consciousness are given a priori, since only the metaphysical exposition’s general orientation towards them is unconditionally necessary: which fundamental concepts they are is a matter of the history of science (KTE 77). Cohen thus methodologically ensures that history as such validates science, since it is precisely in conceiving itself in and as the history of science that sci-ence can bracket off overestimations of the power of logic or analysis and ensure that the scientific concept corresponds to its object: as with Descartes’s piece of wax, it is impossible to determine whether an “Ur-Ding” or some other constant remains in or through real change (KTE 77). And for the same reason that an element of consciousness must exist which in its unanalyzability grounds the validity of the concept that has been historically produced, the history of science also progresses asymptotically towards its object, since one can presume that such elements of consciousness, in their limited analyzability, are sufficient and necessary for grounding the fact of science: “the determinacy of a priori elements orient themselves in their relation and competence towards the facts of scientific cognition which they are to ground” (ibid.).

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The validity of cognitions—how they are possible—and the culmina-tion of the “metaphysical a priori” in the “transcendental—a priori” (KTE 78)—are thus guaranteed, as it were, by the history in toto of how they are represented by particular concepts. And vice versa: the fact of science, in its historical manifestation, is guaranteed by the a priori principle that such an a priori principle must be presumed to exist in the definition of scientific cognition as such. Against the horizon of their asymptotic approach to the “thing,” “point,” or “final element,” which is to say against the horizon of their corresponding “general expressions of consciousness,” the fundamental concepts regulating the cognition of things thus appear neither as a pure concept of thought, nor as a blind copy of sense impression, but as “words,” “threatening words,” “the word (for)” x: as terminology. Philosophy’s systematicity is guaranteed—by the history of its terms. As Cohen remarks: “Precisely because and insofar as science is no fairy tale”—insofar as we must assume that what goes up must come down—“it is possible to find in its fundamental concepts, which are determined by literary proof,” i.e., proof in strategically chosen words, the “correspondence with the most general truths of logic that speculative reason ever abstracted from the confusion of thought” (KTE 78; my emphasis).

III. The Fourth Term

For Cohen’s Kant, “experience” is a technical term invented as a threat against both logic’s overdetermination of the real and psychologism’s latent empiricism, fortifying Hume’s “sensualist weapons” with the introduction of an “internal difference” in the production of cogni-tion: the a priori. The investigation of these a priori elements of our cognition is the task of the “metaphysical exposition,” though it may hope only to infinitely approach such a priori entities, never to deter-mine them. By the same token, the progress from concept to thing is secured insofar as Cohen methodologically acquires the possibility of grounding scientific cognition on the assumption that there are certain elements of consciousness prior to analysis, and that therefore the task set upon the metaphysical exposition of a priori elements of conscious-ness is constitutively incompletely, or infinite. The outcome of Cohen’s exposition of the metaphysical exposition, however, is that “science” is thereby cast as the function of a history of terms strategically chosen to furnish “proof” of the existence of fundamental concepts, of the correspondence with the general truths of logic, and thus of “facticity” in general. In the end, the neo-Kantian concept of science appears to

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consist in “one great metaphysical capitulation before pragmatism,” since “only what is useful to cognition” is identified as an element of cognition (“On Kant” #)—as if “an epistemological end [Zweck] could serve as the argument for ‘method’ in logic!!!” (TB II: 274)

Such, too, was the gist of Scholem’s and Benjamin’s criticism of Cohen as they read the “Introduction” to Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. In another set of notes from the Scholem Archive composed in the context of “On Kant” and entitled “Against the metaphysical exposi-tion of space,”10 Scholem writes:

Cohen wants to claim (on page 77) that only the posing of the question of the a priori is timelessly valid, but that the content, on the other hand—[the question of] which ones are the fundamental concepts—is determined by the “progressive culture of the spirit.” For this reason, the metaphysical exposition is supposed to possess irrefutable validity in its tendency alone, but only relative validity in its results. (“Against” 444)

The problem, according to Scholem, is this: by claiming that the metaphysical exposition of the a priori is valid only in its general tendency and is otherwise relative to the particular content of scien-tific discovery, Cohen’s Kant leaves the validity of cognition up to the notion that history (of science) is composed of a “progressive culture of the spirit” and the concepts that turn out to be correct along the way. In this case, “timeless validity” would accrue to philosophy only in terms of philosophy’s intention to investigate the a priori—it would be unconditional only in its “posing of the question” of necessity and only in its proposing that an internal difference subsists in all cogni-tive activity. Its “results,” that is, the particular cognitions accruing to the investigation of the validity of all cognition, would be considered possible not by force of principles regulating them internally, but on the grounds of their adequacy to the fundamental concepts they are supposed to approach in the course of time, and attain to at the

10Scholem, “Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes,” Scholem Arc 4° 1599 File 277/I #11, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. Reproduced in the present volume in transcription and translation under the titles “Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes” and “Against the metaphysical exposition of space” (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “Against”). —According to Scho-lem’s diary, Scholem and Benjamin started reading Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung around May 23, 1918 (entry of June 23, 1918, TB II: 251); they begin the section on the “metaphysical exposition of space” (Chapter One) on June 17, 1918 (TB II: 238). Scholem makes the decision to write up notes on his conversations with Benjamin on June 26, 1918 (TB II: 258).

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end of history. From this point of view all cognitions of science are possible, and thus correct, so long as the concepts underlying their possibility are proven valid, which is to say so long as they are proven to correspond to the sum total, however that may be conceived, of all possible scientific cognition. “The conceivability of such an evolu-tion,” however, “if it is to have serious meaning at all, is unintelligible” (“Against” 458).

Such “evolution” is “unintelligible” because, as Benjamin writes in a fragment composed in December 191711 around the time he considered writing on the Marburg school’s theory of science for his dissertation: to the extent that “science” is conceived as the investi-gation of a priori intuitions, science is an “infinite task” that can be unconditional only in its “form,” not in its “material” or “content.” For the “unity of science”—the ground on which science might maintain its “autonomy” from both the emptiness of thought and the blindness of intuition—must be based on the idea that “it is not the answer to a finite question, or that it cannot be asked for [erfragt werden]”: otherwise, validity would be a mere function of the “infinite number of all possible questions about the world and being” (GS VI: 51). If the “infinite task” were understood as a set of solutions whose “infin-ity” is limited to possible answers that have been “asked for” by valid questions, cognition would be reducible to what Scholem glosses as “the posing of the question” (“Against” 458): being, reality and world would be begging the question. To relate cognition to its object, one needs to recognize instead that “[t]asked to science is the task whose solution itself still remains within it, which is to say [ . . . ] that its solution is methodological” (GS VI: 52): that is, as a task whose infinity is of a “higher power [höherer Mächtigkeit]” than “all” of its “possible” answers. Only if the infinity of the task is in excess of all possibility might cognition not infinitely regress from its object, and science be something other than the description of sensory impression or logical confabulation. The infinity of task can therefore only be methodological, a formal possibility for a question to be posed or a thesis to be posited in time—and therefore bears the name: “solvability as such.” Only as a “formality” can science fulfill the “infinite task” of providing itself (and any philosophy that regards its cognitions of reality as fundamentally and verifiably scientific) with the grounds for its own certainty.

11Benjamin, “Die unendliche Aufgabe,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) VI: 51–2 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as GS).

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Benjamin then brings this thesis to bear on Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung after he and Scholem begin to study its “Introduction” in the summer of 1918. The final lines of the fragment on the “infinite task,” which likely record the outcome of a discussion Benjamin had with Scholem about its main themes just days after Scholem’s arrival in Bern in early May 1918,12 further specify the “task that is tasked to science” in terms of the terminology of Cohen’s “Introduction”13: “Science does not correspond to an infinitely numerous analysis [unendlich zahlreiche Analysis], but rather is an infinite, absolute (not relative) synthesis [unendliche absolute (nicht relative) Synthesis]” (GS VI: 52). The criticism aims at the very cornerstone of the Marburg school’s understanding of the first Critique as a theory of knowledge. For, on the one hand, Cohen insists that we must set a limit on the analyzability of consciousness with the “threat” of an a priori “general expression of consciousness” in order for there to be an infinite task. On the other hand, Cohen does away with this constitutive remainder by defining the infinity of the task as the infinite number of “relative” results whose sum total must be calculable in order that it ground the fact of science. In insisting on the “relativity” of cognition to the fact of science, Cohen reduces the “infinite task” from a formal condition to a “solution” already predisposed in the “posing of the question,” and thereby to “infinitely numerous analysis” that arrives at its object by projecting its total calculability or by ending history. Cohen’s method methodologically undermines the possibility of its own task. And in Scholem’s words, Cohen has erroneously produced a “mystical obscu-rity” out of the metaphysical foundation of the transcendental method by “granting” a “critical right [ . . . ] to positivism” (“Against” 458).

12Though Benjamin put the subject of “the infinite task” on hiatus at the end of March 1918 in favor of concentrating on what would ultimately become his thesis on the Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism (cf. Benjamin’s letter to Scholem on March 30, 1918, in Briefe, 2 vols., ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966) I: 180 [hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Briefe]), he appears to have brought along his fragment from December 1917 or at least recited its contents for discussion “in the evening” of May 7, 1918 during which Benjamin and Scholem “spoke for three hours” about the themes from “Die unendliche Aufgabe” (“science as infinite task,” “the Marburg neo-Kantians and the idea of science,” how “science cannot be asked for [erfragt],” and “solvability as such”) as well as another fragment, “Über die Wahrnehmung,” which Benjamin had composed in October 1917 as a preliminary study to his essay “On the Program for a Coming Philosophy” (TB II: 221). According to the editors of Benjamin’s Gesammelten Schriften, the final lines of “Die unendliche Aufgabe” were written later than the preceding text (GS VI: 665).

13Benjamin and Scholem began to study the “Introduction” about two weeks after Scholem’s arrival on May 4, 1918.

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Underlying Cohen’s error, to quote from another fragment that Benjamin composed during the summer of 1918, “On the Transcen-dental Method,” is this: in positing the total calculability of the world, we assume that “in mathematics, validity and correctness transition into one another because (perhaps) nothing is added to the fundamental concepts” (GS VI: 52–3). Science accrues from the “speculations that are made about the phenomena” (KTE 54) because we assume that its infinity is the product of certain mathematical operations generating the infinite repetition of the same, and that mathematical truths can be intuited from observing an infinite number of objects falling. In actuality, this “ill-fated confusion,” which has led to a “bogus facticity” in Kant’s successors (GS VI: 52), is the product of the assumption that “(perhaps) nothing is added to the fundamental concepts” in assimi-lating science to the image of quantitative infinity, to the assumption that we have enough time, indeed all the time in the world, to observe an object falling an infinite number of times. Benjamin marks the assumption with a “(perhaps),” and notes that it results from the fact that neither Kant nor his successors recognize that it is “language,” not science, which “gives” the concepts to be investigated. Whatever else “language” means in this context, it seems to present the post-Kantian positivist with the same problem as does mathematics: namely, that his fundamental concepts are, “(perhaps),” founded on the “postulate” that what is true is necessarily given in science, that experience is pos-sible only if scientifically verifiable, that the possibility of the physical world is given by Newtonian mathematical natural science—or that mathematics consists in synthetic a priori judgments. If the fundamen-tal concepts of our experience are given in facts of language, then Kant and his epigones are presented with the problem that mathematics does not necessarily correspond to experience, and burdened with proving why science is not, as Benjamin suggests, “infinite absolute (not relative) synthesis” (GS VI: 52)—that a heavy body suspended in the air, for instance, will necessarily fall to the ground, even if we are not there as witness. To restate: Benjamin’s modest “(perhaps)” marks the place where validity and correctness might coincide—and might not. The burden of proof lies with Cohen to explain how and why, despite the apparent mathematizability of nature and history, the world could still recede from thought—or as Scholem writes, Cohen must “explain how the results of an eidetic investigation are supposed to be relative” (“Against” 458; my emphasis).

In other words, Cohen invents the grounds for his concept of sci-ence, and from Scholem’s notes, it appears that Scholem and Benjamin

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devoted much of their time in the summer of 1918 to elaborating this invention. For Cohen, the relativity of results is methodologically essential to establishing the unity of science, which he conceives on the difference internal to our concept formation and necessary to ensure that our representations of the world do not fall into empty logicism or blind psychologism: “Every ens must be a quale” (KTE 74). With regard to a priori entities such as space, however, “the question of How [Wie] in the sense of Quale (what properties does it have) is completely meaningless” (“Against” 457), since in them nothing is encountered that belongs to sensation: their “reality” viz. objective validity is demonstrated insofar as they are shown to be given a priori in order to ground all intuitions. Yet since it is presumed that “I can ask ‘How’ of every entity” (“Against” 457), Kant asks how a priori entities are possible independently of the constitution of our sensibil-ity. Given in the transcendental exposition, the question of possibility ensures that the answer appears in the form of a synthetic judgment: the representation of a priori entities is nothing at all as soon as we leave aside the limitation that things are only given as objects of our sensible intuition.14

According to Scholem, however, this last step towards the transcen-dental ideality of space is “deviously acquired”15 through a logical fallacy in which the transcendental is inserted into the syllogism as an illicit fourth term.16 The conclusion that a priori entities may only

14The corresponding passage in the “Transcendental exposition of the concept of space” reads as follows: “Our expositions accordingly teach the reality (i.e., objective validity) of space in regard to everything that can come before us externally as an object, but at the same time the ideality of space in regard to things when they are considered in themselves through reason, i.e., without taking account of the constitution of our sensibility. We therefore assert the empirical reality of space (with respect to all possible outer experience), though to be sure its transcendental ideality, i.e., that it is nothing as soon as we leave aside the condition of the possibility of all experience, and take it as something that grounds the things in themselves.” —Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) A28/B44 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CPR).

15Scholem calls the “transcendental” a “magical concept,” and elsewhere refers to the “devious acquisition” as “incest” (“On Kant” 444), “perversion,” and the “ontological proof of god for the devil” (TB II: 274–5).

16Cohen devotes part of the last section of the first chapter of Kants Theorie der Erfahrung to his rebuttal of Herbart’s charge that Proposition 2 of Kant’s metaphysical exposition of space contains a quaternio terminorum, in which the necessity of space as a priori intu-ition is introduced alongside the necessity of space as reality implied by objects. Here Scholem is probably proposing that Cohen’s rebuttal, which claims that Kant switches between apriority and reality in order to introduce the distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments, contains its own version of a quaternio terminorum (KTE 121).

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be asked meaningfully of their possibility, which assures that they are conceivable only under the condition of the possibility of all experi-ence and in synthetic a priori judgment, is drawn from the (minor) premise that it is meaningless to ask of a priori entities how they appear to us, in the sense of Quale. That is, the equivocation that has taken place, whereby the same word, “Wie,” is used to mean both Quale [wie beschaffen] and possibility [wie möglich], leads to the assumption that just because something does not appear in actuality, it must not be possible. The uncovering of this “devious acquisition” reveals the “possibility of all experience” to be without premise—in the sense that the transcendental ideality of space is defined as its being “nothing at all” beyond the human condition. If Scholem is correct, then it follows that the possibility of all other cognitions that determine the properties of space, such as those of geometry, is also the effect of a terminological intervention with the effect that these cognitions are assumed to be necessarily synthetic a priori yet incapable of grasp-ing the real. The relation between concept and thing and thus the possibility of the object, too, would come down to a fact of language, by which an immediate link is arbitrarily sought between the way an object appears to us and how it is possible.

Thus, when Cohen attempts “on page 114” of Kants Theorie der Erfahr-ung to explain that Kant introduces the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments in order to “oppose” Leibniz’s grounding of certainty and necessity on analysis alone, Scholem argues that “Kant did not succeed in demonstrating that the prescription of the problem of synthetic a priori judgments is necessary” (“Against” 459). For Cohen, Kant’s assertion that the a priori entity, space, accompanies all outer intuitions as a fact of consciousness viz. “other moment of sensibility” (KTE 110; my emphasis) is based on the notion that geometrical entities, to cite Cohen citing from Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, are “uniquely” mathematical17, distinct from logic, and must therefore be grounded on a representation of space that is itself presumed to be an intuition a priori (KTE 114). For Scholem, the intuitive character of space is “something to be postulated [Forderndes]” in order to serve the answer to the “transcendental” question of what space “achieves for science”; it is acquired from the equivocation that takes place when we neglect to ask exactly what we “mean when we talk about space”

17“So wird von der evidentia in den geometrischen Demonstrationen gesagt, sie sei nicht blos maxima, sondern unica, omnisque evidentiae in aliis exemplar” (KTE 114).

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(“Against” 458): concept or intuition.18 And if mathematics, for Cohen’s Kant, is presumed to be the essential mediator between logic and the real, then the “fact of science” is also a “postulate” according to which the unity of knowledge is guaranteed by the history of its terms under the constraint placed by the constitution of our sensibility on the analyzability of the world.

IV. Eineindeutigkeit

But the idea that mathematical truths can be delivered by “literary proof” (KTE 78) is also the “reversal of a deep thought” (“Against” 458). It points, at the very least, towards the possibility of another, more rigorous relation between “mathematics and language, i.e., mathematics and thinking” (Briefe II: 128): one which might account for how being, reality and world could correspond with and provide a model for that which can only be “postulated.” To begin, Scholem suggests, one might examine nature of the “postulate” by which Cohen “deviously acquires” the possibility of objective cognition. Everything that Cohen says about scientificity proceeds from the presupposition that “propositions” are the “genuine exemplars of synthetic a priori propositions proceeding from construction” (KTE 123), and that therefore mathematical concepts emerge immediately from and within their “construction” viz. intuition (“Against” 460). Following Trendelenburg, who argued that Kant fails to account for how space must be grounded as representation solely in forms of our sensibility (in Kant’s terms, that we must represent space as infinite given magnitude containing an infinite set of possible differentia-tions “within itself”)19, Cohen proposes that we can nonetheless assume

18In his diary entry of July 24, 1918, Scholem defines the “Methode des Erschleichens” as follows: “What is A? Cohen does not know and answers by decreeing A to be something to be postulated [Forderndes]—by dint of which his ‘methodical’ position, which now means his reality, is to be secured. This is the ontology of the devil. The reality of that which lacks an object [Gegendstandslosen] is proven by the postulate of methodological unity” (TB II: 274).

19Cohen explains his position on the thinkability versus representability of space as “in-finite given magnitude” in context of his interpretation of Trendelenburg’s controversy with Kuno Fischer, in which Trendelenburg’s real objection to Proposition 4, accord-ing to Cohen, lies in his claim that the infinity of extension can only be grasped in a concept, as potential infinity, given the limitations of representation, and that therefore space cannot be an intuition conceived as actual infinity qua infinite given magnitude (KTE 129). Cohen had written an intervention on the controversy in 1871, the same year he devoted a book-length answer to the debate in the form of the first edition of his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. As Cohen writes in his essay “Zur Controverse zwischen Trendelenburg und Kuno Fischer” (in Schriften zur Philosophie und Zeitgeschichte, 2 vols., ed. Albert Görland and Ernst Cassirer [Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1928]) “Trendelenburg

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we have the authority to represent the actual infinity of differentiations in space, because only by assuming that they correspond to “arbitrary divisions corresponding to scientific ends” that set “limitations” on what can be considered my “own” space does the manifold of possibilities arise with apodictic certainty (KTE 123). The immediacy between mathematical cognition and the object, which Cohen calls “intuition-certainty” (KTE 124), and thus the discoverability of the principles with which we may construct being in the observable world, are afforded by an intuitive conception of space which presumes for purposes of method that space is a set containing an “actual infinity” (KTE 128) of possible intuitable constructions. In the interest of serving the ends of science, Cohen derives from the proposition that space must precede every experience as a priori intuition—“one cannot represent that there is no space” (Proposition 2; CPR A24/B38)—the conclusion that we can assume, for the purpose of method alone but with scientific efficacy, to “represent [space as] infinite given magnitude” (Proposition 4; CPR A25/B40). The validity of a priori intuitions vis-à-vis the world requires a concept of relation that could bring with it a principle of its own infinity, and for Cohen, Kant’s fourth proposition lends itself by virtue of its “freely constructive nature” as a postulate of “progress into the infinite” (KTE 126).

As Scholem points out, however, Cohen acquires the intuitability of the “proposition” by confusing thinking with representing (“Against” 460). It is from a collusion of the need to assume we can represent infinite differentiation, and the restriction that we may regard as possible only that which presents itself to us qualitatively, that Cohen is led to the concept that space must not be a concept (regarded as a composite of empirical representations) but an a priori intuition understood as the principle of differentiation tout court. The internal differentiation that intuition represents for Cohen, however, excludes the possibility of any cognition that is not synthetic a priori, as well as the possibility that mathematics might grasp the kind of infin-

demonstrates that Kant, in his arguments in favor of the exclusive subjectivity of space and time, had left a gap” (I: 231): Kant, so Trendelenburg, fails to account for how space must not just precede every experience as pure and a priori, but is also grounded as representation solely in forms of our sensibility, as the modification of sensibility taking place solely within us. (I: 234) This is an estimation with which Cohen agrees, moreover, to the extent that he formulates the need to identify a new “starting point” (I: 270) which the critical historian must adopt in order to understand Kant “today,” as it were, and avoid “rebuking Kant himself for his ‘a priori magic,’ his ‘fantastic concepts’ and other like objectivities” (I: 272). To what extent Scholem’s and Benjamin’s study of Cohen in the summer of 1918 and beyond actually amounts to an intervention in the Trendelenburg-Fischer debate would need to be the subject of another investigation.

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ity of which intuition is the principle, since it is methodologically necessary to regard a priori intuition as “nothing at all” beyond the limit of analyzability. Underlying all of this, therefore, is a concept of mathematics that is limited to what may be perceptible, such as the infinite addition of the number of times an object falls. For a student of mathematics such as Scholem, the “false[ness] of the concepts of perception, mathematics,” as well as “of the concept itself” which leads to conceiving of space as intuition (“Against” 461) would have been difficult to miss. If the space of mathematics per se could be represented, one would be able to represent space with no objects at all—the world would be the fact that in a triangle two sides together are always greater than the third. Consistent spaces exceeding the “infinite given magnitude” must therefore be conceivable—“one can very well think [that there is no space] without absurdity” (“Against” 460)—which indicates that mathematical space cannot be coextensive with the space of perception. Insofar as “pure intuition” is defined on presuming that mathematical space and perceptible space are imme-diately co-extensive, “[the space of] intuition per se is to be contested” (“Against” 456). For this reason, Kant’s concept of space must be fundamentally revised, since on his own terms the “space” in which all possible spaces are conceivable must both precede and exceed intuition, as well as the concept of concept qua a posteriori, relative synthesis, or counting falling objects, from which it was concluded that space must be “single,” “unique,” and contain an infinite set of its own modifications within “itself.”

Thus, for Scholem, Cohen’s grounds for grounding cognition are “absolutely obscure” because whatever else “construction” means, it serves as a “mystical terminus” with which Cohen hopes to “fill in the gap in Kant”20 with a “weak concept of mathematics” (“Against” 459). In fact, prior to mathematics’ apparent “intuition-certainty” is a “mix-up”: “it is not the proposition that a + b > c is in the triangle—a proposition generated only in the categories—that can be seen, but the state of affairs” (“Against” 460), a disposition of things at a given time or place that one must presuppose in order that the relations between things be pictured in a proposition, or, in the term’s original

20With this phrase, Scholem is referring the title of one of Trendelenburg’s essays pertaining to his debate with Fischer: “Über eine Lücke in Kants Beweis von der aus-schliessenden Subjektivität des Raumes und der Zeit,” in Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie 3 (1867): 215–76).

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usage, in a case on trial.21 However else “states of affairs” might stand in relation to the contemporaneous mathematics that threatened to undermine Kant’s third and fourth propositions on the concept of space, Scholem’s replacement of “propositions” with “states of affairs” as the entities that are immediately intuited in mathematical cognition suggests a concept of space in which mathematics might not construct but rather be constructed on the sensible world, perhaps thereby attain-ing to what Benjamin called “infinite absolute (not relative) synthesis” (GS VI: 52). To illustrate, Scholem makes a drawing and accompanying set of notes on the reverse side of his remarks “On Kant”:

21Sachverhalt originally referred to the “state of things [status rerum]” or disposition of events and circumstances as pertaining to a case raised in a trial. Husserl’s student Adolf Reinach, who was also the author of a work that anticipated speech act theory, gave the first definitive formulation of logic as a Sachverhalt-based science, in which propositional meanings are clearly distinguished from Sachverhalte and the latter are conceived in their totality as the a priori realm of truth-making, objective correlates to all possible judgments. Archival and other documents show that both Benjamin and Scholem were familiar with the major works of this short-lived trend in German philosophy around the First World War.

The figure on the left, drawn by Scholem, effectively illustrates the definition of space as an infinite given magnitude in Proposition 4 of Kant’s metaphysical exposition. As Scholem notes, all the segments are “equivalent,” which, as he explains in the accompanying notes, means in contemporary terminology that they are of the same “cardinality”: if conceived as sets of points, all line segments in this space have the same number of elements in the set, each one of which (X) can be paired with exactly one element of another set (Y). The fact that there can therefore be an inverse mapping from Y to X as well guarantees that there exists a bijection, or “eindeutig umkehrbare Beziehung,” from

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X to Y and vice versa. In terms of Kant’s definition of space as pure intuition in Proposition 4, “all the parts of space, even to infinity, are simultaneous” (CPR B40). The space in which the propositions accru-ing to this triangle are valid is one in which the bijective function as represented by the ray PA exists between the elements of segments BB and CD. In geometric terms this means that the interior angles on the same side of the line PA as it intersects BB and CD will always add up to the sum of two right angles, that is, that they will never intersect, and that they therefore exist in a space in which the Parallel Postulate holds, namely Euclidean space.

As the figure on the right illustrates,22 however, “the ray through P and A does not in fact need to meet CD” if redrawn in a different space. “[I]f A corresponded to the point at infinity,” which in the second diagram is denoted by any point on the edge of the disk, then the ray P may intersect CD “at ∞.” The construction that places points on the segments BB and CD in a bijective viz. one-to-one correspondence in the Euclidean plane thus breaks down in another plane—in the case here, a hyperbolic space or concave surface, in which at least “several,” and in fact “(∞) parallels to a straight line are possible” due to the nature of its curvature. Transferring the problem to the question of infinite sets, likely for the same reason Scholem transitions from the inadequacy of the concept of intuition to a need to investigate the concept of concept, Scholem then wonders whether the segments are in fact “equivalent”—that is, of the same “cardinality,” and thus whether “all the parts of space, even to infinity, are simultaneous.” Given that in a different geometry the correspondence between the sets of points might only be an injective function, or “eindeutige Funk-tion,” by which each element in one set (X) is only mapped at most to one element in set (Y) and does not have an inverse function from Y to X, the answer for Scholem seems to be a “no.” As Scholem notes, the “set of all injective functions f (x), 0≤ x ≤1” is “not equivalent to that of the continuum”: the set of all functions from [0, 1] into the real numbers is of a strictly larger cardinality than that of the real num-bers, i.e., the values representing quantities on a continuum. The set of all functions between real numbers, “however little differentiated,” contains the same number of elements as does the set of all values representing quantities on the continuum; thus the set of all mappings

22This figure was not drawn by Scholem himself, and is conceived as a visualization of the fragmentary remarks Scholem makes on hyperbolic space.

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of the values between any two real numbers, however close together, into the set of real numbers, will have a larger cardinality than the continuum. Only by restricting this collection of (injective) functions to “the set of all continuous” functions does one have a set—the set of all continuous functions from [0, 1] into the real numbers—that is of the same cardinality as the real numbers and thus has the same number of elements as the continuum. However close together, two real numbers will have the same number of elements between them as there are elements in the continuum, which is to say that however close together, or however many, the fundamental elements of space do not “add up” to a continuity, or as Kant says, to an “essentially singular,” “unique” space (CPR A25/B39), since something will always come “in between.” Continuity must be (and has been) conceived differently. Prior to extension, motion or force, prior even to the dif-ference between two elements, is a principle of differentiation from the infinite possibility of construction, being, and world.

Whatever else Scholem had in mind with these mathematical notes, the following is clear with respect to the critique of Cohen’s exposition of Kantian space: neither intuition a priori, nor a general concept “space” under which particular spaces are gathered, suffice to express the principle from which space is derived. This principle is, namely, a differentiation whose “infinity,” as Benjamin says of the “task tasked to science” and in language appropriate to its domain, is of a “higher power-cardinality [höherer Mächtigkeit]”23 than the infinite set of representations deemed possible under the limitations of sensibility. Thus space is inconceivable as the set of differentiations within itself to the extent that these differentiations are conceived as “simultane-ous” viz. equivalent “even to infinity” under the restriction of their possibility vis-à-vis the sensible world. If the two diagrams picture the same triangle, assuring their “sameness” is not an “intuition-certainty” deriving from the metrical equivalence of all parts within a single

23In other words, Benjamin borrows the mathematical term Mächtigkeit from Georg Cantor’s transfinite set theory, where “power” refers the cardinality of a set in the sense I have explained above. The phrase “higher power” thus refers neither to the mathemati-cal operation of exponentiation, by which a number can be said to be “to the power of n” if repeatedly multiplied n times (the German term for which is Potenz), nor to “power” in any non-mathematical sense (such as Macht). Peter Fenves has discussed the transference of terms from set theory into Benjamin’s concepts of knowledge and experience in his book The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); see especially Chapter 6, “Pure Knowledge and the Continuity of Experience: ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ and Its Supplements” (152–86).

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all-encompassing space, nor the intuitability of propositions such as would predispose the lengths of two sides of any conceivable triangle to be greater than the third, but a “disposition” regarding the rela-tion between the two apparently dissimilar entities. In the case of the Euclidean space that Newtonian mathematical natural science presup-poses, a bijection [Eineindeutigkeit], a relation of one-to-one invertible correspondence, establishes the “uniqueness” and “simultaneity” of all parts of space. The all-encompassing, essentially singular space underlying the neo-Kantian concept of science, so Scholem suggests, does not mediate between logic and reality because it is intrinsically “sensible” and “constructive,” but because a restriction is placed on the set of its functions that they be continuous and correspond, as it were, to experiential space. This “state of affairs,” the idea for which Scholem borrows from the lexicon of contemporaneous philosophy, retains certain of its juridical provenance to the extent that it must be presupposed as a nexus prior to all possibility and as such must authorize any cognition of the world. The question, then, is what other concept of space arises after intuition is removed from its premises. With regard to Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, however, because “false concepts of perception, mathematics and of the concept itself” are still operative, “the question remains great, but unresolved” (“Against” 461).

*

Upon reading Cohen’s Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode in April 1918, just a month before arriving in Bern, Scholem remarks in his diary that “mathematical natural science precisely does not have a given fact, but rather a well-founded nexus of justification [wohlbegründeter Begründungszusammenhang] that has not fallen from the sky, as its absolute point of reference [Ort]” (TB II: 170). Cohen, however, attempts to construct the concept of science in denial of the force of law in the realm of truth-making and in advocacy solely for the methodological necessity of intuition’s apriority. Under the restriction of human experience, so Scholem continues upon starting Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis a few days later, it “remains entirely unclear (because terminologically devious [erschlichen])” what lends “inner judicial authority [Gerichtsame] [ . . . ] of the origin” to our cognitions of being, reality and world, for though “everything is only postulated” and in pragmatic terms “is great and true as this postulate,” “it is not grounded.” Under the human condition, “building a logic with pos-

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tulates (in the Euclidean sense)” is, so Scholem concludes, “a daring, all too daring enterprise” (TB II: 177).

For as Scholem notes, Cohen interprets the history viz. content of science as a direct and transhistorical confirmation of the principle behind Kant’s Copernican turn: that science produces its own expe-rience. For Cohen, representations [Vorstellungen] are produced by the binding character of consciousness, as if consciousness were “an apparatus [Geräth] that produces the conjunctions” of sense impres-sions, and space and time the “tools for the forming and fixing of our representations”: we can therefore know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them (KTE 84). The Copernican turn thus represents for Cohen the priority of thought over being, which in turn translates as the self-motivated regularity of the law in gen-eral to the extent that the “guiding star” of legitimacy, the “highest principle,” derives immediately from the “recognition of the fact of mathematical natural science as opposed to the metaphysics of morals”: for in mathematics, it is implied, all experience “shall” be legitimate because mathematics is the “fact of science” in which logic and ethics are unified (KTE 139; my emphasis). According to Scholem’s notes on Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, however, the “comparison with an apparatus” is “absurd” (“Against” 459), and the account of the necessity and universality of our experience “the height of nonsense”:

Page 139 in Cohen is the height of nonsense. Link between logic and ethics: the law shall be!!! [ . . . ] And on what grounds shall it be? Not along the lines of morals, but rather—the highest principle shall exist because of the “fact of science” and thus because of Newton! Because the earth revolves around the sun! The entire passage is groundless. We “want” to recognize necessity—as if there were a logical willing where there isn’t even a logical must. (“Against” 457–58)

The conflation of mathematics and metaphysics under the sign of natural science represents “the climax of the epistemological swindle” perpetrated by Cohen, which, as Scholem notes in his diary on July 26, 1918, culminates in Benjamin’s “very nice” summary of Cohen’s book: “I ask not—I postulate—It is valid [Ich frage nicht—Ich fordere—Es gilt]” (TB II: 276). For if Cohen presents science as the achievement of the history of science, whose “progressive culture of the spirit” determines the content filling in an otherwise predetermined form of scientific experience, science (and the philosophy whose “highest principle” derives immediately from science) is inadvertently inflated into a “logi-cal willing [logisches Wollen]—a logical counterpart, it appears, to Alois

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Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen,24 and according to which, so Scholem notes, a principle shall exist because of the “fact of science”—because of the “fact of Newton,” because of the “fact” that the earth revolves around the sun, and because that fact of Newtonian science asserts, in Cohen’s estimation, the priority of “scientific method” for the unity of thought and being. The achievement of Newtonian science translates for Cohen as our “wanting” to recognize the “facts” of nature and discovery as such and as necessary. Construed as logisches Wollen, the purposiveness of scientific judgments ends up (in Scholem’s notes) in a conflation of logic and ethics whereby a Wollen / Sollen replaces a Müssen that has yet to exist.

As a result, the content of our experience, to the extent that for Cohen’s Kant this is co-extensive with scientific experience, is regu-lated by a principle of history whose ultimate reference point is the “highest principle” of mathematics, and which, accordingly, takes the form of a succession of discoveries, each one anticipating the next, each progressively less of one than the one prior to it, each a link in a chain of succession that progressively becomes construed as “fact” at the same time as these “facts” are nothing other than the form of experience becoming progressively inflated as a will to history—and deflated into a sort of prophetic anticipation. Thus, Scholem notes, we see Cohen write sentences such as this: “In this way Leibniz ripens, purified by Hume, into the philosopher reinforced in Newton: Kant” (“Against” 458). In conflating the “highest principle”—the principle that experience “shall” be legitimate—with the principle of the “his-torical” determinations of its content, Cohen equates the principle of experience with its form, such that the principle is proven in the “fact” of whatever representation it takes: in the “literary proof” of the terms selected as fundamental concepts of our cognition, for instance (KTE 78; “Against” 458). To this apparent, though “groundless” imposition of a “logical willing,” which is paler than authorial intention yet more vivid than the “fact of science,” Scholem thus gives an apostrophe in the manner of a loud whisper: “(Style!)” (“Against” #)


24Benjamin had come across Alois Riegl’s works by the late 1910’s, and certainly Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, in which he explicates the concept of Kunstwollen, was highly influential for Benjamin’s early writings, as he states in a posthumously published cur-riculum vitae. Cf. Benjamin, “Drei Lebensläufe,” in Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972) 51.

Intensive Languages❦

Werner Hamacher

Cognition is a relation.1 In this relation, something is apprehended and it is apprehended in its cognizability.2 Cognizability, for its part, is not an object but the medium in which cognition relates to what is apprehended and in which the two are together constituted—the one as cognition, the other as cognized. Cognizability is neither a subject’s capacity to cognize, given as a transcendental structure independent of any object to be cognized, nor a property of objects, a capacity to be known that awaits the opportunity to actualize itself in cognition. Cognizability is not an atemporal, and in that sense transcendental, condition of cognition. Equally, it does not present itself belatedly as a tie between an already constituted subject and a pre-given object. Much more, it is that in which cognition grasps an object and is thus for the first time cognition, and that in which an object imparts itself to a cognition and is thereby cognized. Cognizability is impartibility: the medium common to cognition and the cognized; the medium thanks to which they are able to be what they are; the medium in which they touch, affect, and impart themselves to one another. But if cognizability is the go-between—the medium—through which cogni-tion and cognized impart or convey one another, then the essence of cognition itself is imparting. It is, in an as-yet indeterminately broad sense of “language,” linguistically constituted. Whoever would present


1[Translator’s note: This translation has benefited immensely from the close attention of Julia Ng as well as from Werner Hamacher’s suggestions and corrections. Its failings are, empirically and concretely, my own.]

2Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-penhäuser [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1989] VI: 46 (hereafter cited paren-thetically in the text as GS).

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“the linguistic essence of cognition” (GS II: 168) must do as Benjamin does, basing the possibility of cognition, cognizability, in language as the medium of impartibility. This means, however, that the subject-object relation is secondary for cognition and that it is a distorting derivative of that relation that precedes every propositional cognition of things and every imparting of cognitions between subjects, and that precedes them, to be precise, as the immediacy of mediality.

Hence, in “On the Program for the Coming Philosophy,” Benjamin’s critique of Kant and of neo-Kantianism concentrates itself first of all on the insufficiency of “the notion of cognition as a relationship between some subjects and objects or some subject and object,” and, further, on the reduction of “cognition and experience to an empiri-cal human consciousness.” He writes:

These two problems are closely connected, and even where Kant and the neo-Kantians see beyond the object-nature of the thing in itself as cause of sensations, the subject-nature of a cognizing consciousness remains still to be eliminated. [. . .] It is, indeed, not to be doubted that some idea—how-ever sublimated—of an individual, corporeal-spiritual I plays a great role in the Kantian concept of cognition, with such an I receiving impressions through the senses and on this basis constructing its ideas (GS II: 161).

This “epistemological mythology” of subjectivism and of a closely bound psychologism, as Benjamin has it in the “Program,” is to be dispelled by a theory of “pure cognition-theoretical (transcendental) consciousness, so long as this term remains useable once stripped of all characteristics of a subject” (162–63). Such a theory of pure tran-scendental consciousness may be thought, still imprecisely but less unclearly, as a theory of pure transcendental language, the contours of which are to be found in Benjamin’s treatise “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”

Such a theory can no longer address a relation between “any and all subjects and objects,” and just as little a relation between empiri-cal human subjects or between merely human languages and objects. Rather, it must begin from relationships within languages and from relationships between languages, including those of things themselves: that is, relationships of impartibility and translatability. In the view of a theory of pure transcendental language, languages—human and nonhuman alike; enunciated and silent; artistically, technologically, or institutionally constructed; idioms and the languages of nations—all relate first and foremost not to one another, but to their translatabil-ity, their impartibility, their linguisticality. That is, this theory never considers languages as relating solely in the way that subjects orient

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themselves to objects, but rather addresses each language’s relation to its own medial [medialen] character and thus to that which Benjamin names its “essence.” Only in their linguisticality do the scope and structure of a cognition and an experience that are not impoverished in the subject-object relation, not immobilized in the transcendental subject, reveal themselves. The dynamics and horizon of a language open up only when grasped in their mediality and thus impartibility, which precedes every communicated meaning; language is not an instrumental mark and cannot be manipulated by a non-linguistic consciousness. Just as the essence of cognition is language, so the essence of language is impartibility.

Benjamin’s introduction to his rendering of Baudelaire, “The Task of the Translator,” sets out to demonstrate that and how, in translation, one language relates to another. This text, which complements and extends his earlier theory of pure transcendental language and offers up the theory of experience that took root in those earlier writings, presents the relation between languages as itself the essence of lan-guage: its mediality, impartibility, and translatability. Just as thinking in terms of speakers and addressees is insufficient—since speakers and their audiences occur only because of language, and as its functional extreme—so, too, must we move beyond the propositional content of a language. For what is decisive about translations—their carrying over3 into another language—arises independently of the intentions and semantic determinations of the texts to which they relate. Translation must follow a single law: that of the purely formal relation between languages, which is eminently material only by dint of its formalism. This law is dictated by the original’s pure translatability, which remains unconstrained by any human failings. Benjamin writes:

Translation is a form. In order to grasp it as such, it is necessary to return to the original, in which the law governing the translation lies: as its very translatability. The question concerning the translatability of a work has a dual sense; it can question whether among the totality of a work’s readers an adequate translator is to be found, or, and more properly, whether a work in its essence allows of translation and accordingly—such is the meaning of this form—requires it. At bottom, the first question can be decided only problematically, the second apodictically (GS IV: 9–10).

3[Translator’s note: I have rendered übertragen quite literally here as “carry over,” though it is also often “transmit” or “convey,” and the reader should note that—in German as in English—the verb in question is usually transitive. Man überträgt etwas, just as “one carries something over”; that Hamacher does not here offer an etwas, a something, is crucial to the motion of the thought. Translations themselves carry over as translation, languages as language.]

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The answer to the question of whether a work will find an adequate translator is problematic, is in Kant’s sense of the term dependent on empirical factors and thus not necessarily even possible; it is also, in principle at least, irrelevant. The real question concerns the purely formal structure of language as it presents itself in a translatability that is a matter of principle, and therefore independently of its actualiza-tion in any particular translation. By contrast, then, the question of whether the translation of a work or a language is possible and thereby also necessary is to be answered apodictically, that is, on the grounds of a priori reason, in the affirmative. Moreover, this affirmation is to be offered on the condition that the translatability of a language com-prises its very structure and is independent from the anthropologically limited capabilities of potential translators.

Benjamin insists that “certain relational concepts”—and that of translatability may be taken as the concept of linguistic relation par excellence—retain appropriate significance, and perhaps gain it in the first place, “when they are not from the outset exclusively oriented toward humans.” And he continues:

Thus, we could speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even should all human beings have forgotten it. That is, if its essence demands that it not be forgotten, then this predicate would be not false, but instead simply a demand that humans are not heeding, and at the same time also a scold-ing reminder of a realm in which they would heed it: in a remembrance of god (GS VI: 10).4

Like unforgettability, translatability is for Benjamin not an empirical predicate functioning on condition that it be realizable and conse-quently also that it fulfill a possibility in the actuality of finite reason. Quite the contrary, translatability and unforgettability are essential predicates of a language or a life, in principle indifferent to the capacities of any given subject to fulfill them. They are thus demands irrespective of the horizon of finite experience and operative within this horizon as calls back to the ground of experience itself, to a realm of speech and action ecstatically removed from understanding as a structure of judgment and correspondence. Languages remain trans-latable—or impartible—even when they will never be translated, even when they never could be translated—or imparted—by finite beings.

4[Translator’s note: Rather than render Gott here “God,” thus bringing Benjamin further into Christianity than he himself ventured, or “G-d,” thus according his Judaism an essentiality that is at least arguable, I have opted for a lower-case, generalist “god” that will not, I hope, seem less present for that.]

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The possibility that the concept of translatability bespeaks is not to be limited by propositional cognition; nor is this a possibility that must be converted into the actuality of experience, that is, bounded by a correspondence between concept and intuition. Kant develops only this latter possibility in the postulate of empirical thought, when he writes, “That which accords with the formal conditions of experi-ence (intuitions and concepts) is possible.”5 For Kant, it is always still only such an experience—and thereby also such a cognition—that is possible: one in which intuitions correspond with concepts with never an excess or a deficit, be it of intuition or of concept, and thus with never any transgressing of the boundaries of the subject principally regulated by their accord. Just as intuition and concept must accord with one another in order to fulfill the formal conditions for experi-ence and make the possible actual, for Kant these formal conditions for experience must also be actual in a way that prevents them from overtaxing themselves. Possibility is for him always the possibility of a possible actuality, such that possibility is thinkable from a theo-retical perspective only in correspondence with this actuality. What remains unthinkable for him—or merely thinkable, but not properly cognizable—is an experience that would present appearances not in accord with concepts, or that would offer up concepts with which no appearances accorded. What is unthinkable is precisely the experi-ence that must precede the correspondence of every experience: the experience of the demand for its correspondence. This is the experi-ence of the demand for an experience and thus of the experience in particular that would disclose—in excess of every possible material experience—another experience, the experience of a non-conceptual or imperceptible other and, with it, history.

For Kant, the possibility of such experience no longer belongs under the postulate of empirical thinking, but rather under the categorical imperative and the postulate of practical reason. This postulate’s stipu-lations are relieved of empirical conditions for fulfillment, because they raise the demands for freedom, absoluteness, and, in this sense, the impossibility of experience. Benjamin conceives of the linguistical-ity of language not as the appropriateness of its concepts for possible intuitions, but as a demand—and an excessive demand—made on intuitions by the concept of freedom, as an excessive demand on the

5Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ) A218/B265 (hereafter cited as KdrV).

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concept made by the intuition of something non-conceptual. Hence, translatability is for him not an empirical or epistemological-theoret-ical, but instead exclusively a practical possibility, transcending every given actuality. It is for this reason that translatability manifests as an infinite demand and for this reason that it initiates the event that, as the history of translation, is the event of language: no longer within the limits of empirical object-determination and the transmission of meaning, but instead bounded by mere imparting alone—by freedom, infinitude, and, like the unforgettable moment or the unforgettable life, by god. Translatability is translatability in history; linguisticality—and that means mediality—is linguistic historicality [Sprachgeschichtlich-keit]. Since this does not reach its end in any empirical occurrence, it operates to mark a metaempirical, theological event. Translation, imparting, language: these are structured as excessive demand and hyperbolic reference, and thus as historizing [historiogen] and, fur-thermore, theogizing [theogen].

Should there be cognition, this is only because it is based in cogniz-ability as the common medium of cognition and cognized. Should there be cognizability and therein impartibility, however, these must occur independently of the conditions of their actualization as the empirical cognition of things. If this is so, then history must be present as impartibility’s realm of operation and fulfillment, and there must thus be—with a postulative “must” that goes beyond every empirically verifiable cognition—god. Should language exist, then it does so only as essentially historical. Should history exist, then it does so only as the postulate of a god, in which it can find fulfillment.

Benjamin’s meditations start from a language that is not structured according to the schema of correspondence between intuition and concept, and thus not structured according to the schema of the judgment. The possibility of this language—language as such, as impartibility and translatability—is not to be defined as a possible actuality and thereby as the relation to the object of a propositional act; its truth cannot be the truth that would be limited by the schema of correspondence or adequation. For Benjamin, the possibility of imparting—and thus of translation—is in principle independent of every actuality that could be presented as a material accord between intuition and concept in the sense-impression of the subject of cogni-tion. Because translatability structurally exceeds the delimitations of finite subjectivity, because it is a possibility with which no concrete actuality must necessarily correspond—for these reasons, translatability has, as Benjamin emphasizes repeatedly, the character of a demand

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that, analogous to the moral law in Kant, is not structured accord-ing to the conditions of its actualization but rather, for its part, first enables the very thinking of such conditions. Translatability is not a demand made by some subject, determinate as ever, on a work or an utterance, but is rather a demand of the essence of every work and, moreover, of language itself, in which it is constituted.

When Benjamin opens his clarification of this concept with the question of “whether a work in its essence allows of translation and accordingly—such is the meaning of this form—requires it”; when he writes of the unforgettable that its “essence demands that it not be forgotten” (GS IV: 10); and when he terms translatability the law of translation, then in each case he speaks of essence as a demand [Forderung] that passes beyond the horizon of a subjectively limited actuality. This is essence as the overtaxing [Überforderung] of any and every subjectivity, and possibility as an excess over and above the possibility that is actualizable for subjects; Benjamin posits the essence of language—its translatability—and the essence of a life—its unforgettability—as resting in essence’s absolute surplus over any propositional content that could be attributed to it. Something’s essence defines it—indefines it and infinitizes it—as a demand infinitely in excess of every propositional actuality. The essence of language, its translatability, its possibility of translation, defines it as a possibility beyond all possibilities, as “extrapossibility” [Übermöglichkeit] and the possibility of an impossibility. But if translatability is the possibility of and demand for the essence of a work, and if as such a possibility it oversteps every possible actuality, then it must also be the possibility of—and demand for—an impossibility of translation, the possibility of—and demand for—untranslatability. Translatability must thus be a possibility and a demand which absolutely never applies to itself, but that does not thereby destroy its every application. Pure translat-ability—the law of language—can never manifest itself without simul-taneously withdrawing itself, and can thus appear only in the mode of withdrawal—and perhaps in the withdrawal of every categorical modality. In so appearing, translatability shows only that it demands the impossible actuality. Only because it is impossible—impossible even beyond categorical impossibility—does translatability open the possibility of realization independently of categorical limitations. Only therein does translatability contain the scolding reminder of the realm to which its demand corresponds: with respect to the unforgettable, this is termed “a remembrance of god”; with respect to the translatability of languages, it might be called messianic translation.

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It is in this sense that we should read Benjamin’s essay “Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot”; there, four years before setting down his thoughts on translation, Benjamin writes of the undying life and unforgettability of Prince Myshkin:

The undying life is unforgettable—that is the sign by which we know it. It is that life which, without memorial and without memento, indeed, per-haps without even witness, must be unforgotten. It cannot be forgotten. Without form or vessel, still this life remains imperishable. And in this sense ‘unforgettable’ says more than that we cannot forget it; it points to something in the essence of the unforgettable itself, whereby it is unforget-table (GS II: 239).6

Unforgettability is a sign of the undyingness [Unsterblichkeit] of a life, but this unforgettability occurs, as Benjamin sees it, “perhaps without witness” and hence without a sign. It is thus a sign of signlessness, a sign because it is without signs, an unsigned sign: “without memo-rial and without memento,” without addressee or referent. What is unforgettable is the incommemorable, which imparts itself prior to all commemoration and its signs as simple, unsigned, judgmentless speech. Because it is the unobjectifiable and therefore absolutely immemorial that is presented in every remembrance and for that rea-son captured by none, every statement that can be uttered of it stands under the condition of a “perhaps.” For Benjamin, the unforgettable life is perhaps without witness not because it would be the object of a fallible empirical judgment, but because it is not an object at all and thus cannot be accessed by any judgment.

Just as the unforgettability of a life overtaxes every remembrance, so the translatability of a language overtaxes every translation. Languages are translatable beyond the boundaries of every subjective capacity, and thus insofar as they put behind them every restrictive, Kantian, comprehended actuality of the subject: they are translatable solely as untranslatable. This does not mean only that they are languages solely by fulfilling the criterion of absolute translatability, where language is such only in being translatable over and above every limit on cog-nition. Rather, it also means that languages already—in themselves, in their essence or their structure—realize their translation in a sense that must still be made more precise. Language is that which, in itself,

6This piece, written in 1917, was first published in 1921—in immediate temporal proximity to the writing of the essay on translation (cf. the editorial comments in GS II: 977). This proximity, however, can only be one of the motives that explains Benjamin’s return to the thought of unforgettability in the later text. Decisive in both is the idea of an essential demand that transcends every possible realization.

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posits itself over and beyond itself; a language is itself only in being other than every self operating or positioning itself [sich feststellende] in propositional cognitions. Benjamin calls Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin unap-proachable, and speaks of his “solitude” as “ripe for disappearance” [bis zum Verschwinden reifen Einsamkeit] (238)—a mere, solitary language that disappears before itself might also be called unapproachable. Such a language alone could be called language as such.

The essence of a language lies in its translatability—in this, it imparts not its contents but rather its impartibility to another language. Only with respect to its translation, its status as translatable, does a text become an original; and only with respect to the language of the translation does the language of the original become language. The linguisticality of a language is defined not by what that language means, but by the other language toward which it points the way. Since, fol-lowing Benjamin’s formulation, the law of language as such lies in the a priori reference to another language, translatability is not one among the many laws of language, and is still less an asset that can belong to or be missing from language, but is rather its law par excellence. Translat-ability is the high law, the trans-law, so to speak, of language as such.7 In this key principle of Benjamin’s theory of language, however, law signifies both structure and demand, and translatability is thus the categorical imperative of language: the structural demand through

7[Translator’s note: It has unfortunately not been possible to present Hamacher’s continual play on words in this regard with due attention to its spirit: here, “Übersetz-barkeit ist das Über-Gesetz, das, sit venia verbo, ‘Übersetz’ der Sprache überhaupt.” Gesetz, or “law” (literally, “the placed” or “the posited” as this, in turn, places or posits) stems from setzen, “to posit, place, or position,” as does übersetzen, “translate” (literally, “place over” or “trans-posit”). Hence, in the above, translatability may be thought as “transplace-ability” or “transpositability,” which is in turn “the trans-placed or trans-posited, the trans-placing or trans-positing of language as such” (keeping in mind that the prefix trans- works to figure both a sense of motion-between and a sense of motion-beyond). Here, as elsewhere, I have been driven into an English that reproduces a certain feel and that remains loosely idiomatic, rather than opting for a precision that might rob Hamacher’s language of its fluidity, its own self-overcoming. However, as this essay suggests, the unfulfillable demand on translation is for both. Accordingly, one ought really to read Peter Fenves’ translation of Hamacher’s Entferntes Verstehen (as Premises) alongside this essay, as Fenves sometimes sacrifices fluidity in English for a precision that, though more technical in feel than the original, is crucial in exploring further ramifications of key terms. In particular, the verb setzen (posit, place) and the prefix über (over, beyond, past, above, trans)—by which übersetzen is formed—are both ubiq-uitous and importantly networked in German, and the reader would do well to pay special attention to these as they occur in Fenves’ translation, as also to his rendering of überleben as “out-living,” a term that here finds different emphasis as “living on.” Cf. Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).]

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which alone language is language, the language of the demand for another language, language’s laying claim to another language. It is in this law of languages’ laying claim to (and on) one another, in this law of immediate self-overcoming and becoming-other [Veranderung], that language’s linguisticality consists, even should the claim never be honored so much as a single time by a single language.

Every single language thus has reference to another as its very essence: a language is only language insofar as it is a language for another language, not in its place but in the face of it. This relation of one language to another is absolute in the twofold sense that what is essential for every language (GS IV: 9) is constituted through and through by the relation and that this relation is itself non-reflexive and irreversible. “A certain significance dwelling in the original,” writes Benjamin, “expresses” itself in its translatability; but the translation, he continues in three clarifications, one after another, can “never [. . .] signify something for the original [. . .], signifies nothing more” for it, and is an expression of its life “without signifying anything for it” (10). This indicates, however, that signifying, i.e., the gesture toward another language, is in fact the decisive operation for the essence of language and thus for its translatability. That is, the interlingual signi-fying function of a language expires in the realm of its translation; in the other language that it signifies—the language of the translation—a language no longer signifies and is itself no longer signified. The original, for its part and thus only in part, is original solely because in originally gesturing beyond itself, it had already abandoned itself. It is original and thus originary [ursprünglich] only because it is leaping [auf dem Sprung] into its translation.

In the leap [Sprung] by which it translates into another language, the language of the original leaves behind its signification. Accordingly, it must be said of the language of the original that it does not live [nicht lebt] in the translation—already in the original it did not live as itself, but only as its transition toward another—but rather that it lives on or survives [überlebt], and that relative to its “own” life and distanced a priori from itself, it lives forth or goes on living [fortlebt]. Translation is the a priori form of a language’s living on and living forth in another:

Just as the expressions of life are most intimately connected to the one who lives, without meaning anything to her, so the translation proceeds from the original. But in that, it proceeds not so much from its own life as from its “living on” [Überleben]. For if translation comes later than the original, and designates it indeed as being among the significant works, this is because their chosen translator is never to be found in the period

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of their emergence, and translation signifies the stage of their living forth [ihres Fortlebens] (10–11).

One will have to understand this formulation of an a priori afterlife [Nachleben] as indicating that a significant work is one that signifies its own afterlife; signification arrives for it only via immediate self-overcoming. Language makes a life for itself only in the medium of its “living on”; it “deploys” [einsetzt] not in its natural or its immediate but in its mediate, historical existence, its existence in translation.

Translation is language’s living on, towards which it was drawn from the beginning and without which it would not be language. Just as there is no life without living on, so, too, there is no positing [Setzung] without translation [Übersetzung]. Living on—as also translation—is in every instance living on in quotation marks; it is, as Benjamin writes, “living on,” because it is not simply a living that goes on beyond or outlasts life and thus also death, but is rather a living on that is real-ized, insofar as it is realized, in words: in the phrase “living on,” for instance.8 This is living on in citation and thus no living on at all, a “living on” that is only linguistic and yet that still means living on. Language first lives in “living on,” no longer signifying only its own life in the life of another. Language first speaks or languages in its “living on,” speaking itself and no longer of something and to someone. As living on, translation is the singular element—the medium—in which language and nothing but language occurs. Translation is the form of language’s history, and only as history is translation coextensive with language’s essence. If the language of the original signifies and demands another language, then it signifies and demands this other, the language of translation, as language as such. In translation, the language of the original transposes [setzt über] itself as language as such. Since language itself is the signified in all languages, translation, in which language qua language realizes itself, can for its part no longer

8Like Benjamin, Nietzsche—in aphorism 262 of Beyond Good and Evil—places living on quite intentionally in quotation marks. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1988); Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966) 211. On the motif of “living on in citation,” see my essay, “‘Disgregation of the Will’: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality” in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, 143–80. [Translator’s note: There, this phrase—Überleben im Zitat—is “outliving in citation.” Again, the reader should note that “living on” here is complementary—neither apposite nor opposite—to Fenves’ rendering, in Premises, of Überleben as “outliving” (following Kaufmann’s translation of Nietzsche), and that this Benjaminian “living on” or “outliving” is to be distinguished, in either event, from a Derridean survivre, which has also made its way into English as a “living on.”]

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signify. Hence, if history is the very occurring of language—its essence or having-been [Wesen], verbally understood—then this is a history without significance. For it is not in, but rather as history, as realized by translations, that language qua language appears openly without further intentions, without reference, and without addressees. Transla-tion is the history of language, and this history its apocalypse.

Translatability is the law of language. Only as translatable does one language enter into relation with another and only in this relation with another language can it itself be language. At the same time, translatability is the law of history; it is that law in a fact, an act, or a language, in which these relate to something other than themselves, and in which they “live on” in one another and are in that measure historical. Just as the a priori translatability of languages is the law of translation, translatability is the law of history irrespective of whether or not it can be accomplished by finite subjects. For Benjamin, this means that it is texts and languages themselves, by virtue of their fundamentally historical structure in translations, which are realized in interpretation and critique; and it means that these should by no means be taken as lifeless objects, upon which outwardly historical changes would play out as semantic redefinitions. Just as language’s mediality is immediately its own—and this immediability of mediability is characterized by Benjamin in his essay on language as intensity and as the fundamental problem of the theory of language—so the histo-ricity of linguistic entities, insofar as they are linguistic, is immanent. Languages’ capacity to “have” history is founded in their intensive historicity. They are, per Benjamin, not the stage of history; rather, it is from them that history comes to be (one could also say: languages exist only insofar as they are a priori exposed to their history). Ben-jamin writes:

Only when life is accorded to all that from which history emerges and that is not merely its stage will its concept be given its due. For the ambit of life is to be determined [. . .] in the end according to history, not to nature. Hence, the philosopher has the task of understanding all natural life from the more comprehensive life of history. [. . .] The history of great works of art recognizes their evolution from sources, their composition in the era of the artist, and the period of their fundamentally eternal living forth [Fortlebens] with subsequent generations. This latter, where it manifests, is called renown. Translations, which are more than mediations, arise when in living forth [Fortleben] a work has arrived at the era of its renown. [. . .] In them, the life of the original arrives at its continually renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding (GS IV: 11).

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These thoughts were so important to Benjamin that, more than twenty years later, he takes them up again in the epistemological notes to The Arcades Project and sees sketched in them “the very basis of his-tory as such.” Specifically, he writes, “[h]istorical ‘understanding’ is fundamentally to be grasped as the afterlife [Nachleben] of that which is understood, and hence what is cognized in analyzing the ‘afterlife of works’ as ‘renown’ [as this is discussed in “The Task of the Transla-tor”] is to be regarded as the very basis of history as such” (GS V: 574 –75). Historical cognition, so must one understand this note, is to be grasped as the expression of an afterlife belonging to that which is itself cognized therein. Cognitions can only belong to the cognized as its historical unfolding, since from the beginning of its life it “lived on” beyond itself and was in its implicit afterlife already with others, precisely its interpretation and historical cognition. In understanding, a hermeneutic subject does not represent the utterance of another as limited by its own historical determinants; rather, that which is understood presents itself in its becoming-other [Ver anderung], since it emerged in its basic comprehensibility from the very beginning only for another. Comprehensibility, like translatability, is a category of the a priori historical becoming-other of language. Translatability is historicity; translation is the only, and the historical, existence of languages, because it is in every instance the singular manner in which languages expose themselves as languages for other languages and, hence, the manner in which they expose themselves to their history.

So, too, may we understand Benjamin’s pronouncement that “[i]n them [translations], the life of the original arrives at its continually renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding” (GS IV: 11). Each translation is final and each is an integral translation of the original—not because there can be no others that would be more correct or more plastic, but because in each one another language has already been accomplished and with it the latest phase in the history of the original. Every language is only distanced from its end by an absolute, but irreducible minimum. Its historical “living on” does not play out in the homogenous continuum of a progressive development, in which its meanings might endlessly grow and accumulate, but rather presents itself in always singular expositions, of which none is comparable with another and each is an unsurpassable extreme. Every translation is an eschaton of the language of the original. In each, “fundamentally eternal living forth” realizes itself. Benjamin is able to term this liv-ing forth fundamentally eternal because in it the ground of language itself, its origin, is touched—and, therewith, a time that is no longer

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trapped within the horizon of subjective modes of intuition or, more naïvely, natural succession, but rather plays out openly, indefinitely and infinitely in its own incommensurable movement. Translation is origin or leap into being [Ursprung]. An event is historical if in it a time originates that is singular to it; and language is historical to the extent that it is translatable, is language for another language, is the language of an immediate and in each case singular becoming-other, and thereby allows history to originate. Translations—like all other intralinguistic and interlinguistic transformations—do not perform themselves in a time or history already playing out independently of them, which might serve as their stage; to the contrary, time and history first originate [entspringen] in translation, and originate in such a manner that they touch their ends already in their leap into being [Sprung]. Languages are fundamentally eternal in their historical unfolding, because in this respect they each appear for the only time and thus each time for the last time. They belong to a different order than that of the succession of substitutables, whether arranged logi-cally or temporally. Every historical instant is as instant of translation an instant of origin [des Ursprungs], and in that respect singular and thus—in and not beyond its historicity—fundamentally eternal.

A language can, so long as it speaks and pronounces itself as the claim to another language, never be the fixed, lifeless object of trans-mission, interpretation, or critique. Thus, no translation into another language, be it contemporaneous or later, dialect or national language, can produce its image and become like unto it. Benjamin leaves no doubt that any language that could be the object of reproduction would be unhistorical, untranslatable, and hence unlinguistic, and compares an analysis of the “impossibility of a theory of reproduc-tion” with the conclusion that the affinity between languages cannot rest in their similarity:

If it is shown there that in cognition there could be neither objectivity nor so much as a claim to it if this were to consist of images of the actual, then here it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if it were to strive in its ultimate essence for likeness to the original. For in its living forth [Fortleben], which could not be called such if it were not change and renewal of the living, the original transforms itself” (GS IV: 12).

It is the original, so Benjamin, that transforms itself: not its conceptions, readings, or translations, but it itself in its living forth in translations, interpretations, and usages. And because its life dates back only to its living forth, the original determines itself essentially as its own histori-cal, historicizing self-transformation. Since the original is not similar

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to itself, a translation can strive for similarity to it all the less. History as Benjamin understands it, the a priori of auto-alteration, renders the interdiction on images [Bilderverbot] superfluous: it is the impossibility of fixed images [starrer Bilder] and reproductions [Abbilder] that would be similar to them. Cognition can only be objective, or at least lay claim thereto, when its object is grasped as historically self-transforming and the cognition itself recognized as only a moment, indeed, one of the most powerful moments, of this transformation. Moreover, in fidelity to his programmatic critique of the Kantian subject-object schema, Benjamin insists that this moment of cognition in the historical process of the transformation of languages must not be misunderstood as a form of transcendental subjectivity, not as subjective addition or some individual arbitrariness, but rather grasped as nothing other than one of the expressions of the translational motion [Übertragungsbewegung] of language itself. Benjamin writes:

To seek what is essential in such transformations, or in the equally ongoing transformations of sense, in the subjectivity of successors rather than in the ownmost life of language and its works—this, even allowing for the crudest of psychologisms, would be to confuse the grounds with the essence of the thing. Put more rigorously, it would mean denying one of the most extraor-dinary and fruitful historical processes out of weakness of intellect (13).

While subjectivity may well be the “ground” of linguistic transformation, its essence must lie in the afterlife of languages themselves, since only their structural historicity, their a priori alteration, allows, demands, and conducts every change to their meaning and sense, which emerge as their very history. Thus, as foreign as languages are to one another, there is nonetheless a relation between them that is not that “between some subjects and objects” (GS II: 161); Benjamin names this with a concept that is important for him well beyond the essay on translation: “affinity” [Verwandtschaft]. One can think this as an a priori relation between the foreignnesses of languages in the medium of their own transcendental-historical objectivity—if objectivity can still be spoken of where subjectivity has become one of its historicizing functions.

The language of translation is not an idiolect that would operate outside of all languages already given or still to come, and it is none of these languages themselves, but rather it presents between them their relations to one another as a singular sort of form. It is in this way that Benjamin thinks about translation: not as another language that appears to the others and increases their number, not as a meta-language that signifies all other languages, but rather as a language that exposes their signification, their intimation of still others, and

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thereby also their allegorical intention. In a passage that is perhaps the decisive one for the essay on translation, he writes:

All purposive forms of life, like purposiveness itself, are in the end not pur-posive for life, but rather for the expression of its essence, the presentation of its meaning. In the end, translation, too, is purposive for the expression of the innermost relation of languages to one another. Of itself, it can scarce reveal this buried relation, can scarce produce it; but insofar as it realizes that relation germinally or intensively, it can. Indeed, this presentation of a signified is through that effort, an effort that is the germ of its produc-tion, an entirely individual mode of presentation such as may hardly be met with in the realm of non-linguistic life. For this [realm of non-linguistic life] finds in analogies and signs other modes of suggestion than intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization. By contrast, the intended, innermost relation of languages is that of a singular convergence. In this, languages are not foreign to one another, but rather are, a priori and apart from all historical conditions, related to one another in that which they wish to say (GS IV: 11–12).

Benjamin did not always differentiate between presentation and pro-duction. In his book on art criticism, he understood presentation “in the sense of chemistry, as the creation [i.e., production] of a material through a determinate process to which others are to be submitted” (GS I: 109). In the essay on translation, this equivalence of presenta-tion with production does not hold; rather, the “presentation of a signified”—that is, the presentation of the “innermost relation of languages to one another”—is understood as effort, as “the germ of its production.” Now, the organizing metaphor of the germ and of a “germinal realization” should not be mistaken for a suggestion that the relation of languages is to be understood by analogy with the life of nature, as Benjamin has already forcefully emphasized that “the ambit of life,” including nature, is first defined by history, and that this is defined by the translatability of languages.

Accordingly, germ is to be read here as the a priori of translatability and hence as every language’s transcendental-structural anticipation of its relation—and this anticipation itself as relation—with all others. Without being the disclosure or production of the innermost relation of languages—since this relation, writes Benjamin, remains buried [ver-borgen]—translation is “intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization” of this relation. The full significance of this formulation, in which the law of translation finds expression, remains incomprehensible so long as the strict interrelation between the concepts intensity, anticipation, and realization is not developed. So long, that is, as they are not placed

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in relation to Kant’s formulation, in The Critique of Pure Reason, of the principle of the anticipations of perception and its founding concepts: intensity, anticipation, and reality. And all this must be considered in light of Benjamin’s project for a critical transformation of Kantian transcendentalism.9 The citation of Kant implicit in the formulation intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization helps elucidate the prox-imity and distance of Benjamin’s linguistic theory to mathematical theories of intensive quantities, along with one possible motive for the letter Benjamin sent to Gerhard Scholem in 1916 in accompaniment to his essay on language, in which he emphasized that “especially the linguistic-theoretical consideration of mathematics [is] of quite fundamental significance for the theory of language as such.” That the title “Mathematics and Language” had for him to do not only with the relation between mathematics and thinking but just as much with that between mathematics and Zion suggests both an epistemological and an historical-philosophical-eschatological dimension.10 It was via this latter dimension that Benjamin hoped to make inroads into a linguistic-theoretical consideration of mathematics.

In the table of the principles of synthetic a priori judgments, which contains the rules for the objective use of the categories, the principle of the anticipations of perception stands in the second position, follow-ing the axioms of intuition. Together, these two comprise what Kant termed the mathematical section of the principles of synthetic judg-ment, which is concerned with the necessary conditions of possibility for objects of experience—and not, as in the case of the “dynamic” principles, with the contingent conditions of their existence [Dasein] (KdrV A160/B199). According to these principles, a precept must be operative in every intuition, dictating the conditions under which

9Clarifying the concept of intensity in this particular text, “The Task of the Transla-tor,” can also shed a certain light on its use in other writings of the early Benjamin. One thinks especially of the Hölderlin study (in which he speaks of the “intensity of communion of apparent and spiritual elements” [GS II: 108], characterizes “the law of identity” as “intensive penetration” of its elements [112], emphasizes a “plastic-intensive orientation” [118], etc.), of the essay “On Language as Such . . .” (which speaks of the “intensive totality of language” [144], of “language complete with regard to uni-versality and intensity” [145], and so forth), and of the letter of December 9, 1923, to Christian Rang (which identifies the essential bond between works of art as intensive, and recognizes an “intensive interpretation” and an “intensive infinitude.” Cf. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995- ) II: 390–94 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as GB).

10Letter of November 11, 1916 (GB I: 343–44).

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given phenomena may become objects of cognition. For the axioms of intuition, this occurs in their synthesis of a multiplicity of given phenomena, in their successive ordering in the concept of a quantity [Gröβe].11 “All intuitions are extensive quantities” (B202)—so goes the principle of the synthesis of intuition—because they produce the extensions of the pure forms of intuition, time and space, while at the same time producing the extensions of determinate manifestations of time and space in the phenomenon. The synthesis of intuition, which is simultaneously the coordination of pure intuitions with empirical intuitions and the coordination of a multiplicity of possible empirical intuitions, proceeds from the notion of parts to the notion of a whole comprised of these parts, and in that fashion successively makes all phenomena into aggregates of given parts (A163/B204). While the principle of the extension of intuition takes account of the necessity of a successive ordering of a multiplicity of phenomena in time and space—and thereby raises the problem of the antinomies of pure reason—it cannot account for the necessity that possible phenomena be substantial [sachhaltig]. This substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit]—and, it should be noted, not the actual being—of phenomena is incor-porated by Kant, with regard to intuition, in the principle of the anticipations of perception. That is, while the principle of extensivity simply prescribes the necessary form of intuition in the production of time and space, it is via the principle of perception that this same intuition relates itself to the substantiality of possible experience, to its reality or, as Kant translates this, to its thingness [Sachheit] (A143/B192; A574/B602). The principle of extension produces a relation to the form of intuition, while the principle of perception produces the relation to the material of intuition and to the specific material-ity of this material. The title “anticipations of perception” thus by no means indicates that perception is the agent of anticipations that reach beyond one or another already given perception or beyond the borders of perception as such. Rather, “anticipations of perception” signifies the a priori of perception: that, in order to be perception and

11[Translator’s note: It bears mention that the standard translation for Kant’s Gröβe is “magnitude.” Where the term Gröβe operates in a wide variety of capacities, however, appearing all throughout workaday German, “magnitude” has in English a specialist feel, the sort of feel that contributes to philosophy’s appearing more esoteric or rarefied than it intrinsically must be. By using the term “quantity,” I have sought to convey a sense both technical and everyday. Apart from this, and apart from “phenomena” for Erscheinungen (which I think better captures the dual character of Erscheinungen’s root-edness in the Schein—both that which seems and that which shines, making possible all seeming—than does the standard “appearances”), Kant’s terms of art are generally rendered here in the usual fashion.]

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thus empirical consciousness at all, it must in itself be structured as the anticipatory grasping of the reality of a sensation that offers up, in given phenomena, the material for object cognition. Perception is not anticipated; it is anticipation.

The problem that Kant seeks to solve by introducing the principle of anticipations is that of the empossibilizing12 of reality or of the thing-ness of objects of experience as such. Pure intuition produces merely a formal consciousness a priori of multiplicities in space and time, but does not entail the relation to the material that would be necessary for the fullness of this intuition. While formal consciousness places itself in relation with extensive quantities—and is in this relation itself extensive, that is, successively displaced—this same consciousness must, as material, relate itself a priori to more than formal extensions in time and space (since these are empty). It must posit in itself the ground, independently of these extensions, whereby it can encounter and stand opposite a something, a “what,” a real. It must posit in itself the ground for what Kant termed intensive quantities. Intuition posits this ground with the principle of anticipations of a something, that is, with a principle in which intuition relates itself to an inextensive, intensive quantum, a degree. Hence, in Kant’s formulation, the prin-ciple of anticipations reads, “In all phenomena, the real, which is an object of sensation, has intensive quantity, that is, a degree” (B207). Only by way of this transcendental structural principle can cognition extend out to the “material of perception,” being essentially nothing other than the anticipation of this material and, in this anticipation, itself already material. With this tenet [Grundsatz]—with this tenintent [Grundvorsatz]—and as such, the material is admitted into cognition itself. Fundamentally anticipatory, grasping out a priori beyond the immanence of mere analytical statements and toward the real, syn-thetic cognition is structured as the grasping in advance of its own material. It can now be understood of every “sense impression qua sense impression (without any particular impression being given)” (A167/B209) that it entails a quantity that is not a temporal-spatial extension and hence not the extension of a presentation of an object,

12[Translator’s note: The standard translation of Ermöglichung would be “enabling.” While adequate in many situations, what that would lose here is the sense of Möglichkeit or possibility that is being developed. Under discussion is not the “enabling” of reality, as though some external agent would make it possible—whether that external agent be thought as a principle or a principal—but rather quite precisely the “empossibilizing” of reality: the conditions of and immanent to reality whereby it, reality, is possible as such, immediately and without the intervention (theoretical or empirical) of any agent.]

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but is rather the unextended quantity of something as such. It is to this intensive quantity of sensory material as such that perception is related a priori, that is, before every particular sense impression, insofar as it is simply perception and without needing to be the perception of some determinate sensation. If perception occurs, then it occurs only as that of sensation, that is, as the perception of the material of objects as such and as perception of this “transcendental material” (A143/B182) in its always singular intensity.

The anticipation of the material of perception is immanent to every perception and is thus transcendental. Because the anticipa-tion of the material of perception is therefore not subordinated to extension in time and space and does not present a successive syn-thesis—but rather, as Kant writes, in each case fills “only an instant” and immediately grasps a whole (A167/B209)—anticipation of the material is in each case precisely a singular instant filling time through an intensive real. The principle of the anticipations of perception is the principle of the transcendental material of sensation, which empiri-cal consciousness cannot present to itself but as the intensity of the realitas noumenon. Only through the structure of the category of real-ity, then, is there linguistic access—for the category is nothing if not essentially linguistic—to the world of phenomenal reality; and only through this category is the performance or fulfillment of the form of intuition that is time possible.13 As intensive fulfillment, however, this fulfilling has in every instant the tendency—since intensio means gain, increase—to pass over into a higher one: it is filling [Erfüllung] in the leap toward overflowing [Überfüllung], a whole that swells out beyond itself. Though Kant does not draw this consequence, it can be said that intensity—that is, the character of the reality of sensory material—is not only the experiential correlate anticipated in the concept of the understanding, but has also for its part the structure of anticipation.

13[Translator’s note: It is worth noting that the standard translation of Kant’s erfüllen and Erfüllung in the first Critique—as “to fill,” “filling,” etc. in both Pluhar and Guyer and Wood, though with the caveat in Pluhar that “occupies” is also possible—treats time as already in a sense extant, available for filling. While this is to an extent appro-priate, since time is a pure apprehension of the form of intuition and may therefore be filled by sense-impressions, which themselves occur at a second formal-logical level, it does obscure the sense in which Erfüllung marks the “fulfillment” of conditions or “accomplishment” or “performance” of a demanded end or state. Hence, I have moved between the tradition of “filling” Kant’s time, especially when Hamacher is citing, and “fulfillment,” “accomplishing,” or “performing” in an effort to keep those latter senses alive in the text—for it is surely the case that time in the Critique is accomplished only in being filled, that its becoming full is the fulfillment of its structural promise and demand for itself, and that Hamacher’s reading of Kant should alert us to this fact.]

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It is an outer limit that seeks to shoot out beyond its own superlative. In his later conception of the “critical instant,” Benjamin was able to follow up on precisely this thought, which the Kantian construction preserved from Scholastic philosophy.14

Kant starts his construction of the a priori synthesis of the categories from the types of utterance that he conceives as pure forms of judg-ment. The relation to possible objects of experience is thus for Kant, even if concealed, always already a linguistic relation; and Benjamin, in his essay on a program for a coming philosophy, has good Kantian and not merely Hamannian reason for his demand that “the linguistic essence” of pure transcendental consciousness be reclaimed as the foundation for a new concept of experience (GS II: 168). If the rela-tion to objects in time and space and the relation to their materiality are anticipated in the pure concepts of the understanding as well as the principles for their application, then not only is an extensive and intensive reality within language, but reality is also prefigured therein as essentially linguistic—in the sense that the “pre-” there has, like the “ante-” of anticipation, not a chronological but rather an exclusively structural-implicative significance. Irreconcilable with this perspec-tive (which, granted, is nowhere in Kant’s work explicitly delineated, but is everywhere hinted at), there remains indeed the privilege of a singular language that rules over the entire Kantian construction of experience: that of the judgment and of the categories construed as forms of judgment. As Kant has it, the categories pre-form a realm of possible phenomena from which all autonomy is stripped, because they are encountered only as that which is given for the subject of a categorical and, furthermore, propositional cognition. For Benjamin, by contrast, these phenomena themselves have a linguistic character, and their language is not imputed to them by concepts of the under-standing, principles of judgment, and in the final instance a transcen-dental subject; rather, it comes to them as autonomous essentialities. It is not that a subject of cognition encounters a multiplicity of possible objects, but rather that one language relates itself to another and, in every other, to its own linguistic essence—to the possibility, namely,

14The concept of intensive quantities in Scholasticism is presented in Anneliese Maier’s 1939 “The Problem of Intensive Quantities,” collected in Zwei Grundprobleme der scholastischen Naturphilosophie (Rom: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1968). Regarding the structure of the “critical instant” and Benjamin’s later concept of history, I would point the reader to my essay “‘NOW’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” in The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, ed. Heidrun Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001) 161–96.

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of being not only the vehicle of impartings, but rather of imparting itself in its impartibility.

The anti-instrumental turn that Benjamin’s philosophy of language seeks to effect presses here, however, for an answer to the question of what form would bind the various languages to one another—to language as such—and in which language the relationship of the vari-ous languages to one another would present itself. For Benjamin, it is translation that offers the answer to this question. Translation is, he writes, “fundamentally oriented toward the innermost relationship of languages to one another” (GS IV: 12). In order to make clear how this linguistic relationship, the totality of language and ultimately “language as such” (16), “comes to expression” in translation, however, Benja-min reaches back toward that one among the Kantian principles of a priori synthesis that must, in some connections, count as decisive: the principle of the anticipations of perception. In this alone does Kant seek to think a relation between category and material of intuition in which the relata are not external to one another, not characterized by relations of quantity, by the succession of extensiva, or by purely formal relations of perception or causal relationships: a relation for which the perceptual forms time and space are not empty but materi-ally filled in every instant. Among all the synthetic a priori principles intended to secure the structural conditions for objective experience, the principle of the anticipations of perception exhibits the greatest affinity to Benjamin’s project for a new, language-philosophical foun-dation for the metaphysics of experience. It is here alone that the distance between categorical language and sensuality, between content of apprehension and form of time, between a priori and a posteriori cognition, contracts to a minimum. The density of their relation finds its pregnant formulation in that scholastic expression used by Kant, intensive quantities, which later takes on a central theoretic-strategic function in the texts of the neo-Kantians. Hence the privileging of the concept of intensity in Benjamin’s essays on Hölderlin, language, and translation. Hence, too, the critical reference—the only one to address a relatively clearly circumscribed lesson from Kantian philosophy: the principle of the anticipations of perception from the Transcendental Analytic—to the material of sensation in a 1916 introduction to the “Program” essay, bearing the title “On Perception.” There, Benjamin protests against the Kantian restriction of the concept of experience, arguing that “[t]he so-called ‘material of sensation’ arose as an expres-sion of the separation of the forms of intuition from the categories, artificially, so to speak, held at a distance from the animating center

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of the categorical interrelationship by the forms of intuition, in which it was incompletely absorbed” (GS VI: 34).15 While the aptness of the argument in this precise moment may be doubtful, it is beyond doubt that it attests to Benjamin’s concentrated interest in the category of sensory material, that is, reality as intensivum. Marked in this argu-ment, too, is his opposition to the interruption of the continuum of experience by the lifeless forms of intuition, his preference for the unrestricted operativity of irreducibly linguistic categories as guaran-tors of an expanded experience—and thereby also his insistence on the linguistic essence of cognition. What the essay on the translator protests five years later goes a decisive step further in the direction of this critique.

With Benjamin, the Kantian subject-object relation was transformed into an interlinguistic and, moreover, an intralinguistic relation. If translation is the paradigmatic form in which languages find access to other languages and, thereby mediated, to their linguisticality, then in fact they do so just as the category of reality, in the transcendental consciousness, finds the material of perception as an intensive quan-tity in sensation. That is, just as the linguistic categories and hence transcendental language anticipate the intensivum of sensory material, so, too, does translatability anticipate a language and translation, con-cretely speaking, language as such. Translatability is the transcendental of languages, translation is transcendental language with just this mediating function—for which Benjamin can admittedly no longer simply use the concept of synthesis—that Kant had assigned to the schematized categories. This mediation, this quasi-synthesis, is for Kant as for Benjamin anticipation: for the one, anticipation of the material of the senses, for the other, anticipation of the material of language. For Kant, the category of reality anticipates, without already designat-ing a particular sense-impression, the intensity of sense-impressions as such, and therewith the material of a possible world and thus the conditions for objective experience. For Benjamin, translation does not anticipate a language other than that of the original—since it already speaks this other language—but rather anticipates the “innermost relation of languages to one another” (GS IV: 12) and therein the language of languages, the ground for all experience.

15Benjamin’s thoughts here might also be related to the beginning of the chapter on the Transcendental Aesthetic, where a definitive distinction between the material of sensation and form of appearance is drawn (A20/B34), leaving unexplained only the relation to the “animating center of the categorical interrelationship”—which emerges organically from the chapters devoted to the synthetic principles.

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For Benjamin, this language is also material, though silent; but it is precisely in that respect that it is materially the truth, as he indicates in citing from Mallarmé’s Crise de vers: “penser étant écrire [. . .] tacite encore l’immortelle parole, [. . .] elle-meme matériellement la vérité.”16 That he speaks of a tone of feeling [Gefühlston] (17) in the determination of the connection between what is meant and the mode of meaning offered by a language might, in this respect, be understood as remi-niscent of Kant’s sense-impression; this, too, is implicit in the essentially linguistic category. But the principle of the anticipations of perception is thought by Kant as a principle of the precipitation of reality in the category.17 As such, it cannot hold for Benjamin, since the reality of language as such, in its purity, cannot be precipitated; it cannot be produced as an object, but rather can only be presented, as Benja-min emphasizes, in anticipation, in effort. This means, however, that the significance of the concept “anticipation,” which for Kant is as strong as a priori implication, has been transformed and now denotes the tentative assumption of something to come. The transcendental language of translation no longer determines the conditions under which experience is possible, but rather searches, attempts, hints at, and realizes the grounds of possibility of experience only “germinally or intensively,” that is, in such a manner that it reaches out beyond itself toward an other that it is not and that it cannot present other than through its own striving. The category, for Kant a transcenden-tal form that determinatively contained the data of the senses, has

16[Translator’s note: for Benjamin’s purposes, “thinking being writing [. . .] silent still immortal speech [. . .] would itself materialize truth.” As an appendix to her ex-cellent treatise on Mallarmé Rosemary Lloyd offers a translation of “Crisis of Verse,” from which the relevant passage is this: “Languages, which are imperfect in so far as they are many, lack the supreme language: because thinking is like writing without instruments, not a whispering but still keeping silent, the immortal word, the diversity of idioms on earth, prevents anyone from proffering the words which otherwise would be at their disposal, each uniquely minted and in themselves revealing the material truth” (230). Cf. Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).]

17In this regard, Hermann Cohen is a strict Kantian, insisting still on the production of sensory material through pure thought in the category (cf. Logik der reinen Erken-ntnis [Hildesheim: Olms, 1977] 28–9 and 58–9). Benjamin’s critique of Kant is at the same time a critique of Cohen. This is most evident in the epistemological preface to the book on Trauerspiel, in which he writes, “The category of the origin [des Ursprungs] is thus not, as Cohen would have it, purely logical, but rather historical” (GS I: 226). Indeed, Benjamin develops the elements of differentiation between the logical and the historical from the structure of the infinitesimal principle, which he may have come to know from Kant’s principle of anticipations and to which Cohen works to give pride of place in the logic of cognition (cf. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis 32–6).

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opened itself to that which, in itself, it can absolutely never include, that which as historical other exceeds its capacity to determine and must remain unreachable for it. The category has become historical, no longer defining what can possibly be present [das mögliche Vorlieg-ende], but rather signifying what lies historically ahead [das geschichtlich Vorausliegend] as an indefinable other. Translation, writes Benjamin, “signifies a higher language than it itself is” (15); it has become an ‘allocategory’ [Allokategorie], has become allegorical.

Translation is that principle of linguistic relation in which all indi-vidual languages must be inscribed, if they are to be languages at all. This means that languages do not signify one another and succes-sively fill one another out toward totality as merely formal and thus empty degrees of time and space in accordance with the principle of extensivity. The principle of extension and thus the principle of a successive progression of multiple languages toward a single true one is, in principle, insufficient for expressing the relationship of languages to each other; in the principle of extension, languages would remain alien to one another, without reality and hence without internal rela-tion to their own linguisticality. But as little as the relation between languages can be a relation of producing an external object, and as much as it must be an intensive relation of presentation, so for Benjamin—and herein lies a further decisive difference between his thought and Kant’s—it is just as little a relation of mere cognition. For languages live and live on in their relationship to one another, prior to every cognitive-propositional function, and thus it is essentially a relation of occurring, a historical relation, that binds them with one another prior to and in every epistemic relation. The presentation that translation offers, of the relationship of one language to another and thus of language as such, must indeed for that reason be compre-hended as historical, but cannot be thought as a linear succession, nor as a relation of production. The concept of history that Benjamin seeks to work out through his notion of translation eliminates all characteristics of a formal, homogenous series, which the concept of history had taken on under pressure from the idea of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He replaces the characteristic of extension—and thereby of quantity—with that of qualitative, intensive fulfillment [Erfüllung]. History proceeds in translations; it is nothing other than translation; and the linguistic essence of history, not only that of cognition, plays its part in the language of translation. Just as this language is intensive anticipation, so history must be structured

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as anticipation. Indeed, history must be the intensive “synthesis” of an instant with one to come that cannot be produced through history.

In his dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German roman-ticism, which precedes the essay on the translator by two years, Benja-min writes of the temporal infinitude of the historical process—and the same holds for the process of languages in translation—that it is “medial and qualitative.” He ties these thoughts on what he terms Romantic messianism together with an initial critique of the “modern” concept of progress, which he would take up again and sharpen years later in the theses on history.18 In the idiom of the essay on the trans-

18Benjamin writes in “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism” that “[t]he temporal infinitude in which this process [of unfolding and enhancement] takes places is likewise medial and qualitative. Accordingly, progressibility [Progredibilität] is absolutely not that which is understood under the modern expression “progress” [Fortschritt, lit. “forth-step”], not a certain relation of cultural levels to one another that is only relative. It is, like the entire life of humanity, an infinite process of fulfillment, not a mere process of becoming.” Benjamin uses the formula “Romantic messianism” twice in immediate proximity to these sentences (GS I: 92). Messianism was designated by Benjamin the “center of Romanticism” in a letter from April 7, 1919 that he wrote to Ernst Schoen after completing the rough draft of his dissertation (GB II: 23, note 3).

The idea that the time of history is to be grasped as qualitative had been worked out in preliminary fashion by Heinrich Rickert, with whom Benjamin studied in Freiburg, in his book on The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, though not without grotesquely conflating “quality” with “value.” Cf. Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung—Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913 [1896]). The concept of a qualitative historical time stands at the center of Heidegger’s lecture Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaften [The Concept of Time in the Historical Sciences], which was partially directed at Rickert and which Benjamin read shortly after its publication in 1916, while he was working on the early essay on language—he dismissed it as nonsense (letter to Scholem of November 11, 1916, in GB II: 344, note 3). Cf. Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1976–2011) I. Despite this derisive judgment, there can be no doubt that already at this time, Benjamin could not in principle have been at odds with Heidegger’s critique of the “homogenous, quantitatively determinable character” of time; it was just that Heidegger’s advocacy of the qualitative character of historical time led nowhere further than the communis opinio of the neo-Kantians and left it in a fruitless opposition with the quantitative time of the natural sciences. By contrast, Benjamin was about to bring his language essay to a close and already in possession of an argument with which he could think the qualitative time of history more precisely as a “medial” one, since he had already conceived of the quality of language, its in-tensity, as the “medial, that is, the immediacy of all spiritual imparting” (GS II: 142). In the same letter in which the verdict concerning Heidegger’s “horrible work” is to be found, Benjamin names—albeit without designating them as such—two entry-points to the language- and historical-philosophical theory of pure mediality so central for him: lessons from Kierkegaard, that is, from the theorist of mediable imparting, and lessons from Hölderlin’s commentaries on Pindar, in which it is not only explained that “strict mediability is the law,” but in which Hölderlin claims: “Should understanding be practiced intensively, still it maintains its force in the delapidated as well—so long as it easily apprehends the foreign in its own finely honed acuity” (Friedrich Hölderlin,

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lator and in accordance with Kantian terminology, historical time is qualitative and intensive; this means, again following Kant, that it is the reality of something “so long as it fills time” (A143/B183). This time is a process of fulfillment in the formulation of the work on art criticism, intensive in the idiom of the translator essay, and in both cases antici-patory; such is, in Benjamin’s understanding, the time of language, linguistic time. Anticipation is as little for Kant as “anticipatory [ . . . ] realization” is for Benjamin an anticipation in time regarded as the empty form of perception; rather, it is a moment’s anticipation of any other moment, a language’s anticipation of another language, and in that fashion—ana-chronistically, achronically—at once the consti-tution of historical time and of language. Translation, which draws this anticipation to completion, is the a priori of temporalization or time-ing [Zeitigung], i.e., the genesis of language as of history. It is lan-guage’s anticipatory grasping of language itself, its intensive realization in anticipation of itself and thus the basic structure of language and history as such. For translation is not the synthesis of already given languages. In its translation of the language of the original into its own, it transforms this language and its relation to the former, and projects a relation between languages in general that works toward their integral totality. Translation between two languages is thus always also the translation of languages into the one language as such that is not yet given and never given at all. As such, translation is proto-synthesis, from which languages can first emerge at all as languages and, indeed, as languages of the one language. Translation is as little a belated connection between two given languages as history is the relation between two already completed times, epochs, or stages of history. Like translation, history is the leap that leads from one instant to another that is not given and that only emerges from this leap in the first place.

Only the integral relation of all languages in the completeness of their historical unfolding would constitute language in general and language as such in the first place. This relationship, which does not exist as a positive fact, and which is nonetheless registered within every language as a transcendental demand, presents itself in allusive realization through translation and, hence, in the manner of anticipa-

Sämtliche Werke, ed. by D. E. Sattler [Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1975–2008], XV: 291; 293). Several years would pass before Benjamin would draw, like Heidegger before him (cf. Heidegger 1976–2011, 424 and 431), the consequences from the cri-terion of quality and would orient his critique of the dominant historical ideologies against the homogenous continuum of quantities that they supposed.

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tion. Language itself is only given to us in its a priori anticipation or pre-empting [Vorwegnahme]—that is, never as anticipation of some-thing already existing elsewhere, but rather of something first given through this very anticipation. The fact that translation is the organon of language’s reality [Wirklichkeit] in the anticipation of language, and that it is the organon of prealization [Vorwirklichung] of language, makes of translation a messianic project: in translation, language is messianic—messianic a priori—as its own “what lies ahead [ihr eigenes Voraus]. More specifically, Benjamin writes, the various languages’ manners of meaning complement one another to make up “the meant”:

For individual languages that are not complementing one another, their “meant” [which is, however, pure language] is never met with in relative independence [. . .], but rather grasped in constant flux, until through the harmony of all those manners of meaning it steps forward as pure language. Until then, it remains buried [verborgen] in languages. But when these swell up in this manner to the messianic end of their history, then it is for translation, which kindles itself in the eternal living forth [Fortleben] of works and the endless coming to life [Aufleben] of languages, to make always a fresh trial of that sacred growth of languages: at what distance what is buried there lies from revelation, how present it might become in the knowledge of this distance (GS IV: 14).

The messianic semiotics of the integration of specific linguistic inten-tions into a single intended within them may be formulated profanely, in Kantian fashion: experiences are only possible when, within the structure of the various media of experience, the one thing signified in them is already anticipated. Languages are messianically anticipatory and intensive, not in their particular utterances but in the manner of their meaning. It is not what is uttered in them, but how they speak that is significant in languages. The intention to language in general lies in the always singular manner of intention of the individual languages, and the how of their meaning makes of each an intensive, instantly fulfilled—but in this fulfillment still self-transcending—medium of language in general, and thereby of language as such. As the language of linguistic relations, translation attains to the degree of intensity of language as such, surpassing the individual languages but itself no longer surpassable. Translation is the messianic medium for the mes-sianic end of history in pure language. In translation qua transcendental anticipation of the end of languages and their—and every—history, language and history realize themselves.

Kant was not the first to think of anticipation as the foundational figure of the understanding. He himself justifies the introduction of

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this concept with a reference to Epicurus, writing, “[o]ne can call all cognition an anticipation—whereby I can know and determine a priori that which belongs to empirical cognition—and it is without question that such was the sense in which Epicurus used his expres-sion πρόληψις” (A166–67/B208).19 Now if this prolepsis is for Kant the form in which the transcendental language (of the categories) engen-ders possible empirical objects, so, too, is prolepsis for Benjamin the presentation—indeed, the only possible presentation—of the relation between languages, of language itself, and consequently of a language that precedes those of the categories and empossibilizes them. The internal generative structure of language is translation as prolepsis. Indeed, this structure is translation as prolepsis of language—and only on that account also of languages—to language: in it, languages prove themselves to belong to language; in it, they come to language; in it, they first realize their linguistic essence. Only as anticipation is this realization possible, not as revelation or as production—translation, Benjamin writes, can “impossibly reveal, impossibly produce” (GS IV: 12) the buried relation of languages—but only as the anticipation or preliminary design of a linguistic material that, for its part, is not to be found as a temporal or spatial existent, but only as this anticipa-tion and design of prolepsis itself. As prolepsis, translation trans-poses [setzt über] languages into languages not only that are in each case other, but into language; it poses them in relation to one another and, since translation itself is the “innermost relation of languages” to one another and thus implicitly to language itself, “germinally or intensively realized,” it transposes languages into translation, into language as translation, into pure language as pure prolepsis.

In translation, language realizes itself as anticipation of itself. But since the linguisticality of language is given in no other way and is in

19Presumably, Kant was familiar with the concept of prolepsis from Cicero’s De natura deorum (I.43), where it is translated with the Latin concepts “praenotio” (i.e., anticipation) and “anticipatio,” and where Cicero introduces his use by ascribing it to this sense of Epicurus’s prolepsis. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De natura deorum (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1968). Prolepsis and anticipation are thus synonymous for Cicero and Kant insofar as both designate the anticipatory grasping, pre-cept, or anticipation that allows access to the things meant therein. For Epicurus, the πρόληψις, in which πρῶτον ἐννόημα is at work, is additionally a σπέρμα, a seed or germ (Letter to Herodotus 39; cf. Letter to Menoeceus 124). Graziano Arrighetti, Epicuro, Opere, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1973). When Benjamin writes of a realization of language that is “germinal or intensive” and, again, “intensive, i.e., anticipatory” (GS 4:12), however, one must perhaps read in this combination of germ and anticipation less an immediate reminiscence of Epicurus than a reference to the germ and seed cult of the Romantics, in which the thought of λόγος σπερματιχός lived forth [fortlebte] from the Stoic tradition.

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no other way presentable—and is not producible at all—it consists in nothing other than this absolute, unconditional “what lies ahead” [voraussetzungslosen Voraus]. And since this absolute, historicizing “what lies ahead” is the a priori of prolepsis, indeed, prolepsis as the a priori-cization of language, and since it is only in this a prioricizing prolepsis that the individual languages communicate with one another, they do not impart to one another in translation a something and they do not impart some empirical or even transcendent agency; they impart instead only their impartibility and, with that, they impart themselves as the unconditional presupposition of every predicative and judging imparting. In translation, language realizes itself as absolute pre-supposition [Voraus-setzung] and only thus as the empossibilizing of judgingly intentional languages in that which Benjamin calls language as such. Prolepsis is thus less the founding principle of every possible experience than the proposition [Satz]—the leap [Sprung]—in which alone a basis for experience emerges, without however ever being fixed as availably given or as produced. And since it is only in this intention [Vorsatz] of language, in which every individual language transcends itself and language itself is its own transcendence in language, since it is only in this projection [Vorsprung] that languages speak at all, they are “language as such, its totality” in a non-extensive, non-aggregative manner in translation; in every individual instant, translation is the intensive realization of language, language for another language and for the otherness of language: “language of language” and hence, as the early essay on language puts it, of the name (GS II: 144). The intensity of languages is the a priori “what lies ahead” of translation in them, their pre-supposition in language. As projection that is absolute and in every case singular, language itself is intensive.

Anticipation, which for Kant belongs in the category of quality and furthermore of reality, thus designating their transcendental status, attains with Benjamin a simply limitless prerogative: it no longer marks merely the manner of operation of one among several categories, and no longer only the structure of categoriality, but rather the structure—indeed, the generative structure—of language as such. Prolepsis or anticipation designates the manner in which language realizes itself; it is, accordingly, the category of linguistic realization as such and, as the category before all categories, the proto- and anacategory under which alone language as language is possible and intensively real. With the generalization of prolepsis into the mode of realization of language as such, however, language—and all that can be said in it—becomes endless prolepsis: far beyond reach ahead of itself, unapproachably

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behind itself, it speaks only in efforts, degrees, intensities—each of which is grasped in its escalation and is hence the “latest and most comprehensive” (GS IV: 11)—as infinite finitude. Since prolepsis is the minimal juncture binding languages with language in general and manifesting their belonging to language itself, all languages are proleptic and all are intensive languages. To the extent that their intention and their intensity are directed toward language in general and thus toward bare, pure language—which is exposed by impart-ings—they orient themselves toward their own mediality. Language itself: this is their self-relation and, as the self in its role as the pronoun of emphasis indicates, it is such as pure intensity.

Intensive, that is, anticipatory, allusive realization of the innermost rela-tion of languages: in Benjamin’s definition of translation, “intensive” means, as for Kant, anticipatory; unlike for Kant, it also means allu-sive [andeutend] (not signifying [bedeutend]); and again unlike for Kant, it is not simply positive, not posited. In his commentary on the principle of anticipations, Kant insists that the real of phenomena, their thingness as well as their extension in the phenomenon, is never given in anything other than a continuum of degrees and, therefore, in mathematical determinations of quantity:

The property of quantities by which no part of them is the smallest possible (by which no part is simple) is called continuity. Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given save as included within boundaries (points and instants), and hence in such a manner that this part itself is still again a space or a time. [. . .] It follows that all phenomena as such are continuous quantities: extensive when considered in terms of their intuition and intensive when considered in terms of simple perception (sensation and consequently reality) (A169–70/B 211–2).

That there is no smallest part of a continuum means, firstly, that there is no part in which it has its end and thus that it is infinite in terms of both extension and intensity. In the world of phenomena there is no place at which it would cease to be reality; this indicates, so Kant concludes, that “from experience there can never be drawn a proof of empty space or of an empty time” (A172/B214). Experience is only possible insofar as its subject itself, in the concepts by which it is grasped, opens itself to being affected through phenomena; it opens itself to such affection inasmuch as it arrogates to appearances the character of a something, a positive determination, a thingly nature. It posits anticipatorily, as a presupposition, what is given to it in sense-

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impression, and attains access in this presupposition to an uninter-rupted series of realities.

The principle of anticipations thus includes a further principle—Kant calls it a regulative idea of pure reason—through which an unarticulated connection, if not quite with the actuality of objects, then with their reality, is buried within it: the principle of anticipa-tions must be based in the principle of continuity. In this principle, the mathematical formulation of which first becomes possible via Leibniz’s introduction of arbitrarily small quantities, the so-called infinitesimal, the uninterrupted and hence infinite presence of a thing as such, a real, becomes thinkable. When no number can be the smallest, when any given quantity of perception can yet be end-lessly reduced before disappearing, when there always lies between an arbitrarily small quantity of sense-impression and the next-smaller an interval that is smaller than that separating the first from zero, then the succession of these infinitesimal degrees constitutes a “continuous connection” of degrees (A168/B210) and this continuity itself must shelter within it the irreducible reality-character of these degrees. The continuum guarantees the ongoing presence of something as something at all in infinitely differentiated, but also infinitely real gradations. In stepping through the infinitesimal degrees within self-sameness, there are always only ever more degrees to be encountered, and hence the continuum suggests not only a connection—and even a fluid connection: Kant expressly refers to Newton’s “fluentes” when he speaks of flowing quantities (A170/B210)—but rather, in this dense connection of infinitely differentiated quantities, it always also sug-gests a structure for the identical: a quantity as such, but an intensive rather than an extensive one, a degree. Degree—or intensity—thus means unexposed [unausgesetzte] positive determination in an infinite continuum, something as such, thingness in the inseparable chain of singularities. Regardless of whether it is the determination of a merely possible or of an actual intuition, this thingness fulfills [erfüllt] each instant of time in such a manner that every “here and now” can be the “here and now” of a sense impression or experience; thus every “here and now” is, in an endless gradation that is each time singular, transcendentally material. The schema of reality that operates in the anticipations of perception is thus the schema of an unarticulated and infinitely singular fulfilling of time: “Apprehension,” writes Kant, “by means merely of the sense impression, fills only an instant [. . .]”

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(A167/B209).20 Every experience thus refers, according to Kant, to the real, to the thingness of objects as to that irreducible position of quantities that are in each case singular, in which the empty intuition-form of time fulfills itself as in instants.21

Kant derived the concept of reality, if not immediately from the Scholastic tradition or from the texts of Leibniz, then from Baumgar-ten’s Metaphysica.22 There, Baumgarten offers in §36 the following definition: “What is posited in something through determination is either a positive or affirmative determination, which if true is reality, or a negative determination, which if true is negation.”23 As positive determination—as position or as positing—reality is thus the counter-concept of negation, designating that which constitutes the character of a thing as thing, its essence or quidditas, independently of whether this thing is actual or merely logically possible. Kant translates this formal definition of realitas as determinatio into the terminology of the critique when he writes: “Now, that which in the empirical intuition corresponds to the sense-impression is reality (realitas phaenomenon); what corresponds to its absence, negation = 0” (A167/B209). The concept of being that Kant uses is also to be understood in this sense of reality as positive determination: “the real, that which corresponds to sense-impressions as such, contrary to negation = 0, would only pres-ent something the very concept of which includes being, and signifies

20Accordingly, Kant writes of “infinitely differentiated gradations with which space or time would be filled” (A173/B214). In the chapter on the Schematism, he speaks of a “schema of reality as the quantity of something insofar as it fills time” (A143/B183), and explicitly ascribes to this schema of reality the form of “determination of time,” which has to do with the content of time. Reality is thus the filling of time, every real not merely something as such but rather the “here and now” of a something in the continuum that is distinct and fills in a distinct fashion.

21That realities and hence intensities only ever occur in plural, and that they are organized in a continuum, also means of course that in each individual reality both the second category from the categorical group of quality, negation, and the third, the category of limitation, are operative: there is absolutely no reality that would not be accompanied by a negation and constrained in such a way that there can no more be a last negation or a final limit than there can be a final reality. Reality in the continuum is only ever possible as limn and hence as further determinable. This makes of the Kantian conception of filling time a paradox: as fully filled as it may be, it can always be more fully filled. Precisely this paradox constitutes the content of the term “intensity.”

22Treating the history of the concept of realitas, Anneliese Maier’s “Kant’s Categories of Quality” discusses these different possibilities with sophistication (Issue 65 of Kant-studien, Berlin 1930; reprinted in Zwei Untersuchungen zur nachscholastischen Philosophie).

23“Quae determinando ponuntur in aliquo, (notae et praedicata) sunt determinationes (Bestim-mungen [determinations]), altera positiva, et affirmativa, quae si vere sit, est realitas, altera negativa, quae si vere sit, negatio (Verneinungen [negations])” (Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysica, Editio VII [Hildesheim: Olms, 1982 [1779)] 11).

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nothing but synthesis in an empirical consciousness as such” (A175/B217).24 Just as reality is for Baumgarten and for Kant the affirma-tive positing of a material content [eines Sachgehalts], so for both it is, once more in keeping with the language of the Scholastics and of Leibniz, posited as the determination of quality only in degrees, in individual steps, gradations, and intensities, and thus in such a manner as to present itself only in quantitative determinations of difference. Hence, as Baumgarten writes in §246 of his Metaphysica, “[d]egree is the quantity of quality (or the quantity of capacity [des Vermögens]),”25 and Kant refines this definition with regard to quantities a priori: “It is noteworthy that of quantities as such we can know only a single quality a priori, namely continuity, but that of all qualities (the real of phenomena) we can know nothing further a priori than this intensive quantity itself, that is, that they have a degree; all else remains aban-doned to experience” (A176/B218). On the basis of the unexposed [unausgesetzten] continuum of the real and thus of the irreducible position of a quantity as such, and on this basis alone, the intensive quantity of realities in the continuum between 0 and 1, which are in every case distinct, allows itself to be anticipated a priori. All anticipa-

24Accordingly, he writes in the Schematism chapter while more precisely defining this being as a being in time: “Reality is that which in the pure concept of the under-standing corresponds to a sense-impression as such, and thus that whose concept in itself designates a being (in time). Negation, that whose concept presents a not-being [Nichtsein] (in time)” (A143/B182). As concept “in itself,” the simple concept (nota) is a determination and therefore a signal of the intratemporal being of a something. The problem of “correspondence” is thus resolved for Kant via a sui-correspondence of the concept of the understanding, a self-affection that he calls a “sense-impression as such” that opens up the possibility of an empirical, objective sense-impression with which it must, for its part, “correlate [entsprechen].” For Kant, “Correlations [Entsprechungen]” or “correspondences [Korrespondenzen]” between concepts and beings occur because the concepts themselves, “in themselves,” correlate in infinitesimal differences and, in that manner, “sense”: they schematize themselves, and Kant consistently speaks for that reason of the schema also as a “sensual concept” (A146/B186). This immediately schematizing movement of concepts, which means however their immediate mediability, appears nowhere more forcefully in Kant’s presentation than in his characterization of the concept and the schema of reality and, therefore, in his illustration of the structure of intensity.

25“Quantitas qualitatis est gradus (eine Stuffe, Staffel [a step, a relay]) (quantitas virtutis)” (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 73). In §26 of his Prolegomena (A 95), Kant quotes this defini-tion of Baumgarten’s without citation, as though the source would be quite naturally known. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ). Moreover, in the paragraph following the one from which Kant quotes, Baumgarten defines the multitude of degrees that col-lect themselves in a degree as intensio, translating intensio with “the higher,” and uses the formulation qualitas intenditur to characterize the increase of degrees; he translates intenditur as “accumulating, strengthening in intensity” (Metaphysica 74).

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tion is anticipation of that which is posited in the concept [Begriff] as preconception [Vorbegriff] and anticipatory grasping [Vorgriff]. What is anticipated in the anticipations of perceptions is the endless mul-tiplicity of points of time and space that are posited and therefore fulfilled as things [sachlich erfüllt]. The plurality of possible perceptions is irreducible because reality as such can never be abstracted from its character as quantity: as positing, it follows the schema of number (A142/B182), which “makes every reality presentable as a quantum” (A143/B183), and which, even if mediated, subsumes reality under the pure concepts of mathematics. Kant can hence describe the anticipations of the real, of intensive quantities, as an “application of mathematics (mathesis intensorum)” in the Prolegomena (A 92).

For Kant, the multiplicity of possible experiences is an always already mathematically schematized multiplicity of degrees, and that means it is always already posited in the category of quantity itself. Only in the framework that affords positive determination, the positing of a thing as such as irreducible quantum or as number, can an intuition relate to phenomena and become the cognition of an object. For finite reason it is absolutely essential that its phenomena be “given”; it can-not analytically weave a world out of its concepts, but must grasp the given in synthetic judgments. But a given is, according to Kant, only ever given to finite reason in relation to the positing of this given—it is a given-to-positing [ein der Setzung Gegebenes]—and objective reality is posited exclusively in relation to the concept of a reality as such, while the empirical sense-impression is posited in relation to what Kant calls “sense-impression in itself” (B208); empirical sense-impression is thus posited in relation to the concept of a positing as such: a con-cept that “in itself includes a being” (A175/B217). Reality, and with it quality, continuum and intensity, is positing—determinando ponuntur, as Baumgarten defines it. It is the position of material content in the sense-impression in itself, and without this position, which is opera-tive in “every sense-impression, as sense-impression as such” (A167/B209), without this “autothesis” there would be no synthesis a priori with phenomena and no objective sense-impression, no experience. Anticipations of the real, of “being (in time),” are pre-suppositions [Voraus-Setzungen] of the real, the positing of its “what lies ahead.” Their synthetic anticipation is an anticipation of the concept of number, and only as such is it in the strong sense of the word propositional and does it proleptically constitute a presentation [Vorstellung]. The mathematical logic of the position is inscribed in the entire structure of cognition—including what Kant calls its dynamic part—and regu-

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lates the being of the real no less than the filling of time and space in the “here and now” of the continuum, and thus intensity. Being in the continuum of the real, or intensity, always means for Kant the intensity of a positing and hence posited intensity, posited being.26

In his “Program for a Coming Philosophy” and in the early philo-sophical studies of language and art in the midst of which it stands, Ben-jamin did not subject Kantian transcendentalism to critique because it was insufficiently empirical, much less materialist, but because it was not transcendental enough. “All authentic experience refers to the pure cognition-theoretical (transcendental) consciousness, so long as this term remains useable once stripped of all characteristics of a sub-ject” (GS II: 162–3). The pure transcendental consciousness, in which Benjamin hopes to “find the sphere of total neutrality as regards the concepts object and subject” (ibid.), is for him not to be an agency that would stand opposite [gegenüberstehen] a realm of sensual data; rather, this consciousness must itself immanently step out beyond its own experiences—and can for this reason still be called transcen-dental, though no longer subjective. “The great transmutation and remediation of the one-sidedly mathematical-mechanical concept of cognition that is to be undertaken” (168) must, per Benjamin, make of transcendental consciousness the exclusive ground of experience: “Thus the task of the coming philosophy is construed as the discovery or creation of that concept of cognition that, inasmuch as it at once relates the concept of understanding exclusively to the transcendental consciousness, logically empossibilizes not only mechanical but also religious experience” (164). This logical empossibilizing of concrete as well as religious experience, however, is to be founded in a pure transcendental consciousness that is not formal-logical but is instead solely linguistic. If this concept of experience is to be meaningful, then experience can, for its part and following the principle of the “linguistic essence of cognition” (168), only be a linguistic experience and an experience of language, and no longer mathematically schematized. With the exclusive foundation of experience in a transcendental language, however, it is not only the various disciplinary distinctions between mathematics and religion that must fall away; the concept of the transcendental, too, which with Kant (namely, the Kant of the

26[Translator’s note: Here, as ever, the reader should recall the multiple valences of setzen, “to posit or place,” especially the way it forms “the law,” das Gesetz. “Posited intensity, posited being,” “gesetzte Intensität, gesetztes Sein,” is always also regulated or legislated intensity and being.]

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first Critique) still stood entirely under the law of mathematics and mechanics, transforms itself.

An initial consequence of Benjamin’s transformation of the Kan-tian system concerns the concept of the sense-impression, which is for Kant “the material of perception” (A167/B209) but as “sense-impression in itself is absolutely not objective presentation” (B208). The sense-impression relates to the real as to the “object [Gegenstand] of sense-impression” (B207), but can only relate itself to it if this object is still not objective [objektiver]—not a thing standing opposite [gegenständlicher]—but rather only the subject’s affecting of itself.27 Sense-impression can thus only be an a priori synthesis if it is sensual self-impression and as such both sense-impression and its material, the real; and it can only be “synthesis of a sense-impression’s production of quantity” (B208), that is, the production or positing of an inten-sity, when it originally produces itself as quantity in its auto-affection. Hence, if there should be an empirical consciousness—and, strictly speaking, there is for Kant no other—then it is the auto-empirical consciousness of the subject in its transcendental apperception. In his account, Benjamin avoids these complications within Kant’s concept of sensation, but he strikes at its underlying model of presentation when he objects in the “Program” essay, in connection with his criti-cal commentary on “human empirical consciousness” and its “subject nature,” that

the “whole” is a thoroughly metaphysical rudiment in the theory of cognition [. . .]. That is, it is absolutely not to be doubted that within Kant’s concept of cognition the presentation—however sublimated—of an individual, corporeal-spiritual “I,” through whose senses sense-impressions would be received and who would on their basis form its ideas, plays the greatest role. This conception, however, is mythology, and as far as its truth content goes, it is equivalent to any other mythology of cognition (GS II: 161).

Thus Benjamin discards sense-impression as the criterion of the objec-tivity of an experience, since this remains bound to the subject-position of consciousness and imputes to experience the premises of a naturally developing subjectivity and thereby a mythology. With equal vigor, he discards sensation as the criterion of life when, now no longer in the “Program” but in the essay on the translator, he connects its concept

27[Translator’s note: It is useful to keep in mind that Gegenstand, though typically (and here, for the most part) translated as “object” or “thing,” decompositionally translates as “stand-against” or “stand-opposed.” This notion of the object as a preconstituted external thing standing opposite a subject entails still a Cartesian epistemology that Hamacher, following Benjamin, would move through and beyond.]

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with that of the animalistic and, as with the talk of subject-nature, with the concept of nature: “But it cannot be a matter,” he writes there,

of prolonging its domination by the feeble scepter of the soul, as Fechner attempts to do; never mind that life could be defined by the even less decisive moments of the animalistic, as also by sense-impression, which can only incidentally distinguish it. [. . .] For it is by history, not by nature and still less by such fickle matters as sense-impressions and the soul, that the ambit of life is to be determined (GS IV: 11).

Sense-impression, nature, subjectivity, and mythology thus stand for Benjamin in a configuration that could only remain decisive for the “metaphysical” concept of experience from Kant on to Fechner28 and the neo-Kantians because they did not determine the horizon of life in terms of history—and hence of “living on”—and of language—and hence of translation. What is mythical for Benjamin, as his essay “On the Critique of Violence” most forcefully makes clear, is the violence of law-giving [Rechtsetzung] and the positioning of power [Machtsetzung], the violence of positing [Setzung] as manifestation and as means (GS II: 197–9).29

In the center of that configuration of sense-impression, nature, subjectivity, and mythology—which Benjamin’s re-founding of the concept of experience in a transcendental philosophy of language seeks to eliminate—stands positing, and with it the concept of being, of a real and actual, which regulates the entire Kantian system and whose further development by Fichte into the notion of self-positing Benjamin had contended with in his dissertation on art critcism. The radicalization of transcendentalism means for Benjamin not only the erasure or redemption [Tilgung] of its empirical and naturalistic residues, but rather above all implies critique of the philosophy of

28Fechner’s justification of psycho-physical parallelism is given thorough critical attention in Hermann Cohen’s The Principal of the Infinitesimal Method and Its History and in Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Givens of Consciousness. There are good reasons for assuming that Benjamin was familiar with both texts. In the center of each stands the concept of intensity. Cf. Hermann Cohen, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948 [1927]).

29For clarification of the relations of violence and positing in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” and in particular for an exposition of that which Benjamin calls “deposing” [Entsetzung], see my essay “Afformativ, Streik” in Was heiβt “Darstellen,” ed. Christiaan Nibbrig, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994) 340-371 [translated as “Afformative, Strike” in Cardozo Law Review 13:1133].

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subjectivity and the transformation of every doctrine of positing and self-positing that defines its horizon.

The second consequence to emerge from Benjamin’s discarding of the subject-object model of experience concerns the principle of continuity. It stands in the middle of his reflections on the coming philosophy and on the theory of language. This transpires, without question, in connection with Leibniz, Kant, and above all Cohen (but also Bergson, Rickert, and Cassirer), but while for all these—with the problematic exception of Leibniz—the barrier between subject and object remains decisive for all experience, Benjamin’s concept of continuity must put aside precisely this barrier and with it the barrier between natural science or mathematics and religion. Thus Benjamin opposes the “reduction of all experience to the scientific” and pleads emphatically for a “continuity of experience” and for the necessity of establishing a “pure, systematic continuum of experience” in metaphys-ics (164). And after he has pointed, on the one hand (as already in his study of Hölderlin), to the “concept of identity, unknown to Kant,” and, on the other, to the Kantian concept of the idea in which the unity of experience consists, he proceeds: “For the deepened concept of experience, however, [. . .] continuity is only second in importance to unity, and it is in ideas [Ideen] that the ground must be shown for the unity and continuity of every experience that is not vulgar and not only scientific, but is rather metaphysical” (167). Consequently, he defines experience apodictically as “the unified and continuous multiplicity of cognition” (168).

As early as the language essay of 1916, Benjamin had already real-ized in outline his program for a philosophy in which language would be regarded as a transcendental-empirical continuum of experience and thus not merely as a form, but just as much the very material of empiricism. The conduit between spontaneity and receptivity, which he tries to capture with the concept of the continuum, is there termed the name, since it is in part given and in part received, and in fact received in language: it is the “conception of the nameless in the name.” As much spontaneous as receptive, the name is the “translation of the language of things into that of man” (150). Translation is thus for Benjamin the word for the crossover of the nameless into names, the sensual into the intelligible, the intuition and sense-impression into concepts of the understanding; and since for him their dualistically opposed spheres are languages, translation is the transcendence of languages in one another and, as such, the “language of language” (144). That which speaks or “languages” [spricht], translates. Indeed,

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it translates from one language into another in the medium of trans-latability and therewith in language itself as the continuum, without which there would be no crossovers or transformations. Benjamin defines it as follows: “Translation is the crossover [Überführung] of one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Continua of transformation, not abstract circuits of equivalence and similarity, cross-sect translation” (151). With this interpretation of translation—and hence of language as such—Benjamin is in fact closer to the Kant he later criticized than he would wish to concede, for he follows here the principles of homogeneity and specification, and that of continuity binding the first two, which are laid out in Kant’s first Critique for the regulative use of ideas of reason—most especially the idea of purposiveness. There, Kant writes: “datur continuum formarum, that is, all variations of species border on one another and allow no transition to one another via a leap, but instead only through all those smaller degrees of difference by which one can arrive from one species at another [. . .]” (A659/B687). If Kant characterizes this law of continuity, which mediates between the principles of unity and of specification, as a law of the “affinity [Affinität] of all concepts” (A657/B685) and of the “affinity [Verwandtschaft] of nature’s mem-bers” (A661/B689), here, too, Benjamin follows him, insofar as he speaks on the one hand of a “continuum of transformations” (GS II: 151) and, on the other, in the essay on the translator, of the “affinity [Verwandtschaft] of languages; he says, moreover, that languages are “a priori related [verwandt] to one another in that which they wish to say,” hence, related in that which he had previously termed translation’s purposiveness for expression of the relations between languages (GS IV: 12).30 The transcendental law of affinity or continuity (lex continui in natura), in which the merely logical law of forms is based, however, represents for Kant only a regulative idea “for which a congruent object in experience certainly cannot be shown” (A661/B689). For Benjamin, by contrast, this decisive Kantian constraint must be dropped entirely because, for him, nature itself has a linguistic character; it relates to language not as a phenomenon to a concept, but as a determinate degree of a thoroughly linguistic actuality relates itself to another, higher degree. In his understanding of the continuum of language, then, Benjamin must retreat from the Kantian distinction between

30Benjamin traces the theme of affinity in the 1919 sketch entitled “Analogy and Affinity” (GS VI: 43–5) and works it out more fully in the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften].

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concept and intuition, and between cognition and existence [Existenz], and instead characterize the relation of languages to one another with express reference to the Scholastic doctrine of levels of existence [Existenzstufen], as that “of media, which differentiate themselves by their density, so to speak, i.e., gradually” (GS II: 146). They gradually differentiate themselves, however, only as media crossing over into one another in a continuum. The “continuous multiplicity of cogni-tion” with which the “Program” essay is concerned thus corresponds, in the essay on language, with a continuous multiplicity of languages, which in turn determines itself as a continuous multiplicity of being. Benjamin expresses this straightforwardly enough:

For the metaphysics of language, the identification of spiritual with linguistic essence [des geistigen mit dem sprachlichen Wesen], which knows only gradual differences, proceeds in a gradation of all spiritual being [geistigen Seins] into levels of degree. This gradation, which is to be found within spiritual essence itself [des geistigen Wesens selbst], does not allow of comprehension via any overarching category and for that reason leads to the gradation of all spiritual and linguistic essence into degrees of existence [Existenzgraden] and degrees of being [Seinsgraden], as was already customary for Scholasti-cism with respect to the spiritual (Ibid.).

The thrust of Benjamin’s early writings is to prove not only the linguis-tic essence of cognition and of history, but just as much the linguistic essence of being. Being for him is being from language, linguistic being. And this being is in every case given only in a continuum of degrees or intensities, in a continuum of degrees of existence and intensities of language that “does not allow of comprehension via any overarching category” and whose scope is not limited by any higher agency, whether called idea, “I think,” or god. With the extrication of the continuity principle from the order of the categories, however, the opposition between mathematical and dynamic categories, between mere reality and actual existence, and ultimately also the opposition between the domains of mathematically based cognition and religious experience, falls to the side precisely in the manner that Benjamin programmatically requires. The absolutization of the continuum injects an ambiguity into its structure that brings with it consequences for the entire domain of linguistic being, and in particular for the mathematical and theological sounding of that domain. On the one hand, in releasing the continuum from all restrictions and conceiving of it as a dense infinity of degrees of existence, the ontotheological proposition of god as a supermajority of being, the consummately uttered and the absolutely revealed, becomes possible, albeit at the

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greatest conceivable distance from Kant—Benjamin characterizes the “highest spiritual realm of religion” as one that “knows no unutter-able” (147). On the other hand, it is at least implied that a superior being, and thus also a highest spiritual realm of religion, literally is not, as there are only infinite continua of degrees of existence and revela-tion, infinities of intensities among which none can be the highest or lowest. Accordingly, god would be the unutterable, that which is never uttered but only ever addressed in all languages, not despite but precisely because of his utterability (since this is infinite, but in its infiniteness inexhaustible): paradoxically, “the highest spiritual realm” is also described as “addressed in the name,” and the word of revelation is characterized by its untouchability (146–7). So, too, language and hence being would be unutterable in their infinite utterability.

The paradoxes of the continuum are the paradoxes of its infinite-ness. They reach their critical point in language and in being, in being from language and in being in language, and there burst asunder. If linguistic being presents itself in an infinite continuum of intensi-ties, i.e., in irreducible multiplicity, it can—no more than it abandons the realm of the revealed, of self-presenting in minima—never be absolutely determined in a single presentation and also never in the infinite and thus unfulfillable totality of presentations: on the grounds of its limitless continuity, linguistic being is unutterable in principle and thereby neither language nor being. In other words, the argu-ment for the immanent reversal in the principle of the continuum of media and presentation reads as follows: that which presents itself can never be the object of presentation, since as object it could no longer present itself but would rather be the victim of a restrictive exhibition. And, in turn, if the absolutely utterable is to be uttered, this can only be in each case in one among infinitely many intensi-ties—hence, only imperfectly—and moreover such that the intensity of its having been uttered appends to the utterable a further degree, which for its part must be uttered in the medium of another intensity, and so forth ad infinitum. The continuum cannot be presented in the continuum without at the same time being affirmed and interrupted: affirmed through its extension, interrupted through its presentation as continuum. When Benjamin founds cognition in translatability and hence in the continuum conceived as the essence of language, but relieves this continuum of all restrictive positions—first of which is the transcendental subject-position—he makes the continuum, translat-ability, the essence of language, and makes cognition into something that, for its part, cannot possibly appear or be revealed or be uttered

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as such in the continuum, in a translation, or in a language. Revela-tion cannot be the object [Gegenstand] of revelation. The movement of translation is itself untranslatable, presentation is itself unpresent-able, and language is in its revealability itself unutterable. Precisely because it consists of nothing but mere speaking [Sprechen], every propositional statement must fail it. And because it is mere language or speech [Sprache], speaking in and of it can only ever occur in a multiplicity of languages [Sprachen] and statements [Aussagen], which never bind together in a unity. Pure language, language as language, thus languages [spricht] only in its disintegration into the multiplicity of languages. And pure language itself speaks [spricht] only in failing itself. Its continuum is essentially discontinuous. This is the “crisis” at the “heart of language,” of which Benjamin speaks in a letter to his friend Herbert Blumenthal shortly after composing the essay on language.31

If impartibility is the essence of language, then there remains, as the translator essay insists, “over and above all imparting something final, decisive”; there remains in imparting “a non-impartible” that divides it from itself (GS IV: 19). Absolute translatability, which empossibil-izes and directs the movements and becoming of languages toward “language as a whole” (16), is just as much absolute untranslatabil-ity—namely, the untranslatability of just this translatability. Language is, in a word—though a disintegrating one—translatable. Cognizable, impartible, translatable [-bar]—in these transcendentalist concepts, which Benjamin uses at critical moments in his argumentation, the suffix of possibility reveals its adjectival sense and denotes: barring/open to [bar] every possibility of cognition, of imparting, of transla-tion.32 For Benjamin, the text is “absolutely translatable” where it “belongs immediately [. . .] to true language [wahren Sprache], to truth [Wahrheit], and to doctrine [Lehre]” (21). It is precisely there, however, that it is incapable of any further translation and, because it is true

31GB I: 349, note 3.32It is in this dual sense that the emphasis on suffixes in the early essay on language is

to be understood, as in the sentences: “Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is impartable [mitteilbar]”; “This impartable [Mitteilbare] is immediately language itself”; or “The medial, that is, the immediability [Unmittelbarkeit] of all spiritual imparting, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory [. . .]” (GS II: 142). Here, bar is not only the word for truth or revealability, but also for freedom (it constitutes one of the centers of the essay on the translator) and for purity—especially that of “pure language,” of the mere, of that free from all imparting [Mitteilung]. (For further reflections on the structure of bar, see my text “Maser: Bemerkungen im Hinblick auf die Bilder von Hinrich Weidemann,” Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 1998.)

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[wahr], it is barred from/open to [bar] every translation. This bar in its dual sense is the index of a crisis in the transcendental continuum of language and of linguistic being.

In the Kantianizing formula of intensive, i.e., anticipatory [. . .] realiza-tion, the anticipation of translation does not refer to an ever higher degree in the continuum of communications—in this, again, it would reach only one among the virtual infinitude of languages—but rather concerns their “buried relation” (GS IV: 12), their “withheld domain of reconciliation and fulfillment” (15), that is, language in the mere fact of its occurring. It is realized intensively, transcendingly, and anticipato-rily because no temporally, spatially, or idiomatically distinct, and thus extensively determinable language is indicated there, but rather the mere fact of uttering itself [das bloße Sprechen selbst], which is common to all. And it is only intensively, i.e., anticipatorily, that this realizes the language of language, because its accomplished actuality in any finite language is held back by its semantic load. In translation, as Benjamin understands it, this load is lightened to a minimum. This allows the continuity between languages in translation to become apparent, but also translation’s own discontinuity with language. Since the continu-ity of the continuum, the linguisticality of language, cannot appear within the continuum and can neither be semantically signified nor technically produced nor arbitrarily revealed within it, but functions rather as one of the “last secrets [. . .] harbored without tension and self-silently [therein]” (16), it must present itself from the perspective of the continuum itself as the continuum’s discontinuation.

Kant had noted that, on the basis of the continuum’s infinitude, one can abstract from its extension in time and space, and that the intensity of the real remains unaccounted for as a singular, irreduc-ible fact.33 In practice, however, and without expressly saying so, Kant abstracts from the continuum itself in order to retain the instant or the moment, and thus the intensive, as the sole marker of the real. Though for Kant the intensive is capable of infinite increases and diminutions, it is thus not a phenomenon within a continuum, but rather essentially the phenomenon of continuity and therewith of

33Thus, in the “proof” of the “Anticipations of Perception,” he writes: “One can thus abstract entirely from the extensive quantity of the phenomenon and conceive of simple sense-impression in a moment as a synthesis of the uniform increases from 0 up to the given empirical consciousness” (A176/B218).

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phenomenality itself—of the “sense-impression as sense-impression as such” (A167/B209)—and, as such, a phenomenon that only ever fills an instant, nearly a discontinuous phenomenon.34 But even this very intensity, which as mere sense-impression or self-sensation is relieved of all succession and realizes itself “in a moment” or “in an instant,” is thought by Kant as synthesis and thus as judgment, through which the cognizing subject imparts a phenomenon to itself as object [Gegen-stand]. For Benjamin, language is intensively realized in translation in another sense. In contrast to the synthesis of judgment, the structure of which is fundamentally regulated by the intention toward meaning, translation as Benjamin idiosyncratically defines it “abstains, in very large part, from the aim of imparting something, from sense” (GS IV: 18). What translation abstains from is thus judging predication and the intention that guides it, and therewith from the aim itself, from purpose and its positing in the subject. Translation, as Benjamin had defined it, is ultimately “purposive for expression of the innermost relation of languages to one another” (12). But in pure language, in which this relation realizes itself, translation arrives at a realm in which it “no longer means and no longer expresses, but rather is, as the expressionless and creative word, that which is meant in all

34As with many of his best insights, Kant here shies away from drawing this conse-quence because it would trouble his correspondence theory of truth: phenomenality cannot itself simply be a phenomenon anymore, and hence it cannot correspond with any possible concept. Only in the third Critique, with the principle of the inadequa-tion of cognition and aesthetic ideas, does a relation between phenomenality and the concept begin to take shape, checkmating the truth of correspondence. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ) (hereafter cited as KdU). There, in the first note on the “dissolution of the antinomy of taste” (§57), Kant speaks of the aesthetic idea as an “inexposable presentation of the imagination” because it is an intuition of the imagination “for which an adequate concept can never be found” (342). He remarks of this designation: “Now, since bring-ing a presentation of the imagination into concepts is to expose it, the aesthetic idea can be termed an inexposable presentation of the same (in its free play)” (342). Inexposable thus means presentable or expressible in no concept. As Kant writes elsewhere (§49), aesthetic ideas give the imagination an impetus “to consider [. . .] more thereby than [. . .] allows itself to be embraced within a determinate linguistic expression,” making ready presentations “for which no expression is to be found” (315–6). This overtaxing of linguistic expression by the imagination and thus by the simple phenomenality of a phenomenon, this inexpressibility, the inexposable that bursts the continuum of concepts and their intention regarding the object, is too near to the Benjaminian expressionless [Ausdruckslosen] (GS II: 130; IV: 19; I: 181) for one not to suppose it to be one of the catalysts for Benjamin’s concept. Of course, in the transition from inexposable to ex-pressionless the perspective has changed; for Kant, a phenomenon is inexposable for a linguistic expression of the cognizing subject, while for Benjamin what is expressionless is pure, true language itself.

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languages” (19). That is, it is the expression of the expressionless, toward which translation and with it what is essential in every language is directed. Their intention orients them, finally, towards that which is itself intentionless and thus towards that which, as pure continuity, bursts the continuum. The language of language—that is, the continu-ity of its occurring—does not mean, passes no judgment, and offers up no utterances concerning objects. It says [sagt] nothing because it merely speaks [spricht], and it absolves itself [spricht sich los] of all the inhibitions of an imparting that does not impart itself.

The radicalization of the theorem of language’s thoroughgoing continuity thus does more than allow the ambiguity of this continuity to come to light, that is, reveal the fact that it is stripped of the condi-tions of presentation but for that very reason of presentation as well. The radicalization of the theorem is at the same time its explosion; since the continuum, in which all is included, is itself not included in the continuum, it is at once only continuum and no continuum at all. The continuum can only proceed in an aporia that allows no continuity between continuity and non-continuity, and can for that reason attest to itself only in its own breaking off. Benjamin, who was familiar not only with the Kantian antinomies and the paradoxes of Kierkegaard, but also with those of Russell’s mathematical philosophy,35 concludes from the aporia of the linguistic continuum that the continuum of language is to be founded in the caesura, according to his study of Hölderlin or in the expressionless according to the translator essay and a little later in the piece on elective affinities. Where no ground can be found in the continuum, the expressionless and the caesura offer foundations for the dissolution and the solution, the deliver-ance of the continuum in its discontinuity. Not the significance of an utterance, but rather that it belongs to a language; not the said of a language, but rather its saying: these are the aims of translation, its means and its end. This saying, which speaks alongside [mitspricht] in all expression, is itself what is sayable in no expression: language speaks or languages [die Sprache spricht] only from out of the expres-sionless and into it. In translation—for every language, as language for or at another, is in principle already language in the course of translation—all languages have in principle a share in language itself. But this “having a share” [Teilhabe] occurs for something that cannot

35Cf.“The Judgment of Designation,” the “Effort to Solve Russell’s Paradox” (GS VI: 9–11), and “The Paradox of the Cretan,” where Alexander Rüstow’s tract following Russell, The Liar’s Paradox, is cited (59). Cf. Alexander Rüstow, Der Lügner: Theorie, Geschichte und Auflösung (New York: Garland Publisher, 1987 [1910]).

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become a possible possession [Habe], cannot be the content [Inhalt] of a cognition, and cannot be the object [Gegenstand] of a concept. Insofar as translation brings one language into another, it extends the continuum of languages; but since the continuum itself cannot be expressed as a whole in any singular instance, every translation is the interruption of the continuum of languages in the expressionless: translation extends it [setzt es fort] by exposing it [indem sie es aussetzt] and allowing languages to fall mute. The expressionless, true language is for Benjamin—thoroughly logically and in no wise mystifyingly—the place at which the “secrets after which all thinking strives [. . .] are silently harbored” (GS IV: 16). What remains buried, inaccessible, and unutterable for languages and the language of relation that is translation is language as being silent [Schweigen].

The silent discontinuity of languages, however, has the gravest of consequences for the concepts of anticipation and positing, which for Kant designate the final structural elements of the synthetic relation between category and phenomenon. When Benjamin speaks of trans-lation’s anticipation of language as such, this is not only to say that translation anticipates the actuality of this language, but also that such anticipation alone realizes it: its realization lies in just this anticipation, its “what lies ahead” is its own actuality. Translation realizes language because there is no realization besides its “anticipatory realization.” It does not so much translate into another language as, much more, translate this other in advance into language itself. Since, however, as the realization of language translation is itself already language’s (intensive) actuality, it is essentially translation in(to) translation. Lan-guage is translation, and in every translation language itself is already speaking, as translation. Since it is the anticipation of language and since this language realizes itself only in anticipation, this language itself has the structure of anticipation and does not exist other than as prolepsis or as project. Translation is language itself in the move-ment of its a priori positing of what lies ahead [Voraus-setzung]. This is why Benjamin can describe the “essential kernel” of translation as “that which in itself is not, in turn, translatable” (15). Translations and everything in languages that is oriented toward translation—“what is essential in them” (19)—are untranslatable because they are, in every essential kernel, language itself, and thus because they are the element of absolute translatability. It is thus not only “for humans” that linguistic constructs are “up to a certain degree” untranslatable (10), as Benjamin moots in the introduction to his essay; rather, they are so in principle and by virtue of the constitution of language itself.

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Languages are untranslatable because they themselves move already in the medium of translation, and this is the medium of language. The anticipation [Vorgriff] of translation, its essential gesture and the gesture that makes of translation what is essential in language, is a grasping [Griff] that goes into languages’ void—into the intentionless, the expressionless, into mere language, into impartibility. Its “what lies ahead,” the gesture of its continuation and transcendence, is its breaking off.

But what, after all, then, does “realization [Verwirklichung]” mean, and what, once more, “intensive”? In the formulation, intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization, the concept of “realization” jumps out most clearly from the Kantian context of the train of thought. Intensity was for Kant the character of reality, of thingness, of the affirmative determination of the possibility of an object of experience. As what-ness (quidditas), reality [Realität] stands for Kant not for actuality [Wirklichkeit] or current being [aktuelles Sein], but rather for that con-stitution that an object must have if it is to be an object of experience at all.36 “Being [Sein] is obviously no real predicate”—Kant’s famous statement from the first Critique, which could hardly have been unfa-miliar to Benjamin, purports that being is no reality, that it does not represent the answer to the question of what something is, but rather of whether it is. The that of this being is, in contrast to the positive determination of thingness as Kant proceeds in his definition, “merely the position of a thing, or of certain determinations in themselves” (A598/B626)—indeed, it is the position of those modal determina-tions that distinguish it as possible, actual, or necessary being. Being [Sein], understood as being-there [Dasein], is “merely the position of a thing” on the horizon of the originarily unifying, transcendental apperception of an “I think.” In §76 of the third Critique, Kant says of the difference between the possible and the actual:

36Both Anneliese Maier (“Kant’s Categories of Quality,” 1930, note 12) and then, with greater emphasis, Heidegger (Die Frage nach dem Ding, [Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1962] 160–74; here 165–66), have pointed to the difference between reality [Realität] and actuality [Wirklichkeit] as decisive for Kant’s construction of the principles of experience as well as to Kant’s adoption of Baumgarten’s concept of realitas. More substantive, and moreover much more likely to have been familiar to Benjamin, is Hermann Cohen’s 1883 presentation in The Principle of the Infinitesimal Method (1968, 158), which lays out the basic dimensions of Fechner’s argument with Scholasticism regarding the concepts of reality and intensity and also brings in Leibniz’s and Wolff’s definitions of degree as “quantitas qualitatis” and “Intensitas sive Intensio” as reference texts for the Kantian construction. But, though he himself cites it, Cohen does not bring Baumgarten’s position in the Metaphysica, that “infinitudo est realitas” (§261), to bear in thoroughly distinguishing between reality [Realität] and actuality [Wirklichkeit].

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Now, however, our entire distinction of the merely possible from the actual rests in the fact that the former means only the position [Position] of the presentation [Vorstellung] of a thing with respect to our concept and the capacity to think as such, while the latter means the positing [Setzung] of the thing in itself (apart from this concept) (KdU 402).

As much as the positing of a thing in itself may occur apart from our concept and the capacity to think, it must nonetheless occur with respect to our capacity for cognition. Kant clarifies being’s relationship to the capacity for cognition in his explanation of the category of modali-ties, writing: “The categories of modality have the distinction that, as the determination of the object, they do not in the least enlarge the concept to which they are attached as predicate, but rather express only the relation to the capacity for cognition” (A219/B266). Being as being-actual [Wirklichsein] is thus a position in “relation to the capacity for cognition,” but thereby a position in relation to experience and hence to the perception of sensation. Furthermore, contemporaneous or actual being is the position of object-sensation relative to the subject of transcendental apperception; it is a transcendental predicate—not a real one—in which the actuality of the be-ing [des Seienden], and hence the objectivity of the object, is posited via its relationship to the unity of the subject. For Kant, actuality is positional being and only for that reason propositional (judged) being: being posited with a view to the “originally synthetic unity of apperception,” being as the position, proposition, and relation of transcendental subjectivity itself. As this positing, actuality completes the realitas of the category of quality, which for its part was never thought by Kant and his prede-cessors as anything other than positing—Baumgarten had offered an unambiguous definition in his Metaphysica: “quae determinando ponuntur [. . .] est realitas.”37

37Baumgarten, Metaphysica (note 13), 11. Heidegger works out the decisive movements of Kant’s theory of position most substantively in “Kant’s Thesis Concerning Being,” where he also delineates its connection with the dominant tradition of metaphysics: “Rather than ‘Dasein,’” Heidegger writes, “the language of metaphysics also says existence [Existenz]. To apprehend in sistere, the positing, the connection with ponere and position, it suffices to recall this word; the existentia is the actus, quo res sistitur, ponitur extra statum possibilitatis [. . .]” (Wegmarken [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976] 475). Heidegger’s attention, however, is directed so much toward the position-character of the concept of mediality—possible-being, actual-being, necessary-being—that he over-looks this same character entirely in Kant’s concept of reality. On position in Kant, see the chapter “Premises” in Werner Hamacher, Premises (esp. note 2), in which the ontothesiological constitution of metaphysics since Kant is treated.

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Thus, if Benjamin maintains a distance from precisely this subjectiv-ity in his program for a coming philosophy, but speaks nevertheless of the intensive [. . .] realization of language in translation, the concept of realization [Verwirklichung] is to be thought still in terms of actual-ity [Wirklichkeit] and—in accordance with the essay on language—in terms of being: being-actual [Wirklichsein] or becoming actual [Wirklich-werden]. But this being is no longer a being posited in relation to the subject of transcendental apperception; it is no longer the position of an object and no longer the result of a propositional act in which an “I think” relates to the objects of its experience. In taking his leave of transcendental subjectivity, Benjamin withdraws language and its being from being as position. With the “transmutation and remediation” of the philosophy of subjectivity (GS II: 168), the critical transformation of something that might be called the Kantian, and not only Kantian, ontothesiology comes together in his theory of language. The organ of this transformation is his theory of translation.

Translation [Übersetzung]—what is essential in language, language itself—is not positing [Setzung]. It is that which must precede every positing and even every capacity for positing, whether this be thought as understanding, form of intuition, or as the productive faculty of imagination. Translation [Übersetzung] does not posit [setzen], it trans-poses or places over [setzt über] . . . and trans-poses transcendently over every possible signification and its basis in the forms of intuition and self-relation. In order that a self might relate itself to itself, there must already be the possibility of translation, sheer impartibility—and this, for Benjamin, is called language. In order that there might be positing, there must already be translation and the unposited, lan-guage, in whose medium positing moves and toward whose revelation it works. In order that there might be being as position, there must already be being as trans-position and an appositive given in advance, of which it must remain open whether it can in some sense become an object of the predications of existence that accord or withdraw being to and from it.

Because translation cannot be an agency of a subject, it must first be thought without reference to subjects, whether these be termed producers or recipients, as solely the athetic realization of language. While Kant speaks of the phenomenon of objective reality [Realität] and of actuality [Wirklichkeit] as a position with respect to the capacity for cognition, Benjamin excludes every such consideration beginning with the very first sentence of his “The Task of the Translator”—and, indeed, not only consideration of an empirical subject, but also, equally

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emphatically, any consideration of an “ideal” subject of cognition. “Never,” he writes:

does consideration of those receiving it prove fruitful for the cognition of a work of art or art form. It is bad enough that every reference to a particular public or its representatives misleads, but the very concept of an “ideal” receiver is detrimental in all art-theoretical discussions, since these are put forward solely in order to postulate the being-there and essence of humans as such.

And he concludes this passage with the justly famous formula: “no poem is for the reader, no picture for the viewer, and no symphony for the listenership” (GS IV: 9). The disregard for the position of subjectivity ascribed here to works of art and art forms holds a fortiori for languages and for the language that emerges in their translations. Language cannot do other than disregard the subject, even if “ideal” or transcendental, because, as antecedent mediability, it is not deter-mined by a subject’s position. Not subjectivity, but rather alterity, is what is essential in it; not positing, but rather exposure [Aussetzung]. In translation, every language exposes itself to another and is nothing other than this self-exposure and hence this becoming-other: not the object of a positing or production, not this positing itself, but rather mere exposition [Aussetzung] in a domain in which languages no lon-ger mean something or somebody, but mean language itself as that which means nothing [das Nicht-Meinende]. In thinking the realization of language as translation [Übersetzung], Benjamin thinks it as the evic-tion [Hinaussetzung] of positing languages [der setzenden Sprachen] out into the domain of their neither positional nor propositional speaking and thus as the exposition and exposure [Aussetzung] of languages in a linguistic event that each of them harbors a priori in silence. Only for this reason is the hope and the “original danger of all translation this: that the gates of a language broadened and pervaded in this way might fall to and shut the translator in silence” (21).

The relation of languages to one another is one of affinity and, furthermore, of continuity, but language itself—its essence—is not sub-ject to the criterion of continuity, which is one of positing within the horizon of transcendental subjectivity. Insofar as translation translates from the plurality of languages into language, it exposes from out of the continuum of languages a single language, which is not count-able—not even as one—and does not form a continuum. The principle of continuity holds only under the precondition that being is absolute position, that is, only presupposing that the objectivity [Gegenständlich-keit] of the given is firmly established along with its connection with

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regard to the original unity of subjectivity. The mathematical category of quantity as well as of the quantity of quality—intensity—forfeits its synthetic function where being is no longer thought as position and thus no longer as presentation within the horizon of subjectivity, but rather as that which presents itself as itself in advance of all positing, in its own horizon: as a language that no longer lies under the restric-tions of the pure form of intuition and thus of number, no longer under the limitations of thesis and mathesis, of the concept and the judgment. In the apositional occurring of language, the mathemati-cal continuum and mathematically understood intensity are just as much dismantled by language as they were empossibilized through it in the first place.

Translation is the exposition of languages in language: in translation, language affords the continuum of languages its exposing. In transla-tion, language interrupts the intention that still determines the direc-tion of anticipation. In it, language exposes positing itself and being as the position of another being—or of another as being—which for its part presents itself not positively, as an actual object [Gegenstand], new and unconstrained in its otherness, but rather only as the move-ment of this ex-posure [Aus-setzung] and de-posing [Ent-setzung] of positing [Setzung]. Since translation reaches out in each case beyond the fixed status of languages and the intentions operative within them, moving proleptically in intentionless language, the being that realizes itself in translation is, unlike Kant’s pure positing [Setzung], presup-position [Voraussetzung]: a priori prolepsis of propositional language in a domain in which it is “harbored without tension and self-silently” (GS IV: 16). Benjamin’s thoughts on translation as an athetic move-ment of language interface with a consideration he brings to bear in the “Program” for the modification of the table of categories. There, he writes: “But beyond the concept of synthesis, the concept of a certain not-synthesis of two concepts in another will become of great systemic importance, since outside of synthesis another relation between thesis and antithesis remains possible” (GS II: 166). If this thought of a certain not-synthesis is extended to the original synthetic unity of transcendental apperception, as Benjamin’s critique of the subjectivism of Kant’s theory of experience suggests, then it emerges that cognitions can never simply have the character of synthetic and thereby thetic acts. Benjamin’s further remark, that this not-synthesis could “hardly lead to a quartering of the categories of relation,” makes it likely that he thought of this not as an equally ranked addendum to these categories, that is, not as a further, fourth category, but rather

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as the basis—actually, the abyss [Abgrund]—of all the others: namely, as a not-synthesis thanks to which thesis, antithesis, and synthesis can emerge in the first place; and as a not-synthesis that can never allow for the unlimited accomplishment of these three. It is this structure of the not-synthesis, and of the not-thesis buried within it, that further defines itself in the structure of translation as the a priori anticipatory grasping of a not-propositional, not-intentional language. Like not-synthesis for every thesis, translating language detains and suspends every language of positing.

That translation, and with it language, exposes before and in every positing, that it “lives on” before and in its life, makes of its being an essentially historical one—makes of it, that is, a discontinuum of proleptic expositions that are in each case singular and that cannot be drawn together beneath any greater unity. Transplanting [Verpflanzung] and transposing [Versetzung] are the concepts with which Benjamin characterizes the motion of this exposition of languages. He writes: “Translation thus transplants the original into a linguistic domain that is more ultimate at least insofar—ironically—as the original is not to be transposed away from it by any conveyance, but can only be raised within it, always anew and at different points” (GS IV: 15).38 If the transplanting of the original into a different linguistic domain, the transposing of one language into another, is not ultimate but is rather—“ironically”—more ultimate, although a further transposition and thus a homogenous continuum of transpositions is ruled out, what is thereby said is that each transposing is unsurpassably penultimate, preliminary and yet final and thus exposed and orphaned between the multiplicity of languages and their “ideal” unity. Every translation severs the connection between languages in precisely that movement by which it implies such a connection, in each case just a single time. Between the multiplicity of languages and their unity dwells transla-

38[Translator’s note: It is worth noting here not only, as Hamacher makes quite ex-plicit, that endgültiger is a comparative—“more final,” “more ultimate”—but also, and perhaps especially, that the term endgültig is itself already paradoxically provisional, in a sense comparative, in a manner that English translations like “final” or “ultimate” are not. Something is gültig as an end, counts or is valid as an end—something is taken as final, obtains or is applicable as the being-in-force of the verb gelten, “to count, be applicable, hold,” for an end, an “end.” But something can only count relative to some standards, be applicable in some situation, hold for somebody; and an ultimate end would be the end of standards—hence, no counting—an end of a situation—hence, no applicability—and an end of persons—hence, no holding. An ultimate end that is not absolute would be no ultimate end at all, but could only count as an end, would not be ultimate or final but rather endgültig.]

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tion, belonging to both and yet to neither, suspended—but suspended there with translation dwells language itself. From this observation follows, rigorously enough, the conclusion that what Benjamin termed language itself cannot be comprehended under the concept of linguistic unity. It also follows from this, however, that the historical dimension of language implied in the phrase more ultimate is that of an absolute between-time [Zwischenzeit], in which every moment is an end and at the same time not an end. In accordance with the absolute compara-tive of the more ultimate, the time of language—messianic time—is that of an ending without end. This form of time must be called ironic, because in it every moment marks a non-coincidence with itself. Just as the end, which is none, characterizes a life, which is essentially “living on,” so the language of translation—and language as such—is characterized by irony, signifying a language that refuses to surrender to the signifying. Like history, then, language is essentially ironic. It is the language of no one language.

Benjamin reiterates that the “living on” of language in translation—which is ironic—is also always a living in advance of itself [Sich-Voraus-Leben] and a pre-life [Vor-Leben], stressing:

that all translation is only a somewhat provisional manner of grappling with the foreignness of languages. A resolution of this foreignness that would be other than temporal and provisional, that would be instantaneous and ultimate, remains withheld from mankind, or is in any event not to be sought out directly (14).

If translation’s provisionality and anticipation of language itself comprise the sole manner in which this language realizes itself, then language realizes itself solely as pre-language [Vor-Sprache], as promise [Versprechen], and speaks or “languages” in promising [spricht im Versprechen] once more solely as withheld, that is, as a language of and through which nothing—not something, no determinate thing, but only an infinite, determinable content—can be uttered. That translation, in Benjamin’s words, “suggests in a wonderfully haunting manner [ . . . ] the predetermined, withheld realm of the reconcilia-tion and fulfillment of languages” (15) makes of it a sort of negative mysticism of pure language, a wonderfully haunting—i.e., once again intensive—anticipation of that which is accessible to no anticipation, an intention toward that which refuses to be intended. Thus the inten-tionless moves into intention and makes intensity—piercing, pressure, increase, escalation—which is bound together with every intention, into an intensity of the intentionless. The pre [Vor] and “what lies ahead” [Voraus] that every intensio bears down upon is, as concerns

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language itself, the pre of a language that refuses positioning in any time-series; it is the pre as decisive determination of the category of quality, the quantitas qualitatis, and it thereby disqualifies, indetermines, and ex-poses every positing as such. There could be no predetermined domain of language that was not withheld and did not take from pre-determination both its “pre” and its “determination.” The promising [Versprechen] of language is always this: that there will not emerge a pre or a language. Only herein lies the power of this promising: that it places itself beyond itself. Only herein lies the intensity of language: that it is the intensity of its extinguishing.

The philosophies of language, the theories of cognition and phi-losophies of history with which Benjamin was confronted in his work were, whether programmatically recognized under this title or not, all phenomenologies. They were arranged following the logic of possible phenomena, their laws and constraints. As minimally empirically as they might have proceeded, as phenomenologies, the domain of that which could not become phenomenon or contribute to it had to be suspect or else remain buried for them. In the domain of languages, there is prima facie nothing that could not qualify as a phenomenon—as a morphological, semantic, syntactical, or rhetorical phenomenon. When Benjamin turns his attention to translation as the irreducible structure of language, he turns to it as a form that is without doubt a linguistic phenomenon, but that as language presents a liminal phenomenon between languages, encompassing no independent content. The language of translation is not a language among oth-ers, but rather a language between others, an intermediary language [Zwischensprache] that expresses nothing other than the relation of languages, but that expresses this relation, in turn, not as given but as becoming. Translation expresses that which is not yet there; to this extent, it is historical—oriented toward a historical distance—but, to this extent, it is also not a simple phenomenon, but rather the phe-nomenon of something still and perhaps indefinitely buried, withheld, and aphenomenal: language as a whole and as such. For this reason, Benjamin’s philosophy of language is an aphenomenology; it holds for a dimension that does not enter into appearance and a law that designates not the constraints on possible appearance but rather struc-tural buriedness [Verborgenheit]. And the same holds for the concept of intensity as well. Concerning the “language of truth,” which could only be language in its integral totality at the “messianic end of its his-tory” (14)—concerning this true language, Benjamin writes: “precisely this, in whose divination and description lies the sole perfection for

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which the philosopher can hope, is buried intensively in translation” (16). Buried intensively: that hardly means—since the discussion is here of true language—that it is buried as intensivum, that it is buried in translations only up to a certain degree but is otherwise manifest. If the formulation is to have some sense to it—granted, it might main-tain only very loose contact with that sense—then this must be that translations are in excited tension with what is buried in them—true language—and that they tend toward the buried and themselves strive to enter into this buried. If Benjamin speaks of “final secrets” that are “harbored” in the language of truth “without tension and self-silently” in immediate connection with this formulation, then what intensive buriedness or the intention toward buriedness signifies is a tension in that which lacks tension, the tendency of language to enter into silence as true language. It is in precisely this sense that Benjamin formulates the language-philosophical program he presents to Martin Buber in a letter of July 1916: “Only the intensive orientation of words toward the kernel of innermost falling mute [Verstummens] attains to true operativity.”39 If language thus tends, for the sake of its immanent political substance, toward “that which is barred the word,”40 then translation tends, for the sake of the language of truth, toward silence. If this true language is buried intensively in translations, then its intensive [. . .] realization is none other than the realization of buriedness; then language is the language of silence and its intensity is that, once more, of the intentionless. Benjamin’s theory of translation, the heart of his philosophy of language, is not a logic of linguistic phenomena, but rather of language’s aphanasis; it is a sigetics or doctrine of silence.

In Benjamin’s formulation, where translation is the intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization of language, the term intensive thus does not signify a degree, still less the highest degree, in a continuum of languages—the continuum has no maximum, and the comparative more ultimate domain of language knows no superlative; rather, in contrast to the linguistic usage of the philosophical and mathematical tradi-tion, intensive here means relative to the interruption or breaking off of the continuum, relative to a language with which no relation can be produced. Intensity is only accorded translation insofar as it leaps out of the continuum of languages, leaps over the degrees of existence or degrees of being (GS II: 146) of linguistic being-there, and springs discontinuously into language: into a being other than that which

39GB I: 327, note 3.40Ibid.

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could be measured according to intensities, and into a being other than that of position, one by which alone intensities determine and measure themselves. It is intensive because language realizes itself only in and as this leap of the continuum into the discontinuous; and it is thus paradoxical because the concept of intensity, the anticipation and the projecting of intensity, shatters itself in this event. If Benjamin ties the realization of language together with the concept of irony, then this is because translation designates the state of “living on,” the living on beyond themselves of works, while irony, as Benjamin’s study of art criticism shows, designates “the living on of the work” (GS I: 86) and represents, as formal irony and as an objective moment in the work, the “paradoxical attempt” to “continue building on a structure even through demolition” (87). What is demolished, however, is the con-tinuum of empirical languages, in order to present in its demolition the language that precedes all empiricism and all mathematical idealities. Cognition is in this wise relation—but it is relation with a something that is essentially relationless. The intensity that languages attain in their translation and in their “living on” is the intensity of the break in the series of intensities. It is—ironically—the utmost intensity in that it is already intensity no more. In the leap of intensity, in the origin, a linguistic being is revealed that allows neither of production and determination nor of positing, nor, within the paradigm of positing, of transposing or recomposing. It is being as ex-position: orphaning, externalization, singularization, stoppage, pause.

Translated by Ira Allen with Steven Tester

Diverging Correspondences Concerning the Problem of Identity:

Russell-Wittgenstein and Benjamin-Scholem

❦

Peter Fenves

At the end of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, having reached the limit of what can be done by means of “ordinary language,” Ber-trand Russell makes the following claim as he seeks to circumscribe the field under discussion by capturing the distinction between math-ematical and non-mathematical propositions: “[the former] all have the characteristic which, a moment ago, we agreed to call ‘tautology.’”1 As for the precise meaning of the term tautology and thus the reason for the semantic agreement that he made with himself—the book was written in an English prison, to which Russell was condemned because he insulted the armed forces of the United States—he is lucidly at a loss for words: “For the moment, I do not know how to define ‘tautol-ogy.’ It would be easy to offer a definition that might be satisfactory for a while; but I know of none that I feel to be satisfactory, in spite of feeling thoroughly familiar with the characteristic of which a defini-tion is wanted.”2 Russell agrees with himself that the term “tautology”


1Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (orig. 1919; rpt. New York: Routledge, 1993) 204. This paper is drawn from a larger study of tautology around the time of the First World War with sections on Benjamin, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Wittgenstein.

2Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 205.

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characterizes the distinction between the two mutually exclusive types of proposition, and he is sure that he knows what characteristic should be captured by the term “tautology,” but he cannot say what the term means except by way of the auto-tautological formula, “tautology is tautology,” which is rather disappointing as far as definitions go. When Russell speaks of mathematics, he is in the habit of making paradoxical-sounding pronouncements. Thus, he once wrote, and was frequently quoted as saying: “mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”3 The paradoxical character of this remark—which was widely discussed and found its way into the diary of a young student of mathematics named Gerhard Scholem—can be resolved by means of straightforward exegesis: unlike other sciences, the subject-matter of mathematics is “anything,” that is to say, anything as such, or anything in general, which means that mathematics is concerned with nothing in particular, and it can therefore be defined as the science in which we cannot know what we are talking about, since there is no subject there to know.4 The earlier quoted passage, however, is less susceptible to this kind of exegesis, above all because it is a positive statement about the nature of mathematical propositions, not a simple assertion of their difference from other kinds of utterances. Insofar as the statement concerning the tautological character of mathematical propositions does not belong to the field of mathematics, it is not itself tautologi-cal but should belong, instead, to the field of philosophy; but insofar as the “introduction to mathematical philosophy,” as Russell claims in the preface to the volume—a preface that, oddly enough, solicits an editorial note because of its opacity—is never “actually dealing with a part of philosophy, except where it steps outside its province,” then either the proposition quoted at the beginning of this paper is in the “province” of the field described by the introduction, in which case it may be inside of philosophy but stands outside of the introduction, or the proposition remains inside the introduction and is outside of philosophy, whereupon it would presumably be a mathematical proposition after all, since the introduction to mathematical philosophy

3Bertrand Russell, “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians” (1901), reprinted in Logicism and the Philosophy of Language, ed. Arthur Sullivan (Petersburgh, Ontario: Broadview Press) 221.

4For Scholem’s discussion of Russell’s remark, see his Tagebücher, nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, ed. Karlfried Gründer, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, and Friedrich Niewöhner with help from Karl Grözinger, 2 vols. (Jüdischer Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1995–2000) II: 265.

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belongs to field of mathematics and is not actually a part of philoso-phy.5 Little wonder, then, that Russell is inclined to say of tautology that he is familiar with its characteristics but cannot be satisfied with any proposition that would put this feeling into words, for the incli-nation toward a knowing silence responds to the convolutions of the fields that converge around the conclusion to the introduction to mathematical philosophy.

Only one thing is clear about the passage in question: not the meaning of tautology, to be sure, but, rather, the source of the term. Russell does not derive tautology from its origin in Greek grammarians and even emphasizes this fact at the beginning of the conclusion to his Introduction, when he claims that, up until the turn of the twenti-eth century, the study of mathematics involved doing mathematics, whereas the study of logic meant learning Greek: “The importance of ‘tautology’ for a definition of mathematics,” Russell writes in a footnote accompanying the passage under discussion, “was pointed out to me by my former pupil Wittgenstein, who was working on the problem.”6 At this point, though, obscurity returns as a consequence of the war, itself unnamed, which sets the conditions under which teacher and student are separated, one in prison, the other in the army of the opposing powers: “I do not know whether he solved [the problem], or even whether he is alive or dead.”7 To paraphrase a famous line attributed to Kafka: the problem may have been solved—but not to our knowledge. And the problem is not limited to mathematics. Indeed, it is primarily a problem of logic, for, in Russell’s view, there is no clear line where logic stops and mathematics begins. And since recent logic begins with an analysis of the proposition, the problem could be called that of the proposition per se, if only the term “proposition,” understood as the complete logical unit, were fully distinguishable from its linguistic counterpart. The problem, then, is also that of language, or the rela-tion between language and logos, where the two terms both mean and do not mean the same thing. And as it happens, Wittgenstein is not the only student during the First World War who saw either in the term tautology or in certain tautological formulations the starting point for a solution to the problem under consideration; the same is true of Walter Benjamin, especially in correspondence with Gerhard Scholem. And others could be added to this list, especially Heidegger

5The quotation can be found in the non-paginated “Preface” to Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.

6Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 205.7Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 205.

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and Rosenzweig, each of whom experimented with tautological formu-lations in various forms of writing during the First World War. Because of the limited scope of this paper—which will concentrate only on a single passage in the correspondence between Russell and Wittgen-stein, on the one hand, and a singular passage in the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem, on the other—nothing will be said of Heidegger and Rosenzweig beyond certain framing remarks; but the mere fact that they, too, are drawn to utterances such as “my life is my life” (Heidegger) and “A = A / B = B” (Rosenzweig) indicates the degree to which tautological formulations, differing ever so slightly from traditional formulas, especially the Fichtean “I = I,” offered the prospect of a philosophical breakthrough of sufficient force that new lines of inquiry could emerge, and something other than a renaissance of German idealism in the form of either “southwestern” or “Marburg” neo-Kantiniasm would result.

*

In preparation for the tautological utterance, “my life is my life,” Hei-degger provides the following, highly abbreviated theory of meaning: “The meaning of a proposition [der Sinn eines Satzes] is that which is true, what is incontrovertibly valid, which I have to recognize, to which my thought conforms, against which my elective will stops.”8 There are a number of striking features of this passage, far too many for each of them to be analyzed in this context, but a few are worth emphasizing. Heidegger proposes this theory of meaning, which corresponds to the final section of his soon-to-be-completed Habilitationsschrift, in the pages of his hometown Catholic newspaper, the Heuberger Volksblatt, on Sunday, January 15, 1915. The ultimate occasion for the article is the slowing of the German military advance (the French had made incursions into Alsace, and the eastern offense was effectively stopped during the battle of Łódź). The German Catholic episcopate, wor-ried that the conflict would last longer than originally anticipated, instituted a “triduum,” that is, three days of prayer for the successful prosecution of the war, and at the end of his “war-triduum” article Heidegger outlines the order of prayers, beginning with “repentance (the war and a humble spirit of penance before God).”9 Heidegger

8Martin Heidegger, “Das Kriegs-Triduum in Meßkirch,” Heuberger Volksblatt , January 15, 1915; reprinted in Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, ed. Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander, and Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg, Munich: Alber, 2004) 24.

9Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens 25.

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proposes a theory of meaning in this context because the meaning of “meaning” (Sinn) must be identified in preparation for the kind of authentic “self-reflection” (Selbstbesinnung) that would make it possible for his readers to recognize the cultural-historical situation in which they find—or more generally, lose—themselves. By claiming that the meaning of a proposition is “what is valid” (was gilt), Heidegger alludes to the work of Heinrich Rickert and Emil Lask that guided his 1913 doctoral dissertation on contemporary theories of judgment and likewise informs his “habilitation” work on scholastic speculative grammar. Before Heidegger draws on the work of his Doktorvater for a theory of meaning, however, he alludes to a competing theory, which is more closely associated with the logistics of Frege than with the value-philosophy of Rickert: “the meaning of a sentence is that which is true” (das, was wahr ist)—which implies that no false proposi-tion means anything, or more exactly, that no false proposition is a proposition properly speaking, and only a true proposition is therefore truly a proposition. Hence the foundational status of tautology in this context: “my life is my life.” A similar tautology, in which typography suggests a difference that cannot be expressed as such, represents the culmination of his Habilitationsschrift: “a state of affairs is always a state of affairs [ein Sachverhalt ist immer ein Sachverhalt].”10 By being true,

10Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften 387; the entire section on “Das Verbum” (381–90) must be read in this context, since it revolves around the self-predicating proposition, Ens est, which Heidegger alternatively translates as “Das Sein ist” and “das Seiende ist.” Heidegger’s treatment of this proposition is characteristic of his inquiry as whole, and can be briefly described along the following lines: the scholastic thinker, here identi-fied as Duns Scotus (it was probably Thomas of Erfurt), goes a certain distance toward uncovering the problem at hand, namely the origin of categoriality and the concomitant source of meaning, but is eventually held in place by doctrinal constraints. In the case of ens est, this line of argument means that, despite its disclosure of the underlying gram-mar or structure of the proposition, the analysis fails to penetrate the problem because it cannot recognize the paradigmatic status of the self-predicating proposition. After explaining that the verb does not first and foremost express a temporal relation but, rather, relationality in general, or more exactly, real relationality, Sachverhalt in German, which is generally translated as “state of affairs,” where the reality or Sach-heit of the relation does not derive from there being something in so-called reality corresponding to the verbal term but—and here the allusions to Rickert and Lask return—in its valid-ity, that is, its ability to accomplish the judgment and thus complete the proposition, Heidegger writes the following: “The ens and est distinguish themselves from each other ‘secundum rationis’” (384). The simple Latin phrase Heidegger cites in this context could easily be translated as “in accordance with reason,” but instead of taking this expected route, he translates secundum rationis in such a manner that it becomes untranslatable in turn: “es hat mit jedem von beiden eine andere Bewandtnis.” When Benjamin first read Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift, numbered 725 on his reading list (Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1989] VII: 447 [hereafter cited as GS]), he had only one positive comment about

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regardless of any condition other than “my life” be the “Sachverhalt” that relates the self to itself, tautology makes or discovers genuine sense and thereby prepares the way for authentic “Be-sinnung.”

A theory of meaning almost exactly the reverse of the one that finds succinct expression in Heidegger’s contribution to the January 15, 1915 edition of the Heuberger Volksblatt serves as the anchoring point for the project that Wittgenstein inherited from Russell and Frege. The project ultimately took the form of a small book, which was pub-lished soon after the war under the bland title of Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung and is generally known in the English-speaking world as the Tractatus. The theory of meaning goes something like this (and I should note that any such summary, like almost every remark about the aim of the Tractatus as a whole, tends to be both banal and contro-versial): a “proposition” (Satz) must be capable of being either true or false; in accordance with Russell’s theory of description, which asserts that certain complexes of signs, such as the famous “current king of France,” have meaning even in the absence of any object to which they refer, Wittgenstein stipulates that the proposition be understood as the peculiar sign-complex that retains its truth-valuedness—its ability to be either true or false—regardless of whether any of the aggregate of elementary propositions into which it can be analyzed is either true or false. The elemental character of elementary propositions further requires that the truth-value of each one be independent from all the rest. In short, no proposition must be true in order for it to have a sense. A proposition—or more exactly, a proposition in the proper sense of the term—is always comparable with reality, specifically as its picture or model, Bild or Modell, where “reality” is understood as the standing or non-standing (bestehen or nicht-bestehen) of a certain “states of affairs” (Sachverhalten). All of this implies that a tautologi-cal proposition, which is true under all conditions and which can be

what he considered an academic scandal: it contains a few good translations. And this brief passage is presumably one of them. As Heidegger translates the term through which the scholastic thinker sought to secure the “rational” status of the difference between ens and est, the difference becomes the matter of complementary “twists” in their stances, to the extent that Bewandtnis, derived from bewenden, points in this direc-tion. Heidegger then proceeds as follows: “If one wanted to apply the interpretation of the judgment ‘ens est’ to every judgment, then one would say that the function of form is suited to the verb [. . .] : a stance [eine Bewandtnis] is always a stance for something, twisted around something; a state of affairs is always a state of affairs [ein Sachverhalt ist immer ein Sachverhalt]” (387). This tautology is Heidegger’s last word on the subject, the thesis underlying his qualifying thesis, for it locates the precise point where the theory of meaning, the Bedeutungslehre, gets stuck in doctrine.

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inferred from every true proposition, cannot be a true proposition. And yet, for Wittgenstein, a tautology is not simply a non- or fake proposition but is, rather, one of its two extreme cases, the other being contradiction, and both extremes show their incomparability with reality as such. They are, as it were, the image of what is not an image but must not then be mistaken for an illusory or misleading image. In this regard, the fact that tautology is without sense represents a positive characteristic, which solicits a comparison of a different kind: whereas propositions in the strict sense are comparable with the world, a tautology is comparable to an arithmetical sign, specifically the zero. As with any comparison, there is a corresponding difference, in this case: equations where zero is properly used correspond to thoughts, whereas tautologies are fundamentally thoughtless, since “thought” (der Gedanke) is itself understood as “the proposition full of meaning” (der sinnvolle Satz).11

Instead of entering into the thicket of the Tractatus, however, I want to turn briefly toward the tautology-like remark from which it derives and then more extensively examine the source of the curious passage from Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy with which this essay begins. The remark that generates the “logical-philosophical” project that resulted in the Tractatus is probably the following: “It is to be remembered that names are not things. ‘A’ is the same letter as ‘A.’ This has the most important consequences for every symbolic language.”12 The point of this remark, drawn from some notes Wittgen-stein reluctantly prepared for his Cambridge professors in 1913, is that Russell’s theory of types is fundamentally misguided. Russell devised this theory in response to the recognition that the paradox associated with his name fatally damaged the logical-mathematical program that he and Whitehead sought to accomplish in the volumes of their Principia Mathematica. The theory of types hinges on a prohibition: there are to be no impredicative definitions, where “impredicative” is defined as a predicate that includes itself as a member of the class it defines. To this, in brief, Wittgenstein responded with the remark that “‘A’ is the same letter as ‘A,’” where a name, including A, is not a thing but rather a class, and the sameness of A, consistently applied such that A cannot be predicated of itself, makes the theory of types

11Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus/Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), proposition 4; the paragraph allude to propositions 2.12, 4.01, and 4.11)

12Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916, 2nd ed., ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) 102.

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superfluous inasmuch as the symbolism precludes the introduction of impredicatives. Instead of adding ad hoc rules, so the remark from 1913 suggests, a proper “logical-philosophical” procedure consists in devising a symbolism that discloses the differences that cannot be properly said. And as for the ultimate source of the passage from the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy with which this paper began, it probably derives from an extraordinary letter Wittgenstein wrote to Russell at the end of 1913, when he was seeking solitude on the Norwegian coast. As a postscript to the letter, just before he signs off with a remark about his impending insanity, Wittgenstein identifies precisely where Russell is right, and where he nevertheless goes wrong: “your Theory of Description is undoubtedly entirely right, even if the primitive signs [Urzeichen] are completely different than you think.”13 With similar self-assurance Wittgenstein begins the letter with the claim that Russell will later repeat, in slightly modified form, while in prison: “all propositions of logic are universalizations of tautologies, and all universalizations of tautologies are propositions of logic” (L 39).

Nothing else in Wittgenstein’s letter to Russell is so clear, however, including the term tautology: “What tautologies actually are: this I cannot yet clearly say; but I want to try to explain it approximately [ungefähr]. It is the peculiar (and most important) characteristic of non-logical propositions that one cannot recognize their truth in [am] the proposition-sign itself. When I say, for instance, ‘Meier is stupid,’ you cannot say whether this proposition is true or false by looking at it. The propositions of logic, and they alone, have the property that their truth viz. falsehood expresses itself in their signs. I have not yet succeeded in finding a designation that satisfies this, but I do NOT doubt that such a mode of designation must be capable of being found” (L 39)—a remarkable locution, sich finden lassen müssen, which suggests the discovery must be possible but could, by sheer chance, or perhaps because of an ultimate lack of philosophical resoluteness, fail to occur. The distressing character of this situation unleashes an attack not on poor Meier, who is perhaps a paronym for G. E. Moore, another of Wittgenstein’s slow-witted Cambridge professors; rather, the attack is directed at Russell, who fails to understand simple written instruc-tions. Thus, Wittgenstein continues: “For compound propositions

13Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H. Von Wright and B. F. McGuiness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974) 41 (hereafter cited as L). Writing from an Austrian artillery Feldpost in October 1915 Wittgenstein indicates to Russell that he has solved his problem, and that the solution will appear in the form of a treatise, even if he himself does not survive the war (L 64).

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the ab notation is adequate. It is unpleasant to me that you did not understand the sign rule in my last letter, for it bores me unspeakably to explain it!! You can discover it yourself if you only think a little!” (L 40). In his exposition of the tautological character of logic nothing is more unnerving than tautography: “I ask you to think about the matter yourself. It is HORRIBLE for me to repeat a writing explana-tion that I gave for the time only with the greatest repugnance” (L 40). Despite his distaste for writing, which expresses itself most fully in his horror at tautography, Wittgenstein nevertheless explains himself by sketching what he calls a “sign” for “p ≡ p,” where the equal sign, in accordance with Frege’s notation, has three lines, so as to emphasize both content-identity and equivalence.

The form of this image, with a bipolar structure and fluid connecting lines, would eventually become familiar to readers of the Tractatus; but in the winter of 1913, there is only an image, designated as a sign that is isomorphic with “p ≡ p,” and a corresponding question, which rep-resents the dénouement of the crucial letter in their correspondence. After having declared, with no hesitation, that “all propositions of logic are universalizations of tautologies,” Wittgenstein proceeds to define his task as the demonstration of how precisely this universalization can be accomplished: “The great question is now, how must a system of signs be constructed, so that every tautology can be recognized as a tautology in one and the same way. That is the fundamental problem of logic!” (L 41). In the case of “p ≡ p,” the traditional term tautology undoubtedly applies; the corresponding sign seeks to show that it is unconditionally true, and this, in turn, can be interpreted to show that it “says” nothing, that is, nothing true or false, and is therefore a zero-like element of the symbolism, not a thought in its own right. But with regard to the program of universalization, the term tautology no longer has anything to do with “p = p” and becomes a technical term used to describe the results of the new logical symbolism, thus departing from traditional or standard usages of the term tautology.14 And this terminological transformation takes place because of the

14In this regard, see the famous critique of Wittgenstein’s use of the term “tautology” proposed by Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd, “Tautology: How Not to Use the Word,” Synthese 87 (1991): 23–49. Dreben and Floyd proceed under the assumption that the use of a word should be—tautologically—governed by its current use, which means that any attempt on the part of a thinker to change the use of a term results in a misuse. Derrida introduces a term that captures the function of tautology as a consequence of Wittgenstein’s work: paleonym (see especially the preface to La dissémination [Paris: Seuil, 1972], 10–12).

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fundamental obscurity that Wittgenstein identifies at the center of his letter. Bifurcated by the image, which is supposed to re-clarify what Wittgenstein means, there is this: “Identity is still, as I already said, not at all clear”—an astonishing admission, which is strangely absent from the face-à-face English edition published in numerous editions of Wittgenstein’s Notebooks.15 As one “looks at” or “intuits” the sign of “p = p” that, when universalized, will show that all logical propositions are identical to this one and can therefore be called “tautologies,” without much violence to “ordinary language,” one still cannot see the identity for itself; that is, one cannot see the identity of identity, and so it remains, on the page itself, beyond the reach of the dark lines and thus figuratively in the dark.

*

If the basic problem of Wittgenstein’s philosophical-logical program revolves around the universalization of tautology, with the aim of mak-ing all logical propositions disclose themselves as such, Benjamin’s can be described, in reverse, as the identification of an absolute one. The problem, then, is not that of finding a method to show how senseless and thus thoughtless propositions can show that they say nothing, but of identifying the identity relation simpliciter. Only in a single place does Benjamin explicitly formulate this program: in a letter to Scholem from December 1917, where he discusses for the first and last time the notion of “absolute tautology.”16 The starting-point of Benjamin’s remarks to Scholem is the crux of Wittgenstein’s letter to Russell: “Identity is still, as I already said, not at all clear.” Benjamin is struck by the same unclarity about the nature of identity. It is for this reason that he draws up and eventually sends to Scholem a small document under the title “Theses on the Problem of Identity,” and the letter of December 1917 is an attempt to address the problem with an even greater degree of directness. As for the line of thought that led Benjamin to the term “absolute tautology” in the winter of 1917, it can be succinctly described as follows: in Benjamin’s view, “Theses on the Problem of Identity” resulted in a parenthesis that corrects the final thesis, which should have been definitive.17 The goal of the

15Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916, 129.16Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995– ) I: 409 (hereafter cited as GB).17Benjamin’s “Theses on the Problem of Identity” can be found in GS VI: 27–29.

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“Theses” is defined near the end of his essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”: “Looking ahead,” Benjamin writes, “the fixing of the concept of identity, a concept with which Kant was himself unfa-miliar, has to play a large role in the transcendental logic, insofar as it does not occur in the table of categories, yet nevertheless presumably constitutes the highest transcendental-logical concept and is perhaps truly suited to autonomously grounding the sphere of knowledge beyond subject-object terminology” (GS II: 167). The criticism of Kant does not consist in the patently false statement that he was unfamiliar with the concept of identity but that this concept was, for him, one of reflection, which means that he was unfamiliar with its primitive or foundational status. The task Benjamin here assigns to the “com-ing philosophy,” in turn, derives from a problem that emerges in his earlier studies of logic and language, especially his “little treatise” or “short tractatus [kleine Abhandlung]” (GB I: 343) on language as such and on human language, which is suspended between two identity-propositions, one of which is tautological, the other not: “The linguistic essence of things,” Benjamin writes near the beginning of his tractatus, “is their language” (GS II: 142). And he proceeds to elucidate the “is” in this manner: “The comprehensibility of linguistic theory depends upon bringing this proposition to a clarity that accordingly annihi-lates every semblance of tautology in it” (GS II: 142). Soon thereafter, however, he advances another identity-thesis, which takes the form of a tautology: “the thesis that the linguistic essence of things is identi-cal with their spiritual essence insofar as the latter is communicable turns into a tautology in its ‘insofar as’” (GS II: 145). Both of these identity-theses, one absolutely non-tautological, the other relatively so, respond to the basic logico-linguistic problem that Benjamin sought to isolate by proposing a solution to Russell’s paradox. Russell’s own solution, as noted above, consists in forbidding “impredicative” terms. Benjamin’s proposed solution goes even further in the same direc-tion and, in a sense, meets up with Wittgesntein’s: for Benjamin, the point is not to remove all impredicatives but to do away with all terms like impredicative, the meaning of which is stipulated at certain times for certain purposes by certain agents. Whenever someone grants meaning to a term, it cannot really mean anything. As Benjamin writes in conjunction with his most extensive treatment of Russell’s paradox, judgments of designation yield inauthentic meaning, that is, uneigentliche Bedeutung, where the word meaning is understood to be the impredicative par excellence, for it means meaning: “Inauthentic meaning, that is, designation, is to be distinguished from authentic

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[meaning]. S is P does not designate but rather means that S is P. ‘Impredicative’ designates the predicate of a certain judgment, ‘unap-proachable’ means something” (GS VI: 10). A mode of meaning wholly unapproachable by way of designation can be identified only under the condition that the items meant by its terms say what is meant; in other words, the so-called items are things, which communicate themselves, and the so-called terms are their languages, each one different from the others and all infinite in their own way, insofar as their limits are not defined by an extra-linguistic field of application; in still other words, things communicate their spiritual essences inso-far as they are communicable. Shortly after Benjamin distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic meaning in his attempt to solve Russell’s paradox, he asks: “what does identity mean [was bedeudet Identität]” (GS VI: 10), which itself means not only, “what does the term identity mean?” but also “what does ‘real’ identity mean?” That is: “what does it mean that ‘S is P’ or that the ‘S’ in ‘S is P’ is identical to the ‘S’ in any other proposition? And this question, too, responds to a problem that emerged in an earlier tractatus, specifically “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin,” where Benjamin describes what he calls “the law of identity” (GS II: 112), which governs the generation of the limit-concept he designates as “the poetized.” In the limit case of the “pure poetized,” where the law is fulfilled, there is identity—but no longer any poetized, only either life or poem, which themselves name two “functional unities” (GS II: 107) that are somehow related to each other through the medium of the poetized; but as for the nature of this identity relation, which discloses itself as such only when the poetized, understood as a copula of sorts, finally vanishes—this Benjamin has no name for.18

At issue in the “Theses on the Problem of Identity” and then again in the letter to Scholem from December 1917 is not “the poetized” (das Gedichtete) but, rather, a kindred term: “the thought” (das Gedachte). The latter is difficult to capture in English, since “the thought” (das Gedachte) sounds like “thought” (Gedanke); but “the thought” is pre-cisely not a thought, much less “the thought” that a thinker would think. It is, however, proximate to the poetized, as Benjamin indicates when he uncharacteristically introduces a neologism into his letter from December 1917 by adding to thought a degree of thickness, reminis-

18A more thorough discussion of the issues raised in this paragraph can be found in the first and fifth chapters of my book, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

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cent of dicht in das Gedichtete. Just as Wittgenstein would prefer to speak with Russell about the problem of identity, so, too, Benjamin would rather discuss the problem with Scholem than write to him about it:

In the matter of the identity problem we can decisively move forward only in conversation, and for this reason I do not unconditionally ascribe certainty to the following propositions. For a very long time the matter of identity has seemed to me as follows: I would deny an identity of thinking as of something particular, neither as an object or nor as a thought, because I dispute the notion that a “thinking” is the correlate of truth. Truth is “think-ick” [Die Wahrheit ist “denkicht”] (I must form this word because none is at my disposal). “Thinking” as an absolute is perhaps only somehow an abstraction from truth. (GB I: 409)

Unlike numerous neologisms, which can be deciphered by associat-ing each lexeme with a standard word of a lexicon, denkicht verges on the indecipherable. Despite the obvious importance of the word—it is the predicate of truth, after all—Benjamin never uses it again. As a hapax legomenon, it suggests something about what it predicates: that truth, too, is a one-time affair. In any case, beyond beginning with denk- (“think”) and concluding with an -icht that is suggestive of dicht (“thick”), the word also gestures toward a “thicket,” “jungle,” or “maze” (Dickicht) in which one inevitably gets lost. And indeed, because of its own philological elusiveness, denkicht itself has a dickicht character.19 Instead of explaining to Scholem what he means by this word, and thus perhaps giving him a guiding thread in the thicket of truth, he outlines the condition under which tautology becomes absolute: “The assertion of the identity of thinking would be the absolute tautology. The appearance or illusion, [Schein] of a ‘think-ing’ emerges only from tautologies. Truth is just as little thought and it thinks. / ‘a is a’ designates in my estimation the identity of the thought”—at which point Benjamin, perhaps as an afterthought about the denkicht character of truth, adds a footnote: “better said (the only correct formulation): the truth itself” (GB I: 409). The argument in the body of the letter then resumes as follows: “At the same time this proposition [a is a] designates no identity other than that of the thought. The identity of the object, assuming there is such a thing in a perfect manner, would have another form” (GB I: 409). This leads Benjamin to describe what he means by a “concrete object,” which,

19I would like to thank Uwe Steiner and Bettina Menke for discussing with me the peculiar nature of denkicht and, above all, for indicating that it strongly suggests an association with dickicht.

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in turn, points toward another philosophical exercise he had sent to Scholem, a brief phenomenological study entitled “Eidos and Concept” (GS VI: 29–31), which responds to an essay published in Kant-Studien by Paul Linke, a professor of philosophy at Jena with whom Scholem was then studying and whom he seems to have befriended. The point of returning to “Eidos and Concept” in the December letter is not so much to expand its argument as to indicate that “the thought,” so construed, is not only different from the object but also from both concept and eidos, regardless of how the latter two terms are ultimately distinguished from each other.

All of Scholem’s relevant letters to Benjamin are lost, but his side of the conversation can be partially reconstructed on the basis of his diary entries of the period, especially the ones in which he records his negative reaction to Benjamin’s “Theses on the Problem of Identity.” In Scholem’s view—doubtless bolstered by Linke, who dismissed “Eidos and Concept” as worthless—Benjamin is a lousy phenomenologist. To corroborate this verdict, Scholem sketches into his diary what he calls the “phenomenological doctrine of orders,” which represents a thorough refutation of Benjamin’s “Theses.” At the end of his sketch Scholem raises a very simple objection to the last “thesis,” where Benjamin distinguishes the identity of “the thought” from that of the object and casts doubt on whether “a is a” applies to objects at all: “If I say that the thought [das Gedachte] is identical with itself (Walter), the thought is nevertheless here an object in our sense”—where “our” does not mean his and Walter’s but presumably only his, or perhaps his and Linke’s.20 In any case, Scholem’s objection is purely formal, a matter of stipulating what the term object is supposed to mean, such that it applies to any subject-term in a standard proposition. Under this condition, Benjamin can be consigned to the category of Meier- or Moore-like stupidity, for his “Theses” fail to recognize that thinking includes an object component, which Husserl recently sought to iden-tify and investigate by way of the neologism “noema.” Upon receiv-ing the “Theses,” Scholem must have written to Benjamin in terms such as these, instructing him in the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality and asking whether he had ever come across Husserl’s “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” where the cogito-cogitatum struc-ture is discussed at length. And this presumably generates the passage under examination, remarkable in its politeness, where Benjamin amplifies the point made in the last of the “Theses” and concludes

20Scholem, Tagebücher, II: 79.

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with the assurance he, Benjamin, had indeed read “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” several years earlier, noting, with less than perfect politeness—but with none of the impatient aggressiveness of Wittgen-stein’s letter to Russell—that Linke is not well regarded among the phenomenologists whom he knows.

In responding to Scholem’s objection, then, Benjamin makes sure of one thing: “das Gedachte” is not to be confused with noema, under-stood as a thought-object, which remains identical to itself regardless of the modulations in intentional attitude, such as wishing, hoping, remembering, and so forth. Instead of reiterating the distinction between the identity of the thought and that of the object, which is where the “Theses” had broken off, Benjamin advances a line of argu-ment developed in the “Program” essay and elsewhere, according to which there is no such thing as a thinker, whose thoughts could be described as its properties or qualities. Not only is there no thinker, moreover; there is no thinking simpliciter, which is to say, as Benjamin writes, “thinking as an absolute is also an abstraction.” At this point, even Scholem could not confuse “the thought” with the noema. And this leaves the question, what, after all, is “the thought”? Neither a concept nor an eidos, it also not an object of any kind, including the cogitatum correlate of the cogito. Because the distinction between “the thought” and object is irreducible and ineluctable, it is akin to the distinction between function and object, as it is developed in the work of another Jena professor under whom Scholem was then studying, namely Frege, whose Begriffsschrift—whatever else may be said of it—seeks to guarantee the consistency and transparency of this distinc-tion. And although Benjamin does not adopt the position with which Heidegger concludes his review of recent research in logic, whereby the adoption of mathematical symbolism and the overextension of the concept of function represent a flight away from the genuine prob-lem of logic, and indeed despite the fact that Benjamin had himself experimented with the function concept in his original presentation of the law of identity, “the thought” is not equivalent to the term “function.” Nor is it equivalent into a term Ernst Cassirer, among others, associates with the concept of function and that Benjamin would later adopt for a description of the structure of truth, namely “idea.” And despite all the “nots” that proliferate in response to the question, “what, then, is ‘das Gedachte?” it cannot itself be represented as a species of negation, for instance, as the nothingness of being, or the annihilation of the finite that generates reality and expresses itself in mathematical terms as the infinitesimal. There is only one thing,

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so to speak, to which “the thought” is equivalent and with which the term is therefore convertible, the one through which Benjamin cor-rects himself in the footnote he adds to his letter. To use a Scholastic term, much loved by Leibniz and adopted by Frege, “the thought” is convertible with “truth” salve veritate.

This is the thesis toward which the “Theses on the Problem of Iden-tity” are directed but do not themselves reach: the tautological formula, “a is a” or—or more exactly, “/ a is a”—designates only the identity of “the thought” and is therefore applicable to no other form of identity, least of all to the putative self-identity of either a “concrete object” or a noema. The reason for this can be approximately ascertained from the perspective of the argument Heidegger suggests in his article in support of the “war-triduum”: it is not so much that “a is a” is true as that it truths itself. This is the event to which Heidegger would later refer by way of the bisected Greek term a-letheia. The corresponding term in Rosenzweig’s emerging lexicon is Be-währen.21 In Heidegger’s wartime terminology, which is doubtless more accessible than Benja-min’s, since it was devised for the purpose of popularization, sense accrues to the proposition only under the condition that it be true, which makes it different from every “everyday” proposition, since such propositions are structurally indifferent with respect to their truth-values. The sense of the true proposition is the inner form of thinking, or, again in Heidegger’s terminology, the Sinn of Besinnung, the “meaning” of “minding.” A similar exposition can be devised from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s reflections on the proposition “p ≡ p”: if it must be true, its truth must be of a different order than the truth of a genuine proposition—so much so that this truth cannot be called “truth” but, instead, enforces the law of silence. In the case of Benjamin, a similar necessity expresses itself in his almost unprec-edented recourse to a word of his own making, a “condensed” word, in which thought, thickness, thicket, and Gedicht are fused into the sole predicate that applies to truth. It is a purely positive predicate, which is thick enough, as it were—or, from another vantage point, vague enough—to absorb its opposite, so that its symbolic equivalent would be a similarly new sign that would simply assert truth without the detour of predication. This is perhaps the function of the peculiar

21See, for instance, Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Welt. Gesammelte Schriften III. Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold und Annemarie Meyer (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1984) 159.

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slash in the proposition “/ a is a,” which is recorded in both editions of the December 1917 letter.

Regardless of whether or not the slash is a proto-element of a proto-symbolism, the problem of assertion enters into Benjamin’s highly condensed inquiry in relation to the singular theme of “absolute tautology,” as contrasted with tautologies in the plural. The context of Benjamin’s discussion of “absolute tautology,” is, once again, Scholem’s lost letter, where he presumably recommends that Benjamin read “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” according to which recognition of the cogito-cogitatum correlation, in Husserl’s view, gives philosophy a chance to break into the sphere of genuine science along the lines of modern chemistry, which broke free from the “profundity” of alchemy with the discovery of oxygen. But for Benjamin, there is nothing about the cogito-cogitatum that represents a breakthrough. To the extent that thinking thinks something and is not, as Benjamin elsewhere suggests, a “transcendental intransitive” (GS VI: 43) akin to walking, which would be its empirical counterpart, thinking is in precisely the same situation as the things it thinks, and this situation is one in which “a is a” is only imperfectly applicable. Because tautologies appear to be without content, they produce the corresponding illusion that thinking, thus free of the object, is identical to itself. The assertion of this identity is different than the illusion of self-identity: it would be the “absolute tautology,” if only—here is the decisive conditional—the assertion were not itself a function of thinking and, instead, originated in something like the sheer assertiveness of truth. This assertiveness, however, can assert itself only by way of its opposite: pure passivity, described in the lexicon of the Critique of Pure Reason by the term “receptivity,” which Kant associates with intuition, in contrast to the spontaneity of thinking. For Kant, there can be as little thought-passivity as intuitive spontaneity; as Benjamin densely develops the predicate “denkicht,” thought-passivity, which is how truth asserts itself, acquires the name “das Gedachte,” in other words, that which has been thought, without a thinker ever having thought it.

*

With “absolute tautology” thus placed under a condition—and there-fore no longer or not yet the “absolute” it would otherwise be—Benja-min breaks off. The December 1917 letter to Scholem continues, but it turns to other matters. And nowhere else does Benjamin resume his attempt to fix the primordial concept of identity. The dissertation

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projects with which he experimented and the one he completed can be understood as indirect advances on the problem. And so, too, can some of the “habilitation” projects with which he experimented, especially the one for which he developed a series of theses under the title “Doctrinal Propositions on Symbolism [Lehrsätze über die Symbolik]” (GS VI: 21). The symbol is characterized by nothing so much as the identity of its constituent parts, the symbolizing and symbolized, with no objective remainder. In purely schematic terms, the identity of the two sides of the tautology, symbolically represented by an equal sign, “is” symbolic. In this way, the problem of identity, as Wittgenstein insists, is identical to that of proper symbolization. What tautology cannot say, the latter shows by virtue of what it, symbolically, is. And what it shows is that it is a symbol. As Benjamin notes in the aforementioned Lehrsätze: “what the totality is: beyond identity, nothing lets itself be said” (GS VI: 22). Predication thus “dries up” (versiegt). To say more of what the symbol shows than “it is (the symbol it is)” is to generate “imaginary objects” in which the metaphysics of substance has always found itself entangled. Nevertheless, the differences with Benjamin’s preliminary Lehrsätze and those of the Tractatus are more striking than the similarities, and the same is true with regard to Heidegger’s contemporaneous assault on the problem of identity. In Benjamin’s case, beyond the “Theses” on this problem and the subsequent letter to Scholem, everything revolves around indication, which sidesteps the problem, instead of seeking to grasp it once and for all. To use Benjamin’s own terms, drawn from a letter to Hofmannsthal, there is no further “frontal assault” (GB II: 410) on the concepts at hand. The detour through the theory of symbolism is precisely that: a detour. And the “habilitation” project he eventual completes turns, of course, toward the theory of allegory, the very name of which suggests tautology in reverse. Just as the allo- of allegory is the opposite of the tauto- of tautology, the open space of the agora recalled in agorein is both wider and more narrow than the logos derived from legein.

In contrast to Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, each of the magna opera published in the 1920s by the other thinkers mentioned here here—Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, Der Stern der Erlösung, and Sein und Zeit—are “frontal assaults” on the concept of identity. The common strategy under which all of them operate, despite their diverging paths, can be aptly described by a term through which Kafka gently chastised a novel Max Brod completed in December 1917: in Der große Wagnis, Brod, according to Kafka, sought to create a “Hin-denburg opportunity,” which would allow him to break through and

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thus break free.22 Nowhere perhaps are the lineaments of this risky “Hindenburg opportunity” more evident than in the notebooks of Franz Rosenzweig, who, in the final months of 1917, wrote a long series of remarks that begins by representing the event of revelation in terms of the tautological formula “A = A / B = B” and concludes with a sketch of the quadrangle of forces that stalled Hindenburg’s eastward advances during the battle of Łódź, ultimately leading to the impasse in which the German and Austrian forces found themselves:

22Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Eine Freundschaft, ed. Hannelore Rodlauer and Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987–89) II: 189.

23Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (Haag: Nijhoff, 1979) 123; the formula “A = A /B = B” can be found on the previous page.

1.) Hindenburg, 2.) Austria in August and September [1914], 3.) Com-mon Austrian-German offensive in October [1914], 4.) Łódź . . . . The breakthrough is a purely tactical problem and, as such, easily recognized. But the place of the breakthrough (not on the wings but in the center), thus the strategy of the breakthrough—hic haeret aqua.23

At the very same time as Rosenzweig sketches the quadrangle of forces that stalled Hindenburg’s advance, he sketches the triangle of elements that is composed of coordinated yet asymmetrical sets of tautologies, with “A = A” (symbol of God) at the top, “B = B” to the left (symbol of the human being), and “A = B” to the right (symbol of the world). This triangle becomes the nucleus of the six-pointed “star of redemption,” which points directly at the center of life, thus completing the “strategic” breakthrough Hindenburg failed to accom-

1

23

4

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plish.24 In contrast to this breakthrough, the hesitant movement Ben-jamin undertakes in attempting to “fix” the problem of identity in his “Theses on the Problem of Identity” and the December 1917 letter to Scholem is best captured by the phrase Rosenzweig draws from Virgil and applies to Hindenburg: hic haeret aqua, “here the waters stall.” In “absolute tautology” the otherwise incessant flow of discourse finally stalls and “the expressionless” takes its place.


24Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk 136; the letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg from November 1917 that would be later called the “Urzelle” of the Stern der Erlösung.

The Infinitesimal as Theological Principle:

Representing the Paradoxes of God and Nothing in Cohen, Rosenzweig,

Scholem, and Barth❦

John H. Smith

In a letter to Schelling dated August 30, 1795, Hegel mentions that he wants to write an essay exploring “what it could mean to approach God?” (was es heißen könne, sich Gott zu nähern?).1 Hegel, throughout his entire career, and Schelling, at least throughout the first thirty years of his even longer one, pursued the answer to this question in terms of a dialectics of mediation, reconciliation, and identity. According to this view, to approach God means to come to the awareness, either in the representational mode (Vorstellungsdenken) of religion or in the conceptual form of philosophy, of the fundamental identity between God and man, both of whom are mediated as one in Spirit. It was against this view that the figures explored in this essay rebelled, even if their projects could also be formulated in terms of a series of similar questions, like what does it mean for man to approach God and the world and, in the reverse, what does it mean for God to approach man and the world. In all four cases mathematics will play a role in formulating what they might mean by the crucial term “to approach,”


1Briefe von und an Hegel. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, vol. 1: 1785–1812 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Velag, 1952) 29.

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because for all of them mathematics, and specifically the notions of the infinitesimal and the limit, provide a mode of representing the fundamental aspect of religious experience, namely the paradox that the “nothing” at the heart of non-identity can generate a movement toward an Other such that the distance can become infinitely small without collapsing into sameness. The reason why basic high school calculus can serve as the source (Ursprung) of this way of thinking through and representing religion is that it itself contains precisely this paradoxical structure: not the famous “identity of identity and non-identity” that the early Hegel formulated (together with the young Schelling) but a non-identity that is at once irreducible and productive. It was Hermann Cohen’s contribution to foreground this powerful philosophical and theologically promising role for the infinitesimal and differential limit. Man, God, and World do approach each other (to use the main cornerstones or apexes from Rosenzweig), but there is always the infinitesimal gap, infinitely small perhaps yet absolute, at the limit or, as Barth says, at the “Todeslinie” between them.2 Moreover, if according to Peter Gordon calculus was for Rosenzweig a “metaphor” rather than a logical principle, it can uniquely serve this function in the strong, Aristotelian sense—“from metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh” and “set the scene before our eyes”—because its formulation of the relation between the infinite and the finite is paradoxically non-visualizable and concretely graphic.3 Perhaps we can use this peculiar aspect of the representability of the infinitesimal as a way of understanding Rosenzweig’s perplexing statement that his abstract work was actually an example of “absolute empiricism,” or Scholem’s early call for a “mathematical mystic” and “mystical mathematician.”4 This does not mean that we ought to give absolute priority to the mathematical; this is just one of the rhetorics crossing and connecting these thinkers and allowing them to find a way to express the inexpressible realities of God and nothingness.

2Barth writes, “Kein Einswerden von Gott und Mensch findet statt, keine Aufhebung der Todeslinie, kein proleptisches Ansichreißen der Fülle Gottes, der Erettung und Enderlösung,” in Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1984) 127 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Römerbrief).

3Peter Eli Gordon, “Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism,” Jewish Social Studies 6.1 (1999): 45. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Cosimo, 2010), Book III.10,1410.

4Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, ed. Karlfried Gründer et al., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995–2000) entry from June 11, 1916, II: 353 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Tagebücher).

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The motivation for Hermann Cohen to turn to the method of the infinitesimal was not originally theological. But he did want to explore what the deeper significance of the infinitesimal is and to provide a philosophical justification for that significance (and in this it will come to have theological relevance). What is it about this tool and about reality that the tool so effectively explains? Specifically, according to Cohen, mathematics deals with equalities (Gleichheit) and equations (Gleichungen), while logic deals with identity (Identität). The difference is important since already Leibniz said that equality is really just infinitely small inequality: “Auf diese Weise kann auch die Gleichheit [aequalitas] als unendlich kleine Ungleichheit [inae-qualitas] betrachtet werden, wo der Unterschied kleiner ist als eine beliebig kleine gegebene Größe.”5 Cohen wonders what it says about reality that such (in)equalities and equations should have such power. Indeed, he goes further: he defines the category of “reality” itself, i.e., what can be experienced and known according to scientific laws, as that which is postulated by the infinitesimal. He summarizes his point near the end of his 1883 work, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte:

Und damit kommen wir zu der Summe der Bedeutung, welche wir der Realität hier beimessen. Die infinitesimale Grösse, als Realität gedacht, wird zum idealistischen Hebel alles Naturerkennens. Es ist zwar eine überall gebrauchte Bezeichnungsweise, dass die Infinitesimalrechnung ein werth-volles Instrument der Naturwissenschaft sei; aber es will scheinen, als ob die volle Bedeutung dieses Ausdrucks nicht durchgängig zur Anerken-nung gebracht sei. Nicht blos ein Hilfsmittel der Rechnung etwa ist das Infinitesimale, nicht ein künstliches Werkzeug, um physische Vorgänge zu berechnen, denen die gemeine Rechnung nicht gewachsen ist; sondern das natürliche Verfahren, demzufolge überhaupt Dinge und Vorgänge abgetheilt und specialisirt warden, führt in gerade Richtung, und in letzter Instanz zu diesem Gebilde, ohne welches die gewöhnliche Rechnugnsart unzulänglich und im eigentlichsten Sinne gegenstandlos würde.6

This becomes the key to his own critical Idealism, which, as many have pointed out—including Rosenzweig—may even go beyond Kant toward Hegel with its strong metaphysical claim. For the “tool,” which

5Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Schriften zur Logik und zur philosophischen Grundlegung von Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft, in Philosophische Schriften, vol. 4, ed. and trans. Herbert Herring (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1992) 235.

6Hermann Cohen, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik, in Werke, vol.5 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1984) 133 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Infinitesimal-Methode).

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is the infinitesimal, literally “produces” (erzeugt) the reality that behaves according to it. The idea of the infinitesimal, as Deleuze emphasizes in his book on Leibniz and the baroque, sees reality not as discrete objects, parts and wholes, but as an infinite range of degrees in the play of continuity and difference between nothing and something.7 Since the infinite is not an object of sensual or any other kind of intuition (Anschauung), but only a product of thought, this means that reality is a construct of thought, i.e., it is a principle of Cohen’s “erkenntnisskritischen Idealismus . . . dass die Welt der Dinge auf dem Grunde der Gesetze des Denkens beruht” (Infinitesimal-Methode 125). So what is it about the infinitesimal (and, we will see, the notion of the limit) that can have such power?

At this point it is important to take a quick tour through the world of calculus. Other scholars—for example, Casper, Gibbs, Gordon, Hollander, Pollack, Samuelson, Schmied-Kowarzik, and Wiehl—have pointed out Cohen’s basic premises and their echoes, especially in Rosenzweig.8 But they do not fully convey the steps that make math-ematics so effective a representational model for Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Scholem, and, in a slightly different way, Barth. Certainly one can understand many of the fundamental arguments of Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Barth without a detailed understanding of calculus. But there is an irony here at the level of representation: Cohen turned to the infinitesimal because he needed a logical grounding of reality in pure thought. However, in so far as mathematics is employed in order to represent mysteries of religion, its paradoxical nature plays the role of allowing us to visualize precisely the non-visualizable (“dieses unanschauliche positive X” for Barth, Römerbrief 178, here cited from the second edition of 1922). That is, calculus is both the most abstract and most mundane; the idea of the infinitesimal both difficult to grasp fully and a tool for calculating aspects of everyday

7Gilles Deleuze. Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1988) 88–89.8Luc Anckaert, Martin Brasser, and Norbert Max Samuelson, eds., The Legacy of Franz

Rosenzweig: Collected Essays (Leuven: Leuven UP 2004); Bernhard Casper, Das dialogische Denken: Eine Untersuchung der religionsphilosophischen Bedeutung Franz Rosenzweigs, Ferdinand Ebners und Martin Bubers (Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1967); Robert Gibbs,”The Limits of Thought: Rosenzweig, Schelling, and Cohen,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 43:4 (1989): 618–640; and Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992); Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Palo Alto: Stanford, 2004); Benjamin Pollack, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009); Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Internationaler Kongreß—Kassel 1986. 2 vols. (Freiburg/Munich: K. Alber, 1988).

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reality.9 The following detour through calculus is necessary because its paradoxical nature captures a problem at the heart of theology.

The goal of calculus is to address change and motion that can be depicted as functions and curves, for example, the simple parabola of a ball thrown into the air.10 Specifically, calculus developed in order to deal with the rate of change, e.g., not the height of a ball at any given time, but how the height is changing at any given instant. That rate of change is given as the “slope” of the line that forms a tangent to the curve. Thus, if we look at the curve formed by a simple para-bolic function, we can choose points and see that at times the rate of change is high (or steep), until it slows (levels) and at one instant is zero, before its rate of change again gradually increases (though negatively, as it descends).

9For an excellent historical overview of the history of the mathematical concepts discussed here, see John L. Bell, The Continuous and the Infinitesimal in Mathematics and Philosophy (Milan: Polimetrica, 2005). I am grateful to Ashvin. Rajan for his assistance in clarifying the discussion of the tangent.

10On Leibniz and curves, see esp. Deleuze chapter 2. The fact that this tool was developed by Newton and Leibniz says a lot about the seventeenth century as a time that grappled with movement and change. One only needs to think of the dynamism of Rubens’ paintings.

If we zero in on a given point where the tangent touches the curve, we can see that that straight line, for one particular instant, gives the direction of the curve—only to change in the very next instant.

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So the question is: How can we calculate the slope of the line that is tangent to a curve at a given point on the curve? Since the line that is tangent to a curve at a particular point indicates the direction of the curve at that point, the collection of all the tangent lines to points on a curve may be used to generate the curve as one varies the point of tangency. (That is how Cohen speaks of this phenomenon.) Thus, given a random curve which represents the graph of a function, y = f(x), what is the slope of the line that is tangent to the curve at a given point P = (a, f(a)) on the curve? Once we have the slope of the tangent line, and know that the line is to pass through (a, f(a)), we can write down the equation of the tangent line, thereby specifying it.

y = f(a)

P •

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Now, we can approximate the slope of the tangent line to the graph of the function y = f(x) by working out the slope of a line that passes through (a, f(a)) and a second point on the curve, Q = (a + h, f(a + h)) where the x coordinate (a + h) of the second point Q is farther along the x-axis from a (which is the x-coordinate of P) by a short distance h. The line that passes through P and Q is called a secant line.

Q = (a + h, f(a + h)) y = f(a)

P = (a, f(a))

•

▗

The slope of the secant line that passes through P = (a, f(a)) and Q = (a + h, f(a + h) is

f(a + h) – f(a) = f(a + h) – f(a) (a+h) – a h

and is obtained by using the formula for calculating the slope of the straight line passing through (x1, y1) and (x2, y2), which is

y2 – y1

x2 – x1

We can also consider this to be the way that the dependent variable y changes in respect to changes in the independent variable x. In Leib-niz’ symbolization, which has been standardized (although it means something different from what he intended): dy/dx.

The slope f(a + h) – f(a) h

of the secant line passing through the points P = (a, f(a)) and Q = (a + h, f(a + h)) only approximates the slope of the tangent line to the

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graph of the function y = f(x) at P = (a, f(a)). But we could make our approximation better and better by “moving” Q closer and closer to P.

As the points Q = ((a + h), f(a + h)) are chosen for ever smaller values of h, we get points Q that are very close to P, and the slopes of the corresponding secant lines become very nearly the same as the slope of the line that is tangent to the graph of y = f(x) at P. One would ideally like to make the value of h above zero. However, as calculating the slope requires us to divvide by h, we cannot make the value of h zero, since division by zero is undefined, a mathematical nothing, so to speak. It is, however, meaningful to allow h to become “infinitesimally small.” As we do so, the slopes of the secant lines approach the slope of the tangent line to y = f(x) at P in the limit.

Thus, we can formulate the paradox of calculus, which is the mathematics of change, as follows: The way the function is changing in relation to changes of its variables, i.e., the way y is changing in relation to changes of x was formulated by Leibniz as dy/dx; but if we want to know the change at a specific point, then dx is zero and it makes no sense; and yet we can calculate this value by letting dx (or h) become infinitesimally small, without ever letting it become zero. That notion of the infinitesimal—as close as possible to zero but never becoming the same as that limit—lies at the heart of reality defined as movement.

With this more developed understanding of calculus in mind, we can summarize Cohen’s project, turning from the 1883 work to his magnum opus, the 1902 Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, to see the significance

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of the infinitesimal.11 If his goal is to ground natural laws of science in a pure origin or Ursprung, the only pure source of knowledge can be reason. Any other source (e.g., intuition or the senses) would rely on something given finitely, but finitude can never ground itself because it, by definition, relies on some other finitude for its existence. Thus, only the infinite, which can never be an object of experience, can provide the a priori for knowledge. It allows us to toss aside the “Krücke” (Logik 113) of the senses, for now we can see how finite being, defined as reality, emerges from the infinite as infinitesimal. He says: “Nur das Unendlichkleine vermag es” (Logik 113; his emphasis).

The example he gives is, unsurprisingly, the generation of the curve from the tangent points, each of which is in a sense a “nothing” because each is calculated only thanks to the infinitely small differen-tial as one approaches the point. (It is likely this basic principle that he had in mind in the opening pages when he says he must make a “detour” through the “adventure” of thinking the nothing to get at the origin of being conceived as reality.) And yet, the curve, which is reality—for what is reality if not movement through space?—arises from this abstract and absolute point. He writes:

Die Kurve wird aus der Tangente erzeugt, aus dem Punkte, der ihr mit der Tangente gemeinsam ist. Und diese Erzeugung bezieht sich nicht etwa auf einen einmaligen Ursprung; sondern in allem Fortgang ist die Kurve der Inbegriff solcher sie erzeugenden Tangenten-Punkte. Es ist daher dieser Punkt mehr als bloss Ursprung, der für einmal zu genügen scheinen könnte. Es kommt darauf an, in der Kurve für ihren ganzen Verlauf den erzeugenden Punkt gleichsam zu isoliren, und als eine Art von absolutem Punkt zu denken. Diese Absolutheit des Punktes, sofern in ihm die Richtung liegt und die Erzeu-gung der Kurve ununterbrochen von ihm ausgeht, zeichnen wir als Relaität aus. (Logik 109–10; his emphasis)

Thus, if we go back to our images, we can “see” (although one cannot actually “see” it—and that is the paradox of representation) that we arrive at the tangent point P only through the process of approaching it infinitesimally, i.e., making the difference between it and some other point Q infinitely small. And the curve itself emerges, is “created” or “produced,” from the movement that is inherent “within” this absolute point along continuity at each point out of the infinitesimal point of contact of the tangent line. Indeed, continuity—a fundamental prin-

11Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntniss (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1902), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Logik.

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ciple of reality—is granted only by means of this understanding of the infinitesimal, since it cannot be explained by starting from discrete or finite numbers and things. As with the definition of a function, reality is continuous because the gap (or abyss) between two points can be made infinitesimally small. Each act of becoming, therefore, emerges out of a nothing, which is not nothing. This has dramatic consequences for Cohen’s view of “reality.” If reality is grounded in the infinitesimal, then it does not really consist of “things,” for “[e]in Ding lässt sich nicht als ein Unendlichkleines abzählen” (Logik 111). Rather, the core of the real is movement: “Nicht Dinge sind ihr [der Naturwissenschaft] gegeben; sondern Bewegungen bilden ihr Prob-lem” (Logik 191). Calculus, then, will provide the means of represent-ing the movement to and from God out of a paradoxical nothing.

We know that Rosenzweig stated in the beginning of the Stern der

Erlösung (1924) that Cohen’s method was central to his project.12 To quote the well-known basic passages: “Erst Hemann Cohen . . . entdeckte in der Mathematik ein Organon des Denkens . . . Das Differential verbindet in sich die Eigenschaften des Nichts und des Etwas; es ist ein Nichts, das auf ein Etwas, sein Etwas hinweist, und zugleich ein Etwas, das noch im Schoße des Nichts schlummert . . . Mathematik [ist] die Führerin. Sie lehrt im Nichts den Ursprung des Etwas erkennen” (Stern 23). But, of course, he turns this organon into a theological principle. Like Hegel from the letter quoted at the begin-ning, Rosenzweig wonders about the approach to God—and man and world. But that approach, like the infinitesimal move from nothing to something, like the “absolute point” of the tangent that is undefined yet productive of the curve, can never be mediated or turned into identity: “Wir suchen Gott, wie späterhin Welt und Mensch, nicht als einen Begriff unter andern, sondern für sich, auf sich allein gestellt, in seiner—wenn der Ausdruck nicht mißverständlich ist—absoluten Tatsächlichkeit, also gerade in seiner ‘Positivität.’ Deshalb müssen wir das Nichts des gesuchten Begriffs an den Anfang stellen; wir müssen es in unsern Rücken bringen; denn vor uns liegt als Ziel ein Etwas: die Wirklichkeit Gottes” (Stern 25–26).

Now, it turns out that by the time Cohen had developed his major work, the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis in 1902, and certainly by the

12Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Stern.

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time Rosenzweig claimed the centrality of the infinitesimal, that concept (the infinitesimal) was no longer the basis of calculus. This is made clear in a review of the Logik in 1904 by John Grier Hibben, a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary and president of the university succeeding Woodrow Wilson. After providing a cogent summary of Cohen’s project, Hibben questions its very foundation, the infinitesimal: “This position, however, which is central to the whole system, cannot be maintained in the light of modern mathematics. The mathematical theory of the calculus is not based upon the doc-trine of infinitesimals, as Professor Cohen assumes. On the contrary, the Leibnizian theory of infinitesimals has been discarded, and the doctrine of limits has taken its place; moreover, in the doctrine of limits, the idea of the infinitesimal has no place whatsoever.”13 This critique by no means discredits Cohen and it is unclear whether Rosenzweig was following closely developments in the philosophy of mathematics; but thinking with the limit we can better see new aspects in Rosenzweig’s thought and rhetoric, namely an insistence on the movement of infinitesimal approachability. Hibben writes further: “The differential has only a relative value in the mathematical process; it is a symbol or index of the limit. The gap between it and the limit is never bridged. It only indicates the limit, and is never transformed into it.”14 In a crucial sense, this leads Rosenzweig to a related, but differ-ently oriented representational modality, one which has remarkable overlaps with Barth’s. In calculus, the original tendency, which Cohen continued, was to view “the infinitesimal” represented in the “dx,” as a special kind of number. He referred to it as an “intensive magnitude” (intensive Größe) because it—as we saw—does not correspond to some finite or discrete thing. (An intensive magnitude is most often used for states that do not have any measure per se even though they can be compared—like pain, or the intensity of the blueness of the sky, or the feeling of warmth.) But with the notion of the limit we have a different perspective. The absolute point (e.g., of the tangent) is not itself some special sort of number (“das Unendlichkleine”) but that to which we can become infinitely close; it is not a something (even a concept) but that which we can only move toward—whereby “we” too are limits in relation to others (our “neighbors”). This shift in perspective is what Rosenzweig likely had in mind in the last passage

13John Grief Hibben, “Review of Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” Philo-sophical Review 13:2 (1904): 207–212, here 210.

14Hibben, 210.

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quoted above. With the “nothing” at our backs, we can now approach God (and man and world and their relations, for they are in fact all approaching each other)—as limits. Each point is like the tangent point that, in its movement, creates a curve—a Bahn in Rosenzweig’s terms—moving toward the others. But also, each point represents the limit for that course as the course radiating from each point moves toward the others. In fact, were any of these to reach its goal (“Ziel”), the whole would collapse genuinely into nothing. If God and world were to be the same—deus sive natura according to Spinoza—such pantheism would destroy the very meaning of the two poles. The same would happen if God and man became one—as when Feuerbach turns the “essence” of religion into anthropology. The triangular structure of the Star of David that makes up the structure of his book and ontology is deceptive, or at least needs to be mathematically more complicated. The three “points” must be kept separate because they emerge out of the Nichts. But they are also infinitely close—without ever collapsing onto each other, into that one unifying point that is the dream of philosophy (which he dismisses at the very beginning of the book). The key triangle of “elements” gets transformed into an almost unrepresentable shape of asymptotically approaching hypberoles—a geometrical function to which we will return:

God

ManWorld

These discussions of the differential as limit truly come to fruition later on in the text, beginning with the transition from part 1 on the “Elemente” and the “Immerwährende Vorwelt” to part 2: “Die Bahn oder die allzeiterneuerte Welt.” This middle part was, he claimed, the

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“Herzbuch”15 of the argument. The point is that here the poles that, on the one hand, were kept apart to prevent them from collapsing into nihilistic sameness or identity need, on the other hand, to be brought into motion. (Recall the quote earlier by Cohen about the continuous production of the curve out of the infinite tangents.) If each element were to be considered like a simple number, then it would be caught in its pure “actuality” (Tatsächlichkeit), and as an actuality, each ele-ment would be guaranteed to exist but could not provide grounds for living faith (Stern 94). The point needs to open up into the line and curve: “Ob das einzelne Sein, etwa der Punkt x1 y1 z1 Element einer Geraden, einer Kurve, einer Fläche, welches Körpers sei, all das bestimmt sich erst durch die Gleichung, dieihn in zu x2 y2 z2 in dif-ferentiale Beziehung bringt” (Stern 94). That is, as we saw in Cohen, the important thing is that the individual point—God, World, Man—is not a discrete “thing” but a differential. “How are the elements to be brought into flux?” ([W]ie sollen die Elemente ins Strömen kommen?) he asks. The answer lies in their infinitesimal nature: “Die Elemente selber müssen in sich die Kraft bergen, aus welcher Bewegung entspringt, und in sich selbst den Grund ihrer Ordnung, in der sie in den Strom eintreten” (Stern 96). Like the tangent that is the source generating the curve, “so verwandelt sich das reine Tatsächliche [der Elemente] in den Ursprung der wirklichen Bewegung” (Stern 97). And later he admits that this use of mathematics has pushed such thinking to its limits: “Und wirklich waren ja die drei Linien, mit denen wir in den drei Büchern dieses Teils die drei im ersten Teil entstandenen Punkte verbanden, nicht Linien im Sinne der Geometrie, nicht kürzeste Verbindungen zwischen zwei Punkten, sondern sie waren durch einen in der Entstehungsgeschichte der Punkte begründeten, aber in sich selbst grundlosen Akt der Umkehrung aus ihnen entsprungen” (Stern 284). Not straight lines connecting fixed points, but curves emerging from the non-points or the limit of the tangent. But such an approach constitutes reality: “thus [these are] real [curved lines of motion], not mathematical [i.e. geometrical], lines” (also wirkliche, nicht mathema-tische Linien) (Stern 284). The movement is more real than the static thing, the curve generated out of nothings more real than the abstract straight line. Through this new dynamic relation he tries to make a form visible (sichtbar) so that “die an sich ‘schlechte,’ nämlich un

15Franz Rosenzweig, Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) 151 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Zweistromland).

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geschlossene Unendlichkeit etwa einer Hyperbel zur ‘guten’, nämlich zur geschlossen formulierbaren” (Stern 284). The unreachable limit connects and separates God, World, Man.16

This is the way we can read the notion of “Korrelation,” namely as a strongly mathematical limit-concept that grasps the “das wechselseitige Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Gott” (Zweistromland 306). Consider its specific role in this powerful theology, i.e., the way the mathemat-ics gave linguistic form to the faith: “Aber im Kampf gegen jeglichen Pantheismus, auch den des Geistes, steifte ihm den Nacken sein Judentum, das erst jetzt vollends Sprache gewann. Die ‘Korrelation’ wurde auch hier das begriffliche Mittel, dem Glauben die Zunge zu lösen” (Zweistromland 215). Although the “he” to whom Rosenzweig refers here is Cohen, it applies to himself as well.

Gershom Scholem pursued a project that differed considerably from Rosenzweig’s, but he nonetheless grappled with a similar core issue using remarkably similar mathematical figures of thought and speech. His interest was in finding a living tradition in Judaism that avoided the rationalism extending from Maimonides through Mendelssohn to (at least some extent) Cohen. He found such a tradition in the kab-bala and strands of messianism like seventeenth-century Sabbatianism. Not himself a mystic by any means, he found in his subjects precisely the things that so motivated him, namely a philologist’s love of and attention to language and a concern with maintaining and represent-ing rather than dissolving or avoiding the fundamental paradoxes of religious experience. His deep understanding of mathematics was crucial for his efforts to explain the latter.

It was in the last two of his school years, as he mentions in his autobiography, that he developed “eine starke Neigung und gewisse Begabung für Mathematik.”17 This was not a passing fancy, for he pursued it also in his first three years of university study, adding to his collection “einer ziemlichen mathematischen Bibliothek. Zahlen-theorie, Algebra und Funktionentheorie waren mir besonders lieb” (Von Berlin 87). What prevented him from continuing were both the consuming passion for the study of the Jewish tradition and the sense that he would not be able to contribute something new in the area of mathematics: “Wenn ich einen Widerstreit in mir auszufechten hatte, so war es der zwischen meiner mathematischen und meiner jüdischen

16On the hyperbola, see Gibbs, “The Limit of Thought,” 638.17Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem: Jugenderinnerungen (Frankfurt am

Main: Suhrkamp, 1978) 84 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Von Berlin).

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Seele” (Von Berlin 91). But its significance for his way of thinking in his early years is clear from his diaries and letters and, as we will see, these “two souls” residing in his Faustian breast provided him keys to unlock central concepts of his study of the kabbala and address the decisive question of Judaism.18

His diaries and letters from the years he spent studying in Berlin and Bern, including his extended stay with Walter Benjamin in Muri, Switzerland, from roughly 1914 to 1919 are full of his thoughts about mathematics, often in direct relation to mysticism. As he reflects on the nature of the “Ehrfurcht” that is associated with the mystical experience (i.e., of a man, the messiah, or God “hinter dem . . . der ‘große Abgrund’ gähnt”), he is reminded of the mathematical paradox that emerges in a book by Edgar Zilsel entitled Das Anwendungsprob-lem: Ein philosophischer Versuch über das Gesetz der großen Zahlen und die Induktion, which he bought in Munich while visiting Benjamin (see Tagebücher 314). In a diary entry from August 15, 1916, he remarks on the “antinomische Sätze, die beide gleich richtig sind und nur vom göttlichen Mathematiker aus absolut gewertet werden könnten: das Wahrscheinlichste geschieht, oder das Unwahrscheinlichste geschieht” (Tagebücher 372). The issue here is the parallel between mysticism and the paradoxes of higher mathematics. He himself says shortly thereaf-ter that he moves between the disciplines: “Ich weiß sofort, wenn ich mathematisch aufgelegt bin oder historisch, judaistisch, prophetisch oder sonstwie” (Tagebücher 373).

Although over time Scholem becomes less and less concentrated on the study of mathematics as such, key problems absorb him, for example, the relationship between intuition (Anschauung) and pure conceptual or definitional thinking. In this, he is addressing a fundamentally Kantian issue, since he is raising the synthetic nature of mathematical knowledge. That is, there is a difference between deriving knowledge from concepts that cannot be intuited (space with more than 3 dimensions, e.g.) and knowledge that combines intuitions and concepts. In a sense this problem parallels reflection on divine and human knowledge.

In his long and detailed summaries of conversations with Benjamin, mathematics is a regular topic, both in its own right and in relation to other phenomena, e.g., myth and philosophy. Discussing the flow

18See Von Berlin 87. Note in the following discussion citations will differ in spellings of key terms from the Hebrew.

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of temporality and the difficulty of determining its directionality, he addresses specifically the phenomenon at the heart of differential calculus: “Auch über die Richtung krummer Linien ergeben sich sehr schwierige Dinge, durch die zwar willkürliche, aber doch den Menschengeist befriedigende und ihm als selbstverständlich ers-cheinende Einsetzung der Tangentenrichtung als Kurvenrichtung” (Tagebücher 390). This captures the significance of the procedure of the infinitesimal: It allows us to calculate the direction of a curve, a procedure that combines the attributes of difficulty, satisfaction, randomness, and self-evidence. Not by chance, he follows this with the comment: “All dies hängt natürlich sehr mit dem Problem der Geschichte zusammen,” an issue that, he adds, occupies Benjamin deeply (Tagebücher 391). Indeed, lest there be any doubt that he had considerable knowledge of differential calculus: “Nach acht Monaten Knopp [professor of mathematics in Berlin] weitergearbeitet, die partielle Differentiation, auf diese Weise wieder richtig in die Sache gestiegen, auch alles verstanden. fxy=fyx” (Tagebücher 412). In the very next sentence, without transition, he mentions his work on Genesis.

On November 14, 1916 he proposes a possible essay that would attempt a “mathematische Theorie der Wahrheit” (Tagebücher 418). If being is multiple and changing, and if truth can be considered a function of being (y=f(x), i.e. truth = f (being)), then he concludes:

Da der Begriff eines Dinges als die Richtung seiner Wahrheit auf Gott bezeichnet werden kann, so ergibt sich hieraus, wenn wir ferner den Umfang eines Begriffes als sein Quadrat definieren, folgendes: Der Begriff der Wahrheit ist sie selber, denn der Begriff ist die Tangente der Wahrheit und die Grade ihre eigene Tangente in jedem Punkte. Der Quotient von Zuwachs an Wahrheit durch Zuwachs an Sein wird die gemeinsame Linie zweier Wahrheiten charakterisieren und sein Limes den Inbegriff ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und ihre Grenze: den Begriff. Was nicht ist, ist nicht wahr, denn zum Sein 0 gehört nach der Gleichung y = αt die Wahrheit 0. (Tagebücher 418)

Here he attempts to conceive of the relationship of truth to being not as correspondence but as differentially related, with their relationship captured by concepts. Truth approaches being, and can be determined, but the identity of the two makes no sense (because the denominator would be zero). Our concepts name this infinitessimal approach. This is “eine höchst interessante und durchaus nicht spielerische Unter-suchung” that would yield “das wahrhafte Lehrbuch der Logik und Wissenschaftslehre, das erst der Messias schreiben wird, das sachlichste und metaphysischste Buch der Weltliteratur” (Tagebücher 418). We can

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recall the comment referred to at the beginning of this essay: “Jener mathematische Mystiker oder mystische Mathematiker—er wird gewiß ein Jude sein. Er wird der Messias sein” (Tagebücher 11 July 1916, 353). Thus, he himself did not go on to compose this book. Instead, he turned to the study of kabbalistic writings. Might we not say, however, that in them he found such “world literature,” i.e., literature of and about the truth of the world that combines mysticism and mathemat-ics? Hence, we can turn to some passages dealing with central issues in the kabbala.

We should first recall that Scholem went to Munich after the war and wrote his dissertation on the philosophy of language of the kabbala. This move was not unrelated to his earlier studies, even if it came at the expense of explicit work in mathematics. Consider, for example, the diary entry from November 18, 1916, in which the connection is made between math and language:

Man kann durchaus mit Recht sagen, daß hier [in der Thora] die Wahrheit eine stetige Funktion der Sprache sei. Die Wahrheit ist die innere Form des Satzes oder Wortes, und wenn das Wort geändert wird um ein Differntial auch nur, so wird die Wahrheit eine andere, nämlich die innere Form des neuen Wortes . . . Es ist noch möglich, ein tiefes gemeinsames Zentrum beider [der Wahrheit und der Sprache] anzugeben, die Tangente der beiden: den zugrundeliegenden gemeinsamen Begriff. (Tagebücher 421)

Thus, he contemplates the name for a book on this topic: “Über die mathematische Theorie der Wahrheit oder ‘Über die innere Form der hebräischen Sprache’” (Tagebücher 422–23). Language and mathemat-ics in the kabbala and his work enter into a dialectical relationship. When he calls for his friend Grete Lissauer to embrace the dialectic in November 1916, he is likewise referring to himself:

Die Dialektik kann kein bloßes Luftgespinst sein, sie hat irgenwelche außer-ordentlich innerlichen und wichtigen Beziehungen zur Wahrheit, und man kann nur sagen: Das größte Unglück ist, über der Mystik die Mathematik zu vergessen, wenn man einmal gehört hat, daß sie existiert. Nur der Einfältige darf undialektisch sein, nicht aber Grete Lissauer, die die Kraft und Größe der Mathematik an Leib und Seele jederzeit spüren kann und zeitweilig auch schon gespürt hat. (Tagebücher 426)

This complex dialectical relationship is (unsurprisingly) not to be found in the study of mathematics itself. Hence he decries: “es war entsetzlich [den Herren Mathematikstudenten] zuzuhören. Ich habe ja so ungefähr gar keine Beziehung zu den Mathematikstudierenden”

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(Tagebücher 435). Rather, it will lie at the heart of the Jewish mystical tradition.

Earlier we saw that Scholem’s reflections on awe (Ehrfurcht) led him to thoughts on the book dealing with “huge numbers.” It was in that context that, to my knowledge, he first mentioned a central concept when he said concerning the Mysterium Gottes: “Es ist vielleicht kein Wunder, daß die Kabbala Gott als אין ףוס [en-sof, das Unendliche] bezeichnet. אין ףוס [en-sof] ist eben das, was jenseits jeder Grenze ist, was nicht genannt werden kann” (Tagebücher 372). Let us explore both the significance of this central concept of Jewish mysticism for Scholem and the way he characterizes this “limit.”

“All kabbalistic systems have their origin in a fundamental distinc-tion regarding the problem of the Divine,” namely that God can be thought of in the abstract, with reference to his own nature, or in his relation to creation and “[i]n order to express this unknowable aspect of the Divine the early kabbalists of Provence and Spain coined the term Ein-Sof (‘Infinite’).”19 Because it cannot be traced back to a translation of a Latin or Arabic term, this idea of the hidden God who “extends without end” could be considered a foundational and unique aspect of Jewish thought. But it becomes even more signifi-cant when connected to the other part of the distinction: since God can only be known through contemplating creation, a paradoxical relationship has been established. “In kabbalistic teaching the transi-tion of Ein-Sof to ‘manifestation,’ or what might be called ‘God the Creator,’ is connected to the question of the first emanation and its definition” (Kabbalah 90). Although many of Scholem’s reflections attend to the nature of the ten Sefirot (singular Sefirah), the numbers or divine epithets and stages of emanation and creation, what con-cerns us here is the way this very “act” of creation and its paradoxes echo the fundamental ideas about nothingness and reality—including their mathematical grounding—which we have seen in Cohen and Rosenzweig.20 Everything revolves around capturing the fundamental paradoxes: “the Sefirot are both identical with the essence of God and also separated from Him” (Kabbalah 102). This is not just one among

19Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co, 1974) 88 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Kabbalah).

20Benjamin Lazier deals with these topics in his excellent study, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008). He shows that Scholem intersected with other debates about pantheism and heresy. See especially Chapters 11 and 12, which touch only fleetingly on the mathematical elements of Scholem’s work.

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many features of mysticism but it “ultimately became the backbone of Spanish kabbalistic teaching and of that basic system of mystical symbolism which had such important repercussions on the kabbalists’ view of the meaning of Judaism” (Kabbalah 99).21

The problem at the heart of kabbalistic mysticism, therefore, is that of representing the relationship and the leap between the primal nothing and being. The kabbala accomplished this in two ways:

The overall symbolic systems are based on both mathematical and organic imagery. In the system depending on mathematical concepts, which is some-times linked with images of light and rivers, the first Sefirah is nothingness, zero, and the second is the manifestation of the primordial point, which at this stage has no size but contains within it the possibility of measurement and expansion. Since it is intermediate between nothingness and being, it is called hathalat ha-yeshut (‘the beginning of being’). And since it is a central point it expands into a circle in the third Sefirah, or it builds around itself a “palace,” which is the third Sefirah. (Kabbalah 109)

Scholem presents the efforts of the Spanish kabbalist Cordovero to capture the paradoxes of the transition from nothing to being in remarkable terms, which deserves to be quoted at length:

Cordovero understood full well that the salient point of the whole theory of emanation was the transition from Ein-Sof to the Sefirah Keter [or first or “crown”] and he devoted great effort to its solution. The Sefirot, he argues, owe the source of their existence to Ein-Sof, but this existence is “hidden” in the same sense that the spark of fire is hidden in the rock until it is struck with metal. Moreover, this aspect of their existence is incomparably more rarified than their existence once they have been emanated to their respective places, for in their emanated existence they assume a totally new guise. Even in their ultimate, “hidden” mode of existence, however, when they are comprehended in the substance of Ein-Sof and united with it perfectly, they are nevertheless not truly identical with this substance, which apprehends them while remaining unapprehended by them. This being the case, should it be said that the first change in their ontological status takes place in their hidden existence or not until their manifest one? Cordovero avoided giving an unequivocal answer to this question, while at the same time developing the theory that even the highest aspects of the

21See also Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965) 35: “Most if not all Kabbalistic speculation and doctrine is concerned with the realm of the divine emanations or sefiroth, in which God’s creative power unfolds.” Because they are symbolized also in terms of language, they make a strong “analogy between Creation and Revelation” (36). Hereafter cited parenthetically in text as Kabbalah and its Symbolism.

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Keter which he called “the Keter of the Keter,” “the Keter of the Keter of the Keter,” and so forth, approach the substance of Ein-Sof asymptotically until the human intellect can no longer distinguish them. Nevertheless they retain an identity distinct from it, so that there is a kind of leap between Ein-Sof and their hidden existence within it that continually approaches infinity.22 (Kabbalah 149)

Consider also the parallel description from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

The creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God Himself. This is also a crisis of the hidden En-Sof who turns from repose to creation, and it is this crisis, creation and Self-Revelation in one, which constitutes the great mystery of theosophy and the crucial point for the understanding of the purpose of theosophical speculation. The crisis can be pictured as the break-through of the primordial will, but theosophic Kabbalism frequently employs the bolder metaphor of Nothing. The pri-mary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefiroth emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the ‘supreme crown’ of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible.23

This description calls to mind formulations by Hermann Cohen from the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, which Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky summarizes as follows: “Am Anfang steht . . . die ‘tiefste Not’ des denkenden Erkennens, der Abgrund des Nichts und die Erfahrung der Diskontinuität. Denken setzt mit anderen Worten voraus, daß . . . der ‘Kreuzweg des Nichts’ gewagt wird.”24 That this description con-nects him to Hegel, who in his Logik deals with calculus in order to explain the transition from nothing to being involved in every act of a particluar entity’s (Dasein’s) becoming, would lead to a broader set

22See also Lazier, God Interrupted 166–67.23Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books,

1961), 217 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Major Trends).24Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen: Jüdische

Werte, Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin: Vorwerk 8: 2000), 110.

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of associations between mathematics and dialectics.25 Scholem writes: “Here as elsewhere, mysticism, intent of formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instruments of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking” (Major Trends 218)—linked, we see, by the mathematics of the paradoxical infinitesi-mal. In the words of Lazier, Scholem translated “Cohen’s distinction [between the nothing of the zero and the negation of which originary thought could emerge] into the lexicon of the kabbalah.”26 Indeed, the mathematical terms are even clearer in an earlier passage where Scholem explores Cordovero’s paradoxical view of the infinite number of “aspects” (behinot) within each Sefirah or Keter: “He [Cordovero] therefore postulates that the behinot within Keter within Keter within Keter and so on, although they potentially continue ad infinitum, do not in fact reach an identity with the essence of the Emanator, so that the propinquity of Ein-Sof and Keter remains asymptotic. All this, of course, is stated from the point of view of created beings for even the supernal awakening of ‘aspects’ of the Will within the Will within the Will and so on does not reveal Ein-Sof, and it is this differential which comprises the leap from the essence of the Emanator to that of the emanated” (Kabbalah 114–15). We can thus say that the mathematical language employed here that makes more precise the imagery of the kabbalists is more than a “metaphor.” It is impossible to name the mystery of God and hence it is “knowable” only as mystic experience. But given our position within creation, we nonetheless have language to speak about the divine from our perspective. The language of the infinitesimal and differential, the tangent and the asymptotic line, is “appropriate” not because it captures the divine but because it expresses the paradox without collapsing distinctions into identities.

To appreciate the centrality of these issues for Scholem, we need to understand what drew him to the kabbala as “tradition” and to the history of Judaism as such. He argues in Kabbalah and its Symbolism that Judaism, more than other religions, is torn between two forces: the desire to “preserving the pure unity of God” and to grasping him as a “living reality” (Kabbalah and its Symbolism 89). The strongest drive to the former can be found in the mystical approach to the Ein-Sof “beyond” the limit of experience; and the latter in views of divine

25See the longest “Anmerkung” (by far) in Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, vol. 5 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 289–372.

26Lazier, God Interrupted 184.

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emanation. The kabbala, in short, was important because it was a prime example of how Judaism “called for a state of perfect balance between the two factors, and this balance has always been precarious” (Kabbalah and its Symbolism 89).27 That is, “to the Kabbalist the unity of God is manifested from the first as a living, dynamic unity, rich in content” (Kabbalah and its Symbolism 94). The abstract nothing is also infinite and neither identical with creation nor impossibly opposed. The kabbala embraces the paradox:

Thus the world of the Godhead, which the Kabbalists conceive as the dynamic world of the sefiroth, containing the infinite unity of divine being, not only in its hidden essence but also in its creative unfolding, must not be interpreted as a world of pure transcendence. Frequently it is that too, but the Kabbalists are essentially interested in showing how the world of the sefiroth is related to the world outside of God. (Kabbalah and its Symbolism 122)

The infinitesimal captures this paradox of unity and difference between a God that is “wholly Other” and the world of man. And with that formulation in mind, we can turn to the last figure, Karl Barth. This leap across faiths may not be as radical as it seems and, in fact, reveals a deep conceptual affinity. In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he points to the “far-reaching and highly illuminating similarity” between aspects of Sabbatianism and Christianity based on “the ancient Jewish paradox of the sufferings of God’s servant” and an “historical event which in turns draws its strength from the very fact of its paradoxality” (Major Trends 307). One might argue that in the interwar period, there are likewise striking affinities between Jewish and Christian thinkers who are attempting to use similar means to capture deep paradoxes of religious experience.

For Karl Barth, one could certainly not claim that calculus was necessary to give voice to his faith. But the persistent mathematical references that pervade the Römerbrief do offer a unique possibility for capturing the paradox of absolute distance and absolute closeness between God and humanity. Randi Rashkover’s work is one of the few studies that looks at the deeper methodological connections between these two thinkers, although her interest is in what she calls their “theopolitics” rather than in what we might call, borrowing the term from Steven J. Mailloux, their mathematical “theo-rhetoric.”28 Barth’s

27On the historical origins of this particular “balance” see Chapter 1 of Gershom Scholem, Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbalah (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962).

28Randi Rashkover, Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise (London: T&T Clark, 2005). Steven J. Mailloux, “Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Ballif (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, expected 2013).

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initial position, like Rosenzweig’s, had to skirt the same pantheistic-atheistic dangers he had seen for theology as a result of a centuries-long development (the fact that he later wrote a monumental work on the history of nineteenth-century theology demonstrates that he also knew that development had to be taken into account). He needed to avoid what he (reductively) saw as Scheiermacher’s “subjectivism” that defined the core of religious belief as individual feeling, since such a position, he felt, put the human at the center of religious experience instead of God as the source of faith. He also felt that he needed to avoid the collapse of theology into cultural history or anthropology and religion into an expression of human needs. The solution for Barth lay in the absolute objectivity of the divine Word, which in its pure Otherness nonetheless touches the world in the radical “events”—he uses the word Ereignis—of creation, revelation, Christ’s incarnation, and the saving grace of biblical faith. Like a comet streaking across our horizon from a beyond (tracing the form of a hyperbole, we will see below), faith disturbs our self-absorbed orbit. Barth even goes so far as to say that religion itself can no longer exist as we know it, for it can only lead us to the limit: “Religion auf der Schwelle, an der Wende zweier Welten” (Römerbrief 222). Only grace (Gnade) can per-form the mathematical leap across the “Todeslinie”: “Kein allmählicher Übergang, kein stufenmäßiger Aufstieg, keine Entwicklung etwa ist der Schritt über diese Grenze, sondern ein jäher Abbruch hier, ein unvermittelter Anfang eines ganz andern dort . . . ” (Römerbrief 222). Our being unfolds in time only out of these turns around such dif-ferentials. Man and God relate as limits.

Hence, one key element of Barth’s theology was the importance of eschatology—the understanding of “last things” not at the end of time but at the limit. Whereas the nineteenth century developed a largely teleological view of biblical temporality—i.e. a movement whereby God was revealed over time in (human) history—the early twentieth century discovered in the New Testament a wholly different view of time. And for this he needed, so to speak, a higher mathematics. For the early Christians, the “end was at hand”; it was about to break in upon them as the Kingdom of God. While some (like Schweitzer) saw in the failure of God’s advent the necessity to abandon such “mytho-logical” accounts, Barth insisted on maintaining an eschatological view which meant changing our conception of time. The “closeness of the end” only makes sense, according to Barth, if we abandon completely the teleological (and historical, unfolding, evolutionary) perspective of revelation. The “end,” i.e., “divine time,” is always “at

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hand” because the present cannot account for its own origin but is related to an infinite or eternal Otherness, even as it is infinitely, because absolutely qualitatively different from it. “The ‘last’ hour, the time of eternity, was not an hour which followed time. Rather at every moment in time we stood before the distinctive feature of the frontier of ‘qualified time.’”29 The paradox that this “other time” or “end time” or “new time” might always be breaking into our time with an infinite closeness and infinite distance, and had even become a real “event” in the Incarnation of Christ and the Word of the Bible, strikes our reason as a skandalon or offense, even as it makes up the root of all faith. Following the discussion of Rosenzweig, we can rep-resent this relationship mathematically as the relationship between a tangent and a curve. Time arises out of a timeless “now,” out of a point that is an infinitesimal nothing or, in Cohen’s terms, “intensive magnitude” (Christ’s death): “What comes before and after this instant of all instants, the surface that surrounds this point, which itself has no extension, is temporality” (Römerbrief 287). Divine time comes from “out of nowhere” and exists always on a different plane from the fall of human time. It can always, indeed is always, “touching” our time in the constant crises of revelation and although it is what has sent us on our present path it always stands in a dynamic tension to it.30

29From Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 635; as cited in Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931 (London: SCM Press, 1962) 78.

30See John H. Smith, Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012) 223.

The “other” origin of human time

Incarnation or resurrection of Christ

The “fall” of human time

Creation

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These various points of contact are the instances or instants of rev-elation of divine righteousness, the impossible sources (Ursprung) of knowledge, the places of reversal (Umkehrung), radical re-orientation (radikale Neuorientierung), and what Kierkegaard called the infinite qualitative difference (den unendlichen qualitativen Unterschied) between God and world (Römerbrief 66–73).

Barth brings together these key features of his theology at the opening of his commentary on Romans in a familiar image. On the one hand, he insists on the radical Otherness of the divine order. The descent of Christ into our world comes from another geometric plane: “Jesus als der Christus ist die uns unbekannte Ebene, die die uns bekannte senkrecht von oben durchschneidet” (Römerbrief 6). On the other, Christ’s appearance on earth, and especially his resurrec-tion, would be the point where the divine and the earthly touch. But they do so in a paradoxical way—time and again he refers to Christ as “das Paradoxon”—because they do not lose their ontologically opposite character in their point of contact:

In der Auferstehung berührt die neue Welt des Heiligen Geistes die alte Welt des Fleisches. Aber sie berührt sie wie die Tangente einen Kreis, ohne sie zu berühren, und gerade indem sie sie nicht berührt, berührt sie sie als ihre Begrenzung, als neue Welt. So ist die Auferstehung das Ereignis vor den Toren Jerusalems im Jarhe 30, sofern sie dort ‘eintrat’. (Römerbrief 6)

With this construction Barth argues against all previous theologies that would see any kind of “Verschmelzung zwischen Gott und Mensch,” or the rise of the divine in man, or the pouring of the divine into the human vessel (Ergieβung Gottes ins menschliche Wesen). Any theology that posits an identity between man and God leads to the death of God. Having experienced the nothingness of that (Hegelian) God of the philosophers who is drawn down to the human level, having recognized it as in fact Nicht-Gott, having seen that it is better to challenge such a being rather than support him with “proofs” and absolute characteris-tics—in short, having reached a stage of atheism (Römerbrief 13f)—it is now time, according to Barth, for the affirmation (Bejahung) of “the wholly Other” (“der ganz Andere”; Römerbrief 15), in all its dialectical and paradoxical, i.e., non-idenitical relationality to man.

Let us consider a few passing references to the way Barth turns, not overwhelmingly but consistently and self-reflexively, to the mathematics of the infinitesimal as his way of describing this indescribable event. Consider, for example, his approach to the “turn” from the “old” to the “new” being that takes place for the faithful through the crucifixion. He struggles through a series of images to capture the phenomenon

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of movement, which was for Cohen at the basis of reality itself. Barth says that in Christ’s death and my justification through faith

erscheint mir also (als Nicht-Erscheinendes!) dieses Gegenüber, dieses mich erkennende X, der Punkt, von wo aus ich negiert, als “alter” Mensch rekognosziert bin, und der eben darum ein positiver Punkt, ein positives X sein muß. Dieses unanschauliche positive X “gegenüber” dem Kreuzestod, welchen Christus für mich stirbt und welchen ich mit ihm sterbe, ist nun offenbar die Angel, in der sich die überlegene Wendung vom alten zum neuen Menschen vollzieht. Nur in einer Reihe von sich widersprechenden Momentbildern (Vogel im Flug!) läßt sich diese Wendung beschreiben. (Sie ist also weder in einem von diesen Momenten für sich, noch in der Reihe dieser Momente gegeben, sie ist die also solche nie und nirgends gegebene Bewegung selbst!) (Römerbrief 178)

The key trademark of the need for a higher math is here: the demand to capture the most real movement out of the transition from the non-X to the positive-X. Thus, the “Echtheit der Bewegung von Adam zu Christus” breaks the “so vollständig, so lückenlos in sich geschlossener Kreis” of the old world (Römerbrief 166) and places us, as subjects of faith, at the “Nullpunkt zwischen zwei im Unendlichen auslaufenden Hyperbelarmen” (Römerbrief 125). This image is astoundingly similar to the new mathematics of an open infinity that revelation introduces for Rosenzweig (see the passage cited above, Stern 284). And just as hyperboles are defined by their infinite approximation to their limit lines, which they never cross, so too the realms of grace and sin are, “mathematisch gesprochen, nicht nur Punkte auf verschiedenen Ebenen, sondern Punkte in verschiedenen Räumen . . . Zwischen beiden ist ein Vergehen und Neuwerden des Menschen” (Römerbrief 170–71).

In conclusion, we can say that human talk about God, also called theology, tries to formulate the relationship between the finite and the infinite. The finite cannot just “add up” to the infinite, for that would make the infinite nothing more than a conglomerate of the finite, and thus not genuinely infinite. We, as finite beings seem to have the capacity to contemplate the infinite, as Augustine says at the beginning of his Confessions. Yet, the reduction of the infinite to the finite leads to pantheism or atheism. Thus, Barth asks: “Wie sollte das Endliche—und wäre es Religion höchsten Grades—das Unendliche zu fassen vermögen?” and then he quotes Calvin: “Finitum non capax infiniti” (Römerbrief 193). Here, however, we might recall Cohen’s statement cited above about the power of the infinitesimal: While the finite might not be capable of the infinite, “Nur das Unendlichkleine

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vermag es” (Logik 113; his emphasis). The goal of this essay was simply to explore one modality of giving expression to a reality of religious experience, one attempt to represent infinitude. The turn to math-ematics and specifically to the conceptions of the infinitesimal and the limit, largely inspired by Cohen’s philosophy, was a way of giving linguistic and conceptual form to the fundamental paradox of the opposition, the unbridgeable gap between these poles that nonetheless approach or touch tangentially. The “rhetorical” use of mathematics does not contradict, indeed it supports, Rosenzweig’s claim that “neues Denken” really requires a new “Methode des Sprechens” rather than a method of thought (Zweistromland 151). Like Cohen’s “Korrela-tion,” it is a means “dem Glauben die Zunge zu lösen” (Zweistromland 215). Moreover, from the perspective of this form of mathematical representation—which stretches from the seventeenth century to the twentieth—the relationship between Jewish and Protestant theology at least in the 1920s is not identical but differential, or tangential, or co-relational, their differences infinitely vast and infinitesimally small.

University of Waterloo

Intensive Infinity: Walter Benjamin’s Reception of Leibniz

and its Sources❦

Paula L. Schwebel

References to Leibniz’s monad appear at crucial points in Walter Benjamin’s writings, from his early “metaphysical” work to his late “materialist” theses on history.1 In each case, Benjamin appeals to the monad as the unique and total expression of his main philosophical point. He writes to Florens Christian Rang in 1923 that Leibniz’s monad “in its totality [. . .] seems to me to embrace the summa of a theory of ideas.”2 Almost two decades later, in the theses “On the Concept of History,” he emphasizes that “[t]he historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad.”3 The persistence and gravity of these references make it important to look deeper into the meaning and sources of the monad in Benjamin’s work. The topic warrants especially careful interpretation because Benjamin’s monad confronts us as a cipher. Benjamin invokes it, with little argumentation, as the privileged expression for numerous


1The themes discussed in this article are developed at greater length in my doctoral dissertation, Walter Benjamin’s Monadology (2011). I have benefited greatly from the comments of Rebecca Comay, Andrew Cutrofello, Bob Gibbs, Willi Goetschel, Eduard Iricinschi, Vivian Liska, and Liliane Weissberg.

2Walter Benjamin, “Letter to Florens Christian Rang, December 9, 1923,” in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno; trans. Manfred R. Jacobsen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 224–25.

3Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” in Selected Writings, eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith; 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003) IV: 396 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SW).

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philosophical ideas: it is at once the summa of a theory of ideas, the salvation of induction,4 and the object of materialist historiography.

If it seems paradoxical that Benjamin invokes rationalist metaphysics in order to “redeem the phenomena,” or that Leibniz—the thinker of pre-established harmony—is called upon as an ally in rupturing the continuum of universal history, this perplexity is scarcely abated when Benjamin’s interpretation is traced back to its supposed source in Leibniz. Indeed, Benjamin seems to have read little of Leibniz’s work. He refers to Leibniz as the philosopher of the Monadology, and he appeals to the Discourse on Metaphysics in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Origin of German Tragic Drama (OT 47–48). This sug-gests at least basic familiarity with two major texts of Leibniz. In the Verzeichnis der gelesenen Schriften, however, not a single text by Leibniz is cited.5 A search through the reconstruction of Benjamin’s library, recently published by Antiquariat Herbert Blank, also yields no results.6 Leibniz may have been in the atmosphere of German philosophy departments during Benjamin’s student years, but there is no record that he ever attended a course on Leibniz, or even on early modern philosophy.7

4Benjamin describes the representation of phenomena in the monad as their “salva-tion”; see Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne; introduc-tion by George Steiner (Verso, London, 1998) 33 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as OT). For Adorno, this was one of Benjamin’s most noteworthy accomplishments. He writes to Benjamin in December 1934: “In your book on Baroque Drama you suc-ceeded in salvaging induction.” Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Henri Lonitz (New York: Polity Press, USA, 1999) 62.

5Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppen-häuser, with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem; 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) VII: 437–76 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as GS). I am not suggesting that Benjamin’s own index of the texts that he read should be seen as comprehensive, or that the absence of Leibniz from this list is definitive proof that Benjamin had no acquaintance with Leibniz’s work. The index is nonetheless a useful resource, since it includes various twentieth-century interpretations of Leibniz, which influenced Benjamin’s reading, according to my argument.

6Walter Benjamin and Detlev Schöttker, In Walter Benjamins Bibliothek. Gelesene, zitierte, rezensierte Bücher und Zeitschriften in der Edition, in der sie Benjamin kannte und nutzte. Do-kumentation einer verlorenen Bibliothek Teil I (Stuttgart: Antiquariat Herbert Blank, 2006).

7At the University of Bern, where Benjamin wrote his doctoral dissertation, he took graduate seminars in philosophy and psychology with Anna Tumarkin, Paul Häberlin, Harry Maync, and Richard Herbertz. The complete list of Benjamin’s graduate courses can be found in Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 3. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, ed. Uwe Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008) 298–314.

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The puzzle of Benjamin’s Leibniz could simply stop here, with the answer that this is just another indication of his magpie’s relation-ship to the history of philosophy. This is exactly what George Steiner says, for instance, in his introduction to the English translation of the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels:

Benjamin was not, in any technical sense, a philosopher. Like other lyric thinkers, he chose from philosophy those metaphors, dramas of argument and intimations of systematic totality—whether Platonic, Leibnizian or Crocean—which best served, or rather which most suggestively dignified and complicated his own purpose.8

This understanding of Benjamin’s monad as a “metaphor” and of Ben-jamin himself as a “lyric thinker” tells more about the critical failure to respond to the difficulties of his thought than about Benjamin’s work itself. Benjamin does not assume the anaemic position that meaning must be immediately and universally intelligible. But he does not thereby withdraw from philosophy into the merely aesthetic or hybrid domain of the “lyric thinker.” Indeed, Benjamin’s monadology demands philosophical interpretation. But in order to understand its place in his work, we cannot simply compare Leibniz’s philosophical arguments with Benjamin’s texts. Such interpretive idealism would ignore both the distortions of his reading, as well as the historical mediations through which he encountered Leibniz.

As I show in this essay, Benjamin was engaged with two extremes of Leibniz reception in early twentieth-century Germany. On the one hand, he was immersed in the mathematical-theological orientation of Hermann Cohen, who interpreted Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus as the generation of objective knowledge from intensive functions. On the other hand, Benjamin read a single secondary source on Leibniz by Heinz Heimsoeth. Heimsoeth saw Leibniz as the heir to a medi-eval German tradition of Christian mysticism, and he interpreted the monad as the microcosm of the infinite spirit within finite individu-als. An investigation into these sources reveals a face of Leibniz that is inaccessible via a neutral reading of his texts. The questions that emerge from the synthesis of these extremes will provide our point of entry into the meaning of Benjamin’s monad.

The first section of my argument will be devoted to the divergent interpretations of Leibniz that Benjamin discovered in Cohen and Heimsoeth. Even though Cohen and Heimsoeth offer radically differ-

8George Steiner, “Introduction” to OT 7–24, esp. 22–23.


ent portrayals of Leibniz, they both read Leibniz as having innovated the reconciliation of the infinite and the finite within the monad. As I will argue in section two, Benjamin’s interpretation of Leibniz also focuses on Leibniz’s notion of an immanent infinity. But Benjamin does not read this as the microcosm of the Absolute within finite creation (Heimsoeth), or as the infinite task by which reason constructs its objects (Cohen). Rather, Benjamin interprets Leibniz’s abbreviation of infinity within finite beings as a symptom of secularization, whereby an unfulfilled yearning for transcendence is forcibly redirected toward contingent nature. Infinity persists within this world in what could be described as an inverted metaphysics: although reason is denied access to the transcendence of the heavens, in its pursuit of a fundamental grounding for contingent experience, thinking is drawn into an abyss of infinite analysis.

§1 Benjamin’s Sources: Hermann Cohen and Heinz Heimsoeth

In the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin interprets the Baroque Trauerspiel in the historical context of the Thirty Years’ War and the Schism of the Church. His reading brings out the intense melan-choly that resulted from the Reformation and the Lutheran denial of “good works.” According to Benjamin, longing for redemption was not muted so much as redirected toward the saeculum.9 Taking Leibniz as the chief representative of Baroque metaphysics, Benjamin interprets the Leibnizian “monad” as corresponding to the intensifi-cation of melancholy yearning in things, rather than as little souls or microcosms of the divine in nature. In Benjamin’s reading, Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is cast as the expression, in mathematical terms, of the redirection of infinite succession into the restricted space of the natural world. In this view, contingent being becomes the object of infinite analysis. But what should have its ultimate solution in the idea of God is denied a theological fulfillment. Without its anchor in theology, theoretical knowledge is pursued into the abyssal depths of spiritless nature.

Benjamin’s singular reading of Leibniz was mediated by two anti-thetical sources. Throughout his university education, Benjamin was

9Benjamin describes the displacement of religious longing onto the immanent world of nature as the “keystone” of Baroque expression: “religious aspirations did not lose their importance: it was just that this century denied them a religious fulfillment, demanding of them, or imposing upon them, a secular solution instead” (OT 79).

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deeply engaged with Cohen’s work. Together with Gershom Scholem, he studied Cohen’s seminal text, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung.10 Their letters record a mutual project to investigate the “mathematical theory of messianism,” which reflected Cohen’s core idea of the generation of reality from an infinitesimal method.11 On the other hand, the Verzeichnis der gelesenen Schriften indicates that Benjamin consulted only one secondary source on Leibniz—an essay by Heimsoeth published in Kantstudien in 1917—“Leibniz’ Weltanschauung als Ursprung seiner Gedankenwelt.”12 The position of these sources in relation to each other is quite revealing, and not only in the realm of ideas: Heimso-eth, who was a graduate student of Cohen’s at Marburg, became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933.13 From his position as the dean at the University of Cologne (awarded that same year), he developed a series of “metaphysical” interpretations of German philosophy, which helped to destroy the influence and reputation of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism.14At issue here are not only two divergent interpre-

10In his memoir, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Scholem describes how he spent many hours with Benjamin discussing and analyzing Kants Theorie der Erfahrung during their time together in Switzerland (1918–1919). Scholem relates how disappointed they were by Cohen’s interpretation of Kant, and how they eventually gave up their study ([Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975] 76–9). While Benjamin complains about Cohen’s one-sidedly logical, and un-dialectical approach to philosophy in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (46, 177), he frequently returns to Cohen’s ideas as a way of defining and differentiating his own thought. The definitive study on Benjamin’s engagement with Cohen is Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen: jüdische Werte, kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000).

11Between 1916 and 1918, Benjamin’s correspondence with Scholem focused on the relationship between mathematics and language, and the relationship of mathematics and language to “Zion.” See Benjamin’s Correspondence 81–82.

12Heinz Heimsoeth, “Leibniz’ Weltanschauung als Ursprung seiner Gedankenwelt: Zum 200. Todestage des Denkers am 14. November 1916,” Kantstudien (1917): 365–95. For the reference to Heimsoeth, see the list of works read by Benjamin in Benjamin, GS VII: 443.

13Helmut Holzhey’s article includes a brief sketch of Heimsoeth’s period as a “Mar-burger,” as well as his eventual turning away from Cohen’s school; see Helmut Holzhey, “Die Leibniz-Rezeption im ‘Neukantianismus’ der Marburger Schule,” Studia Leibnitiana, Stuttgart; suppl. XXVI (1986): 289–300. See also Ingeborg Heidemann, “Metaphysikge-schichte und Kantinterpretation im Werk Heinz Heimsoeths,” Kantstudien 67 (1976): 291–312, and H. J. de Vleeschauwer, “L’œuvre de Monsieur Heinz Heimsoeth de 1911 à 1924,” Kantstudien 67 (1976): 313–32.

14Heimsoeth’s growing impatience with Cohen’s critical idealism is evident in his correspondence with Nicolai Hartmann; see Nicolai Hartmann and Heinz Heimso-eth, Nicolai Hartmann und Heinz Heimsoeth im Briefwechsel, eds. Frida Hartmann and Renate Heimsoeth (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1978). After the publication of Heimsoeth’s article on Leibniz (the same one which Benjamin read), he shares with Hartmann his incredulity and disappointment at the lack of response from the Marburg school,


tations of Leibniz, but also two ways of understanding the national spirit of German philosophy, and Leibniz’s place within the canon. Cohen’s reading of Leibniz exemplifies his attempt to construct a syn-thesis of German philosophy and Jewish literary sources. On the one hand, he emphasizes that Leibniz studied Maimonides, and developed some of his mature metaphysical concepts on the basis of this read-ing (a fact known to scholars since Foucher de Careil’s publication of Leibniz’s notes on Maimonides in 1861).15 On the other hand, Cohen’s Maimonidean reading of Leibniz does not simply affirm an ethnic conception of identity by introducing “Jewish” sources into the German canon. In fact, Cohen argues that Leibniz was a better interpreter of Maimonides than Spinoza, and he laments that if only Kant had become familiar with Jewish thought through Leibniz, he would not have condemned Judaism.16 Moreover, although Cohen’s reading of Leibniz looks forward to Kant’s transcendental idealism, he appeals to Maimonides’s concept of the “negation of privation” in order to purify the residual “mythology” in Kant’s distinction between “things-in-themselves” and ideas of reason.

Heimsoeth, for his part, was repelled by the identification of Ger-man thought with rationalism. His work on the history of philoso-phy strove to refresh the streams of mysticism that once irrigated Scholastic thought.17 According to his argument, the Enlightenment

emphasizing particularly Cohen and Cassirer: “Da imponiert mir eigentlich doch Cohen mehr, der, ebenso wie Cassirer, nicht ein Wort als Erwiderung oder Empfangsbestätigung geschickt hat” (December 1916, 253).

15A conservative Catholic thinker, Duke Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil pub-lished a book on Leibniz’s relationship to the Kabbalah, in an effort to ward off the threat of “Spinozistic atheism”; see Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques avec les manuscrits inédits de Leibniz. Leibnitii observationes ad Rabbi Mosis Maimonidis librum qui inscribitur Doctor perplexorum (Paris: A. Durand, 1861). Foucher de Careil published Leibniz’s study notes on Maimonides in French and Latin. For an English translation and commentary, see Lenn E. Goodman, “Maimonides and Leibniz,” Journal of Jewish Studies 31/2 (1980): 214–36.

16The issue turns on Spinoza’s understanding of substance as logical “independence,” rather than as activity. Cohen’s critique of Spinoza is that this account of substance does not allow for God’s freedom from necessary laws of nature. Moreover, this also renders all worldly becoming as the mere accident of the one independent substance, i.e., God. Cohen argues that Kant’s mistaken understanding of the “Jewish God” is based on his reading of Spinoza. He suggests that it could have been avoided if only Kant had read Leibniz’s interpretation of Maimonides. See Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) 331.

17“Leibniz’ Weltanschauung,” 367.

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marks the degeneration of a once flourishing tradition of German speculative metaphysics. Rather than depicting Leibniz as Germany’s late contribution to the development of scientific naturalism (after Descartes and Spinoza), Heimsoeth places him at the highpoint of the German Christian mystical tradition. Heimsoeth’s emphasis on Leibniz’s inheritance from his mystical forbears seeks to demonstrate the continuity between Christian thought and enlightened modernity, as well as to point out the Germanic origins of this tradition.18 Despite clear contrasts between their motives and philosophical orientations, Heimsoeth and Cohen both locate the historical significance of Leibniz in his reconciliation of the infinite and the finite within the monad. Whereas Heimsoeth reads the “infinite in the finite” as the microcosm of the Absolute, or as the soul’s capacity to receive revelation,19 Cohen interprets the “intensive infinity” within the monad in terms of an “infinitesimal method,” which generates objects from pure concepts of reason.20 These antithetical readings both argue that Leibniz grounds finite objects, or extensive magnitude, in infinity. In other words, infin-ity is not to be understood as an extension of finitude, but rather as its source. Likewise, finitude is not substantial and independent, but rather is a limitation of the infinite. Heimsoeth explains this structure in terms of the immediate causal relationship between an infinite cre-ator and his creatures, whose souls, although finite, have the capacity to receive the idea of the infinite. Cohen explains the same structure in terms of the relationship between an infinite method and its finite results, which are not mere extension, but have their reality (or the conditions of their validity) in principles of reason.

Heimsoeth’s approach to Leibniz as a Christian metaphysician turns on a distinction that he draws between “Oriental” thought (in which he includes Greek, medieval Arab and Jewish thinkers), and what he determines to be a single tradition of German-Christian philosophy from Meister Eckhart to Hegel. The paradigmatic distinction between the Oriental and the Christian, according to Heimsoeth, is that the former establishes a rigid dualism between matter and spirit, while

18For a more developed version of his argument, see Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Ramon Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994) 53.

19“Leibniz’ Weltanschauung,” 385.20For a comprehensive account of Cohen’s Leibniz reception, see Andrea Poma, The

Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, trans. John Denton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) 39–41.


the latter unites these opposing principles in the one Being of God and nature. According to Heimsoeth, the first decisive stage in the development of Christian metaphysics occurred with Duns Scotus’s argument for the univocity of Being—the claim that the predicate of existence can be ascribed to both God and nature. This thought of the unity of Being was the driving force behind Eckhart’s claim that God’s Being is the fullness of reality, rather than an abstract unity, conceived in opposition to the multiplicity of the natural world. Whereas an “Oriental” dualism persists in the definition of Being as an abstract negation of becoming, the Christian conception of Being as full positivity takes up the multiplicity of becoming within itself. The apparently contradictory attributes of the natural world are sublated and preserved in the Godhead. According to Heimsoeth’s historical reconstruction, Leibniz’s turn to the infinitesimal has its origins in the quest to unify the disjointed fragments of the world in God’s Being. Heimsoeth delineates a path to Leibniz leading from Nicholas of Cusa’s doctrine of the “coincidentia oppositorum,” which asserts that all contradictory properties of things are resolvable into a unity when analysis is extended infinitely: “It is only in the finite that members exclude each other; in perfect infinity everything falls together into one .”21 One implication of the Cusan’s doctrine that Heimsoeth discerns in Leibniz’s metaphysics is that contingent matter is not brute and indeterminate, but must be read and interpreted: it is only by immersing ourselves in the details that we progress toward knowledge of the Absolute.

In showing the significance of the univocity of Being for Christian metaphysics, Heimsoeth establishes the difference between the “Ori-ental” God as an abstract Being, or mere negativity, and the Christian living God as the fullest and most concrete reality, which unfolds or expresses itself in the multiplicity of creaturely life. His argument also reveals two distinct conceptions of the infinite, which he sche-matizes as an opposition between the Greek prioritization of body, and the Christian conception of the infinite as ontologically prior to the finite—as in fact creating the finite.22 The Greek prioritization of the finite over the infinite reflects the idea of form as a limiting principle, which gives shape to indefinite matter. Consequently, the Greeks shunned the infinite as an endless regress in which form

21Six Great Themes 57.22“Leibniz’ Weltanschauung” 378–79.

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disintegrates. The Christian idea of the infinite, by contrast, is one of simultaneous presence or perfection. The privative conception of infinity as formless and indeterminate prevailed throughout Scho-lasticism until Scotus’s discovery of the soul’s capacity to receive the infinite, which established an entirely new conception of the infinite within the finite: “God can descend to us only if our nature has the capacity to receive him.”23 For Heimsoeth, Leibniz’s monad completes the development of the Christian concept of infinity, since it fully dissolves the opposition between finite body and infinite spirit with a new definition of substance as the actualization of the infinite in the individual soul, or monad.24 Heimsoeth sees Leibniz as a turn-ing point in Christian thought since his monad combines two ideas that show it to be decisively different from the Greek. The first is the valuation of the concrete individual over the abstract universal, and the second is the understanding of the individual itself as the locus for receiving the infinite, or as a microcosm of the Absolute.25 The monad is not a particle of matter (an atom), nor is it a universal form (like the Platonic eidos); each monad is unique, and reflects the whole world within itself from the standpoint of its individuality. Accord-ing to Heimsoeth’s argument, the combination of these two ideas shows Leibniz’s concept of substance to be definitively rooted in the Judeo-Christian understanding of creation. It is only in the context of an immediate causal connection between creator and creature that individual monads can be both isolated from the outer world (“windowless” according to Leibniz’s expression), and also mirrors of God, reflecting his infinite activity within themselves.26 The soul is a microcosm of God and the world because all of its perceptions are the immediate result of God’s continuous fulguration, rather than mere impressions of external objects.27

It is worth dwelling on the concept of creation and the idea of life that emerges as a result of Heimsoeth’s interpretation. According to Heimsoeth, the Judeo-Christian narrative of creation vivifies the lifeless, indeterminate matter of antiquity. It is the concept of creation, argues Heimsoeth, which allows Leibniz to overcome dualism and to explain

23Six Great Themes 94.24Six Great Themes 95.25“Leibniz’ Weltanshauung” 381, 385.26“Leibniz’ Weltanschauung” 384.27Heimsoeth’s argument is based on an interpretation of Leibniz’s “Discourse on

Metaphysics,” §28 (Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, Hackett: Indianapolis, 1989) 59.


how monads can mirror God’s infinite creative power. As creatures, monads are implanted with their own principle of life, which retains its simple unity, while exceeding any finite shape. In contrast to the mechanistic account of nature, which describes the world in terms of parts in motion, Leibniz sees nature as full of living creatures. Monads are not dead (extensive) parts of a machine, but they are sources of activity in themselves. As such, they are both simple (they cannot be subdivided, as extensive magnitude can) and infinitely complex, since they are incessantly unfolding and transforming themselves.

Cohen’s reading of Leibniz is the antithesis of Heimsoeth’s. For Cohen, the meaning of the infinite within the finite is in no way the microcosm of the Absolute within the individual, nor is monadic “inten-sity” interpreted in terms of living force. Rather, Cohen accounts for the infinite within the finite in terms of the rational construction of objectivity, which generates finite results from an infinite method. In the second edition of Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (the text which Benja-min studied with Scholem in 1918), Cohen added a section describing the significant contribution of Leibniz to the development of critical idealism. Whereas Descartes identifies substance with extension, Cohen suggests that Leibniz’s discovery of intensive magnitudes enables him to overcome Cartesian dualism, and to ground all substance in the constitutive activity of thought. If extension is only the appearance of inertia that results from an infinitesimal degree of activity, then any given quantity can be generated, in a mathematically determin-able continuum, from pure intensive functions of thought. Cohen’s “infinitesimal method” thus idealizes substance in two ways: in the first place, the constitutive component of reality is intensive magnitude, rather than material atoms. The infinitesimal has no extension, but it cannot be reduced to nothing, since there is a continuum between any given magnitude and zero. In the second place, Cohen argues that Leibniz (without knowing it himself) established the priority of law over substance: it is only according to the grounding principle of continuity that reality can be generated from an infinitesimal degree of sensation: “Thus the transcendental center of gravity was shifted in favour of the principle.”28 Cohen points to Leibniz and Maimonides as the two sources for this advance in reasoning, which he sees as

28Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin, F. Dümmler, 18711, 18852; Berlin, Bruno Cassirer, 19183; reprinted in Werke, vol. 1, I–III, hg. vom Hermann-Cohen-Archiv am Philosophischen Seminar Zürich, Hildesheim, G. Olms, 1987) 547, as cited in Poma, Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen 43.

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culminating in Kant’s grounding of phenomenal reality in the tran-scendental unity of apperception. Leibniz opened the path for critical idealism by distinguishing substance from absolute independence (i.e., Spinoza) and extension (i.e., Descartes’s “res extensa”). By establishing substance as activity, he took the first step towards Kant’s idea of the active contribution of reason in constituting reality.29 But if Leibniz accomplished the distinction between substance as independence and substance as activity, Maimonides had already originated a version of the transcendental argument with his distinction between negative attributes and the privation of negation.30 Maimonides’s distinction between negation and privation points to a kind of reality other than the positivity of existence—namely, the reality of original principles.

Cohen’s insight into the generative “nothings” of Grundsätze grows out of the Maimonidean distinction between the negation of something positive and the negation of privation. The negation of something positive is the negation of an existent being. The negation of priva-tion, on the other hand, negates only the apparent independence of phenomena by grounding these in transcendental principles.31 The laws of reason that constitute appearances are nothing for sensibility (they have no existence), but this does not establish the lesser reality of the law. Rather, the negation of the privative being of appearance leads reason to a higher affirmation of reality as constructed by laws of reason. The innovation of Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus lies here, according to Cohen: the infinitesimal is not the infinitely small mag-nitude that would result from the endless division of a body, resolving it into a vanishing quantity. On the contrary, it is the generation of reality from a constructive method, just as the curve of a circle can be plotted through the continuous application of a function.

Cohen’s interpretation of Leibniz may have its prehistory in Mai-monides, but it takes its orientation from Kant’s “anticipations of perception.”32 Kant argues that perceptible qualities like light, colour,

29Cohen writes that, “in conformity with the loftiness and maturity of thought that Leibniz achieved with his principle of living force, Kant was able to break away from all scholasticism with regard to the concept of substance, and to make it a presupposition for the concepts of relation. The position that Kant gave to substance as a precondition for causality and reciprocity of action tore away, as it were, the absolute independence of substance” (Religion of Reason 60).

30Cohen, Religion of Reason 61.31Cohen relates Maimonides’ distinction between the negation of positive attributes

and the negation of privation to the category of the originative principle, or Ursprung, developed in the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (cf. Religion of Reason 63).

32Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) A166–76/B207–18.


and sound admit of a degree of intensity, which Cohen takes to mean that quality is not merely an impingement of matter on sensible intu-ition, but can be constructed from pure concepts of reason. Accord-ing to Cohen, it is due to Leibniz’s recognition of the principle of continuity (i.e., that “there are no leaps in the manifold”) that reality can be generated from an infinitesimal method. Cohen suggests that Leibniz implicitly recognized the primacy of the law in the principle of continuity, a primacy that would first become explicit in Kant.33 But Cohen’s argument goes further than Kant’s in idealizing the ground of possible experience. Whereas, according to Cohen’s argument, Kant undermines the autonomous purity of reason by grounding cognition in a transcendent “Ding an sich,” Cohen grounds objective knowledge in original “hypotheses,” or norms of reason. These original, transcen-dental “nothings” lack the mythical implications of an all-powerful, creative Being, as well as the inert givenness of substantial “things,” which would be inaccessible to critique.34 Cohen’s infinitesimal method thus gives new meaning to the priority of the infinite over the finite: rather than pointing to the metaphysical priority of the infinitely pow-erful God over his creature, he shows the logical priority of rational principles over posited facts. The distinction between the account of creation as emanation from an infinitely powerful Being, and the logical understanding of the generation of reality from intensive func-tions clarifies what Cohen means by the purification of the residual mythology in German thought.

Cohen registers the difference between the “actual infinite” and the recursive, or “bad infinite,” by distinguishing between the infin-ity of a function and the infinite regress that results from dividing a body. A function is determinate or formed without being a finite body; this is because it generates a series of results in accordance with a principle, or law. As Cohen argues in his essay on the infinitesimal method, the rule-governed infinity of Leibniz’s calculus gives us the

33Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal Methode und seine Geschichte. Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntnisskritik (Berlin, 1883; Reprint: Werke, volume 5:1, 1984) 55–58; Kants Theorie der Erfahrung 540–548.

34The argumentative thrust of Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902) is to establish the objective validity of knowledge independently of intuition, or the relationship to a “given” object (System der Philosophie. Erster Teil, Berlin, 1902, 1914. Reprint of the second edition: Werke, volume 6 [hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as LE]). Cohen argues that thinking, if it is to be pure, must have its origin in itself. In this vein, he criticizes both the theological notion of Ursprung as creation (LE 80; cf. Reli-gion of Reason 59–70), and the metaphysical notion of a “given” object that transcends reason (LE 81–83).

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tools to conceptualize creation as the generation of form from an infinite process. One implication of this reading is that “outer sense” (space, geometrically understood) is entirely absorbed into “inner sense” (temporality, or sequence).35 A second implication is that the object of knowledge is stripped of its exteriority, both in the sense of having a causal impact on sensibility, and in the sense of having independent being in itself. “Objectivity” no longer means substantial independence from mind; rather, it indicates the theoretically valid result of methodological generation. By grounding extension in an infinite process, Cohen provides a parallel account for what Heimsoeth had described in terms of “life”; namely (following Kant), he overcomes the idea of substance as inert and opposed to transformation, and rather grounds appearances in the activity of reason. Unlike Heimsoeth, however, Cohen’s idealization of matter intends no spiritualization of the physical. On the contrary, the methodical construction of reality explicitly deprives it of soul, or independent animation, and renders reality as the dependent results of knowledge.

Cohen and Heimsoeth both credit Leibniz with overcoming the dualism of matter and spirit. As we saw, however, the reconciliation of finite body and infinite spirit can be accomplished from two directions. For Heimsoeth, nature is enchanted, or absorbed into the perfect full-ness of the living God. For Cohen, on the other hand, the objectivity of beings is generated by the activity of reason, which dissolves the opposition of things (Gegen-stände) over against reason into a single source: reason’s own generative production.

§2 Benjamin’s Leibniz: Between Mysticism and Enlightened Rationality

The question that comes to the fore when Cohen and Heimsoeth are read together concerns the contested meaning of infinity at the junc-ture between a theological interpretation of the immanent infinite, and the rise of a natural-scientific interpretation, whereby infinity is subsumed under the principle of continuity, and rendered effective as a method. Mediating between these positions while diverging from both of them, Benjamin reads the infinitesimal calculus as the math-ematical expression of the secularization of history. Benjamin explains the secularization of history as the transformation of the meaning of

35Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal Methode 20–21.


creation, from a temporal stage on the way to salvation, to the immanent totality of what is. Along these lines, he argues that the novelty of the infinitesimal calculus resides in its transformation of infinity, from endless succession (a temporal notion) to an infinity of detail within (spatial) presence.

Benjamin’s interpretation of Leibniz is best approached by exam-ining the relationship that he establishes between a mathematical notion of infinity (loosely understood) and an unfulfilled yearning for redemption that finds no satisfaction in the profane world. The first appearance of this relationship is found in a 1916 fragment on “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in which Benjamin describes the form of the mourning play as inherently non-unified; it does not achieve its resolution within itself, but has its meaning in relation to a withdrawn or emptied transcendence. This is expressed as an infinite (i.e., unfulfilled) yearning, which repeats itself in the profane world. Ben-jamin describes this repetitive mirroring in terms of a mathematical function. Whereas Heimsoeth’s microcosm is fulfilled and complete in itself, the form of the Trauerspiel lacks such unity: “the idea of its resolution no longer dwells within the realm of drama itself.” This form is “mathematically comparable to one branch of a hyperbola whose other branch lies in infinity. The law governing a higher life prevails in the restricted space of an earthly existence, and all play until death puts an end to the game, so as to repeat the same game, albeit on a grander scale, in another world” (SW I: 57).

Benjamin makes the allusion to mathematics more precise in his Habilitation thesis on The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and he con-sequently gives a different image of the unfulfilled infinity expressed in the Trauerspiel. Rather than describing an unchecked repetition, in which each part derives its unity from a whole that is never fully real-ized, he characterizes the form of the Trauerspiel in terms of intensive infinity, or the absorption of succession within a spatial image. Thus, Benjamin argues that the infinitesimal calculus is the mathematical equivalent of the secularization of history at the core of the Baroque Trauerspiel:

If history is secularized in the setting, this is an expression of the same metaphysical tendency which simultaneously led, in the exact sciences, to the infinitesimal method. In both cases chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image (OT 92).

Benjamin’s notion of the absorption of succession in spatial presence, or simultaneity, may seem to echo Heimsoeth’s notion of the “infinite within the finite” as the microcosm of divine perfection. But the com-

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parison is misleading for two reasons. First, Benjamin describes the attempt to transfix the infinite by grasping it within a spatial image, but this cannot be done without distortion. If the infinite is mirrored within the finite, it is a concave mirror.36 Second, the infinite is not contained in a spatial image; it rather reveals any finite representation to be a “confused” perception, which closer inspection shows to be infinitely complex.

Let us consider this argument more closely: Benjamin describes secularization in terms of the foreshortening of history within a “set-ting.” Whereas the medieval chronicle depicts time as the via recta from creation to redemption, Benjamin argues that, in the Baroque, the status of “creation” is transformed from a transient stage on the way to salvation, to an immanent totality (OT 81). But this immanent totality should not be understood as self-sufficient, so much as self-enclosed. According to Benjamin, who emphasizes the Lutheranism of the German Trauerspiel, the age was preoccupied by the question of salvation, but believed that access to revelation was beyond the reach of fallen humanity.37 Cut off from transcendence, the finite understanding could only plumb the depths of the profane world for a dim reflection of divine illumination.38 This self-enclosure is reflected in the dramatic structure of the Baroque Trauerspiel, which contracts the entire course of events within the setting of courtly life: “Inasmuch as it became absorbed in the microscopic examination of

36Benjamin uses the figure of a “concave mirror” to suggest distortion, but also to suggest the “self-enclosed” domain that is produced when the chronological infinite is grasped within a spatial totality (OT 91).

37Benjamin notes that the great authors of the German Trauerspiel were Lutherans (OT 138). Leibniz also described himself as a “follower of the Augsburg confession,” i.e. as Lutheran (in C.I. Gerhard ed., G.W. Leibniz: Die Philosophische Schriften, 7. vols., Berlin, 1875–90, vol. 6 43; cf. Hartmut Rudolph, “The Authority of the Bible and the Authority of Reason in Leibniz’s Ecumenical Argument,” in M. Dascal, Leibniz: What Kind of Rationalist, Tel Aviv, Springer: 2008, 440).

38According to Luther, fallen humanity could no longer understand the meaning of God’s revealed word, or scripture. After the fall, the univocal relationship between God’s word and human languages was definitively lost. In face of the unbridgeable abyss separating human languages from the revealed word, Lutherans re-evaluated the “Book of Nature” (cf. OT 81). If one could only decipher the natural language of creatures, one might be able to read the ordinatio divina in the details of nature itself, and thereby bypass the mediation of scripture. Luther expresses this newly discovered link between creaturely life and the word of God in the Tischreden: “For we are now again beginning to have the knowledge of the creatures which we lost in Adam’s fall [. . . ]. We see the power of his word in the creatures” (ed. Kurt Aland; Stuttgart: Klotz, 1960, vol. 1, item 1160; cf. Hans Aarsleff, “Language, Man and Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, Princeton University, 1964: 23–24).


details, it progressed no further than the painstaking analysis of the calculations of political intrigue” (OT 88). Succession is supplanted by intensification; plot is absorbed in the microscopic analysis of details.

In the figure of the self-enclosed world of creation, Benjamin offers an interpretation of the “windowless” monad that differs markedly from Heimsoeth’s microcosm. For Heimsoeth, the infinite within the finite stems from the soul’s immediate capacity to receive revelation, that is, from its transcendent, God-like qualities. By contrast, Benjamin emphasizes that the monad relates to transcendence only indirectly, by translating exteriority into the totality of its “petites perceptions.”39 In addition to having a merely indirect (i.e., intensive) relationship to exteriority, each monad, moreover, expresses the whole equivocally, by abbreviating it within a finite point-of-view.40 The concentration of the universe within a monad suggests a unique interpretation of the finite understanding, as concealing a representation of the whole world, and even an image of God, in its confused perceptions. Each monad brings with it an indistinct horizon, which belongs to it only “virtually,” rather than explicitly.

Monadic perception is both immanent—in that monads express the world only in the intensive configuration of their perceptual states—and transcendent—in that the infinity of a monad’s percep-tions exceeds what the finite understanding can apperceive, or cog-nize. This immanent excess, which, for Heimsoeth, is a mark of the creature’s capacity to receive revelation, is interpreted by Benjamin in terms of the “virtuality” of an idea, which is neither reducible to a concept, nor accessible via intuition (OT 35–36). Virtuality, which is synonymous with latency in Leibniz,41 receives a decisively negative interpretation in Benjamin, who emphasizes the loss of consciousness involved in thinking transcendence. Because revelation is denied to

39For a similar argument relating Leibnizian expression to translation, see Robert McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976) 22.

40Benjamin emphasizes the equivocal nature of the monadic representation of the world: “The idea is a monad. The being that enters into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings—concealed in its own form—an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s “Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others” (OT 47–48).

41In §8 of the “Discourse on Metaphysics,” Leibniz distinguishes between what is explicitly contained in a notion, and what is only “virtually” or implicitly included in the “complete individual concept.” This virtual totality corresponds to God’s under-standing, since only God is capable of beholding the complete notion of an individual all at once, or intuitively (Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 41).

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the finite understanding, Benjamin describes the mode in which ideas are given to thought in terms of recollection, or Platonic anamnesis (a move that Leibniz also makes in the “Discourse on Metaphysics.”)42 But whereas Plato describes a process of remembering what we once had as objects of knowledge, Benjamin characterizes monadic fullness as lost for consciousness. The deepening of attention to the infinite implications of an idea is the “death of intentionality”: “truth content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject-matter” (OT 29; 36).

According to Leibniz, an adequate grasp of an idea would involve the thoroughgoing determination of all of its predicates, including a representation of how these predicates are interconnected in an under-lying identity. This inherence of multiplicity in identity is grounded in the simultaneity of divine intuition, which is inaccessible for the finite understanding. As Leibniz notes: “It must be the case that the sufficient or ultimate reason is outside the sequence of this multiplicity of contingencies, however infinite it may be.”43 This exteriority shows itself within the monad as a confused totality of detail, which can be infinitely parsed by the finite understanding without ever reaching a sufficient reason in God. “Confusion”—which, as Benjamin notes, is a technical term in the dramaturgical theories of the Baroque, as well as term used by Leibniz to describe the indistinct cognition of an infinitely complex idea—thus provides yet another representation of the infinite within the finite.44 The monad contains infinitely more than the finite mind can grasp or comprehend, fused into an indis-tinct abbreviation.

Benjamin’s interpretation of the infinitesimal as a figure for the secularization of history is, likewise, opposed to Cohen’s “infinitesimal method,” or the generation of extensive magnitude from intensive magnitude. Whereas Cohen understands presence as the result of the

42Leibniz appeals to Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis in the “Discourse on Metaphysics,” §26 (Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 58). Benjamin also describes how philosophy can only access transcendent ideas through a process of anamnesis. What is most interest-ing, from the point of view of our argument, is that Benjamin invokes thinking as recollection precisely because philosophy is barred from revelation: “Since philosophy may not presume to speak in tones of revelation, this can only be done by recalling in memory the primordial form of perception. Platonic anamnesis is, perhaps, not far removed from this kind of remembering” (OT 37).

43Monadology §37 (Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 217–18, my emphasis).44Benjamin discusses the “confusion” [Verwirrung] of the Baroque Trauerspiel in

OT 95. Leibniz provides a technical definition of “confused” knowledge [confusa] in “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 24.


successive application of a function, Benjamin argues that succession is circumscribed, or abbreviated, within presence. Benjamin articulates this concept in terms of the subordination of chronology to the unfolding of an essence (OT 47; 92). What Benjamin refers to as Baroque “natural history” stems from an interpretation of Leibniz’s understanding of the relationship between contingent and eternal truths. For Leibniz, history does not have a predominantly temporal meaning, but signifies a mode of cognition relating to contingent truths of fact.45 Accord-ing to Leibniz, contingent truths are ultimately truths of identity, that is, they inhere (inesse) in the nunc stans, or eternal presence of divine intuition.46 It is only from the limited perspective of the finite understanding that truths of fact appear to be contingent. An infinite analysis would show that such truths are “virtual” identities. Thus, for Leibniz, history is merely phenomenal, and it must be interpreted as the determination of an essence, or under the aspect of eternity. Note that for Benjamin, the very phenomenality of history is the ground for its infinite analysis; it cannot be dismissed as brute contingency or mere transience, but must rather be “redeemed” within an essence—an idea that remains virtual for the finite understanding (OT 46). The subordination of chronological history to an essence is reflected in Leibniz’s monadology: monads always already contain the full scope of their virtual history, which is identical to the thoroughgoing deter-mination of their essence, or “complete individual concept.”47 Leibniz accordingly redefines the future and the past in terms of presence: insofar as it is possible to uncover the configuration and relationships between one’s “petites perceptions,” one can also predict the future and recall the latent past.

Despite Benjamin’s evident disagreement with Cohen regarding the significance of Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus, Benjamin’s reading of

45Leibniz distinguishes between two types of truth: necessary and contingent truths. The main difference between these two types of truths concerns the mode of their demonstration. Eternal truths are immediate identities, without the need for further grounding. Contingent truths, although ultimately identities, require a demonstration that proceeds to infinity. See “On Freedom” in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, 94–8.

46The temporal significance of Leibniz’s distinction between necessary truths and con-tingent truths of fact is brought out with particular clarity in Heidegger’s 1928 Lectures on Leibniz, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (trans. Michael Heim, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) 42–50. Heidegger shows that Leibniz’s logical definition of substance in terms of the inherence and interconnection of predicates within an underlying subject rests on a metaphysical understanding of the relationship between the finite understanding and the ideal of God’s understanding. Divine understanding is intui-tive, which means that God knows everything simultaneously, or in eternal presence.

47See, for example, “Primary Truths,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 32.

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Leibniz’s intensive infinity in terms of secularization resonates with another aspect of Cohen’s philosophical idealism: namely, the simul-taneous purification of the idea of transcendence from any existential attributes, and the disenchantment of the natural world as mere knowl-edge (i.e., as dependent on the activity of a knower, rather than as being in-itself).48 That is to say, Benjamin’s understanding of secularization as the restriction of reason within a self-enclosed, immanent world, shares Cohen’s (Kantian) view of the finitude of theoretical reason. But whereas Cohen seizes upon the infinity of practical reason, and extends it to the infinite task of constructing knowledge, Benjamin’s interpretation of “Baroque” metaphysics intensifies the chasm between profane knowledge and the perfection of divine ideas. The infinite analysis of profane knowledge may yield an abundant wealth of phe-nomenal detail, but such knowledge is ultimately illusory; it vanishes into the simple identity of divine understanding. Benjamin’s interpre-tation of the infinite within the finite exudes a palpable melancholy in that it pertains to “the supposed infinity of a world without hope,” an infinity that is itself the result of humanity’s finite and fallen state (OT 232, my emphasis). Cohen evades this hopelessness by appeal to the “infinite task,” whereby theoretical knowledge asymptotically approaches the ideal of reason.

According to Leibniz, an infinite analysis is needed to resolve contingent truths into truths of reason. Benjamin opposes Cohen’s suggestion that this analysis has the character of an “infinite task.” Rather, he describes the abysmal infinity that opens up between our confused perceptions and the simple identity of the divine understand-ing. This is the strict consequence of pursuing the infinite within the restricted domain of profane creation: “What tempts is the illusion . . . of infinity—in the empty abyss of evil. For it is characteristic of all virtue to have an end before it: namely its model, in God; just as all infamy opens up an infinite progression into the depths” (OT 231, my emphasis). Benjamin’s portrayal of the “bottomless” infinity that we fall into when we seek the sufficient reason for contingent reality

48In the Religion of Reason, Cohen sharply distinguishes between practical and theo-retical uses of reason, which enables him to secure the practical fulfillment of the idea of God as an exemplar for action, but he denies any possibility for the theoretical fulfillment of being. All natural becoming is transience from the standpoint of the unique transcendence: “matter remains transitory dust. All natural poetry is shattered on the rock of the insight that allots sublimity to the unique God exclusively” (49). In other words, the purification of God from the world—God’s uniqueness, according to Cohen—goes hand in hand with the secularization of the world as absolutely spiritless.


has its roots in Leibniz. This is perhaps surprising, since Leibniz insists that there is a sufficient reason for everything, and that even “the hairs on our head are numbered.”49 Yet Leibniz also warns that “here is the occasion to recognize the altitudinem divitarum, the depth and abyss of divine wisdom, without seeking a detail that involves infinite considerations.”50 The danger involved in seeking such a detail is that the analysis of our contingent representations is endless: it literally lacks an “end,” or telos, in God.

Benjamin’s interpretation of Leibniz provides the theoretical backdrop for his enigmatic account of the Baroque allegory’s sudden reversal—from an infinite interpretation of a detail—to an apotheo-sis, or beatific vision (OT 232–35). Benjamin describes how allegory plunges into an abyss of interpretation, falling “from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its bottomless depths” (OT 232). This vertiginous analysis is the source of its greatest insights, as it delves into the details of the profane world, ringing its images with layer upon layer of significance. Each thing is presented in its own allegorical setting, or “confused court” (OT 188). The source of this infinite analysis is the very opacity of contingent things, which are invested with meaning as ciphers of divine providence, or filled with the promise of mysterious instruction. This fall of knowledge into the abyss of endless interpretation is arrested only in the recognition of identity, or the absorption of phenomenal reality into the simple unity of divine intuition:

This solves the riddle of the most fragmented, the most defunct, the most dispersed. Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most pecu-liar to it: the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All of this vanishes with this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final phantasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, re-discovers itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of heaven (OT 232).

In this passage, Benjamin hints at the underlying source of this identity, and thereby points beyond Leibniz to Kant and Cohen: that is to say, the “phantasmagoria of the objective” vanishes only when the knowing subject “re-discovers itself,” or recognizes its own activity as the animat-ing force behind the appearance of life in things. But with the final absorption of exteriority into subjectivity, allegory loses its profound

49“Discourse on Metaphysics” §37 in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 68.50“Discourse on Metaphysics” §30 in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays 61.

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knowledge, and “goes away empty-handed” (OT 233). The “empty hands” of the allegorist—a result of the subject’s recognition of his own activity as grounding the substantiality of things—may be a step toward a fully accomplished Enlightenment, but Benjamin registers this step as a loss of the unique intensity with which the melancholy subject interprets an alien world.

Whereas Heimsoeth and Cohen both present Leibniz’s monad as having entirely accomplished the absorption of external things into spirit or mind, Benjamin’s reading of Leibniz intensifies the dualism between matter and spirit, emphasizing the alien, thing-like character of knowledge. The profane illumination of allegory is only possible when the details of the world are read as signs of a divinity that we cannot know directly, but that we can only glean from the faint traces and fragments of spiritless nature.

Conclusion:

I have argued that Benjamin’s monad turns on a particular interpre-tation of the infinite within the finite. The “intensive infinity” within the monad is in excess of any concept. But the pregnant fullness of the monad intends no mythic re-enchantment of nature. Against Heimsoeth’s interpretation of Leibniz, I have shown that Benjamin reads the infinity within the monad in terms of the secularization of metaphysics within an immanent, self-enclosed world. From this vantage point, Benjamin can also be read as refuting Cohen’s infini-tesimal method. For Cohen, infinity is stripped of any ontological or metaphysical weight, and instead takes on the sober, epistemological significance of an infinite method. But Benjamin shows that Cohen nonetheless retains the (mythological) belief in reason’s progress toward the fulfilled ideal. By contrast, Benjamin’s monad already contains all of its states simultaneously, but the immanent totality of perceptions within the monad yields a confused infinity of detail, the analysis of which is bottomless. Benjamin does not minimize the hopelessness of this infinity by adopting Cohen’s Kantian language of an infinite task. The source of this infinity is the non-identity between the simple per-fection of divine rationality, and the contingent character of the world.

It is no accident that Benjamin turns to metaphysics precisely at the point where metaphysics has lost its home in theology; his mon-adology is a meditation on the status of the Absolute within secular modernity. The metaphysical object has been successively dissolved by the negativity of enlightened rationality. But transcendence is not


reduced to nothing, as philosophical positivists would argue. Rendered homeless by the loss of the medieval ordo, metaphysics acquires the rapacious character of an infinite method. This method is brought to bear on the smallest, most peripheral traces of experience, with no guarantee of their ultimate grounding in God.

„Zeitlos und dennoch nicht ohne historischen Belang“.

Über die idealen Zusammenhänge der Geschichte bei dem jungen Benjamin und Hermann Cohen

❦

Pierfrancesco Fiorato

1. Vorbemerkung: Einblick in das Verhältnis einer Wahrheit zur Geschichte

Die Wahl eines angemessenen Themas für die Dissertation bereitete Benjamin erhebliche Schwierigkeiten. Anfang 1918 gestand er sogar in einem Brief an Scholem, sich diesbezüglich in einer „schreckliche[n] Verlegenheit“ zu befinden.1 Im Herbst 1917, als er das Projekt gehegt hatte, über „Kant und die Geschichte“ zu schreiben (GB I, 390f.), hatte er noch gehofft, die Arbeit an der Dissertation, trotz der dafür verlangten „konventionellen wissenschaftlichen Haltung“ (GB II, 23), mit seinen persönlichen Interessen vereinigen zu können. Die Überzeugung, die er am 22. Oktober an Scholem geäußert hatte, „daß es sich im Sinne der Philosophie und damit der Lehre, zu der diese gehört, [ . . . ] nie und nimmer um eine Erschütterung, einen Sturz des Kantischen Systems handeln kann, sondern vielmehr um


1Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, hg. von Christoph Gödde u. Henri Lonitz, 6 Bde. Frankfurt a. M. 1995–2000 [im Folgenden: GB], Bd. I, S. 420.

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seine granitne Festlegung und universale Ausbildung“, hätte sich in einem solchen Projekt mit Benjamins tiefwurzelndem Interesse für die Geschichtsphilosophie vereinigen lassen können, dessen Gründe er im selben Brief emphatisch erörtert hatte: „[I]n der Geschichtsphilo-sophie wird die spezifische Verwandtschaft einer Philosophie mit der wahren Lehre am klarsten hervortreten müssen; denn hier wird das Thema des historischen Werdens der Erkenntnis das die Lehre zur Auflösung bringt, auftreten müssen“ (GB I, 389 und 391).

Die Enttäuschung, die ihm die Lektüre von Kants Hauptschriften zur Geschichtsphilosophie bereitete (vgl. GB I, 408), sollte ihn aber bald zur Suche nach einem anderen Thema bewegen. Das Thema der romantischen Kunstkritik taucht das erste Mal in einem Brief an Scholem vom 30. März 1918 auf. [D]ie „Erledigung“, wie es nun heißt, der Promotion scheint aber jetzt für Benjamin mit einem Ver-zicht oder wenigstens mit der Verschiebung der Verfolgung seiner Hauptinteressen verbunden zu sein: „die fernere Auseinandersetzung mit Kant und Cohen muß verschoben werden“ (GB I, 441). Auch im Brief an Erst Schoen vom Mai 1918, in dem Benjamin seinem ehe-maligen Schulkameraden von der Genehmigung des Themas seiner Dissertation über die „philosophischen Grundlagen der romantischen Kunstkritik“ endlich berichten kann, lugt im Hintergrund die ihm immer noch wichtige Auseinandersetzung mit Kant hervor, der nun von ihm als der „größte Gegner“ bezeichnet wird. Hier spricht Ben-jamin auch von „eine[r] sehr wichtige[n] erkenntnistheoretische[n] Arbeit“, die zu vollenden er bisher unvermögend gewesen sei und die „schon monatelang“ liege (GB I, 455): Gemeint ist das stark von der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Marburger Neukantianismus geprägte Projekt, in dessen Rahmen er einige Monate früher die Schrift „Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie“ verfasst hatte—dieselbe Schrift, die er nun Gershom Scholem bei dessen Ankunft in Bern am 4. Mai (von der derselbe Brief berichtet) überreicht.2 Die gemeinsame Lektüre von Hermann Cohens Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, auf welche die beiden Freunde sich dann im Sommer 1918 einließen, begleitet also still in ihren ersten Schritten Benjamins Arbeit an der Dissertation, ohne dass eine Überschneidung oder auch nur Berührung zwischen beiden Interessenbereichen feststellbar wäre.

Die Arbeit an der Dissertation wird von Benjamin mit derjenigen „innere[n] Anonymität“ durchgeführt, die ihm zu solchem Zweck

2Vgl. G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin—die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt a.M., 1975, S. 67.

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unerlässlich erscheint: Viel bleibt dabei unentwickelt, so vor allem auch die „geschichtlich fundamental wichtige Koinzidenz [der Romantik] mit Kant, die zur ,dissertatorischen‘ Erscheinung zu bringen sich unter Umständen als unmöglich erweisen könnte“ (GB I, 456). Nichtsdesto-trotz kann Benjamin am 8. November 1918 Ernst Schoen mitteilen, dass die Dissertation für ihn „keine verlorne Zeit“ sei: „Das was ich durch sie lerne, nämlich einen Einblick in das Verhältnis einer Wahrheit zur Geschichte, wird allerdings darin am wenigsten ausgesprochen sein, aber hoffentlich für kluge Leser bemerkbar.“ (GB I, 486) Der hier angedeutete untergründige Zusammenhang zwischen dem Text der Dissertation und derjenigen geschichtsphilosophischen Problema-tik, die Benjamin so sehr am Herzen lag, hat stets das Interesse der Interpreten geweckt. Meistens hat sich dabei ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf das Thema des romantischen Messianismus konzentriert, d.h. auf dasjenige „Zentrum der Romantik“, wie Benjamin ihn in einem Brief vom 7. April 1919 bezeichnet, worauf er in der Dissertation nur in zwei Fußnoten hatte hinweisen können (an E. Schoen, GB II, 23).3

Die Relevanz der messianischen Fragestellung für Benjamins Den-ken steht außer Frage. Das Thema des romantischen Messianismus taucht aber in der Dissertation vornehmlich im Zusammenhang mit demjenigen der „unendlichen Progression“ der poetischen Formen in der Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schlegels und Novalis’ auf. Die Berück-sichtigung dieser Tatsache lässt einen weiteren Horizont zutage treten, in dessen Rahmen auch der Versuch einer Bestimmung von dem, was Benjamin zwischen den Zeilen abzuhandeln gedachte, fruchtbar weitergeführt werden kann. Erst der komplementäre Blick auf die „der ewigen Progression enthobene[n] Gebilde“ (GS I.1, 116/KG III, 126f.), den Benjamin im „esotherische[n] Nachwort“4 über „die frühromantische Kunsttheorie und Goethe“ wirft, rückt nämlich das Thema der „unendlichen Progression“, das er im vorangehenden Teil der Arbeit behandelt hatte, ins rechte Licht. Und erst die Span-

3Vgl. zuletzt Uwe Steiners Kommentar in der neuen kritischen Ausgabe der Disserta-tion: W. Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, hg. von Christoph Gödde u. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt a.M. 2008 ff. [im Folgenden: KG], Bd. 3: Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, S. 180. – Für die zwei Fußnoten vgl. W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno u. Gershom Scholem hg. von Rolf Tiedemann u. Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 Bde., Frankfurt a. M. 1972–1989 [im Folgenden: GS], Bd. I.1., S. 12 u. 92 (= KG III 13, 100).

4So wird das letzte Kapitel der Dissertation im Brief an E. Schoen vom 14. Mai 1919 bezeichnet: „Ich habe zu ihr [scil. zur Dissertation] ein esotherisches Nachwort für die geschrieben, denen ich sie als meine Arbeit mitzuteilen hätte“ (GB II, 26).


nung zwischen diesen beiden Momenten und den entgegengesetzten Forderungen, die sie zum Ausdruck bringen, lässt demzufolge auch das Problem des „Verhältnis[ses] einer Wahrheit zur Geschichte“, in dessen Andeutung Benjamin den ganzen Sinn seiner Arbeit an der Dissertation erblickte, in all seiner Tiefe und Komplexität zutage treten.

Der Interpret, der die eigene Aufmerksamkeit auf diese spannungs-geladene Komplementarität richtet, wird sofort auf das methodische und architektonische Grundgerüst des ganzen Werks verwiesen. Bezeichnenderweise stößt er aber dabei nochmals auf Spuren derje-nigen philosophischen Tradition des Kantianismus, der damals—wie wir schon gesehen haben—Benjamins tiefste Interessen galten. Wie ich im Folgenden zeigen möchte, ist es nämlich gerade seiner Aneignung und besonderen Interpretation eines methodischen Ansatzes neukan-tianischer Prägung, d.h. seiner Entscheidung, eine problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung durchzuführen, zu verdanken, dass Benjamin hier letztendlich denjenigen „Einblick in das Verhältnis einer Wahrheit zur Geschichte“ erhält, der ihm die eigene Arbeit an der Dissertation als „keine verlorne Zeit“ erscheinen ließ.

2. Die Schwelle des reinen Problems

Bemerkenswert ist der Nachdruck, mit dem Benjamin sowohl in den ersten Seiten als auch im Fortlauf der Dissertation seine Absicht betont, einen „Beitrag zu einer problemgeschichtlichen Untersu-chung“ leisten zu wollen (vgl. GS I.1, 11f., 41f./KG III, 11f., 44f.). Auch die philosophische Natur seiner Arbeit soll für ihn durch ihre Kennzeichnung als eine solche problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung näher bestimmt werden. Benjamin spricht nämlich von „eine[r] philosophische[n], genauer gesagt eine[r] problemgeschichtliche[n] Aufgabe“, die als solche, obwohl „systematisch orientiert[]“, jedoch von einer „rein systematische[n]“ sowie von philosophiegeschichtlichen und geschichtsphilosophischen Untersuchungen streng unterschieden werden müsse (GS I.1, 12/KG III, 12).

Der Verfasser unterstreicht dann diesen Status der eigenen Arbeit, vor allem im schon erwähnten letzten Kapitel über „die frühroman-tische Kunsttheorie und Goethe“. Erst in diesem Zusammenhang, in dem Benjamin sogar von einem „problemgeschichtlichen Denken“ spricht und das Verhältnis desselben zum „systematischen“ näher bestimmt (GS I.1, 117f./KG III, 128f.), zeichnen sich die originellen Züge seiner Auffassung der Problemgeschichte deutlich ab.

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Von Wilhelm Windelband geprägt—dessen Geschichte der neueren Philosophie Benjamin hier übrigens in der Darstellung der Position Fichtes ausführlich benutzt5—und dann von demselben dank dem erfolgreichen Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie verbreitet, ist die Problemgeschichte bald zum Gemeingut beider Hauptströmungen des Neukantianismus geworden.6 Es ist gerade ein solches Gemein-gut, das Gadamer dann in Wahrheit und Methode einer heftigen Kritik unterziehen sollte. Im Abschnitt „Die Logik von Frage und Antwort“ wirft er der neukantianischen Problemgeschichte ungeschichtliche Ausgrenzung identischer Probleme vor. Gadamers hermeneutische Vorbehalte setzen schon bei der inneren Struktur des, der Problem-geschichte zugrundeliegenden, Problembegriffs ein: „Die Kritik am Problembegriff, die mit den Mitteln einer Logik der Frage und Antwort geführt wird, muß die Illusion zerstören, als gäbe es die Probleme wie die Sterne am Himmel.“7 Vom hermeneutischen Standpunkt aus stellt der Begriff des Problems eine „leere Abstraktion“ dar: Die „Ablösung des Frageinhalts von der ihn allererst aufschließenden Frage“.8 Eine solche Ablösung erweist sich aber als unhaltbar, denn „[e]inen Stand-ort außerhalb der Geschichte, von dem aus sich die Identität eines Problems im Wandel seiner geschichtlichen Lösungsversuche denken ließe, gibt es in Wahrheit nicht.“9

Gadamers Kritik des Anspruchs, eine überzeitliche Identität philo-sophischer Problemstellungen bestimmen und erfassen zu können, trifft in der Tat einige Züge des neukantianischen Programms, wie sie etwa in Nicolai Hartmanns Aufsatz „Zur Methode der Philoso-phiegeschichte“ zutage treten.10 „Das Problem als solches steht fest“, behauptet Hartmann in seiner Darstellung des problemgeschichtlichen Ansatzes: „[A]lle historische Variabilität an ihm betrifft nicht es selbst, sondern nur die Grade oder Stufen seines Hindurchdringens zum Selbstbewußtsein“.11 Die fragwürdigen Aspekte, die diese Auffassung mit sich führt, sind leicht zu erkennen. Für Manfred Brelage ist dabei „das, was als Methodologie der Philosophiehistorie begann, unter der Hand zu einer Metaphysik der Philosophiegeschichte geworden“.12

5U. Steiner, Die Geburt der Kritik aus dem Geiste der Kunst, Würzburg 1989, S. 38 (vgl. GS I.1, 23, 32f., 39/KG III, 25, 35, 42).

6Manfred Brelage, Studien zur Transzendentalphilosophie, Berlin 1965, S. 2 f.7Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Mohr, Tübingen 1960, S. 359.8Ebd., S. 358.9Ebd., S. 357.10N. Hartmann, „Zur Methode der Philosophiegeschichte“, Kant-Studien 15 (1910) S.

459–485, zit. nach dem Nachdr. in ders., Kleinere Schriften, Bd. 3, Berlin 1958, S. 1–22.11Ebd., S. 10.12M. Brelage, a.a.O., S. 11.


Der eigentlich historischen Untersuchung bleibt im Rahmen eines so verstandenen problemgeschichtlichen Ansatzes nur die neben-sächliche Aufgabe, das an sich in seiner systematischen Verfasstheit schon bestimmte Problem „im Historischen wiederzuerkennen“. Die Schwierigkeiten, die bei dieser Aufgabe entstehen mögen, können nicht historischer, sondern allein systematischer Natur sein: „Die eigentlich historische Aufgabe des Wiederfindens ist dagegen, unter Voraussetzung systematischer Klarheit über das Problem, durchaus einfach und beschränkt.“13

Gerade durch den Vergleich mit dieser auf der Annahme einer überzeitlichen Identität philosophischer Problemstellungen beru-henden Auffassung tritt Benjamins originelle Interpretation des problemgeschichtlichen Ansatzes besonders deutlich hervor. Dort, wo Benjamin ein „problemgeschichtliches Denken“ vom rein systemati-schen unterscheidet, schreibt er nämlich der historischen Dimension, die das erste durchforscht, eine entscheidende Bedeutung zu, die mit der bei Hartmann angetroffenen kaum vergleichbar ist.

Auch Benjamin spricht in Wirklichkeit von einem „metahistori-schen d.h. absolut gestellten Problem[]“: In der Selbstanzeige der Dissertation, die er 1921 in den „Kant-Studien“ veröffentlichte, ist sogar in wenigen Zeilen davon zweimal die Rede (GS I.2, 707/KG III, 160). Nun darf die Tatsache, dass Benjamin in einem so kurzen Text diese problemtheoretische Dimension der eigenen Arbeit so stark hervorhebt, als eine Bestätigung der zentralen Relevanz der von uns angesprochenen Fragestellung betrachtet werden. Die wiederholte Erwähnung eines „metahistorischen Problems“ soll aber nicht in die Irre führen: Eine problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung kann für Benjamin nicht von einem an sich bestehenden metahistorischen Problem ihren Ausgang nehmen, um dann die Züge desselben im Historischen wiederzuerkennen. Die Sache verhält sich eher umge-kehrt: Es geht nämlich darum, das Historische bis zu jenem Punkt zu durchforschen, da in ihm „das reine Problem“ sichtbar wird (GS I.1, 110/KG III, 121). Das Zutagetreten des „reinen Problems“ ent-spricht für Benjamin einer „Schwelle“, an der sich ein zeitloser Kern der historischen Dimension enthüllt, der mit der Tiefenstruktur der Geschichte selbst zu tun hat.

Im letzten Kapitel klärt Benjamin, in welchem Sinn die eigene Unter-suchung, gerade als eine problemgeschichtliche zwar „systematisch

13N. Hartmann, a.a.O., S. 8.

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orientiert[]“, zugleich aber doch von einer „rein systematische[n]“ abzugrenzen sei. Allein das „systematische Denken“ vermag das zu lösen, was das „problemgeschichtliche“ nur als Problem darstellen kann—obwohl als ein solches, das an sich schon die Züge seiner Auf-lösung ins System eindeutig erkennen läßt. Die „vorliegende Untersu-chung“, wird nun dem Leser gesagt, könne nicht die „Schwelle“ der „systematische[n] Grundfrage der Kunstphilosophie“ überschreiten: „[S]ie konnte allein einen problemgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang soweit ausführen, bis er auf den systematischen mit völliger Klarheit deutete“ (GS I.1, 117/KG III, 128).

Zu einer solchen „Schwelle“ muss man aber kommen können: Ihr entspricht in der Geschichte ein kritischer Brennpunkt, den das pro-blemgeschichtliche Denken zu ermitteln hat. Es ist in diesem Sinn, dass für Benjamin der Gegensatz zwischen den Frühromantikern und Goethe als das „kritische Stadium“ in der Geschichte des Kunstkri-tikbegriffs betrachtet werden darf: „[I]n der problemgeschichtlichen Beziehung, in welcher der Kritikbegriff der Romantiker zu demjenigen Goethes steht, tritt unmittelbar das reine Problem der Kunstkritik an den Tag“ (GS I.1, 110/KG III, 121). Die spannungsvolle Polarität, die eine solche Beziehung kennzeichnet, verleiht der letzteren die Bedeutung einer kritisch-systematischen Schwelle, deren Aktualität nicht mehr durch die Zeit bedingt zu sein scheint. Benjamin hebt die Züge einer solchen, durch die Geschichte hindurch wirkenden und von der Zeit unberührten Geltung ausdrücklich hervor: „Noch heute ist dieser Stand der deutschen Kunstphilosophie um 1800, wie er in den Theorien Goethes und der Frühromantiker sich darstellt, legitim“ (GS I.1, 117/KG III, 128f.).

Um den Zusammenhang der hier angesprochenen Fragestellung mit demjenigen „Einblick in das Verhältnis einer Wahrheit zur Geschichte“ näher bestimmen zu können, den Benjamin sich von seiner Arbeit versprach, soll schließlich noch die Tatsache erwähnt werden, dass die „systematische Grundfrage der Kunstphilosophie“, die sich in diesem polaren Gegensatz ankündigt, für Benjamin bezeichnenderweise die Absichten und das Bewusstsein aller darin einbezogenen Persön-lichkeiten überragt haben soll. Die Romantiker und Goethe haben nämlich eine solche Frage weder gelöst, noch auch nur gestellt. Sie wirken vielmehr „zusammen, um sie dem problemgeschichtlichen Denken vorzustellen“ (GS I.1, 117f./KG III, 129).

Berücksichtigt man den gesamten hier zum Vorschein kommenden Problemkomplex, so wird nicht verwundern, dass Benjamin einige Jahre später in einem Brief an Florens Christian Rang—der ihm als


der wichtigste Leser seiner Dissertation galt14—gerade mit Bezug auf das Paradigma der Problemgeschichte seine spekulativen Reflexionen über die spezifische Geschichtlichkeit der Kunstwerke anstellen sollte.

3. Ideale Aufhebung der Zeitunterschiede

Im Brief vom 9. Dezember 1923 teilt Benjamin Florens Christian Rang mit, dass er sich derzeit mit der Frage beschäftige, „wie Kunstwerke sich zum geschichtlichen Leben verhalten“. In der herkömmlichen Kunstgeschichte soll eine solche Frage nicht einmal als Diskussions-thema Eingang gefunden haben. Die Untersuchungen der „kurrenten Kunstgeschichte“ sollen nämlich immer nur die Stoff- oder Form-Geschichte betreffen, „für welche die Kunstwerke nur Beispiele, gleichsam Modelle herleihen“: „[E]ine Geschichte der Kunstwerke selbst kommt dabei garnicht in Frage“ (GB II, 392). Ob aber und unter welchen Voraussetzungen von einer solchen Geschichte der Kunstwerke überhaupt die Rede sein kann, bedarf für Benjamin einer näheren Untersuchung. Kunstwerke sind nämlich, wie er im selben Brief schreibt, ihrem „Wesentlichen nach geschichtslos“, denn „[s]ie haben nichts was sie zugleich extensiv und wesentlich verbindet“ (GB II, 392). Gerade in dieser Hinsicht meint Benjamin im genannten Brief eine Analogie zwischen ihnen und den philosophischen Systemen herstellen zu dürfen.

Eine solche Analogie kommt genaugenommen bei Benjamin nicht erst in diesem Brief vor. Schon am Anfang des dritten Abschnitts seines Aufsatzes „Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften“ (GS I.1, 172f.) und im Fragment „Theorie der Kunstkritik“ (GS I.3, 833f.) hatte er aufgrund des Verhältnisses der Wahrheit zur Schönheit das Bestehen einer eigentümlichen Verwandtschaft der Kunstwerke mit dem System der Philosophie behauptet. Bezeichnenderweise gab es damals eine emphatische Interpretation des Problembegriffs, die jene Analogie begünstigt hatte. Nur aufgrund seiner Verwandtschaft mit dem „Ideal des Problems“ soll nämlich das Kunstwerk nach Benjamin „ins genaueste Verhältnis“ zur Philosophie treten. Als „Ideal des Problems“ versteht Benjamin hier den Begriff derjenigen „nicht-existenten Frage, welche die Einheit der Philosophie erfragt“ (GS I.1, 172). „Auf diese virtuelle Frage (die allein von der Antwort aus erblickt wird)“ gibt

14Hierzu vgl. U. Steiner, „,Der eigentliche Leser‘. Florens Christian Rang über Walter Benjamins Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik“, in: Heinz Brüggemann u. Günter Oesterle (Hrsg.), Walter Benjamin und die romantische Moderne, Würzburg 2009, S. 105–159, und sein Kommentar in KG III, 192–194 u. 338–363.

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es, mit seinen Worten gesprochen, „nur eine Antwort: das System der Philosophie selbst“ (GS I.3, 833). Nun stellen aber gerade die Kunstwerke für Benjamin Gebilde dar, „die ohne Frage zu sein, zum Ideal des Problems die tiefste Affinität haben“—deshalb meint er, sie als „Geschwister“ der philosophischen Systeme betrachten zu dürfen (GS I.1, 172).

Dieselbe Analogie zwischen Kunstwerken und philosophischen Systemen wird nun im Brief an Florens Christian Rang mit Bezug auf das Problem ihrer „spezifischen Geschichtlichkeit“ und der sie konstituierenden Zusammenhänge weiterentwickelt. Diese Zusammen-hänge sind für Benjamin in beiden Fällen „intensiver“ Natur, und zu ihrer näheren Bestimmung wird von ihm wieder das Paradigma der Problemgeschichte herangezogen. Wichtig ist ihm dabei vor allem die Tatsache, dass „die sogenannte ,Geschichte‘ der Philosophie“, wenn sie nicht eine „uninteressante Dogmen- oder gar Philosophen- Geschichte“ sein will, sondern eben als Problemgeschichte betrieben wird, „jederzeit die Fühlung mit der zeitlichen Extension zu verlieren und in zeitlose, intensive—Interpretation überzugehen droht“ (GB II, 392). Die Möglichkeit, die Natur der „spezifischen Geschichtlichkeit von Kunstwerken“ durch die Analogie mit der Problemgeschichte zu erschließen, hängt von der genauen Bestimmung des spannungsvol-len Verhältnisses zur zeitlichen Extension ab, das hier zutage tritt. Es ist bemerkenswert, dass Benjamin nur von der ständigen Gefahr, die Fühlung mit einer solchen Extension zu verlieren, bzw. von einem ,drohenden‘, nicht aber von einem vollständig vollzogenen Übergang spricht. Das problemgeschichtliche Denken überschreitet nämlich auch hier diejenige „Schwelle“ nicht, an der das historische Moment auf das systematische deutet. Nur indem sie in der Schwebe eines solchen Übergangsstatus verbleibt und die ihm innewohnende Spannung aushält, kann die Problemgeschichte als angemessenes Vorbild für die Erfassung der gesuchten Geschichtlichkeit dienen und demgemäß erklären, wie in ihr Zusammenhänge zutage treten können, „welche zeitlos und dennoch nicht ohne historischen Belang sind“ (GB II, 393).

Auch Hermann Cohen, der zwar keine ausdrückliche Reflexion über das Thema der Problemgeschichte angestellt, aber stets die Notwen-digkeit einer Verschränkung von historischem und systematischem Moment in der Philosophie behauptet und verteidigt hat, hat sich bezeichnenderweise auf die eigene Auffassung der Philosophiege-schichte bezogen, um die Natur der Verbindung unter Kunstwerken in der Geschichte näher zu bestimmen. Er hat das in einigen Seiten


seiner Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls getan, die Benjamin vermutlich kannte, da er dieses Werk mehrmals in seinem Aufsatz über Goethes Wahl-verwandtschaften zitiert.15 Ohne hier behaupten zu wollen, dass diese Seiten die unmittelbare Quelle von Benjamins Ausführungen im oben genannten Brief gewesen seien, kann sich ein Vergleich dieser Texte im Hinblick auf eine Beleuchtung des gemeinsamen Hintergrunds beider Denker lohnen.

Im ersten Kapitel seiner Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls meint Cohen die geschichtliche Verbindung unter Kunstwerken in denjenigen „Zusammenhang alles Geschehens“ eingliedern zu müssen, den—wie er schreibt—die Geschichte überall zur Entdeckung bringen müss.16 Die entscheidende Frage betrifft dabei die Natur eines solchen Zusammenhangs: Um ihn zu begreifen, beruft sich Cohen auf das paradigmatische Beispiel der Geschichte der Philosophie. Dabei spricht er bezeichnenderweise von einer „ideale[n] Aufhebung der Zeitunterschiede“: Sie soll für ihn jede „echte“, „wissenschaftliche“ Philosophiegeschichte kennzeichnen.17 Da nun aber die Geschichte der Philosophie dem Cohenschen Ansatz gemäß als allgemeines Paradigma für die Geistesgeschichte überhaupt zu gelten hat, so muss gerade diese Rücksicht „auf eine gleichsam zeitlose Zusammenfassung aller Inhalte“ für ihn als „die erste Rücksicht aller Geistesgeschichte“ betrachtet werden. Die „Zeitunterschiede“ erscheinen ihm dabei „als technische, als hodegetische Abschnitte und Einteilungen“: „Die Zusammenhänge sollen wahrlich die Verschiedenheiten nicht aufhe-ben, aber alle Mannigfaltigkeit und alle Verschiedenheit soll doch einem Zusammenhange zustreben und angehören, in dessen Problem vornehmlich das Problem der Geschichte besteht. So muß es auch in der Kunstgeschichte sein.“18

In dieser durch ästhetische Fragen angeregten Erörterung erscheint die Geschichte bezeichnenderweise, um eine Wendung Walter Ben-jamins zu gebrauchen, als „der farbige Rand einer kristallinischen Simultaneität“.19 Im Cohenschen Werk steht aber eine solche Stellung-

15Vgl. GS I.1, 134, 191. – Schon am 1. Februar 1918 hatte Benjamin aus Bern Gershom Scholem gebeten, für ihn beim Verlag Bruno Cassirer u.a. „Hermann Cohen: System der Philosophie 4 Bd“ zu bestellen (GB I, 429).

16H. Cohen, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, Berlin 1912, zit. nach: Werke, hg. vom Hermann Cohen–Archiv am Philosophischen Seminar der Universität Zürich unter der Leitung von Helmut Holzhey, Olms, Hildesheim/ Zürich/ New York, 1977 ff., Bde. 8 und 9, Bd. I, S. 47.

17Ebd., S. 47.18Ebd., S. 47 f.19So klingt bekanntlich die Definition der Geschichte, die Benjamin in der „Erkennt-

niskritischen Vorrede“ zum Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels formuliert: GS I.1, 218.

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nahme zum Problem des geschichtlichen „Zusammenhangs“ durchaus nicht isoliert da. Eine weitere Bestimmung desselben findet gerade in denjenigen Seiten der Einleitung zu Kants Theorie der Erfahrung statt, denen Benjamin, wie wir noch sehen werden, eine besondere Auf-merksamkeit schenken sollte. Auch in diesem Fall sind es bezeichnen-derweise einige Überlegungen zur Philosophiegeschichte, die Cohen den Anlass geben, sich über das Problem der Geschichte überhaupt zu äußern. Mit Bezug auf Benjamin sind aber vor allem die unver-wechselbaren monadologischen Züge besonders relevant, die hier das annehmen, was Cohen den „idealen geschichtlichen Zusammenhang“ nennt.20 Cohen spricht in diesen Seiten vom „ideale[n] Ganze[n]“ der Geschichte, und versteht als die „ideale Aufgabe“ derselben die „Ermittlung desjenigen Zusammenhangs, den die Einzelerscheinung, als solche, auch die mächtigste, nur widerspiegelt, den sie selbst jedoch in bewußter Reflexion nicht darzutun vermag“.21 Ähnliche Anklänge an Leibniz lassen sich auch an jener anderen Stelle aufspüren, wo Cohen ausdrücklich von seinem von der „Methode der Philosophie bedingten Ideal geschichtlicher Erkenntnis derselben“ spricht. Hier betont er nämlich, wie nach dieser Methode „alles Einzelne einer Gesamtheit eingeordnet [wird], die nichtsdestoweniger im Einzelnen genau und unbefangen zu ermitteln ist“.22 Diese monadologische Auffassung der Grundstruktur der Geschichte soll im Folgenden mit derjenigen Benjamins kurz verglichen werden.

4. Schlussbemerkung: Philosophische Geschichte als Wissenschaft vom Ursprung

Es ist nicht verwunderlich, dass gerade im oben erwähnten Brief an Florens Christian Rang dasjenige monadologische Paradigma zum ersten Mal auftritt23, das dann Benjamins Denken von der „Erkenntniskritischen Vorrede“ zum Trauerspielbuch bis zu den späten Thesen „Über den Begriff der Geschichte“ begleiten sollte. Die „spezifische Geschichtlichkeit von Kunstwerken“, von der hier die Rede ist, stellt nämlich eine Antizipation derjenigen Geschichte dar, die Benjamin in der Vorrede zum Trauerspielbuch dem „in der

20H. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 3. Aufl., Berlin 1918, zit. nach: Werke, Bd. 1.1, S. 8.

21Ebd., S. 3 f.22Ebd., S. 8.23Vgl. GB II, 393: „Ihre intensive Unendlichkeit kennzeichnet die Ideen als Monaden“.


Idee des Ursprungs Ergriffenen“ zuschreiben wird: „[D]as in der Idee des Ursprungs Ergriffene hat Geschichte nur als einen Gehalt, nicht mehr als ein Geschehn, von dem es betroffen würde. Innen erst kennt es Geschichte“ (GS I.1, 227). ,Ergreifbar‘ ist eine solche Geschichtlichkeit, die das innere Leben der Gebilde charakterisiert, nur von derjenigen „philosophische[n] Geschichte“, die Benjamin an derselben Stelle „als die Wissenschaft vom Ursprung“ bezeichnet.

Bekanntlich hat Benjamin sowohl in den Nachträgen für die zweite (dann nicht erschienene) Auflage seiner Habilitationsschrift als auch später im Passagen-Werk behauptet, dass sein Begriff des Ursprungs im Trauerspielbuch die „strenge und zwingende Übertragung“ des Goe-theschen Urphänomens „aus dem heidnischen Naturzusammenhange in die jüdischen Zusammenhänge der Geschichte“ darstelle.24 In wel-chem Maße die Kritik an Goethes Naturalismus, die schon ansatzweise in der Dissertation und dann im Aufsatz über die Wahlverwandtschaften auftauchte,25 durch Hermann Cohens Ursprungslogik unterstützt und verstärkt worden sein mag, bleibt umstritten. Die isoliert dastehende Abwehrgeste, die die Erwähnung des Namens Hermann Cohen an der entscheidenden Stelle der Vorrede begleitet, wo Benjamin den Ursprungsbegriff einführt,26 lässt in diesem Sinn viele Fragen offen. Benjamins ständige Aufmerksamkeit auf die Darstellungsform der eigenen Gedanken und auf die Komplexität des Verhältnisses zwischen offenkundigen und latenten Gehalten lässt eine Strategie vermuten, die dem Leser verborgen bleibt. Man hat den Eindruck, hier werde eine umfangreichere Auseinandersetzung absichtlich verschwiegen, die allein einer solchen Abwehr einen Sinn verleihen könnte.

Ein solcher Eindruck lässt sich durch die Berücksichtigung einer anderen Stelle der „Erkenntniskritischen Vorrede“ bekräftigen, wo Benjamin sich mit dem für unsere Fragestellung zentralen Problem der „Aktualität“ und unberührten „Geltung“ derjenigen „alten Systeme der Philosophie“ auseinandersetzt, „deren bloßer Erkenntnisgehalt längst die Beziehung zur Wissenschaft eingebüßt hat“ (GS I.1, 212). Wie man aus der ersten Fassung der Vorrede entnehmen kann, hatte Benjamin zuerst geplant, an dieser Stelle bezeichnenderweise einen „Verweis auf Cohens Einleitung zu Kants Theorie der Erfahrung“ (GS I.3,

24Vgl. GS I.3, 953f. und V.1. 577: N 2a, 4.25Vgl. GS I.1, 112f./KG III, 123f., 138f. und GS I.1, 147f. – Hierzu vgl. U. Steiner, Die

Geburt der Kritik aus dem Geiste der Kunst, S. 141–150.26Vgl. GS I.1, 226: „Die Kategorie des Ursprungs ist [ . . . ] nicht, wie Cohen meint,

eine rein logische, sondern historisch“.

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931) hinzuzufügen. Die spätere Tilgung dieser Anmerkung aus der endgültigen Druckfassung ändert nichts an der Vermutung, dass hier eine untergründige Wirkung der Cohenschen Gedankenwelt, und zwar gerade im Hinblick auf einen mit dem Thema der Problemgeschichte eng zusammenhängenden Problemkomplex, anzunehmen sei.

An der schon zitierten Stelle aus der Einleitung zu Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, wo behauptet wurde, daß diejenige „Gesamtheit“, der alles Einzelne „eingeordnet“ wird, „im Einzelnen genau und unbefangen zu ermitteln ist“, betonte Cohen bezeichnenderweise die zentrale Rolle, die nach diesem monadologischen Modell der Philosophiegeschichte dem Individuum zugeschrieben werden soll. Unmittelbar danach schrieb er nämlich: „Daher müssen [ . . . ] vor allem die Individuen selbst als selbständig und bewußt agierende Personen nach ihren Werken beschrieben und beleuchtet werden“.27 Eine solche Aussage steht im diametralen Gegensatz zu derjenigen Nicolai Hartmanns, der ‚ausgehend von einem an sich feststehenden Problem und seiner metaphysizierenden Auffassung der Problemgeschichte zufolge‚ per-emptorisch behaupten wird: „Zwischen der Individualität des Denkers und dem philosophischen Problem ist immer dieses Verhältnis: der Denker kann das Problem nicht ändern“.28

In ihren Ausführungen zu Cohens Auffassung der Philosophiege-schichte hat Ursula Renz mit Bezug auf seinen frühen Aufsatz „Zur Kontroverse zwischen Trendelenburg und Kuno Fischer“ darauf hingewiesen, daß Cohen im Unterschied zu späteren Vertretern der Problemgeschichte „zwar explizit von einem ,Zusammenhang‘, nicht aber von der überzeitlichen Identität philosophischer Problemstellun-gen aus[geht]“.29 Dabei konzipiert Cohen, wie Ursula Renz an anderer Stelle betont, „die Entwicklung der Philosophie als ein Wechselverhält-nis von Frage und Antwort, als eine Vertiefung der Frage, die nicht von vornherein auf ein bestimmtes Resultat zielt“.30

Paradigmatisch wird eine solche Entwicklung in den Seiten der Logik der reinen Erkenntnis beschrieben, wo Cohen sich über das dia-

27H. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, S. 8.28N. Hartmann, a.a.O., S. 10.29U. Renz, Die Rationalität der Kultur. Zur Kulturphilosophie und ihrer transzendentalen

Begründung bei Cohen, Natorp und Cassirer, Hamburg 2002, S. 122 – Vgl. H. Cohen, „Zur Kontroverse zwischen Trendelenburg und Kuno Fischer“ (1871), in: ders., Schriften zur Philosophie und Zeitgeschichte, hg. von Albert Görland u. Ernst Cassirer, Berlin 1928 Bd. 1, S. 271: „[D]ie Geschichte der Philosophie [ . . . ] will den fortlaufenden Zusammen-hang der philosophischen Probleme im ganzen der menschlichen Kultur darstellen“.

30U. Renz, „Philosophiegeschichte angesichts der Geschichtlichkeit der Vernunft. Überlegungen zur Historiographie der Philosophie im Ausgang vom Marburger Neu-kantianismus“, in: Studia Philosophica 61/2002, S. 185.


lektische Verhältnis von Kategorie und Urteil äußert: „Der eigentliche Kern einer Kategorie“, schreibt Cohen hier, „kann scheinbar in einer Urteilsart liegen, während bei besserer Einsicht eine andere sich als Wurzel erweist“.31 Oft muss so das Denken das nicht mehr eindeutig Erkennbare „auf verschiedenen Wegen und in verschiedenem Aus-druck erst wieder entdecken“ bzw. es in „anderen Fragen“ aufspüren, wohin dieses nicht mehr eindeutig Erkennbare inzwischen „unter anderen Formulierungen verteilt und zerstreut worden ist“.32 Der Zusammenhang der „neuen Fassung“ mit dem „alten Kern“ wird dann mitunter gerade dort zu entdecken sein, wo er so „befremdend“ erscheint, „daß man die alte Frage in der neuen Antwort nicht immer sogleich wiedererkennt“.33

Gewiss hat ein solches ,Wiedererkennen‘ kaum etwas mit derjenigen „durchaus einfach[en] und beschränkt[en]“ „Aufgabe des Wiederfin-dens“ zu tun, von der Hartmann sprechen wird.34 Die hier beschriebene Denkerfahrung scheint eher eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit derjenigen „Entdeckung“ zu haben, die für Benjamin „in einzigartiger Weise sich mit dem Wiedererkennen verbindet“ (GS I.1, 227). Mit diesen Worten beschreibt Benjamin in der „Erkenntniskritischen Vorrede“ die eigentümliche „Dialektik“, „die dem Ursprung beiwohnt“ (GS I.1, 226). Bedenkt man nun, dass Grundmotiv und Motor der oben beschriebenen „Entwicklung“ nach Cohen das „Prinzip des Ursprungs“ ist, von dem „alle reinen Erkenntnisse [ . . . ] Abwandlungen sein [müssen]“35, so ergibt sich hier eine weitere Möglichkeit, trotz Ben-jamins entschiedener Abwehrgeste, der isolierten Erwähnung des Namens Hermann Cohen in der Vorrede einen sinnvollen Horizont zu verleihen.

Università degli Studi di Sassari

31H. Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 2. Aufl., B. Cassirer, Berlin 1914, zit. nach: Werke, Bd. 6, S. 51.

32Ebd., S. 80 f..33Ebd., S. 80.34Vgl. die oben bereits zitierte Stelle, a.a.O., S. 8.35H. Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, S. 36.

Eine geheime Verabredung.Über Walter Benjamins Umgang

mit Theologie❦

Gérard Raulet

Benjamins „Thesen“ Über den Begriff der Geschichte lassen sich nicht umstandslos in eine Tradition „jüdischen Denkens“ einschreiben. In meinen bisherigen Veröffentlichungen zu diesem Komplex habe ich diese Spannung als nicht auflösbar dargestellt und umso mehr für unauflöslich gehalten, als es nicht nur um die Spannung zwischen historischem Materialismus und jüdischem Denken, sondern auch innerhalb des letzteren um diejenige zwischen Messianismus und Apo-kalyptik und zwischen äußerst widersprüchlichen Strömungen geht, die an beidem Anteil haben und beides verschiedentlich kombinieren.1 Damit ging freilich die Neigung einher, diese ungelöste Spannung als Scheitern zu interpretieren. Ich möchte hier deshalb ein stück-weit von diesem Deutungsschema abrücken und sie vielmehr—wenn auch als Ausdruck eines unleugbaren praktischen Scheiterns—als die Grundstruktur des Benjaminschen Denkens aufzufassen versuchen: als die Struktur, durch die es sich eben weder dem Marxismus noch dem Judentum verschreibt, sondern zwischen beidem eine „geheime Verabredung“ inszeniert.

Nach Scholem soll die Religion für Benjamin bis zuletzt die höchste Ordnung geblieben sein. Diese Behauptung kann sich auf verhält-


1Siehe Gérard Raulet, Le caractère destructeur. Esthétique, théologie et politique chez Walter Benjamin, Paris 1997, S. 187–245; „Mythe et théologie politique. Sur la conception ben-jaminienne de la justice“, in: Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, 27/2010, S. 25–48.

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nismäßig zahlreiche Äußerungen stützen. So steht in einem Brief an Max Rychner, von dem Benjamin ihm kennzeich nenderweise eine Kopie schickte:

Ich habe nie anders forschen und denken können als in einem, wenn ich so sagen darf, theologischen Sinn—nämlich in Gemäßheit der talmudischen Lehre von den neunundvierzig Sinnstufen jeder Thorastelle.2

Allerdings fügt Benjamin sogleich mit Humor hinzu:

Nun: Hierarchien des Sinns hat meiner Erfahrung nach die abgegriffenste kommunistische Platitüde mehr als der heutige bürgerliche Tiefsinn, der immer nur den einen der Apologetik besitzt. (GB IV, 20)

Ähnlich humorvoll ist die sehr berühmte und oft überstrapazierte Äußerung:

Mein Denken verhält sich zur Theologie wie das Löschblatt zur Tinte. Es ist ganz von ihr vollgesogen. Ginge es aber nach dem Löschblatt, so würde nichts, was geschrieben ist, übrig bleiben.3

Die Verwandtschaft dieser Formulierung mit derjenigen der ersten These „Über den Begriff der Geschichte“, in der die Darstellung des Verhältnisses zwischen Marxismus und Theologie ebenfalls unter das Zeichen des Humors gestellt wird, ist unüberhörbar. In letzterer heißt es nach dem Wortlaut des Manuskript blatts 466v:

Gewinnen soll, wenn es nach mir geht, die Türkenpuppe, die bei den Phi-losophen Materialismus heißt. Sie kann es ohne weiteres mit jedem Gegner aufnehmen, wenn sie sich der Dienste der Theologie [versichert], die heute ohnehin klein und häßlich ist und sich nirgends sehen lassen darf.4

Löschblatt und Tinte, Zwerg und Puppe etc.—nur auf den ersten Blick scheinen die Metaphern eindeutig zu sein:

Der historische Materialismus nimmt die Theologie „in seinen Dienst“: er ist Herr, der bestimmt; die Theologie die Dienstpflichtige, die für ihn die Arbeit zu tun—sozusagen das Denken zu besorgen hat.5

2Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, hrsg. von Christoph Gödde und Henri Lonitz, 6 Bde, Frankfurt/M., 1995ff., Bd. IV, S. 19; im Folgenden abgekürzt: GB, Bd. u. Seitenzahl.

3Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt/M. 1978ff.; im Folgenden abgekürzt: GS, Band u. Seitenzahl. Hier: Passagenwerk, Konvolut N, 7a, GS V–1, 588.

4Walter Benjamin, „Über den Begriff der Geschichte“, hrsg. von Gérard Raulet, in: Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band 19, Frankfurt/M. 2010, S. 121.

5Rolf Tiedemann, „Historischer Materialismus oder politischer Messianismus? Politi-sche Gehalte in der Geschichtsphilosophie Walter Benjamins“, in: Materialien zu Benjamins Thesen ‚Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, hrsg. von Peter Bulthaup, Frankfurt/M. 1975, S. 97.

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Mit Recht weist Tiedemann darauf hin, dass Puppe und Zwerg, ja auch das Schachbrett selbst, ein Ganzes bilden und dass die von Benjamin beanspruchte Effizienz—es „ohne weiteres mit jedem aufnehmen“ zu können—nur aus dieser Kombination resultiert. Dass Benjamin die Publikation der Thesen anscheinend ausschloss—zumindest in dieser Form, d.h. als Thesen—dürfte kein genügendes Argument sein, um das theologisch-politische Spannungs verhältnis in Benjamins Denken für unauflösbar zu halten und es bloß als offene Spannung bestehen zu lassen. Ich neige eher zu der Annahme, dass gerade diese Spannung das Medium ihrer „geheimen Verabredung“ bildet. Das wird hier der Fluchtpunkt meiner Überlegungen sein.

I. Eine Philosophie des Judentums

Hier empfinde ich die Sätze über die Verschränkung des Deutschen und Jüdischen als ganz entscheidend. (Adorno an Benjamin 17.12.1934).

Man soll aufhören, Benjamins Verhältnis zum Messianismus isoliert zu behandeln, d.h. ohne es in den in den 1920er und 30er Jahren besonders regen Kontext der Debatten über Theologie und Politik und insbesondere über den Zionismus einzuschreiben. Man hat diesen Komplex bis jetzt auf die „jüdischen Philosophen“ beschränkt, die—wahrscheinlich wegen ihrer vermeintlichen „jüdischen Identität“—in irgendeiner Weise mit Benjamin in Verbindung gebracht werden konnten. Also in erster Linie Rosenzweig, Scholem, am Rande auch Bloch. Ebenso wenig reicht freilich die Formulierung der Problematik als Spannung zwischen einem „orthodoxen“ Messianismus (gibt es so etwas?) und einem geschichtsphilo sophischen, praktischen Messi-anismus aus. Noch weniger reicht sie aus, wenn sie letzteren auf die Alternative Zionismus / Marxismus reduziert und so tut, als ob der „späte“ Benjamin zwischen dem Einfluss von Brecht und demjenigen von Scholem zerrissen gewesen wäre.

Ich möchte mit einer Figur ansetzen, die in der Benjamin-Forschung nicht im Vordergrund steht aber ohne jeglichen Zweifel der Benja-minschen Reflexion Pate gestanden hat. Die Kritik der Gewalt bezieht sich ja sehr ausführlich auf Cohens Auffassung der Gerechtigkeit:

[ . . . ] jener Eingriff des Rechts, den die Verletzung des ungeschriebenen und unbekannten Gesetzes heraufbeschwört, heißt zum Unterschied von

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der Strafe die Sühne. Aber so unglücklich sie den Ahnungslosen treffen mag, ihr Eintritt ist im Sinne des Rechts nicht Zufall, sondern Schicksal, das sich hier nochmals in seiner planvollen Zweideutigkeit darstellt. Schon Hermann Cohen hat es in einer flüchtigen Betrachtung der antiken Schick-salsvorstellung eine „Einsicht, die unausweichlich wird,“ genannt, daß es seine „Ordnungen selbst sind, welche dieses Heraustreten, diesen Abfall zu veranlassen und herbeizuführen scheinen“ (Hermann Cohen: Ethik des reinen Willens, zw. rev. Aufl., Berlin 1907, S. 362). (GS II–1, 198f.)

Für Cohen erfordert der Übergang zu einer „Religion der Vernunft“ den Bruch mit der mythischen Macht des Schicksals, die das Indivi-duum daran hindert, ein selbst verant wortliches Subjekt zu werden, was zugleich eine tiefe Veränderung der Auffassung des Verständnisses von Schuld und Strafe bedeutet. Denn für den Mythos und für die antike Tragödie gilt die Schuld als primär.6 Cohen erinnert daran, dass die Propheten das Opferritual bekämpft haben und dadurch der autoritären Auffassung der Gebote den Vorrang der Moral entgegen-gesetzt haben (RV 200–02). Benjamins Kafka-Essay von 1934 bezieht sich ganz in demselben Sinn auf Cohen. Er erwähnt Cohens negative Auffassung des Schicksals und unterstreicht, dass „Kafka [der] Lockung [des Mythos] nicht gefolgt ist“ (GS II–2, 415). In demselben Zusam-menhang findet sich die Bemerkung, dass Kafka „den Versuchungen des Mystizismus nicht immer aus dem Wege gegangen“ sei, aber dass seine Welt alles in allem doch eher als „Welttheater“ gedeutet werden solle (GS II–2, 422).

Auch der Gebrauch, den Benjamin in dieser frühen Schrift und in der „Erkenntniskritischen Vorrede“ des Trauerspielbuchs von der „Idee“ macht, mag auf Cohens Bemühung verweisen, die Gedanken-welt Platons mit derjenigen der Propheten in Zusammenhang zu bringen und zu versöhnen. In seiner Philosophie des Judentums, deren erste Ausgabe 1933 mit Hermann Cohen endet, hat Julius Guttmann die Schwierigkeit und zugleich die Anziehungskraft der Religion der Vernunft in der unauflöslichen Spannung zwischen dem religiösen Gehalt und der philosophischen Begrifflichkeit gesehen.7 Ein Urteil, das der geheimen Formel von Benjamins Denken völlig angemessen ist. Es kommt „nur“ darauf an, zu unterscheiden, auf welche Seite das Gewicht fällt.

Man kann nicht einmal ausschließen, dass der Gedanke von Benja-mins „Theologisch-politischem Fragment“, nach welchem das Irdische

6Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Wiesbaden 1978, S. 197. Im Folgenden abgekürzt: RV u. Seitenzahl.

7Julius Guttmann, Die Philosophie des Judentums, München 1933.

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im Glück seinen Untergang erstrebt, „während freilich die unmit-telbare messianische Intensität des Herzens [ . . . ] durch Unglück, im Sinne des Leidens hindurchgeht“ (GS II–1, 204), in den Seiten der Religion der Vernunft seinen Ursprung nimmt, wo Cohen die Not-wendigkeit des Leidens für die Heilsökonomie erklärt. (RV 263–275 Allerdings kommt Cohen zu dem Schluss, dass „die Erlösung [ . . . ] gar nicht hinaus geschoben zu werden [braucht] auf das Ende der Tage, sondern sie haftet schon an jedem Momente des Leidens, und sie bildet an jedem Momente des Leidens einen Moment der Erlösung“—eine präsentische Auffassung, die Benjamin, wie noch zu sehen ist, nicht teilen kann (RV 274).

Benjamins Aufbegehren gegen den damals dominierenden Neu-kantianismus im „Programm einer kommenden Philosophie“ richtet sich in erster Linie gegen die Allmacht der „Theorie der Erfahrung“. Cohens Buch über Kants Theorie der Erfahrung studierte er 1918 gemein-sam mit Scholem.8 Im Fragment „Über die Wahrnehmung“ macht er an Cohen eine wichtige Konzession, die seine Bemühung widerspiegelt, sich von der Theorie der Erfahrung nicht abstoßen zu lassen, und davon zeugt, dass er von vornherein auf die religionsphilosophische Seite von Cohens Philosophie großen Wert gelegt hat. Er betont die „Bestrebungen der neukantischen Schule auf die Aufhebung der strengen Unterscheidung zwischen Anschau ungs formen und Kate-gorien [zu] dringen; mit der Aufhebung dieses Unterschiedes aber scheint tatsächlich die Umbildung der transzendentalen Philosophie der Erfahrung zu einer transzendentalen aber spekulativen Philo-sophie“ eingeleitet worden zu sein (GS VI–1, 36). Wenn dem so ist, dann gilt es unbedingt, sich über den philosophischen Status dieser spekulativen (bzw. theologischen und auf jeden Fall metaphysischen) Dimension Klarheit zu verschaffen. Das „Programm“ entzieht sich dieser Herausforderung nicht: Er macht sich zur Aufgabe, „auch reli-giöse Erfahrung logisch [zu] ermöglich[en]“ (GS II–1, 164)—wobei es sich selbstredend nicht „um die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Philosophie und Religion, sondern nach dem zwischen Philosophie und Lehre von der Religion handeln muß; mit andren Worten um die

8„Wie sehr die hier angestellten Erwägungen über Kants System und seinen Begriff der Erfahrung damals im Mittelpunkt seines Denkens standen, zeigt sich auch daran, daß er mir zur gemeinsamen Lektüre als ersten Text das damals gerade in dritter Auflage erschienene große Werk von Hermann Cohen ‚Kants Theorie der Erfahrung’ vorschlug, das wir dann wirklich im Sommer 1918 miteinander gelesen haben“ (Scholem, „Walter Benjamin und die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit“, in: Max Horkheimer (Hg.), Zeug-nisse. Theodor W. Adorno zum 60. Geburtstag, Frankfurt/M. 1963, S. 33).

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Frage nach dem Verhältnis der Erkenntnis überhaupt zur Erkenntnis von der Religion“ (GS II–1, 169–70).9

Dem entspricht Benjamins Würdigung von Cohen in „Juden in der deutschen Kultur“. Nicht nur gehört Cohen dort zu der relativ kurzen Liste von Denkern, denen Benjamin überhaupt einen maß-geblichen Einfluss zuerkennt, sondern er betont nachdrücklich, dass dessen Rationalismus in erster Linie um die universalistische ethische Botschaft des jüdischen Messianismus bemüht war:

Cohens religionsphilosophisches Hauptwerk „Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums“ (1919) konfrontiert das Judentum der Propheten mit der Welt des Mythos, um im jüd[ischen] Monotheismus die einzige streng mythenfremde, ethische Religion zu erkennen. Cohen ist nichts weniger als Intellektualist, wohl aber strenger Rationalist. (GS II, 809)

Cohens Projekt war auf den ersten Blick völlig transparent: „Der Titel, der diesem Buche übergeschrieben ist, enthält die Vorschrift für das Buch“ (RV 3). Es gipfelt im 22. Kapitel, das dem Frieden gewidmet ist. Ungefähr in der Mitte bildet das 13. Kapitel, „Die Idee des Messias und die Menschheit“, den Übergang von der jüdischen Tradition zum Denken der Aufklärung. Ebenfalls eindeutig ist die Intention: „Der Begriff der Religion soll durch die Religion der Vernunft zur Entdeckung gebracht werden“ (RV 5). „Die Religion der Vernunft macht die Religion zu einer allgemeinen Funktion des menschlichen Bewusstseins“ (RV 8). Das sind Sätze, die ich nur deshalb zitiere, weil sie mit dem Wortlaut von Benjamins Programm der kommenden Philosophie übereinstimmen.

Wiewohl es ihm auf die „Idee“ ankommt, setzt Cohen den Akzent auf die geschichtlichen und literarischen Dokumente, durch welche sie überliefert wird. „Denn die Frage nach dem Begriffe des Juden-tums schwebt nicht gänzlich in der Luft [ . . . ]: das Judentum hat literarische Quellen“ (RV 3). Eine völlig ähnliche Spannung zwischen der reinen Sphäre der Ideen und der geschichtlichen Welt charak-terisiert Benjamins Denkweise insgesamt. Cohens Grundsatz—der allenfalls für Benjamin eben nicht mehr gelten kann—ist, dass „ein gerader Weg [ . . . ] von dem geschichtlichen Begriffe des Judentums zur Philosophie der Religion“ führt (RV 6). Also müssen die Quellen des Judentums [ . . . ] als das Material aufgezeigt und nachgewiesen werden, in dessen geschichtlicher Selbsterzeugung die problematische Vernunft, die problematische Religion der Vernunft sich erzeugen

9Hervorhebung von mir, G.R.

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und bewahrheiten soll“ (RV 5). Cohen bemüht sich, die Etappen und Übergänge nachzukonstruieren und mit emblematischen Figuren zu identifizieren: mit dem Juden Philo von Alexandria (RV 279) oder mit Maimonides, den er als „das Wahrzeichen des Protestantismus im mittelalterlichen Judentum“ bezeichnet.10 Der Bezug auf die Reform hat als Denkschema dieselbe Funktion wie bei Heine oder bei Marx und deutet darauf hin, dass es gleichsam eine unwiderstehliche Teleo-logie der Vernunft gegeben hat, die die Geschichte beherrscht hat. Cohens eigene Pointe besteht freilich darin, dass er sich bemüht, diese Tradition als jüdisches Erbe zu präsentieren. Seine Beweisführung läuft darauf hinaus, dass der Humanitätsgedanke, bzw. die Idee der Huma-nität, die vom deutschen Humanismus zur Geltung gebracht wurde, ihren eigentlichen Ursprung bei den Propheten Israels genommen habe. Aber wenn die messianische Hoffnung von dem jüdischen Volk ausging, wendet sie sich an alle anderen Nationen: Sie ist einem Volk gegeben worden, damit alle Menschen an diesem göttlichen Bund teilhaben können.11 „Es wäre daher ein unverbesserlicher Fehler [ . . . ], wenn wir die Religion der Vernunft auf die jüdische Religion [ . . . ] einschränken und abschließen würden.“(RV 9) Auf gleichsam Hegelsche Weise erkennt er sogar dem Christentum das Verdienst zu, durch seinen „welterobernden Anspruch“ „den Begriff der Menschheit zum historischen Inhalt der Religion gemacht zu haben“ (RV 280). Diese Auffassung erklärt, dass er dem jüdischen Nationalismus und insbesondere dem Zionismus alle Legitimität abspricht. Er unterlässt es auch nicht, daran zu erinnern, dass „die Propheten den nationa-listischen Hochmut [geißeln], der den universalen Monotheismus verletzt“ (RV 303).

Das Reich Davids [ist] nicht der Boden für die Welt des Monotheismus. Nicht in dieser kurzen Vergangenheit, noch überhaupt in einer politischen Wirklichkeit liegt der geschichtliche Beruf Israels. Der Sinn und Wert des Monotheismus sollte sich erproben in diesem geschichtlich-politischen Widerspruch. (RV 294)

Daraus zieht Cohen zwei Schlussfolgerungen: zum einen vertritt er das Paradoxon, dass der Untergang Israels als Staat, „aber die Erhaltung des Volkes, ein providentielles Symbol für den Messianismus“ darstellt (RV 295), zum anderen behauptet er den Vorrang der Zukunft: Die

10Cohen, „Deutschtum und Judentum“ (1915), in: Jüdische Schriften, Berlin 1924, S. 244.11Ebd., S. 265.

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Zukunft wird die Wirklichkeit der Geschichte“ (RV 294). Darauf werden wir noch eingehen.

Cohen macht sich auf die Suche nach den „philosophischen Urmo-tiven“ (die Unter streichung ist von mir), in denen und kraft derer sich die Religion der Vernunft durchsetzt (RV 11). Im 13. Kapitel wendet er diese Methode insbesondere auf den Messianismus an, so dass die Interpretation, die er von diesem gibt, sich nicht auf des-sen Komplexität und Widersprüche einlässt, sondern vielmehr das erklärte Ziel verfolgt, die philosophischen Gehalte (Weltuntergang, Welterneuerung, Leitung und Erziehung der Welt durch Gott, Tod und Fortleben . . . ) herauszuarbeiten.

Cohen hat dabei immer jegliche metaphysische Interpretation sei-nes Ansatzes zurück gewiesen. Benjamin widerspricht ihm in diesem Punkt. Die „metaphysische Grundrichtung [seines] Denkens“12 hat er seinerseits nie geleugnet. Bei Cohen spielt die Ethik die Rolle, die Benjamin der Metaphysik zuschreibt. Für Cohen stellt—wie er es gerade am Anfang des zentralen 13. Kapitels nochmals betont—die Ethik die Sphäre dar, in welche das von der „Eigenart der Religion“ Angestrebte mündet (RV 276) und in der sich die scheinbaren Wider-sprüche zwischen Religion und Vernunft aufheben. Wenn nämlich die Religion—und insbesondere die jüdische—sich an das Individuum wendet, so wird in der Ethik „das Ich des Menschen [ . . . ] zur Idee der Menschheit“ (RV 15). Also haben wir nach ihm „den messianischen Gott als den Gott der Ethik“ darzustellen (RV 25).

Ebenso wenig wie Cohen war Benjamin bereit, den Bezug auf eine allgemeingültige Vernunft aufzuopfern. Auch Benjamin geht es um die Menschheit, um den ewigen Frieden etc. Wenn bei ihm eine ausdrück-lich zur praktischen Umsetzung auffordernde Geschichtsphilosophie das Erbe des Messianismus antritt, so darf man nicht vergessen, dass auch Hermann Cohen die „Idealität des Messias“, seine „Bedeutung als Idee“, merkwürdigerweise in der Auflösung seines Sinnbilds erfasst (und bei Cohen ist der Messias an dieser Stelle ganz ausdrücklich ein Sinnbild13): Diese Auflösung des Sinnbilds „in den reinen Gedanken der Zeit, in dem Begriffe des Zeitalters“, was für ihn bedeutet, dass „die Zeit Zukunft und nur Zukunft [wird]. Vergangenheit und Gegenwart versinken in dieser Zeit der Zukunft. [ . . . ] Das Dasein des Men-schen hebt sich auf in dieses Sein der Zukunft. So entsteht für das

12An Max Rychner, 7.3.1931, GB IV, 18.13Davon macht Cohen schon in der Einleitung keinen Hehl: „Das ist es eben, was

der Messias bedeutet: daß das Unrecht aufhören werde“ (RV 24).

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Menschenleben und das Völkerleben der Gedanke der Geschichte“ (RV 291). Benjamins Radikalität auf politischem Gebiet in seinen letzten Schriften ist nicht zu leugnen. Sie verdeckt aber die tiefere Verwandtschaft mit dem weltgeschichtlichen Programm, an welches die Neukantianer ihrerseits ethisch herangingen. Sieht man es so, dann ist die Verwandtschaft zwischen Benjamin und dem von ihm scheinbar verpönten Neukantianismus grösser als allgemein angenommen. Sie bezieht sich auf den springenden Punkt des Verhältnisses zwischen jüdischer Religion und Vernunft, wobei Ethik und Metaphysik eine Alternative darstellen.

Cohens Ansatz spiegelt ziemlich typisch die allgemeine Neigung der jüdischen Bildungs schicht zum Liberalismus wider. Diese Juden empfanden sich in ihrer Mehrheit als Deutsche, ggfs. als deutsche Juden, keineswegs aber als „Angehörige eines jüdischen Volks“.14 Dieses Bewusstsein galt wenigstens für die integrierten bürgerlichen Schichten—und alle Denker, von denen wir hier reden, gehörten diesen an. Aber im sozialen Kontext des Wilhelminischen Reichs und mehr noch nach Ausbruch des Krieges spaltete es sich auf in eine Fülle kleinerer Gruppen von deutsch-patriotischen Juden, Zionisten, Kosmopoliten etc. Das macht den geradezu explosiven Hintergrund von Cohens Stellungnahmen aus. Darüber hinaus entwickelte sich parallel dazu in der jungen Generation eine Debatte über das lebende Judentum im Gegensatz zur nunmehr etablierten „Wissenschaft des Judentums“. Auf die Komplexität dieses Hintergrunds will ich mich hier nicht näher einlassen. Ich zweifle daran, dass sie für ein besseres Verständnis von Benjamins „Position“ hilfreich sein könnte. Fest steht, dass im Gegensatz zu Scholem, Benjamin, Bloch und Rosenzweig selbst zu den Nichtzionisten gehörten. In Cohens Feldzug in den Kriegsjahren sieht Scholem nur eine „tragische Illusion“.15 Wenn aber der Essay von 1915 „Deutschtum und Judentum“ zeitbedingt und an die amerikanischen Juden gerichtet war, damit sie den Eingriff der Vereinigten Staaten in den europäischen Konflikt verhindern,16 dann

14Monika Richartz (Hg.), Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland. Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte 1918–1945, Stuttgart 1982, S. 26.

15Die Bilanz, die er gezogen hat, ist unerbittlich und verheerend: siehe in Hans Mayer, Der Widerruf, a.a.O., S. 426f. Vgl. auch den Brief an Karl Löwith vom 31.08.1968 (in: Briefe, II [1948–1970], München 1995, S. 213f.), anlässlich des Essays von Löwith „Philosophie der Vernunft und Religion der Offenbarung in H. Cohens Religionsphi-losophie“, in: Sämtliche Schriften, III, Stuttgart 1985, S. 349–383.

16An dieser Stelle kann man nicht umhin, daran zu erinnern, dass auf französischer Seite Bergson den umgekehrten Druck ausübt.

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lässt das Hauptwerk von 1918 keinen Zweifel an der geschichtsphilo-sophischen Tragweite der berühmten Formel bestehen: „Als Deutsche wollen wir Juden, und als Juden Deutsche sein.“ Ob Benjamin diese Illusion—und bis zum letzten Augenblick—geteilt hat, das muss an anderen philologisch-historischen Komplexen erprobt werden, die keine zweitrangigen Akteure ins Spiel bringen, sondern zum Kern des ideologisch-politisch-philosophischen Archivs der Zwischenkriegszeit dringen.

II. Politische Theologie / theologische Politik

Das kann man an vielfältigen Intertextualitäten kenntlich machen, die bis zu Leo Strauss und Carl Schmitt reichen. Sie kreisen alle um das Verhältnis von Theologie und Politik. An ihnen hat das „Theologisch-politische Fragment“ im eminenten Sinn Anteil, dessen Entstehung sehr wahrscheinlich auf 1920 zurückgeht und das deshalb zwar auf unüberhörbare Weise die Reflexionen der „Thesen“ antizipiert aber vor allem mit dem Aufsatz „Zur Kritik der Gewalt“ von 1921 in Ver-bindung zu bringen ist.

Vor allem fällt der nachdrückliche Bezug auf Ernst Blochs Geist der Utopie auf, genauer auf dessen erste Ausgabe von 1918, in welcher dem Schlussteil des 5. Kapitels (Über die Gedankenatmosphäre dieser Zeit—Beschluß. Programm und Problem) ca. 12 Seiten angehängt sind, die den Titel „Symbol: Die Juden“ tragen und in der Ausgabe von 1923 entfernt wurden.17 Blochs Exkurs beschreibt die geistige und politische Unruhe der jungen jüdischen Generation, die sich immer weniger mit der Alternative des Ghettos und der Assimilation zufriedengibt.18 Er distanziert sich allerdings von den jüdischen Erneuerern und weist im Namen eines „Dritten über Jude und Christ“19 sowohl den Antise-mitismus als auch den Zionismus zurück—eine Stellungnahme, die derjenigen von Hermann Cohen sehr nahe steht.

Entscheidend ist in diesem Zusammenhang Blochs Berufung auf Spinoza: „Spinoza [bog] aufs Neue die kabbalistische und die mathe-matisch naturphilosophische Denkweise zusammen.“20 Wenn meine

17Den Geist der Utopie hat Benjamin in der Fassung von 1918 gelesen (vgl. in GS VII–2 das „Verzeichnis der gelesenen Schriften“, in dem er die Nummer 643 trägt). Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 1918, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 16, Frankfurt/M. 1971; Ausg. 1923: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 3, Frankfurt/M. 1964.

18Geist der Utopie, Ausg. 1918, a.a.O., S. 320.19Ebd., S. 329.20Ebd., S. 321.

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Hypothese zutrifft, d.h. wenn Benjamin sich tatsächlich auf Bloch bezogen hat, dann hat Adorno mit der Bezeichnung „Theologisch-politisches Fragment“ zweifelsohne das eigentliche Anliegen getroffen: Auch Benjamins Fragment ist in die Tradition der Kabbala und ihrer Radikalisierung durch Spinozas „Theologisch-politisches Traktat“ einzuschreiben. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Absage an die Theokratie. Spinoza zeigte in erster Linie, dass Moses keineswegs der Urheber der fünf Bücher des Alten Testaments, des Pentateuchs, ist, sondern dass ein Pfaffe namens Esdras sie viel später aus Fragmenten verschie dener Herkunft gebastelt hat—ein Argument, das Bloch sich in Atheismus im Christentum angeeignet hat.21 Auf dieser Grundlage werden die Verhältnisse zwischen der zivilen Ordnung und der kirchlichen Macht hinterfragt. Es geht um nichts Geringeres als um—in Blumenbergs Formulierung—die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Ebenso wenig, wie „das Reich Gottes [ . . . ] das Telos der historischen Dynamis“ ist (GS II–1, 203), kann das Reich Gottes die weltliche Ordnung begründen. Die Theologie kann und darf die Politik nicht begründen. Gerade an diesem Punkt lobt Benjamin Bloch dafür, dass er in seinem Anhang „Symbol: Die Juden“ die politischen Ansprüche der Theologie zurück-gewiesen hat: „Die politische Bedeutung der Theokratie mit aller Intensität geleugnet zu haben ist das größte Verdienst von Blochs ‚Geist der Utopie’.“ (GS II–1, 203)

Die Berufung auf Spinoza und die Parteinahme für Bloch waren im damaligen Kontext alles andere als anekdotisch. Vielmehr war Spinoza wieder Gegenstand heftiger Auseinander setzungen gewor-den. Während—wie Leo Strauss in „Das Testament Spinozas“ (1932) erinnert hat—sich allmählich ein Konsens darüber etabliert hatte, hatte Cohen das Bild Spinozas als einer der Begründer des modernen Denkens infrage gestellt. Cohens Attacke ist auf den ersten Blick nicht leicht zu fassen, weil sie seinem Engagement für eine „Religion der Vernunft“ und für eine Versöhnung der Deutschen und der Juden zu widersprechen scheint. Im „Theologisch-politischen Traktat“ sieht er vor allem eine antijüdische Schrift, die ihm als umso abscheulicher erscheint, als sie von einem Juden stammt. Sehr hellsichtig hat Franz Rosenzweig in Cohens Spinoza-Deutung die Signatur einer Zeit erkannt, in welcher—der Cohenschen Hoffnung auf Versöhnung entgegen—der deutsch-jüdische Konflikt wieder auszubrechen drohte

21Siehe hierzu auch Leo Strauss: „Das Testament Spinozas“, in: Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung, München, VIII, Nr. 21, 1932, S. 322–326.

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und sich an kollidierenden Lektüren von Spinozas Traktat entzün-dete, in erster Linie am Gegensatz zwischen einem „religiösen“ und einem „nationalen“ Judentum.22 Auf keinen Fall kann es nun Cohen darum gegangen sein, sich zu der einen oder zu der anderen Partei zu schlagen. Er bekämpfte ja den Zionismus, der in seinen Augen eine falsche Antwort auf die Herausforderung darstellte, vor welche das Judentum gestellt war, und ließ sich nicht täuschen durch die Strategie der Zionisten, die den Konflikt zwischen Liberalen und Orthodoxen dadurch überwinden wollten, dass sie mit der nationalen Idee beiden Parteien einen Ausweg aus ihren Querelen über Kultus und Ritual anboten. Benjamin scheint mir ganz auf dieser Linie zu stehen. Aber Spinoza scheint Hermann Cohen, im Namen der Ver-nunft, für die auch er mit seiner „Religion der Vernunft“ einsteht, zu große Konzessionen an das Christentum gemacht zu haben und darüber jene „Quellen des Judentums“ vergessen zu haben, nämlich die Propheten, deren Messianismus der Menschheit eine universale Zukunftsaussicht zuerst eröffnet hat. Er lehnt sich vor allem gegen die Unterstellung auf—die ihm aus Spinozas Unternehmen zu folgen scheint—, dass die jüdische Religion ausschließlich das Ziel verfolgt hätte, die Gründung und Aufrechterhaltung eines nationalen Staats der Juden zu rechtfertigen.

Daraus ergibt sich wahrscheinlich auch Cohens erbitterte Bekämp-fung des Pantheismus, die es sich lohnen würde, in eine archäologische Vergegenwärtigung der „Pantheismus-Debatten“ einzuschreiben, deren charakteristisches Merkmal ja seit jeher darin bestanden hat, dass der Rationalismus und die beiden miteinander konkurrierenden Religi-onen, das Judentum und das Christentum, daran beteiligt gewesen sind. Zum „Pantheismus“ äußert sich jedenfalls Benjamin weniger negativ als Cohen—so zum Beispiel in dem frühen „Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart“ (GS II, 21–23), in dem die beiden Pro-tagonisten sich über die Symptome der Irreligiosität der Gegenwart einig sind. Obwohl dieser nicht genannt wird, lässt sich der Dialog in vielerlei Hinsicht als eine Debatte mit Cohen interpretieren, denn es geht in ihm um das Verhältnis zwischen Mystik und Aufklärung, Individualismus und Gemeinschaft, und nicht zuletzt um Ethik und Politik—„Achtung vor dem Sozialen“.

22Franz Rosenzweig, „Über den Vortrag Hermann Cohens ‚Das Verhältnis Spinozas zum Judentum’“, in: Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, Dordrecht 1984, S. 165–167.

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Nun muss Cohens (Gegen-)Angriff nicht nur in den damaligen Kontext wieder eingeschrieben werden, sondern Leo Strauss hat—aufgrund seines eingehenden Umgangs mit dem antiken Denken und der in ihm grundlegenden Rhetorik—durchschaut, dass er selbst Opfer einer diskursiven Strategie geworden ist. Cohen habe gleichsam Spinozas Denkstrategie in umge kehrter Weise reproduziert, weil er nicht einsah, dass Spinoza das Risiko einer Konfrontation mit den orthodoxen calvinistischen Theologen nur eingehen konnte, indem er anscheinend sich zur Partei der liberalen Christen schlug. In sei-nem Traktat habe Spinoza drei Wege umschrieben: den Zionismus, die Assimilierung und die Rückkehr zur Orthodoxie. Die ersten zwei hätten nach ihm in eine Sackgasse geführt, aber ein Ausweg sei auf keinen Fall im Neukantianismus von Hermann Cohen, sondern viel eher auf der Seite jener Erneuerungs bewegungen zu suchen, die auf protestantischer Seite Karl Barth und auf jüdischer Franz Rosenzweig verkörpern. Nichtsdestotrotz geht Strauss, wie mir scheinen will, alles in allem mit dem Beitrag Spinozas zum modernen Denken und zum Verhältnis des Judentums zu diesem nicht sehr viel anders um als Hermann Cohen. Nachdem er zweifelsohne ein wichtiges, für eine Geschichte der Ideengeschichte festzuhaltendes Moment und vor allem dessen diskurs strategischen Charakter betont hat, muss er es wirklich mit den Intentionen seiner eigenen politischen Geschichts-schreibung aufnehmen. Das muss ich hier als vorläufige Feststellung dahingestellt lassen.23

Wo sich Benjamin nun in „Kritik der Gewalt“ ausdrücklich auf Spi-noza bezieht, geht es wiederum um das selbstverantwortliche moderne Subjekt—dasjenige, das überhaupt einen Vertrag, und sei es auch den Unterwerfungsvertrag von Hobbes, unterzeichnen kann:

Wenn nach der Staatstheorie des Naturrechts die Personen aller ihrer Gewalt zugunsten des Staates sich begeben, so geschieht das unter der Voraussetzung (die beispielsweise Spinoza im theologisch-politischen Traktat ausdrücklich feststellt), daß der einzelne an und für sich und vor Abschluß eines solchen vernunftgemäßen Vertrages jede beliebige Gewalt, die er de facto innehabe, auch de jure ausübe. (GS II, 180)

Somit haben wir auch gleich die Überleitung zu der anderen Debatte, um die sich in den 20er und 30er Jahren das politische Denken und

23Diesen diskursiven Strategien ist ein Forschungsprojekt der „Groupe de recherche sur la culture de Weimar“ (Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris) über die Geschichte der Ideengeschichtsschreibung gewidmet. Siehe unter www.weimar.msh-paris.fr

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die politische Ideengeschichte dreht. Denn auch die Hobbes-Debatte zwischen Schmitt und Strauss kreist um das Verhältnis von Theolo-gie und Politik. Im Vorwort zur amerikanischen Neuausgabe seines Hobbes-Buchs24 erinnert Leo Strauss daran, dass er sich für Hobbes zu interessieren begann, als er sich an seine Studie über die Anfänge der Bibelkritik im 17. Jahrhundert und insbesondere über Spinozas Tractatus heranmachte. Er fügt hinzu, dass die Aufbruchsstimmung in der Theologie, die mit den Namen Karl Barth auf christlicher und Franz Rosenzweig auf jüdischer Seite verbunden war, die Frage auf-warf, inwiefern die Kritik aller orthodoxen Theologie gerechtfertigt war. Derselben Erinnerung gibt er im amerikanischen Vorwort zu seiner Dissertation über Spinozas Kritik der Religion eine biographi-sche Wendung: Der Verfasser, schreibt er, sei damals ein junger, in Deutschland aufgewachsener Jude gewesen, der mit dem theologisch-politischen Problem konfrontiert gewesen sei. Wie Heinrich Meier gezeigt hat, mag tatsächlich Strauss’ lebenslange Beschäftigung mit dem Thema des „guten (oder richtigen) Lebens“ in dieser Auseinan-dersetzung ihren Ursprung genommen haben.25 Sie mündet bereits in den frühen Schriften in eine Gegenüberstellung der politischen Theologie und der poli tischen Philosophie, deren Echo sich noch in der programmatischen Schrift Was ist politische Philosophie? nie-derschlägt.26 Spinoza und Hobbes sind für ihn die beiden Denker, die dem Primat der Offenbarung in der Politik ein Ende gesetzt haben. Während für die antiken Völker die Religion integraler Teil der Politik war, habe die christliche Offenbarung dieses Verhältnis umgekehrt und aus der Politik einen Teil der Religion gemacht—so verstehe er Hobbes’ Kritik.27 Seiner Interpretation von Hobbes liegt nämlich von vornherein die Absicht zugrunde, aus der Absage an die theologische Begründung eine Weiche für das moderne Denken zu machen, das die Wahl gehabt hätte—und noch habe—zwischen einer anthropologischen Begründung, wie sie Hobbes durchführt, und der Rückkehr zum profanen Politikbegriff der Griechen. Auf diesen Aspekt seines Vorhabens, der eine Kritik an den Grundsätzen des modernen Liberalismus einleitet, muss im Rahmen des vorliegenden Beitrags

24Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, translated from the German, Oxford 1936, Foreword, S. VIII.

25Heinrich Meier, Das theologisch-politische Problem. Zum Thema von Strauss, Stuttgart 2002, S. 16.

26Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, Glencoe, Ill. 1959.27Leo Strauss, „Spinozas Kritik“ (1930), in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 1: Die Religions-

kritik Spinozas und zugehörige Schriften, Stuttgart u. Weimar 1996, S. 75.

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verzichtet werden.28 Ebenso wenig kann ich hier darauf eingehen, dass Carl Schmitt seinerseits in seinem Buch über den „Leviathan“ eine grundsätzlich ähnliche, aber in die umgekehrte Richtung gewandte Strategie einsetzt, indem er Hobbes in den Dienst einer sozusagen „modernen“ politischen Theologie zu stellen versucht: auf die Frage nämlich, ob der Leviathan-Mythos bei Hobbes eine „echte Wieder-herstellung der ursprünglichen Lebenseinheit“ darstellt oder nicht.29

Die Hobbes- und die Spinoza-Interpretationen von Strauss, Schmitt u.a. stellen also einen Hintergrund dar, der nicht nur den allgemeinen Kontext von Benjamins Denken bildet, sondern gegen welchen dessen ethisch-soziales Ziel, die „klassenlose Gesellschaft“, sich abhebt. Man darf nämlich nicht vergessen, dass es in diesen Interpretationen—vor allem bei Strauss—um einen „dreifachen Gegensatz“ (wenn man so sagen darf) ging: zwischen der jüdisch-christlichen Überlieferung und der antiken Tradition sowie zwischen letzterer und dem modernen politischen Denken.30 Während Cohen bemüht war, letzteres mit der Lehre der Propheten in Zusammenhang zu bringen und zu versöhnen, betont Strauss deren Gegensatz.31

Gegen irgendwelche Anziehung durch das antike Konzept des „richtigen Lebens“ scheint Benjamin immun zu sein. Sein Denkweg hat hier nur denjenigen der Inspiratoren der künftigen Neokonser-vativen gekreuzt. Umso weniger gibt es für ihn einen Ausweg aus der Klemme des modernen Denkens. Die Art und Weise, wie er sich davon freimacht, besteht paradoxerweise in seinem Umgang mit den Bildern, die eben das Gegenteil einer reinen „Sprache der Ideen“ sind.

III. Messianismus und Allegorie

Man wird sicher stutzen, wenn ich nun behaupte, dass Benjamin bei aller Radikalität dasselbe Ziel verfolgte wie Cohen, und dies ausge-

28Wiederum verweise ich auf das noch nicht abgeschlossene Projekt über die Ge-schichte der politischen Ideengeschichte der „Groupe de recherche sur la culture de Weimar“.

29Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes (1938), Stuttgart 1993, S. 23.

30Vgl. hierzu ganz ausdrücklich: Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933–34), in : Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. III: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften, Stuttgart u. Weimar 2001, S. 270.

31Vgl. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Leo Strauss, Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss, Selected and introduced by Thomas L. Pangl, Chicago 1989. Strauss schrieb für die amerikanische Ausgabe der Religion der Vernunft ein langes Vorwort, das er kennzeichnenderweise auch in seine Studien über platonische Philosophie (Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Chicago 1985) aufnahm.

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rechnet in seinem großen Projekt Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Ich bin im Rahmen dieses Aufsatzes nicht imstande, die tieferen Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Trauerspiel-Projekt und der gesuchten Zusammenkunft zwischen Deutschtum und Judentum im Einzelnen zu rekonstruieren. Eines steht freilich fest: sie verdichten sich in der Auffassung der Sprache, in deren Verhältnis zur Theorie der Parabel, und sie kreisen um eine Reihe von Fragestellungen, die alle zum „messianischen Komplex“ in Benjamins Werk gehören. Wie bzw. in welcher Sprache können Schuld und Trauer bzw. kann die Klage ver-handelt werden? Worin besteht der Unterschied zwischen der Schuld (der Tragödie) und der Trauer (dem Trauerspiel)? Der Schlüssel ist wahrscheinlich in dem Satz enthalten, dass „die Philosophie nicht als Offenbarung zu reden, sich anmaßen darf“, das heißt, dass sie zwar an die Ursprache zu erinnern habe, dieses Erinnern aber in keiner-lei Weise ein „Assoziieren, in dem sich zum Wahrnehmungsbild das Bild der Idee gesellt[e]“ (GS I–3, 937), sein könne. Was hier in der Begrifflichkeit der „erkenntniskritischen Vorrede“ ausgedrückt wird, nämlich die Ablehnung sowohl von Bedeutung im gemeinen lingu-istischen Sinn als auch von jeglichem symbolischen Zusammenhang zwischen der Welt der Wahrnehmungen und derjenigen der Ideen, ist nichts anderes als der Kern der Allegorie.

Man wird aber auch—vielleicht mit einer gewissen Verwunderung—zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass Benjamin in einem Brief an Florens Christian Rang vom 18. November 1923 (in jenen Monaten wird Rang zum engeren brieflichen Vertrauten Benjamins, während die Briefe an Scholem viel kürzer werden) zwei Themen miteinander verbin-det: einerseits die „Theorie der Tragödie“, die im Mittelpunkt seines Austauschs mit Rang steht, und anderseits ein ziemlich pathetisches Bekenntnis zu seiner jüdischen Herkunft (er erwähnt u.a. Rathenaus Ermordung), das aber offensichtlich vor allem dazu dient, sich von Buber abzugrenzen:

Nicht zum ersten Male erfährst Du von mir, daß ich nur ungeheuer widerstrebend, nur mit tiefsten Bedenken, Deine Gefolgschaft mit meiner Person, mit dem Jüdischen in ihr vermehre. Nicht aus opportunistischen Erwägungen stammen diese Bedenken, sondern aus der jederzeit zwingend mir gegenwärtigen Einsicht: daß in den furchtbarsten Augenblicken eines Volkes einzig die zu reden berufen sind, die ihm angehören, nein mehr: die ihm im eminentesten Sinne angehören, die nicht allein das mea res agitur sagen, sondern meam propriam rem ago aussprechen dürfen. Reden soll der Jude sicher nicht. (Mir ist die tiefe Notwendigkeit in Rathenaus Tod immer klar gewesen, indessen der Landauers, der nicht geredet, sondern geschrieen hat, die Deutschen mit anderer Schwere bezichtigt.) Soll er

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mitreden? Das ist auch eine der Fragen und zwar die objektiv wichtigste, welche die Aufforderung zur Zuschrift in mir erweckt. Und sollte ich Dir in diesem Zusammenhange, in den es gehört, nicht sagen dürfen, daß eine Schrift, deren Wirkung mit so feinen Gewichten ausgewogen werden wird, wie es der Deinigen geschehen muß, sich Unrecht tut, indem sie nun gar den überall mitredenden Martin Buber unter ihr Gefolge aufnimmt. Hier, wenn irgendwo, sind wir im Kern der gegenwärtigen Judenfrage: daß der Jude heute auch die beste deutsche Sache für die er sich öffentlich einsetzt, preisgibt, weil seine öffentliche deutsche Äußerung notwendig käuflich (im tiefern Sinn) ist, sie kann nicht das Echtheitszeugnis beibringen. Ganz anders legitim können die geheimen Beziehungen zwischen Deutschen und Juden sich behaupten. (GB I, 368–69. Hervorgehoben von mir, G.R.)

Zugleich distanziert er sich sehr ausdrücklich vom Zionismus und, was ihn persönlich betrifft, von jeglichen Emigrationsplänen:

Die Frage der Auswanderung, um auf sie zurückzukommen, hat nur im Sinn dieser defensiven Antwort auf Deinen Verpflichtungsversuch für mich mit der jüdischen Frage zu tun. Im Übrigen nicht. Vielmehr resümieren deren Anforderungen für mich vorderhand sich darin: Hebräisch zu lernen. Wo ich dann auch sein werde, werde ich das Deutsche nicht vergessen. (GB I, 368–69)

Das deutsch-jüdische Verhältnis hebt sich für Benjamin in der über allen menschlichen Sprachen stehenden Sphäre der reinen Ursprache auf, wie aus seinem Urteil von 1917 über Scholems erste Übersetzungen hebräischer Texte unmissverständlich zu entnehmen ist:

Ihre Liebe zur hebräischen Sprache kann sich im Medium der deutschen nur als Ehrfurcht vor dem Wesen der Sprache und dem Worte überhaupt darstellen, nur in der Anwendung einer guten und reinen Methode. Das heißt aber: Ihre Arbeit bleibt eine apologetische, weil sie die Liebe und die Verehrung eines Gegenstandes nicht in seiner Sphäre ausdrückt. Es wäre nun prinzipiell nicht unmöglich daß zwei Sprachen in eine Sphäre eingehen: im Gegenteil das konstituiert alle große Übersetzung und bil-det die Grundlage der ganz wenigen großen Übersetzungswerke die wir haben. Im Geiste Pindars erschloß sich Hölderlin die gleiche Sphäre der deutschen und der griechischen Sprache: seine Liebe zu beiden wurde eine. (Ungewiß bin ich mir halte es aber fast für möglich daß man über Georges Dante-Übersetzung gleich Großes sagen kann) Ihnen jedoch ist deutsche Sprache nicht gleich nahe wie die hebräische und darum sind Sie nicht der berufene Übersetzer des hohen Liedes, während Sie es eben dem Geiste der Ehrfurcht und der Kritik verdanken daß Sie kein unberufner geworden sind. (17.7.1917, GB I, 370–71)

Ein paar Monate später heißt es in einem Brief vom 30.03.1918, in

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dem Benjamin eine Verbindung herstellt mit seinem Aufsatz „Die Bedeutung der Sprache in Trauerspiel und Tragödie“:

Ohne Beziehung zum hebräischen Schrifttum, das wie ich nun weiß der gegebne Gegenstand solcher Untersuchung ist, habe ich die Frage „wie Sprache überhaupt mit Trauer sich erfüllen mag und Ausdruck von Trauer sein kann“ in einem kurzen „Die Bedeutung der Sprache in Trauerspiel und Tragödie“ überschriebnen Aufsatz an das Trauerspiel herangebracht. Ich bin dabei im einzelnen und ganzen zu einer Einsicht gekommen die der Ihrigen nahe steht, habe mich aber dabei fruchtlos an einem Verhält-nis abgearbeitet, das ich erst jetzt in seinem wahren Sachverhalt zu ahnen beginne. Im Deutschen tritt nämlich die Klage sprachlich hervorragend nur im Trauerspiel hervor und dieses steht im Sinne des Deutschen der Tragödie fast nach. Damit konnte ich mich nicht versöhnen und sah nicht daß diese Rangordnung im Deutschen ebenso legitim ist wie im Hebräischen wahrscheinlich die entgegengesetzte.[ . . . ] Im Gegensatz zu Ihrem Ausgangspunkt hat der meine nur den einen Vorteil gehabt, mich von vornherein auf den fundamentalen Gegensatz von Trauer und Tragik hinzuweisen, den Sie nach Ihrer Arbeit zu schließen noch nicht erkannt haben. [ . . . ] [Ihre] Übersetzungen—über deren Relation zum Hebräischen ich zwar nicht urteilen kann, ihnen aber in dieser Hinsicht vollkommen vertraue—haben was ihre Relation zum Deutschen angeht letzten Endes den Charakter von Studien. Es handelt [sich] bei Ihren Übersetzungen offenbar nicht darum, einen Text für das Deutsche gleich-sam zu retten, sondern eher dar[um] ihn regelrecht auf das Deutsche zu beziehen. Sie empfangen in dieser Beziehung von der deutschen Sprache keine Eingebung. Ob sich die Klagelieder jenseits einer solchen Beziehung auf das Deutsche auch noch in diese Sprache übersetzen lassen vermag ich natürlich nicht zu entscheiden und Ihre Arbeit scheint es zu verneinen. (GB I, 443–44)

In aller Regel gibt man von dem Sprachaufsatz eine nicht nur metaphy-sische, sondern eine tendenziös religiöse Interpretation. Man übersieht dabei, dass er den Akzent auf den zweiten Akt der Schöpfung setzt, d.h. auf den Menschen und auf sein Vermögen, die Dinge zu benennen und somit „sein eigenes geistiges Wesen in seiner Sprache“ mitzuteilen ( GB II–1, 143). Das Anliegen ist ein anthropologisches und begründet nichts anderes als Benjamins philosophische Anthropologie: Es geht um „das sprachliche Wesen des Menschen“, das darin besteht, „dass er die Dinge benennt“, also dass Gott ihm gleichsam das Vermögen des Namengebens anvertraut und ihn somit als Erkennenden „zum Bilde des Schaffenden“ schuf (GB II–1, 149):

Gott hat den Menschen nicht aus dem Wort geschaffen, und er hat ihn nicht benannt. Er wollte ihn nicht der Sprache unterstellen, sondern im

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Menschen entließ Gott die Sprache, die ihm als Medium der Schöpfung gedient hatte, frei aus sich. Gott ruhte, als er im Menschen sein Schöpfe-risches sich selbst überließ. (GB II–1, 149)

Der Gegensatz, auf den es eigentlich ankommt, ist nicht der zwi-schen Gott und Mensch, sondern zwischen der Mitteilung „durch“ die Sprache und der Mitteillung „in“ der Sprache. Er liegt auch dem Unterschied zwischen dem auf die Mitteilung von etwas ausgerichteten „bürgerlichen“ Sprachgebrauch und der „metaphorischen“ Sprache, der Sprache in Bildern und Parabeln, zugrunde.

Benjamin bat am 11. August 1934 Scholem, ihm ein Buch von Chajim Nachman Bialik über „Hagadah und Halacha“ zugänglich zu machen. Auch Cohen betont—und dies mag wiederum ein Zeichen der tieferen Verwandtschaft zwischen seiner Auffassung des Juden-tums und derjenigen Benjamins sein—, dass die mündliche Lehre in der jüdischen Tradition genauso wichtig wie die geschriebene ist. „Das Buch ist abgeschlossen; der Mund bleibt offen; er darf für den Nationalgeist nicht verstummen.“ (RV 32–33)

All dies scheint mir auf eine Theorie des Symbols und der Deutung, auf Spuren, die nicht unmittelbar etwas bedeuten, aber nichtsdesto-weniger wichtig sind, hinzuweisen und Brecht hat es völlig richtig erfasst, als er Kafkas Schreiben als einen Konflikt zwischen Parabel und Vision charakterisierte.32 Das Gesetz ist selbst nur eine Allegorie des Sinns, weil es weder ein „Bild“ sein kann, noch darf.

Wie Tiedemann es auf die Formel gebracht hat, gibt es auch eine „geheime Verabredung“ zwischen den Allegorien des 17. Jahrhunderts im Trauerspielbuch und der Parabel des Engels in den „Thesen“—eine Verwandtschaft, die sich nicht von ungefähr im bildlichen Medium verdichtet: die „facies hippocratica der Geschichte als erstarrte Urland-schaft“ auf der einen Seite, der zum Himmel wachsende Trümmerhau-fen der neunten These auf der anderen. In beiden Fällen übersteigt die Erfahrung, um die es sich handelt, die Sprache der Begriffe; sie kann nur noch als Bild ausgedrückt werden, auf welches gestarrt wird.33

Wie wäre es nun, wenn der Engel sich plötzlich umdrehte? Die Notizen zum Kafka-Essay beklagen sich über die „Eliminierung der Gegenwart“ zugunsten der Vergangenheit und der Zukunft (II–3, 1205). Diese Umdrehung wäre dann durchaus mit der sehr mysteriösen dialektischen Umwälzung, die am Ende der Trauerspielbuchs als pon-

32Brief an Benjamin vom 5. Juli 1934.33Vgl. Tiedemann, „Historischer Materialismus . . . “, a.a.O., S. 82.

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deracion misteriosa bezeichnet wird, vergleichbar. Sie würde wetteifern mit der präsentischen Auffassung der Offenbarung bei Scholem und im konservativen jüdischen Denken. Wofür steht nämlich letztendlich die „Metapher“ des Engels? Auch hier muss man Tiedemann recht geben: nicht für den Messias selbst, wohl aber für den „historischen Materialisten“, und das heißt für den ernüchternden Blick, der mit den Trümmern konfrontiert ist und „zur Sache gehen“ muss.34

Das Moment der Entscheidung und Erlösung des Vergangenen bedeutet als „Stillstand“ der Dialektik einen Sprung aus dem Kon-tinuum einer sich ziellos wiederholenden Geschichte. Aber dieser Sprung unter dem Himmel der Geschichte ist kein Sprung in die Theo-logie, sondern ein Sprung aus der Geschichte der Unterdrücker, die gerade ein Kontinuum bildet, während diejenige der Unterdrückten „ein Diskontinuum [ist]“ (I–3, 1236). Die Thesen „Über den Begriff der Geschichte“ sind alles andere als ein Dokument der Resignation. Aber die Komplexität der Verhältnisse zwischen Messianismus und Apokalyptik lassen mich allerdings daran zweifeln, dass man Benjamins Position durch eine klare Unterscheidung beider Diskurse deutlicher umreißen könnte und dass es überhaupt Sinn haben kann, um es in Hermann Cohens Worten auszudrücken, anders als philosophisch „den Knäuel der Motive zu entwirren, welche sich in der Idee des Messianismus verschlingen“ (RV 285). Dies gilt allenfalls, wenn man nur den „orthodoxen“, sprich: konservativen jüdischen Glauben an den Messias meint. Vielleicht nutzt Benjamin vielmehr sogar diese Komplexität aus. In den Thesen kreuzen sich apoka lyptische und messianische Elemente, die einander kontaminieren, ja zum Teil wider sprechen, und den Thesen, d.h. der letzten Geschichts hilosophie Benjamins, ihre faszinierende Eigenartigkeit verleihen.

Université Paris-Sorbonne

34Ebd., S. 86.

Messianisme et philologie du langage

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Dans son poème « Résignation », Schiller écrit « die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht », et comme l’allemand n’attribue pas au sujet de lieu syntaxique défini dans la phrase, le vers reste suspendu dans une ambiguïté sans doute voulue, simplement parce que Weltgeschichte (histoire universelle) et Weltgericht (tribunal universel ou Jugement dernier) peuvent y intervertir leur fonction de sujet et de prédicat. Si l’histoire universelle est l’accomplissement d’un verdict déjà arrêté quant au monde, le jugement étant préalablement rendu, l’histoire n’est que l’exécution de ce verdict et son cours obéit à cet arrêt. Si, inversement, le Jugement dernier est le terme d’une histoire, il sera fonction de ce que cette histoire mondiale aura été ; son contenu sera constitué de ce que l’histoire aura produit et qui n’est ni d’avance fixé ni entièrement discernable à chaque présent. Dans le premier cas, l’interprétation du messianisme sera « nihiliste », on aura affaire à un messianisme de rupture (souvent apocalyptique, voire, parfois antinomiste1) ; dans le second, à un messianisme d’accomplissement2.


1C’est, de manière exemplaire, le cas de certaines sectes gnostiques manichéennes (celle de Carpocrate, par exemple, au IIe siècle de notre ère), du courant sabbatianiste et de son prolongement, au XVIIIe siècle dans les sectes frankistes (cf. G. Scholem, « La Rédemption par le péché », Le Messianisme juif, trad. fr. B. Dupuy (Paris : Cal-mann-Lévy, 1974).

2Plus proche d’une conception comme celle de Hermann Cohen, Religion de la Rai-son tirée des sources du judaïsme, trad. A. Lagny et M. de Launay (Paris : PUF, 1994). Cf., également, P. Bouretz, Témoins du futur (Paris : Gallimard, 2005).

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On peut se risquer à transposer au langage ce qui vaut pour l’histoire, dans la mesure où l’on isole pour terme de comparaison et critère d’évaluation une conception d’arrière-plan de ce qui peut leur être commun, c’est-à-dire une conception du temps où reparaît l’alternative évoquée dès le début : ou bien le temps est dissocié de l’histoire pour en être l’origine et la fin d’ores et déjà arrêtées ; ou bien le temps est lié à l’histoire (sans s’y confondre), et il est alors possible d’articuler un champ d’expériences (une tradition) et un horizon d’attentes (une promesse, par exemple, ou un projet). Transposée au langage, cette alternative prend la forme suivante : soit la source du sens est antérieure et supérieure à tout langage possible, et donc aussi à toute langue, et sa manifestation plénière implique la rupture ou la mort des langues ; soit le sens est produit par des langues et ce qu’il est comme ce qu’il signifie n’est pas encore défini. Dans le premier cas, il s’agit de retrouver les traces du sens dans le langage en général, les langues et les œuvres plus particulièrement – le commentaire ayant alors pour finalité en quelque sorte une techouvah du sens dont la plénitude est historiquement aliénée en autant de traces –, le sens étant d’emblée un événement extra-historique même s’il fonde toute l’histoire ; dans le second, il s’agit autant de prolonger une tradition que d’innover par rapport à ce qu’elle lègue, et le commentaire n’est plus investi d’une fonction sotériologique, mais cherche à restituer à une parole sa singularité, donc à montrer comment les traditions se forment et se transforment ; le sens est, dans l’histoire, un événe-ment historique même si les modalités de son élaboration peuvent être transhistoriques, référées à une réflexivité innovante, humaine, artistique et intellectuelle.

L’arrière-plan philosophique, dans le second cas, mobilise des pen-seurs qui ont développé une conception des liens entre langage et histoire, sens et temps, qui n’ont pas comme horizon un messianisme de rupture, mais, le cas échéant, un messianisme d’accomplissement : cette lignée, qui part d’une constellation kantienne, a été inaugurée, à l’époque moderne, par Schleiermacher3 et Humboldt4, et, au tournant du XIXe siècle par Rickert5.

Pour entrer véritablement dans la complexité évoquée de l’une des constellations où les rapports du langage au messianisme sont

3F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Herméneutique, trad. et préf. Ch. Berner (Paris : Le Cerf, 1987).4G. de Humboldt, La Tâche de l’historien, trad. A. Disselkamp et A. Laks, introd. J.

Quillien (Lille : PUL, 1985).5H. Rickert, Le système des valeurs, trad. et préf. J Farges (Paris : Vrin, 2007).

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compris de manière radicale et dans une perspective apocalyptique ou, du moins, dans celle d’une rédemption fondée sur la temporalité de l’instantanéité, on peut partir des discussions qui ont intimement lié Walter Benjamin et Gershom Scholem durant les années qu’ils passèrent souvent ensemble, de 1915 à 1923, à Berne, et dont Scho-lem a écrit qu’elles furent pour lui tout à fait décisives. Certaines de ces discussions se sont sédimentées dans des textes dont l’un des plus célèbres est le passage d’une lettre de Benjamin à Scholem qui est devenu l’essai connu sous le titre « Sur le langage en général et le langage humain » qui date de 1916, l’époque où les deux amis discutaient dans le cadre de ce qu’ils avaient appelé, en reprenant le nom d’un quartier de Berne, l’« université de Muri ». Les réflexions développées dans ce texte par Benjamin se prolongeront dans l’avant-propos de sa thèse sur L’origine du drame baroque allemand et jusque dans la préface à sa traduction des Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire, « La tâche du traducteur » ; mais font également partie de cet ensemble ses « Thèses » sur « Le concept d’histoire » qui datent apparemment de 1940 bien que Benjamin ait dit qu’il les avait portées en lui durant vingt ans.

Il n’est pas question ici d’examiner en détail l’ensemble de ces textes, d’autant que, dans l’esprit de Benjamin, ils sont indissociables de ceux que Scholem avait écrits durant cette même époque ou qu’il a conçus à ce moment-là, même s’il ne les a publiés que bien plus tardivement, c’est le cas non seulement des « Dix propositions non historiques sur la kabbale »6, mais surtout de l’étude sur « Le nom de Dieu et la théorie kabbalistique du langage »7. Mais c’est bien dans ce contexte des discussions entre Benjamin et Scholem qu’il faut situer le débat de fond entre les deux conceptions, évoquées plus haut, du langage, sur la base d’une opposition entre conception « mystique » de l’histoire et conception « philologique ».

On s’est maintes fois posé la question de savoir d’où Benjamin avait tiré ses sources en écrivant son essai de 1916 « Sur le langage en général et sur le langage humain ». Bettina Menke8, Winfried Menninghaus9,

6G. Scholem, Aux origines religieuses du judaïsme laïque, préf. M. Kriegel (Paris : Cal-mann-Lévy, 2000).

7Ce texte fut d’abord celui d’une conférence « Eranos » publiée dans Eranos Jahrbuch, n° 39 (1970) (repris et traduit en français par M. Hayoun et G. Vajda in Le Nom et les symboles de Dieu [Paris : Le Cerf, 1988]).

8B. Menke, Sprachfiguren (Munich: Fink, 1991) 29.9W. Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie (Francfort/M.: Suhrkamp,

1980) 189.

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Stéphane Mosès10, et Susan Handelmann11 militent en faveur de l’idée que Benjamin aurait, par ce texte, influencé Scholem, et ainsi l’aurait encouragé à se plonger dans l’étude des kabbalistes ; Richard Wolin12, Robert Alter13 et Moshe Idel14 défendent la thèse inverse : Scholem, déjà immergé dans la lecture des kabbalistes, aurait insufflé à Benja-min l’intuition qui commande l’essentiel de son travail15. Il est certain, en tous cas, que Benjamin ne savait pas l’hébreu, n’avait donc accès à aucune des sources à l’époque accessibles, et qu’il ne mentionne, dans ce texte, aucun auteur juif, a fortiori aucun kabbaliste16. Il est, en revanche, possible que Benjamin ait puisé à des sources mystiques, Jakob Böhme, et il est certain qu’il a lu Hamann – deux auteurs dont les intérêts qui confinaient à ceux de la mystique les avaient sans doute rapprochés des sources kabbalistiques. Il est également possible, c’est même tout à fait vraisemblable, que Scholem et Benjamin aient tout simplement longuement discuté à partir des premières lectures faites par Scholem des textes kabbalistiques publiés en Allemagne dans le courant du XIXe siècle17. Sur cette question philologico-historique, Moshe Idel donne un excellent éclairage en retraçant soigneusement les différentes étapes au cours desquelles Scholem a peu à peu appré-

10S. Mosès, L’Ange de l’histoire (Paris : Le Seuil, 1992) 252 sq.11S. Handelmann, Fragments of Redemption (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 77.12R. Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia UP,

1982) 39–41.13R. Alter, Necessary Angels. Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem

(Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 1991) 46.14M. Idel, « A. Aboulafia, G. Scholem and W. Benjamin, on Language », in Jüdisches

Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000). Cf., également, L’Expérience mystique d’Abraham Aboulafia (Paris : Le Cerf, 1989).

15Avant 1920, Scholem ne connaissait que les textes d’Aboulafia traduits par A. Jel-linek à partir de 1853 ; mais en 1916, il ne pouvait transmettre à Benjamin une vue maîtrisée de L’Épître des sept voies, par exemple (Paris : Éd. de l’ Éclat, 1985, préf. S. Trigano, trad. J.-Ch. Attias).

16Scholem écrit, dans une conférence de 1964 sur Benjamin, qu’il lui a fait connaître, en 1916, l’existence de l’ouvrage de F. J. Molitor sur la kabbale, Philosophie der Geschichte, oder über die Tradition, Francfort/M., 1827, et que Benjamin acquit ainsi l’un « des pre-miers ouvrages sur le judaïsme » ; cf. G. Scholem, Fidélité et utopie, trad. M. et J. Bollack (Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1978) 131.

17Scholem a débuté ses lectures de textes kabbalistiques en 1915. Le texte de Benjamin, aux dires de Scholem, fut une réponse à une lettre que ce dernier lui avait envoyée à propos des rapports entre mathématiques (Scholem avait étudié cette discipline avant de se vouer à l’histoire) et langage. Dans son ouvrage biographique, De Berlin à Jérusa-lem, Scholem mentionne, en la datant de fin novembre 1920, une conversation entre Benjamin et lui : Scholem faisait part à son ami d’un changement dans l’orientation de ses recherches ; il allait abandonner la problématique du langage kabbalistique, rebuté par la difficulté des textes auxquels il était confronté, spécialement ceux d’Aboulafia.

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hendé l’univers kabbalistique18. Plus simplement, il n’est pas invraisem-blable que Benjamin ait développé les idées essentielles de son essai à partir d’hypothèses qu’on rencontre également dans la scolastique médiévale, chez les tenants du courant « réaliste », c’est-à-dire chez des penseurs qui affirmaient la « réalité » des concepts généraux, les « universaux ». Benjamin évoque d’ailleurs explicitement cette source dans son essai de 1916 lorsqu’il parle de la « gradation de toute essence spirituelle aussi bien que linguistique, selon des degrés d’existence ou d’être comme ceux auxquels la scolastique déjà était accoutumée en ce qui concerne les essences spirituelles »19. Cette même référence se rencontre dans l’avant-propos à l’Origine du drame baroque allemand, dont Benjamin situe la conception en 191620, et les deux petits textes de la même époque – « Trauerspiel et tragédie », « La signification du langage dans le Trauerspiel et la tragédie » – présentent des dévelop-pements analogues, issus d’une même matrice intellectuelle.

Les thèses développées par Benjamin dans son essai sur le lan-gage découlent logiquement de deux présupposés fondamentaux : 1) l’essence de toute réalité est d’ordre langagier21 ; 2) la nature du langage est d’être constitué de noms. Les choses ont donc une essence linguistique, et s’il est possible d’affirmer cette proposition, c’est précisément parce que « ce qui est communicable dans une essence spirituelle, c’est son essence linguistique ». Le langage ne communique pas quelque chose qui serait extérieur à lui, mais se communique lui-même : puisque « rien ne se communique par le langage, ce qui se communique dans le langage ne peut être limité ou mesuré du dehors, et c’est pourquoi chaque langue a son infinité incommensurable et unique en son genre ; sa limite est définie par cette essence linguistique, non par ses contenus verbaux22. L’essence

18M. Idel, « A. Aboulafia, G. Scholem and W. Benjamin, on Language ». Cf., éga-lement, « À la recherche de la langue originelle », Revue d’histoire des religions 213.4 (1996) : 423–32.

19W. Benjamin, Œuvres I, trad. fr. P. Rusch et R. Rochlitz (Paris : Gallimard, 2000)150.20W. Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand, I. Wohlfahrt (Paris : Flammarion,

1985) 37.21M. Idel a fort bien souligné que « le passage d’une vision cosmogonique à une vision

épistémologique du langage représente le point de divergence le plus fondamental des Modernes par rapport aux conceptions qui prévalaient dans le judaïsme médiéval sur l’appréciation du langage » (cf. « Langue et kabbale. Le langage mystique : de la cosmogonie à l’épistémologie », Revue de l’histoire des religions, n° 4, 1996). Ce n’est plus le monde en lui-même qui est structuré par le langage, mais la perception que nous en avons. Indépendamment de sa connaissance des sources spécifiquement juives, Benjamin a donc pu très logiquement reconstruire une conception du langage partagée par la plupart des mystiques médiévales.

22Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 146.

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linguistique n’est pas la structure d’une langue qui se manifesterait à travers les divers « aspects » selon lesquels telle langue traite une même réalité, car cela impliquerait que l’essence de telle langue inclurait précisément sa syntaxe. Or Benjamin poursuit en expliquant que si l’on applique cette thèse de l’essence linguistique à l’homme, « l’homme communique sa propre essence spirituelle en nommant », mais non par les noms qui serviraient à désigner quelque chose, car « cette vue est la conception bourgeoise du langage »23. La communi-cation aurait alors pour destinataire l’homme désignant pour un autre homme un objet grâce à des mots. L’essence spirituelle de l’homme se communique à Dieu dans le nom. Le nom, ainsi entendu, est « ce par quoi rien ne se communique plus et ce en quoi le langage se communique lui-même et de façon absolue »24. La nature, les choses ont un langage, mais sont muettes, car seul l’homme donne des noms ; choses, nature se communiquent dans l’homme, dans son langage, et si l’homme parvient à une quelconque connaissance de ces choses, de cette nature, c’est dans le nom : « La création divine s’achève lorsque les choses reçoivent leur nom de l’homme, cet homme seulement à partir duquel, dans le nom, le langage parle (die Sprache spricht).25 » Benjamin cite alors le passage de Genèse 2, 19-20 où l’adam – « parce qu’il n’est pas bon qu’il reste seul » – doit nommer les animaux sans néanmoins que cette nomenclature, ce lexique qui ne peut pas encore être un langage véritable, lui permettent de ren-contrer sa « contrepartie ». La nomination par l’adam des animaux ne peut ni être un langage ni être l’achèvement de la création. Un langage, dans ce cas-là, ne peut être qu’une langue ; d’autre part, et puisque la création est achevée au sixième jour, son parachèvement n’est pas la nomination par l’adam des animaux, mais l’aboutissement de la quête qui a commandé cette nomination : la découverte ou la rencontre d’une contrepartie, d’une interlocutrice qui sera d’abord désignée par un nom commun arbitraire – « une femme », « isha » qui fait pendant à « ish », l’homme masculin – avant de recevoir, bien après26, un nom propre motivé27, Ève, Hava, la « vivante ». Benjamin

23Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 147.24Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 148.25Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 148.26Genèse 3, 20.27C’est à Adam que le texte attribue la tâche de justifier le nom d’Ève en réaction, à

la malédiction divine qui vient de lui rappeler sa condition mortelle en jouant sur le signifiant de son nom (adama : terre) : « poussière tu es, tu retourneras à la poussière ». Adam oppose à la mortalité humaine, l’histoire de l’humanité rendue possible par Ève.

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oublie que l’acte de nomination auquel se livre l’adam est un échec28 auquel succède sans transition la « torpeur » où il se trouve plongé pour ne pas assister à la genèse de la femme : autrui lui restera donc impénétrable, et même si une identité sexuellement différenciée lie l’homme à la femme, l’interlocution restera à tout jamais affaire d’asymétrie : autrui peut bien parler une même langue, son langage ne tombera jamais sous le contrôle d’un même. Cette différence dans l’origine, reconnue par le texte biblique, a pour conséquence que l’homme (non pas la femme) « devra quitter son père et sa mère » (Genèse 2, 24) pour se lier à sa femme – quitter sa « tradition » pour entrer dans une relation où l’interlocution exige un décentrement, voire une innovation à titre de condition de possibilité. Nulle part, le texte biblique ne suggère qu’il pourrait y avoir une origine divine des langues ; mais l’insistance sur l’interlocution se révèle on ne peut mieux dans l’exposition sous forme de récit des conséquences désastreuses de son absence : de même qu’Adam et Ève ne se parlent pas, même lorsqu’il s’agit de la transgression qu’ils accomplissent tous deux, Caïn et Abel ne sauront pas davantage s’adresser la parole, et leur rencontre ne peut alors qu’être réglée par la violence. Plus encore, ceux qui se prennent pour les fils de Dieu et « choisissent des femmes pour leur beauté 29» – sans les reconnaître pour des interlocutrices – déclencheront ainsi le déluge dont la résolution aura pour condition la diversité des langues, tandis que l’épisode de Babel révèlera que la nostalgie régressive d’une langue « une », refusant la dispersion et la différence, aboutit à la pure et simple confusion30.

Benjamin, fidèle à son refus de la conception bourgeoise du langage, c’est-à-dire utilitariste et conventionnelle, devrait fustiger

28Nommer les animaux n’a pas pour cause première ni pour cause finale l’exercice d’un pouvoir de nomination : la finalité de cet exercice de langage est de montrer à quelle condition il peut être mis fin à la solitude : le texte biblique semble revenir sur ce qui a déjà été « créé », l’homme et la femme (Genèse, 1, 27) ; en fait, Genèse 2 montre, en détail, cette fois, les conditions de possibilité d’une relation autre que simplement sexuée, et la médiation essentielle se révèle être le langage, qui d’ailleurs prime sur la relation sexuelle, commune à tous les animaux. L’injonction faite à l’homme de « quitter son père et sa mère » pour s’unir à sa femme introduit une rupture dans la répétition purement instinctive de la fécondation. De tous les animaux qui partagent avec le genre humain le fait d’avoir « un souffle de vie », l’homme se distingue en faisant un usage différent de son « souffle ».

29Genèse 6, 2.30Contrairement à la représentation ordinaire et habituelle, la différence des langues

n’est pas le résultat d’un châtiment divin frappant Babel (cf. Genèse 10, 32), mais un état de fait qui doit être reconnu comme tout aussi nécessaire que le partage de la terre. Le verdict frappant Babel contraint ceux qui ont voulu se soustraire à la dispersion et à la différence de s’y conformer.

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l’acte de nomination par l’adam des animaux puisque, par avance, Dieu lui-même semble vouloir se conformer à la manière dont Adam distribuera les noms31. Surtout, son interprétation s’écarte du texte biblique, de sa logique interne et de la manière dont il faut jouer les ressources d’une langue contre des attentes convenues ; il choisit ainsi de « lire » le texte à travers le targoum qui explicite plutôt qu’il ne traduit Genèse 2, 7 (« l’homme devint une âme vivante ») en considérant que ce qu’insuffle Dieu à l’homme est en même temps esprit et langage (« l’âme devint un esprit doté de parole ») : ainsi, le langage est-il « donné » avec l’« âme ». Or la faculté de langage, si elle est universelle, ne débouche évidemment pas sur une langue unique. Ce n’est pas le langage qui est réalité dernière, inexplicable et mystique, mais il est compréhensible que la diversité des langues suscite la nostalgie d’un état indifférencié – comme on en trouve un écho chez Mallarmé : « Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême »32.

La conception de Benjamin suit la logique introduite par la prémisse selon laquelle Dieu seul possède un verbe créateur ; autrement dit, en lui, « le rapport du nom à la connaissance est absolu », ce qui implique que « tout langage humain n’est que le reflet du verbe dans le nom »33. Plus encore, « la langue de l’homme au paradis a dû être celle de la connaissance parfaite »34 ; du même coup, le péché est interprété sous trois modalités langagières : a) pécher consiste à faire du langage un moyen, un instrument ; Benjamin y voit la source de l’état de fait ulté-rieur, c’est-à-dire de la pluralité des langues35 ; b) pécher c’est porter un jugement nécessairement médiat en le substituant à l’immédiateté du nom, dépositaire du verbe créateur absolu ; autrement dit, c’est introduire une distance, une dualité, entre ce qui est jugé et l’instance qui juge ; c) ainsi, pécher, c’est préférer l’abstraction produite par l’acte de jugement : toute communication est nécessairement médiate, elle mobilise des mots comme des instruments, des truchements de son intention, et, là encore, se détourner de l’immédiateté plénière du sens entraîne une chute dans le bavardage. Ultime conséquence,

31Genèse 2, 19.32Cf. « Crise de vers », Œuvres complètes (Paris : Gallimard, « La Pléiade », 1945) 363.33Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 154.34Il devient alors impossible, du point de vue de l’exégèse du texte biblique, de

comprendre autrement le péché qu’en supposant une éclipse de cette connaissance parfaite, et la fonction d’Ève est bien conforme à toute une tradition chrétienne de lecture puisqu’elle est censée troubler le jugement d’Adam et l’induire en tentation grâce, sans doute, à ses seuls charmes puisqu’elle n’argumente qu’avec le Serpent . . .

35Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 161.

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le pouvoir de nommer implique la possibilité insigne de sauver la nature et le monde des choses de leur mutisme originaire, « c’est la traduction du langage des choses dans le langage de l’homme »36. Ainsi se dessine une « histoire » particulière, celle du passage d’un ordre dans un autre, de l’ordre le plus voué au mutisme, celui de la nature, à l’ordre supérieur du monde humain, puis, de ce dernier à celui, suprême, du divin. Puisque la totalité du monde même est constituée par le langage, l’orientation générale de cette « histoire » mystique tend à la rédemption, et l’instrument sotériologique qui permet le passage d’un ordre à un autre est la traduction : « Tous les langages sont traduisibles les uns dans les autres. La traduction est le passage d’un langage dans un autre par une série de métamorphoses continues. La traduction parcourt des continus de métamorphoses non des régions abstraites de similitude et de ressemblance. 37» Ce processus continu, cette « histoire », s’effectue donc aussi bien avec le concours de l’homme – puisqu’il dispose, imago dei, d’une certaine part du pouvoir de nomination –, que sans lui, et l’ensemble de ce processus est doté d’une objectivité qui « est garantie en Dieu »38. Ainsi comprise, la traduction s’effectue selon deux axes, de bas en haut, en quelque sorte, de ce qui est muet à ce qui porte un nom, et du nom au verbe divin (mouvement ascendant de « rédemption ») ; et, de haut en bas, puisque, après la chute, via le péché, et après l’épisode de Babel tel que Benjamin l’interprète, le langage déchoit39 vers la pluralité des langues, vers l’abstraction du jugement, vers l’illusion de la connaissance abstraite, vers le bavardage et la communication utilitaire, c’est-à-dire vers l’obscurité toujours croissante d’un mutisme de plus en plus inconscient de sa vacuité, de son « inanité sonore 40»

36Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 157.37Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 157.38Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 157.39On trouve une résonance directe de cette conception dans la première des « Dix

propositions non historiques sur la kabbale » de G. Scholem : « La tradition authentique reste cachée ; seule la tradition déclinante déchoit jusqu’à être un objet, et c’est dans cette déchéance seulement qu’elle devient visible dans toute sa grandeur. » Publiée en 1958, ces « Dix propositions . . . » ont cependant été rédigées en 1921, comme l’atteste le manuscrit 4° 1599/282 des fonds Scholem de la bibliothèque de Jérusalem. La 9ème proposition est un écho direct des conceptions benjaminiennes : « Les totalités ne peuvent être transmises que de manière occulte. Le nom de Dieu peut être évoqué, mais non prononcé. Car seul ce qui en lui est fragmentaire permet au langage d’être parlé. Le “vrai” langage ne saurait être parlé, pas plus que l’absolument concret ne saurait être réalisé. » (cf. G. Scholem, Aux origines religieuses du judaïsme laïque, trad. M. de Launay (Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 2000) 255.

40S. Mallarmé, « Sonnet allégorique de lui-même », Œuvres complètes I, éd. B. Marchal (Paris : Gallimard, 1998) 37.

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(mais même la nature reste intelligible, il s’agit alors d’un mouve-ment descendant de « révélation » progressive). L’horizon final du mouvement ascendant qui semble, donc, se dérouler sur un mode exactement inverse de celui de l’histoire effective est celui du tiqqun, de la restauration cosmique ad integrum des parcelles de langage éparses dans les divers ordres du monde ; la cosmogonie s’allie à une théodicée : « Tout langage supérieur est traduction du langage inférieur jusqu’à ce que se développe dans son ultime clarté le verbe de Dieu qui est l’unité de ce mouvement du langage. 41» Le moteur secret de l’histoire mystique et non plus effective est la tension toujours croissante entre les deux orientations contradictoires : plus le langage déchoit dans son instrumentalisation utilitaire qui vise l’adéquation arbitraire ou conventionnelle du nom et de ce qu’il est censé désigné, et plus devient instante l’exigence des ordres muets comme celle, dans le langage humain, des mots et des noms en attente de leur sens véritable. Cette tension, poussée à l’extrême, débouche sur une crise, la rupture brusque de toute tension, l’instant apocalyptique où fait irruption la Rédemption qui met fin à l’opposition entre temporalité mystique et temporalité historique. Ainsi, le mouvement « profane » qui accentue la déchéance du langage est-il secrètement celui-là même qui suscite négativement l’avènement du « royaume messianique »42. Cette « tâche de traduction » qui incombe à l’homme est elle-même prescrite par Dieu puisque l’homme est voué à donner un nom aux choses43 : nulle liberté d’inventer ou de forger des noms, mais obliga-tion de nommer en fonction de l’essence véritable des choses. En fin de compte, le mouvement de la traduction n’est que le déploiement du nom divin dans le monde, puis sa résorption finale dans l’unité primordiale enfin restaurée. Nulle histoire effective dans pareil pro-cessus, mais les différentes étapes d’exécution d’un drame « divin » où le rôle humain est immédiatement voué à l’échec s’il déroge par rapport aux exigences du « langage pur »44.

On retrouve un écho direct de cette problématique dans un pas-sage du Journal de Scholem écrit entre août 1918 et août 1919, et qui conforte l’idée d’une discussion permanente entre les deux amis : « On peut traduire de l’hébreu en allemand parce qu’on ne sait pas

41Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 165.42Benjamin, « Fragment théologico-politique », Œuvres 1 : 264. Une lettre de Scho-

lem à Maurice de Gandillac (11 novembre 1970), date en toute certitude ce texte de 1920–1921, c’est-à-dire, précisément, de l’époque où les deux amis étaient en pleine discussion sur ces questions.

43Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 157 sq.44Benjamin, « La tâche du traducteur », Œuvres 1 : 251.

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aussi bien l’hébreu que l’allemand – exercice –, parce qu’on le sait tout autant – acte historique – et, enfin, parce qu’on le sait mieux. L’idée d’une telle traduction est : rédemption. En elle seulement on tente de retrouver l’unité du langage (Hölderlin, George, Schlegel). La possibilité de restituer méthodiquement les sphères muettes d’une langue est donnée par une traduction de la Bible. La traduction de la Bible est la rédemption des langues. L’ordre de la langue de Dieu est redécouvert, restauré par la traduction de la Bible dans toutes les langues.45 » Bien entendu, Scholem développe, pour sa part, une vision différente du rôle, historique, cette fois, que la traduction en allemand de la Bible hébraïque aurait à jouer dans la perspective du sionisme politique et culturel qui est la sienne : cette traduction « est le xénion [cadeau de l’hôte] du Juif sioniste à l’allemand, son cadeau d’adieu, qui rend enfin possible l’adieu même. [ . . . ] Cette traduction est la tâche qui incombe à un Juif qui vient d’avoir découvert l’hébreu et qui prend congé de sa langue maternelle [ . . . ] la traduction de la Bible est la tsedaqah du judaïsme allemand, la justice qui l’oblige vis-à-vis de l’Allemagne et qui, en un sens extraordinaire, peut seule le sauver de la mort. La traduction allemande de la Bible est l’unique action publique du sioniste en Allemagne : s’il n’accomplit pas cette tsedaqah, il sombre ; s’il fait davantage, il trahit la Loi ». Comme on le sait, ce n’est pas Scholem ni Benjamin qui s’acquitteront d’offrir ce présent, mais Rosenzweig et Buber, le premier, neutre à l’égard du sionisme, le second, sioniste par conviction, mais contraint à l’exil par les nazis et non acteur de sa propre aliyah. Et la traduction s’achèvera, bien après la mort de Rosenzweig, quand l’Allemagne des années 1920 aura été à ce point détruite que plus personne ne sera là pour recevoir dignement le xenion46.

Dans sa lettre à Salman Schocken du 29 octobre 193747, Scholem expose « les motifs véritables » qui l’incitèrent à étudier la kabbale,

45G. Scholem, Tagebücher 1917–1923 (Francfort/M.: Insel, 2000) 345 sq.46C’est Scholem qui se chargera d’écrire et de prononcer le discours tenu à l’occasion

de la publication de cette traduction débutée en 1925 et achevée en 1961 (trad. fr. par B. Dupuy, in G. Scholem, Le messianisme juif (Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1974 ; il s’adresse, gardant le souvenir de ce qu’il avait écrit quarante-deux ou quarante-trois ans aupa-ravant dans son Journal, en ces termes à Buber : « Quel Gastgeschenk [xenion] les Juifs pouvaient-ils offrir à l’Allemagne qui pourrait avoir davantage de signification historique qu’une traduction de la Bible ? [ . . . ] Si l’on envisage les choses avec le regard de l’historien, cette traduction ne peut plus être le Gastgeschenk des Juifs d’Allemagne. Elle sera au contraire [ . . . ] la pierre tombale d’une relation qui a été anéantie dans une catastrophe effroyable. » On notera que le « regard de l’historien » a désormais pris le pas sur toute autre considération d’ordre mystique.

47G. Scholem, Briefe I : 1914–1947 (Munich: Beck, 1994) 471 sq.

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et retrace ainsi le parcours intellectuel qui fut le sien depuis les pre-mières orientations de sa jeunesse jusqu’à la rédaction d’une longue étude sur le sabbatianisme – « La rédemption par le péché » – qui précède néanmoins les deux grands livres qu’il consacrera à la kab-bale (Les grands courants de la mystique juive, 1938-1941, et Sabbataï Tsevi, 1957). Le point de départ de tous ses travaux ultérieurs est la décision très précoce de préférer ce qu’il appelle la « philologie » aux mathématiques, sa première formation universitaire, et à la théorie de la connaissance. Ce qu’il appelle « philologie » est, exprimé dans d’autres termes, la critique historique et l’examen historico-critique des sources documentaires dont il souligne à la fois qu’ils sont indis-pensables et qu’ils exigent des sacrifices : autrement dit, les sources mystiques juives restent inaccessibles sans ces instruments méthodo-logiques, mais, et précisément parce que les saisir implique le biais d’une méthode, ce que l’on peut ainsi appréhender demeure l’objet d’une analyse et non une source vivante : « Certes, il se peut fort bien que l’histoire soit au fond une apparence, mais une apparence sans laquelle aucune vision de l’essence n’est possible dans le temps. Le merveilleux miroir concave de la critique philologique peut refléter, pour l’homme d’aujourd’hui, d’abord, et de la manière la plus pure dans les structures légitimes du commentaire, cette totalité mystique du système dont cependant l’existence s’efface précisément lorsqu’elle est projetée dans le temps historique. » Acceptant le dualisme qu’impose la partition entre méthode et objet, Scholem nourrit néanmoins l’es-poir qu’une lumière autre que celle projetée par la philologie sur son objet viendra éclairer non pas seulement ses travaux, mais l’orientation même de l’histoire juive contemporaine : « Aujourd’hui, comme au premier jour, la vie de mon travail consiste dans ce paradoxe, et se nourrit de l’espoir d’être justement interpellé depuis la montagne, de voir se produire cette infime translation, tout à fait imperceptible, de l’histoire qui, à travers l’apparence de l’“évolution”, laisse sourdre la vérité. » Le paradoxe48, c’est ce qui caractérise la position même du

48Cf. la première des « Dix propositions non historiques . . . », 249 : « La philologie d’une discipline mystique comme la kabbale a quelque chose d’ironique en soi. Elle s’intéresse à un voile de brume qui [ . . . ] nimbe le corps de la chose même [ . . . ], brouillard qui, en fait sourd de son objet. Reste-t-il dans ce brouillard et discernable pour le philologue, quelque chose de la loi de la chose même, ou bien n’est-ce pas précisément l’essentiel qui s’estompe dans cette projection historienne ? L’incertitude de la réponse à cette question ressortit à la nature de la problématique philologique elle-même ; ainsi, l’espoir dont vit ce travail conserve-t-il quelque chose d’ironique dont on ne saurait l’en détacher. »

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chercheur ; et « l’infime translation de l’histoire » traduit tout l’espoir qui l’anime de voir ressusciter sous une autre forme la vie animant les sources étudiées afin d’innerver l’histoire juive à laquelle il a voulu activement participer en quittant l’Allemagne pour la Palestine.

Scholem indique, en outre, que 1916–1918 furent les trois années « déterminantes pour l’ensemble de [s]a vie » ; c’est à cette époque, donc durant une période d’intenses échanges avec Benjamin, qu’il en est très vite arrivé à se situer « à l’extrême limite entre la religion et le nihilisme », à fréquenter cette frontière dont il dit qu’elle trouve, dans les œuvres de Kafka, une expression sécularisée de la « sensibilité kabbalistique chez un esprit moderne »49. Un autre passage de cette lettre à Schocken montre à quel point les deux amis étaient proches dans leurs rejets et leurs aspirations : « J’étais révolté en constatant que les trois auteurs que je connaissais – Saadia, Maïmonide et Hermann Cohen – s’appliquaient principalement à contredire, à réfuter le mythe et le panthéisme alors qu’il aurait fallu dépasser cette contradiction et les élever à un niveau supérieur. » Comme on le sait, préserver la part mythique dont la confrontation avec le règne croissant de la raison est jugée on ne peut plus féconde, a constitué l’orientation militante de Benjamin lorsqu’il traite du désenchantement50, et lorsqu’il développe sa propre critique de Cohen (au nom d’une expérience religieuse véritable), explicite dans son avant-propos à son ouvrage sur le drame baroque51, comme dans le texte, daté de novembre 1917 par Scholem, « Sur le programme de la philosophie qui vient »52.

Cette expérience, Scholem l’a passionnément recherchée tout en refusant la version bubérienne, sans doute trop existentialiste à ses yeux 53; car il a sans cesse voulu maintenir une position de résistance à la sécularisation : non seulement en dénonçant « la confusion entre

49Cf. la dernière des « Dix propositions . . . » où Scholem cite un passage des « Médi-tations sur le péché, la souffrance, l’espoir et le vrai chemin » (publié in Préparatifs de noces à la campagne [Paris : Gallimard, 1994 (coll. « L’imaginaire »)] 51, aphorisme 30).

50Notamment dans son essai sur « L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique ».

51Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand, 4452Benjamin, Œuvres 1 : 188 sq. Les critiques adressées par Scholem et Benjamin à

Cohen, lorsqu’il s’agit de revivifier et de révolutionner la notion d’expérience dans une perspective explicitement religieuse, vont de pair avec un profond respect (voire une sorte de vénération juvénile chez Scholem), comme en témoignent les nombreuses références louangeuses de Benjamin à l’Esthétique du sentiment pur (1912) de Cohen dans son étude sur les Affinités électives de Goethe.

53Cf., notamment, G. Scholem, « 95 Thèses sur le judaïsme et le sionisme », envoyées à Walter Benjamin le 15 juillet 1918 à l’occasion de son 26ème anniversaire : thèses 63 et 75 (in G. Scholem, Sur Jonas, la lamentation et le judaïsme [Paris : Hermann, 2011]).

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mouvements séculiers et messianisme qui voue ces derniers à l’échec », mais en affirmant plus franchement : « Je ne me suis jamais détaché de Dieu »54. Le point essentiel qui a toujours constitué le lien profond entre Scholem et Benjamin n’est évidemment pas l’engagement sio-niste du premier ni le mysticisme confinant au messianisme nihiliste du second55, mais la reconnaissance d’une dimension symbolique propre au langage : « Ce qui rend la kabbale intéressante, c’est son pouvoir de transformer les choses en symboles »56. Cet intérêt puissant s’est déjà exprimé, en 1926, dans la fameuse « lettre » à Rosenzweig où Scholem écrit encore comme sous la dictée de son ami, et semble toujours pris dans l’atmosphère particulière de leurs échanges de 1916–1923 : « Le langage est nom. C’est dans le nom qu’est enfouie la puissance du langage [ . . . ] les noms hantent nos phrases [ . . . ] car les noms ont leur vie propre. S’ils ne l’avaient pas, malheur à nos enfants, qui seraient alors livrés sans espoir à un avenir vide [ . . . ]au cœur de cette langue [ . . . ] Dieu lui-même, à son tour, ne restera pas silencieux.57 »

C’est dans cette atmosphère intellectuelle et spirituelle que Scho-lem dit avoir jeté les bases de son étude sur la théorie kabbalistique du langage, puis l’avoir abandonnée pour l’achever et la publier en 197058, c’est-à-dire exactement cinquante ans après, comme il le confie dans ses souvenirs, De Berlin à Jérusalem.

Le présupposé initial quant à la nature du langage est analogue à celui de Benjamin : outre ses fonctions expressives et son rôle d’ins-trument de la communication, de la signification, le langage n’est pas

54Entretien avec Muki Tsur, in Fidélité et utopie, 55. Il admet un peu plus loin que toutes les décisions majeures de sa vie ont eu une dimension religieuse. Mais Scholem insiste avec la dernière énergie sur le fait qu’il a toujours refusé de voir dans le sionisme un mouvement messianique (67).

55Bien que Scholem se soit toujours très nettement élevé contre les tentatives de Benjamin pour voisiner avec le marxisme (sans doute sous la pression d’Adorno et de Horkheimer), il lui est arrivé de reprendre presque littéralement, et sans citer ses sources, les conceptions développées par Benjamin dans ses thèses « Sur le concept d’histoire », qui ont été conçues bien avant leur publication et leur rédaction ultime en 1940 : la conférence de 1946, « Mémoire et utopie dans l’histoire juive », reprend notamment les « Thèses » III et VII de son ami. Il est vrai que sous la plume de Benjamin l’expression « matérialisme historique » n’a que de lointains rapports avec l’orthodoxie marxienne.

56Fidélité et utopie, 72.57G. Scholem, « À propos de notre langue. Une confession » (1926), Le prix d’Israël

(Paris-Tel-Aviv : Éd. de L’éclat, 2003) 94.58G. Scholem, « Le nom de Dieu et la théorie kabbalistique du langage », Eranos

Jahrbuch, n° 39, 1970, repris in Le Nom et les symboles de Dieu, trad. M. Hayoun et G. Vajda (Paris : Le Cerf, 1988).

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seulement signe ; il possède une dimension excédentaire, pour une part ésotérique, et qui est sa dimension symbolique. Mais Scholem admet en même temps que « Benjamin fut longtemps un pur mystique du langage »59, caractéristique qui est la tendance générale à considérer le langage comme une sorte de révélation ; toute langue exprimerait donc aussi quelque chose qui est antérieur et d’un autre ordre que ce qu’elle peut ordinairement signifier. Le langage ne s’épuise pas dans l’expression d’un sens communicable et intelligible. Benjamin partage avec Hamann, qu’il cite dans son étude de 1916, cette perspective que le second formule ainsi dans une lettre de fin 1785 à Jacobi : « Lan-gage – père de la raison et de la révélation, leur alpha et leur oméga. » Trois thèses résument ces orientations : 1) création et révélation sont des représentations de Dieu par lui-même, et l’essence de l’univers est langage ; 2) le nom divin est l’origine métaphysique de tout langage, et, partant, le langage est détermination de ce nom dans les textes révélés comme dans toute langue en général ; 3) il existe une relation entre magie et mystique dans la théorie des noms divins, comme dans le pouvoir supposé du verbe divin60 (cette relation peut aller jusqu’à ouvrir la voie à des pratiques théurgiques). Néanmoins, ce n’est pas dans le Pentateuque qu’on pourrait rencontrer une conception peu ou prou magique du nom de Dieu : même Exode 3, 14 ne formule pas exactement le tétragramme, malgré le lien étymologique patent qui y rattache ehyeh61 ; on ne trouve pas non plus mention de formules spécialement prescrites pour accompagner le rituel des prêtres durant les sacrifices ou pour inaugurer des fêtes : les prescriptions sont toujours celles d’actes à accomplir et ne détaillent pas une liturgie verbale. Que le nom divin soit l’objet d’une crainte révérencielle (le nom présent dans l’arche abritée au cœur du Temple est distingué du Dieu absolument transcendant et n’implique aucune présence,

59Scholem, « Le nom de Dieu », 56.60Cf. Psaume 33, 6. D’où l’on peut tirer l’idée centrale que le nom divin est agens,

ce qui implique une coïncidence entre le nom et le verbe divins.61Cf.. M. Buber, Une nouvelle traduction de la Bible (Paris : Hermann, 2012). Dans sa

lettre du 1er juillet 1932, Martin Buber (Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, vol. II [1918-1938] [Heidelberg : Lambert-Schneider, 1973] 442) écrit à Scholem : «Vous avez raison : le ehjeh [Ex. 3, 14] doit être plus profondément analysé. Je ne voulais pas alourdir davantage le contexte ; quant à l’essentiel, j’ai cru pouvoir me contenter de renvoyer à Rosenzweig [«L’Éternel» («Der Ewige», in Zweistromland, 806 : B. Jacob est vanté pour l’objectivité et l’ampleur de vue dont il a fait preuve dans son article «Mose am Dornbusch», in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1922)] qui est à l’origine de la chose et de l’interprétation à mon sens plus décisive (asher = en tant que celui qui ; Benno Jacob avait découvert le trésor sans l’exhumer).»

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aucune parousie permanente) ; en outre le Pentateuque prend soin de rétablir une histoire qui de Genèse 4, 26 où le nom commence d’être invoqué conduit à Exode 20, 7, le troisième commandement interdisant qu’on le prononce. Avant la destruction du deuxième Temple, le nom était prononçable à Yom Kippour.

En rappelant cette histoire, Scholem ne fait qu’accroître la distance prise à l’égard des convictions mystiques ; il va même plus loin en considérant comme un pur utopiste Hermann Cohen lorsque ce der-nier évoque le pouvoir expressif inépuisable du nom de Dieu dans le sentiment religieux des Juifs : « Le nom de Dieu n’est plus un vocable magique si tant est qu’il le fût jamais ; c’est néanmoins la formule magique de la confiance messianique [ . . . ] Un jour, le nom attestera l’unicité divine, il en témoignera dans toutes les langues, chez tous les peuples. Un jour, je transformerai le langage de tous les peuples en une langue plus pure pour que tous ensemble proclament le nom de l’Éternel. Voilà le sens originel du nom de Dieu.62 » Avant la création, Dieu et son nom existaient seuls63, et c’est par le verbe que quelque chose se communique, comme en témoignent les « dix paroles », ce qui accrédite non seulement l’idée d’un pouvoir langagier créateur, mais surtout celle d’une innervation langagière de tout ce qui est. Par voie de conséquence, les mystiques ont pu en déduire que tout a été créé par la combinaison64 des lettres d’un langage qui, de fait, est l’hébreu, devenant ex post langue originelle, langage de la révélation langue sacrée65. Plus tardivement, au XIIIe siècle, Abraham Aboulafia, qui reprend un certain héritage de cette tradition qui s’est livrée à des spéculations fondées sur le calcul, tout en dénonçant les dérives théurgiques auxquelles elles peuvent conduire66, est celui dont la conception de la « science des noms » se rapproche le plus des thèses

62H. Cohen, « Les courants religieux actuels », Jüdische Schriften I (Berlin : Schwetschke, 1924) 63.

63Pirké de Rabbi Eliézer, chap. 3.64Talmud de Bab., Berakhot 55a : « Bézalel (qui construit le Tabernacle) savait com-

biner les lettres qui servaient à créer les cieux et la terre » ; le Tabernacle équivaut alors à la Tente et au cosmos tout entier.

65La conception développée dans le Sefer Yetzira (IIe-IIIe siècle) où l’alphabet est à la fois origine de l’être créé et du langage, de sorte que l’essence linguistique du tout permet de concevoir l’interpénétration du microcosme et du macrocosme, tandis que le langage quel qu’il soit dérive du nom et s’y résume tout à la fois.

66A. Aboulafia, L’Épître des sept voies (Paris : L’Éclat, 1985) 92 : « Leur erreur [à ceux qui s’affublent du titre de ”Maître du Nom”, Baal Shem] consiste en ce qu’ils croient pouvoir accomplir des miracles par la forces des noms et le moyen d’incantations, et, ce, en les prononçant simplement par la bouche, sans même en avoir saisi la signification ».

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benjaminiennes. Scholem voit en lui la formulation la plus expressive de la mystique du langage : « La création est un acte d’écriture divin où l’écriture forme la matière de la création, tandis que la révélation et la prophétie sont des actes où le verbe divin se répand 67» dans le langage humain, sur le mode d’un renouvellement continué. Ce qu’Aboulafia entend par « prophétie » est la doctrine de la combi-naison intelligente des lettres afin d’entrer en contact avec le langage divin par le biais de ce qui, dans le langage humain, demeure trace de ce langage suprême. L’union des facultés intellectuelle et imagi-native avec l’intellect agent définissait la prophétie chez Maïmonide (mais il renvoyait aux temps messianiques la possibilité de la voir réapparaître) ; pour Aboulafia cette union est l’essence linguistique (il joue sur le terme davar et l’adjectif devari, pour identifier ce qui est rationnel et ce qui est linguistique). Aboulafia représente le cœur humain comme un parchemin, comme une tablette, les âmes comme l’encre, dont Dieu userait pour y inscrire ses mots. Tout langage peut être conçu comme le déploiement du nom divin unique ; seuls les faiblesses et les aveuglements de notre esprit nous empêchent de prolonger comme il le faudrait, à l’infini, les permutations des lettres qui sont révélatrices de ce déploiement. Le langage humain est une des décompositions possibles de ce nom divin. Les combinaisons des lettres contiennent toutes les vérités possibles et toutes les connais-sances. Les noms divins sont l’essence même, tandis que les noms humains viennent s’adjoindre à une essence, et les noms propres s’unissent aux essences qu’ils désignent. Surtout, la caractéristique de la « prophétie » ainsi entendue comme logique supérieure de la combinatoire est qu’elle ignore la grammaire68. C’est dire, du même coup, que la syntaxe est nécessairement d’un ordre inférieur : or c’est la thèse corollaire de toute conception de la traduction qui la réduit à celle des noms. La syntaxe est le biais par lequel un texte est doté d’une temporalité historique interne, pas simplement extérieure comme n’importe quel texte qui est toujours daté, situé, encadré par telle culture ou telle phase d’une culture. La syntaxe est directement l’expression d’un style, c’est-à-dire la résultante d’un travail individuel sur un matériau qui, lui, est nécessairement déjà donné ; elle est tout simplement l’expression d’une innovation d’ordre symbolique en un sens précis : le symbole n’est alors nullement gagé sur une substance

67G. Scholem, Le Nom et les symboles de Dieu, 91.68A. Aboulafia, L’Épître des sept voies, 84. La logique des philosophes est impuissante

face à la prophétie mystique, dont elle est servante (90) : élucider un paradoxe consiste à découvrir la bonne combinaison qui le résout.

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ou une essence auxquelles il renvoie, mais le résultat, dans l’ordre esthétique, de la confrontation d’une liberté singulière à une tradi-tion, dans un cadre historique précis. Au contraire, pour Aboulafia, la prière, par exemple, consiste à retrouver les « noms » (qui sont plus que des idées) dans le langage humain ; par analogie, et c’est la conception défendue par Benjamin, la traduction consiste à restituer une puissance verbale aux ordres muets (la nature, les choses) ou à faire communiquer les différents ordres, nature, humanité, divinité : la rédemption finale n’est pas une panglossie répandue dans tous les ordres ou restituée en chacun d’eux, mais la résorption de tous les ordres dans le nom divin69. Ainsi la traduction comprise dans cette perspective de la « prophétie mystique » est-elle une propédeutique de l’avenir réconcilié du langage qui révèlera, aux jours du Messie, tous ses secrets.

La conception mystique du langage d’Aboulafia, dont celle de Benjamin est extrêmement proche dans ses présupposés comme, parfois, dans son expression, peut se résumer en quelques points. Tout d’abord, le nom de Dieu est considéré comme nom suprême à l’origine de toute forme de langage ; ce nom n’a pas de signification, au sens humain du terme, ni de sens courant. Il est simplement ce qui rend possible le sens parce qu’il le dépasse toujours et parce qu’il est infiniment antérieur à tout sens possible. Ensuite, le verbe divin nous parle à travers la création et la révélation (sans doute par le biais de l’insufflation initiale et par celui de l’inspiration prophétique, lato sensu), il se reflète dans notre langage et il peut être interprété à l’in-fini. Ce que nous en percevons est moins une communication, au sens étroit, du divin, qu’un appel. Enfin, ce qui revêt un sens n’est pas ce verbe lui-même, mais sa tradition, sa transmission et sa réflexion dans un temps qui n’est plus le temps historique humain, mais le temps plein susceptible d’interférer constamment avec le temps historique ; ce qui implique le privilège accordé à la création poétique, chargée de « donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu 70», au détriment de la syntaxe qui n’est jamais comprise comme la source effective de l’innovation. Cette tradition peut, dans notre histoire finie, devenir chuchotement presque inaudible, et ce que nous éprouvons comme

69G. Scholem, Le Nom et les symboles de Dieu, 95 sq. La « prophétie » mystique implique toutes les langues étrangères réductibles à l’hébreu par une série de dérivations et de permutations correctes, parcourant à l’inverse les corruptions successives dont elles sont issues, puisqu’elles sont nées du langage originel ; le nom divin restant la condensation du mouvement et de la mutation des lettres.

70Mallarmé, « Tombeau d’Edgard Poe », Œuvres complètes, 38.

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un désenchantement être tel que nous ne pouvons plus saisir dans le langage le secret qui l’habitait dès l’origine ; néanmoins, une étin-celle, si ténue soit-elle, luit encore aux regards de quelques inspirés : « Quelle sera l’éminence du langage dont Dieu se sera retiré, c’est la question que doivent se poser tous ceux qui croient encore percevoir dans le monde l’écho diffus du verbe créateur. C’est une question à laquelle les poètes sont aujourd’hui les seuls à pouvoir apporter une réponse.71 »

Mais il est d’emblée patent que, nonobstant tout ce qui l’engagerait vers une adhésion profonde à de telles croyances, Scholem adopte néanmoins la position de l’historien, se place à distance de ce qu’il expose en cherchant à le rendre intelligible, en en reconstruisant le sens sans s’identifier aux conceptions ainsi développées et analysées. Si son intérêt n’est bien entendu pas réductible à une curiosité détachée, il est pourtant loin de soutenir, dans une proximité immédiate, les vues qu’il explique, à la différence de Benjamin qui, lui, était animé d’une certitude dont le degré de conviction se mesure moins à une croyance susceptible de nourrir une règle de vie qu’à la réussite stylistique proprement littéraire qui fut incontestablement la sienne. Scholem, pour sa part, a dès le début voulu affronter lucidement une dualité et la tension qu’elle génère : cette tension avait à ses yeux une signification particulière puisqu’il y voyait une analogie entre sa propre situation historique de Juif allemand nourri de tradition philologique et son engagement dans un projet de reviviscence du judaïsme qui, espérait-il, passerait au moins par la redécouverte de sources mystiques négligées et presque complètement oubliées. Cette tension se retrouvait inscrite au sein même du projet sioniste dans la mesure où le fait de retrouver en Palestine la liberté d’orienter leur histoire en fonction de décisions propres devait conduire les Juifs à rompre avec toutes les distorsions engendrées par l’exil en retrouvant la maîtrise d’une vie commandée par la logique inhérente à leur tra-dition recouvrée. Scholem n’était pas non plus sans lucidité à l’égard d’un tel projet, et nombre de ses déclarations révèlent sa conscience historienne d’une fragilité menaçant constamment la réalisation

71G. Scholem, Le Nom et les symboles de Dieu, 99.72Cf., par exemple, son entretien avec Meïr Lamed, le 15/XII/1964 (à paraître dans

le Cahier de L’Herne « Gershom Scholem » (2009) : « Si au moment de mon émigration en Terre d’Israël, vous m’aviez demandé si j’avais pour le sionisme un intérêt politique, je vous aurais certainement répondu : non. Et si vous m’aviez demandé : Pourquoi êtes-vous parti pour la Palestine ? Je ne vous aurais certes donné qu’une réponse. Je l’ai souvent donnée, et donc je peux vous la répéter. Je suis parti pour la Terre d’Israël parce que je pensais qu’il n’y a d’espoir qu’ici. Je ne pensais pas que le succès de

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des espoirs nourris72. Plus essentiellement, cette tension, qui fut au fondement même de la manière d’aborder les sources juives censées renouveler l’histoire contemporaine du judaïsme, s’inscrit chez lui dans la droite ligne du dilemme initialement évoqué par l’interprétation du vers de Schiller : « Je crois bien que la philologie profonde peut avoir une fonction authentiquement mystique lorsqu’elle transpose, accompagne et adjure dans son travail la transformation des époques ; et je crois que la transmission digne de ce nom des biens propres aux différentes générations, sur la positivité ou la négativité desquels statuera, en fin de compte, non pas le tribunal de l’histoire mais le verdict du Jugement dernier, recèle un rapport plus profond à la kabbale, qui ne signifie pas sans raison “tradition ”, que celui auquel parvient l’arbitraire de ceux qui titubent. 73»

CNRS – Archives Husserl de Paris

l’entreprise sioniste en Palestine était garanti. J’ignorais si le sionisme allait revêtir une forme politique ou non, vous comprenez ? J’ai rédigé là-dessus quelques notes, que je n’ai pas publiées. Dans ces textes, j’ai écrit que ce qui m’a poussé à émigrer ici n’était pas l’assurance que le projet sioniste réussirait. Je n’en étais pas du tout certain. J’ai toujours été très pessimiste à ce sujet, très pessimiste. J’étais pessimiste à l’égard de l’ensemble des choses juives. Mais je voulais que le projet réussisse, c’est-à-dire que je le voulais et que je pensais que mon devoir était d’habiter la Terre d’Israël. Il fallait en tout cas essayer. Pas d’autre voie. Si vous me posiez la question : Est-ce que vous vous intéressez à la construction d’une société nouvelle, est-ce que vous l’espérez ? Est-ce que ce qui compte avant tout pour vous, c’est la formation d’un organisme social vivant, ou est-ce le cadre politique qui compte ?, je vous aurais sans aucun doute répondu dans ma jeunesse et je vous réponds aujourd’hui que le premier point est plus important ».

73G. Scholem, « Poésie de la kabbale ? » (1921), à paraître dans le Cahier de L’Herne « Gerschom Scholem » (2009).

Irreconcilable:Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann

Cohen and Walter Benjamin❦

Rochelle Tobias

Over the past thirty years Benjamin scholarship has convincingly shown the importance of Judaism for Benjamin’s thought from the early writings on language to the later reflections on history, modernity, and urban life. The same strain is evident in Benjamin’s critique of metaphysics, as exemplified in the Christian notion of grace. Benjamin dismisses the notion of the redemption of the individual from history and replaces it with the idea of the redemption of the historical past in a mystical now or punctual present.1 What has received surprisingly little attention is the impact of Judaism on Benjamin’s reflections on aesthetics in essays like “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” and “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in which he grapples with the relation of art to life and the truth, or essence, of semblance (Schein). While Benjamin’s thought need not be confined to religious or Judaic concerns, the reluctance of critics to identify Judaic elements in his aesthetic writings has reinforced an existing prejudice. According to this prejudice, Jewish art is based in the prohibition of graven images,


1See Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch, and Modern Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985): 78–124; Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philoso-phy and German-Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 155–67; Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992) 3–67.

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which amounts to saying that Jewish art consists in the dissolution of its images or the negation of its representations. Among the twentieth-century thinkers to adopt this position was Theodor Adorno, who made the biblical injunction against graven images into a defining feature of modern art.2 While Benjamin understood the limits of the aesthetic image, he did so within a broader frame. Art was not to be confused with religion or ethics, lest they both become myth. (I will elaborate on this point later.) In the essay on the Elective Affinities, he distinguishes between art and ethics in a startling way: by invoking the Jewish Day of Atonement (in German, der Versöhnungstag) to oppose the sacrificial logic of Goethe’s text.

According to this logic, the novel’s heroine Ottilie must die to make up for the rift she causes in Eduard and Charlotte’s marriage not through any deed, but her mere presence in the household. Benjamin emphasizes that Ottilie is not guilty of any misdeed, any trespass against the marriage since such conduct would automatically disqualify her death as a sacrifice. Rather she can expiate the sins of others only to the extent that she is not tainted by sin, like the Nazarene Jesus whom Benjamin refers to at the end of the essay.3 Benjamin readily admits that the framing of Ottilie’s death as a sacrifice belongs to “the deep-est intentions” (GS I: 140) of the novel. At the same time, he insists that there is another religious model at work in the Elective Affinities that requires neither sacrifice nor the negation of one’s most ardent wishes. This model comes to the fore in the novella “The Marvel-ous Young Neighbors” embedded in the main text, which Benjamin

2See, for instance, Adorno’s statement, “Das alttestamentarische Bilderverbot hat neben seiner theologischen Seite eine ästhetische. Daß man sich kein Bild, nämlich keines von etwas machen soll, sagt zugleich, kein solches Bild sei möglich,“ in T.W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) 106. For Adorno, natural beauty cannot be reproduced in an image since beauty is not a substance but a form—specifically the form in which nature appears and, in appear-ing, surmounts itself. Elsewhere in the Aesthetic Theory he refers to beauty as the surplus (das Mehr) in art. An artwork can be true to natural beauty only if it negates itself in accordance with the biblical prohibition of graven images. For a lengthier discussion of the prohibition of graven images in Adorno’s thought, see Gertrud Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” Screen 34:3 (1993): 211–22.

3Benjamin suggests that the concluding line of the novel in which the narrator imag-ines Eduard and Ottilie’s eventual resurrection is too Christian in orientation and in this context says that the mystery of the work lies not in “this Nazarene being” but in the image of a shooting star presented five chapters earlier. In Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) I: 200 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and in the notes as GS).

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reads not only as an inversion of the novel’s plot but also, and more importantly, as an inversion of the logic underlying it.

The novella, like the novel, concerns two lovers who are drawn toward each other, although they have given their hand in marriage to someone else. (In the novel Charlotte and Eduard are married; in the novella the young girl is engaged to an older acquaintance.) But unlike the characters in the novel who passively endure rather than actively challenge their fate, the protagonists in the novella risk everything, including their life, to realize their love in this world instead of the next. They are willing, in other words, to sacrifice themselves, which makes the “wondrous” or “marvelous” outcome of their act of defiance all the more astonishing. Benjamin describes the marvel as follows:

Weil nämlich wahre Versöhnung mit Gott keinem gelingt, der nicht in ihr—soviel an ihm ist—alles vernichtet, um erst vor Gottes versöhntem Antlitz es wieder erstanden zu finden, darum bezeichnet ein todesmutiger Sprung jenen Augenblick, da sie [die Liebenden der Novelle]—ein jeder ganz für sich allein vor Gott—um der Versöhnung willen sich einsetzen. Und in solcher Versöhnungsbereitschaft erst ausgesöhnt gewinnen sie sich. (GS I: 184)

What enables the two lovers to gain each other and reunite with their family and friends is a death-defying leap that the two take together, but also apart, insofar as each confronts God alone regarding his fate. The association of this leap with a reversal of fortune would seem to recall Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, according to which one must give up everything as lost in order to find it again, as if it had never been lost, as if the world had always been as it now presents itself.4 But this reversal has an equally important precedent in the holiday of Yom Kippur as interpreted by Hermann Cohen in his magnum opus

4In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard contrasts the knight of infinite resignation with the knight of faith, who demands the fulfillment of his desire in the here and now instead of in the hereafter. Kierkegaard writes, “[The knight of faith] does exactly the same as the [knight of infinite resignation] did: he infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life; he is reconciled in pain. But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her—that, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.” The marvel of faith described by Kierkegaard resembles the marvel of reconciliation Benjamin sees in “The Marvelous Young Neighbors.” In both cases the impossible becomes possible through the intervention of an infinite, spiritual force in the finite, empirical world. See Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 6, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 27–53, esp. 46.

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Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, published posthumously in 1919.5 Benjamin wrote his text in 1922 and published it in 1924.

Originally the Day of Atonement was observed as a collective rite, in which the community repented for its sins through the sacrifice of an animal. After the destruction of the Temple, the holiday was redefined as an individual act of penance, in which the individual had to stand alone before God. What Cohen adds to this fairly standard account of the evolution of the holiday is the claim that even at the time of the Temple, the sacrifice had taken on largely symbolic significance. Through recourse to Ezekiel he argues that animal sacrifice was a ritual performed by the temple priest to remind the congregation of the work it had to do on its own without the benefit of an intermedi-ary. For Cohen, the solitude of this work is crucial for understanding that the God of monotheism does not want to be placated through sacrificial offerings or other compensatory gifts. Instead he wants to redeem those who, in repenting, demonstrate their trust in him. Indeed Cohen insists he wants to redeem them in the here and now, in the historical world.

Little has been written about the influence of Cohen on Benjamin’s work with the exception of Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s groundbreak-ing study Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen. Even Deuber-Mankowsky, however, limits herself to exploring the link between the Elective Affinities essay and Cohen’s Aesthetics of Pure Feeling, which Benja-min cites on two occasions.6 In the first instance, he invokes Cohen to

5Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1929; reprint, Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1995). All references to Religion der Vernunft will hereafter be cited as RV parenthetically in the text. All translations of this work are my own. Cohen wrote another essay on Yom Kippur entitled “Die Versöhnungsidee,” which I have not referenced in this text, since the essay was published in 1924, after Benjamin had already completed his investigation of the Elective Affinities. See H. Cohen, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauß with an Intro. by Franz Rosenzweig, vol. 1, Ethische und religiöse Grundfragen (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924) 125–39.

6Astrid Deuber–Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen: Jüdische Werte, Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000) 251–80. Deuber-Mankowsky compares Cohen’s and Benjamin’s concepts of love. She argues that Benjamin revises Cohen’s conception to allow for a particular love as opposed to the universal love of mankind in any one person. While my emphasis is different than Deuber-Mankowsky’s, I nonetheless agree with her general position that Benjamin reflects on the nature of art through the figure of Ottilie. It should be noted that in another essay, Deuber-Mankowsky suggests at the end that the idea of hope that Benjamin develops in his study of the Elective Affinities may indeed be derived from Cohen’s notion of reconciliation and redemption. See Deuber-Mankowsky, “The Image of Happiness We Harbor: The Messianic Power of Weakness in Cohen, Benjamin, and Paul,” New German Critique 35:3 (Fall 2008): 57–69.

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support the claim that the characters in the novel cannot be regarded as moral subjects since, unlike human beings, they play no role in determining the course of their life; rather the formal composition of the novel dictates their fate.7 Later he draws on Cohen’s analysis of passion (Leidenschaft), affection (Neigung), emotion (Rührung), and love (Liebe) to indicate that, as the attachment to another person grows more sublime, it also depends less and less on the visual register.8 The absence of scholarship on Benjamin’s Goethe study and Cohen’s Religion of Reason, however, is startling given the centrality of reconciliation in both texts for distinguishing ethics from aesthetics and redemption from sacrifice.9 For Cohen, reconciliation is first and foremost a pro-cess of self-purification and sanctification (Selbstheiligung) that begins with the act of penance (Buße), a term he understands quite literally through the Hebrew t’shuvah, which means reversal and return. In pen-ance, one turns back to examine the sins one has committed and in acknowledging them, one reverses the course of one’s life; one is born again. Cohen does not hesitate to identify the moment of repentance with rebirth: “[In turning away from sin] the new man is born and the individual becomes an I” (RV 225). For reasons that exceed the scope of this essay, Cohen claims that ethics does not provide a concept of the individual, much less of an “I.” Instead, it offers an ideal of humanity that the individual can achieve only at the expense of his selfhood or in his words Ichheit.10 Ethics triumphs in the dissolution of the indi-vidual and his replacement with a subject without any distinguishing features, not even a biography.11 Monotheism, by contrast, is based in the individual to the extent that it posits for every living soul the task of realizing the “correlation of man and God,” which is a key concept for Cohen that enables each individual to achieve holiness in this life. Through the process of self-purification and sanctification (i.e., pen-ance) the individual lives up to the biblical verse, “Sanctify yourselves

7See GS I: 134.8See GS I: 191.9Martin D. Yaffe goes so far as to claim that the chapter on reconciliation (Versöhnung)

and the Day of Atonement (Versöhnungstag) constitute the core of Cohen’s reflections on ethical monotheism in Martin D. Yaffe, “Liturgy an Ethics: Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig on the Day of Atonement,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:2 (1979) 216. Michael Zank identifies reconciliation or atonement as the key term that links Cohen’s thought on religion, ethics, and culture in M. Zank, The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen (Providence: Brown University Press, 2000) 19.

10Cohen uses this term, which has a long history in German thought dating back to Meister Eckart, twice in the text. RV 219 and 273.

11See Deuber-Mankowsky’s discussion of Cohen’s dispute with Kant on this point in “The Image of Happiness We Harbor,” 60.

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. . . and be holy” (Lev. 11:44), which Cohen cites on several occasions to indicate how the individual corresponds to, or correlates with, the God of monotheism.12

Man is charged with the task of purifying and sanctifying himself since he alone among the creatures is endowed with the holy spirit. It may seem odd in an avowedly Judaic text to find reference to the holy spirit. For Cohen, however, the concept is indispensable to the degree it allows him to see the individual as the author of his sins as well as his purification. With this characterization of the human being, Cohen decisively rejects the doctrine of original sin. Man is not born guilty, nor does he inherit the sins of his father, but in his ignorance, he errs. He forgets “the call [Ruf] and therewith the calling [Beruf] to holiness” (RV 213), as Cohen puts it, and thus sins not only against God but also against himself. For this reason Cohen repeatedly argues that knowledge of one’s errors is a precondition for reconciliation with God in statements like, “[In monotheism] the knowledge of sin can only mean one thing: to become free of sin” (RV 222). But he also adds that knowledge alone does not suffice to remind the individual that his calling is to be holy like God. For this, one needs a unique God, who not only forgives man’s trespasses—this could in fact be done by any pagan god—but also inspires the individual to realize the correspondence between man and God in his own person. Whenever this is achieved, the individual emerges as a unique and sovereign “I” endowed “with the authority to create for himself a new heart and a new spirit” (RV 226).

Cohen insists on the latter point for at least two reasons. First, he needs to establish the ethical dimensions of monotheism, and the idea of a unique God enables him to focus on the individual as a moral agent instead of as a member of a collective body. Secondly, he needs to emphasize that self-purification is an ongoing task, and by positing the holiness of God as the aim of the process he insures that it will never reach an end. How could one ever match God’s holiness? For Benjamin’s essay on the Elective Affinities, these two aspects of Cohen’s argument are of critical importance. Benjamin’s emphasis—to return

12Bernhard Caspar defines the term “correlation” in its most formal aspect as a “relation of correspondence” in Caspar, “Korrelation oder ereignetes Ereignis? Zur Deutung des Spätwerks Hermann Cohens durch Franz Rosenzweig,” in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. Stéphàne Mosès and Hartwig Wiedebach (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1997) 54. The link between self-purification and holiness is more pronounced in Ger-man than in the English translation, where the former is designated as Selbstheiligung and the latter as Heiligkeit.

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to the passage originally cited—that the two lovers in the novella stand “each entirely for himself alone before God” (GS I: 184) takes up a point Cohen makes on the ritual observance of Yom Kippur. While on some holidays the individual lies prostrate before God, on the Day of Atonement he is obliged to stand during the closing service: “Der Mensch steht vor Gott. So wird die Selbständigkeit des Menschen in der Korrelation mit Gott deklariert. In diesem Stehen vor Gott vollzieht das Individuum seine Selbstheiligung” (RV 256). Cohen notes that man is the only creature that stands upright before God, in contrast to the animals that walk on all fours. Were this the limit of Cohen’s interpretation of man, it would hardly be a novel contribution to ethics. The distinction between two-legged and four-legged creatures dates back to Aristotle and is frequently invoked in political and moral theory. But what Cohen adds is that man’s bearing is a sign of his direct relation with God. He faces him without the mediation of a priest or a sacrificial offering, and this is precisely why he can be redeemed and reborn, provided he recognizes his errors and rises up to his calling. Monotheism’s singular accomplishment is to posit an individual who is free to dictate the course of his life in contrast to myth, which frames the subject as a victim of fate regard-less of his conduct. Cohen categorically states that in monotheism fate does not exist.13

Monotheism does not need a concept of destiny because of its focus on the relation of the individual to the one God. Cohen would not deny that the burden for forging this relation falls to the individual who has to recognize and confess his own sins which even if commit-ted unknowingly—and these are the only ones that Cohen regards as reconcilable—constitute acts against God, as they violate the holy spirit planted in the human being. But Cohen would be equally adamant that the individual could not commit to this endless task if he did not trust in God’s goodness. The work of penance is always under-taken “with a view toward God” (RV 241), which is to say with a view toward a supreme and benevolent being that forgives all sins and in so doing redeems the individual. Seen in this light, every confession of wrongdoing is simultaneously a confession to God’s goodness, which Cohen says is not only the aim of self-purification but also the means.

13In an interesting reading of Benjamin’s “Kritik der Gewalt,” Carlo Salzani com-ments that the concept of fate belongs to law, not religion. See C. Salzani, “Violence as Pure Praxis: Benjamin and Sorel on Strike, Myth and Ethics,” Colloquy text theory critique 16 (2008): 25.

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For the correlation of man and God ensures an unusual reciprocity. Just as man shares in the goodness, unity and holiness of God, so too God shares in the goodness, unity, and holiness of man, as expressed in the labor of penance. This is the meaning of reconciliation for Cohen, which he explicitly equates with redemption. Reconciliation is the realization and renewal of the holy spirit embedded in man. The emergence of the individual as a spiritual being signals his birth as an “I,” that is, as a being whose wishes no longer conflict with his nature, for he knows now whence he comes. For this reason Cohen can declare that redemption is based in the reconciliation of man with God, which engenders “the reconciliation of man with himself, in himself and to himself” (RV 235).

To some degree the novella “The Marvelous Young Neighbors” is tailor-made for Cohen’s account of ethical monotheism. The central conflict of the text is an internal one. The two lovers are torn between the demands of the social order on the one hand, and the desire of their hearts, on the other. At stake is whether they acquiesce to the social order, and in so doing forfeit all authority over their life or whether they follow the dictates of their heart and turn them into a law, albeit a law that applies only to them, as it is the law of their heart, their spirit. For Benjamin, it is critical that the two decide to defy the social order, even if doing so will result in their death, since living in a world governed by an alien law is itself a form of death: the death of the heart, the spirit. This is the significance of his otherwise cryptic remark that “every love grown in itself must become master of this world [Herr dieser Welt]” (GS I: 187). What Benjamin here calls mastery—in particular, the mastery of love— he calls law elsewhere. Indeed in the continuation of this passage he indicates that the lov-ers determine the law for themselves in a manner that has distinctly Jewish overtones:

Dies hat Goethe in der Novelle ausgesprochen, da der Augenblick der gemeinsamen Todesbereitschaft durch göttlichen Willen das neue Leben den Liebenden schenkt, auf das alte Rechte ihren Anspruch verlieren. (GS I: 188)

Given the centrality of the concept of reconciliation in this essay, it could hardly have escaped Benjamin that the opening prayer on Yom Kippur is a legal formula canceling all previous vows, so that from this day onward they “lose all claim” to validity. But what is equally astonishing in the passage is the echo of Cohen’s idea that in rec-onciling with God, man is born again. He is born into a world that accords with his heart, as it was just this world, in which the desire of

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the individual would coincide with the law, that the heart demanded. For Benjamin this is the world in which the two lovers find themselves after their death-defying leap. The two are welcomed back into the fold of the family in spite of having violated the implicit social law, for in their commitment to each other they explicitly lay down a new law. For Cohen, this law is grounded in the correlation of man and God, which gives man the ability to reverse the course of his life and to become master of his situation: “Only now does man become master of himself and is no longer at the mercy of fate” (RV 226).

The same could not be said of Ottilie who lives her life, as if she played no role in determining its course. “[She] lives on [dahinleben] without deciding anything” (GS I: 176), as Benjamin puts it, and for this reason she is subject to fate, as are the other characters in the novel. Ottilie’s fate, however, is not merely to die without consummat-ing her love; such a death would be regrettable but not remarkable as it also befalls Charlotte and the Hauptmann. Rather in her passivity she is stripped of her personhood and reduced to a semblance, which neither lives nor dies but carries on indefinitely as an image. This is the significance of Ottilie in Benjamin’s reading. Her figure enables the critic to read both the possibilities and limits of art with respect to life and ethics.14

Benjamin explores the distinction between life and art, or ethics and aesthetics, in an unlikely place: in Ottilie’s innocence, which at first glance would seem to attest not to their difference but their convergence in the novel. For Ottilie’s innocence would seem to have just as much to do with her appearance as her essence. Benjamin cites Friedrich Gundolf’s characterization of Ottilie as a saint to indicate the general tenor of the commentary on Goethe’s novel.15 For Benjamin, however, Ottilie’s innocence never amounts to more than a semblance, because in her silence she never demonstrates the clarity of purpose or resolve that defines innocence. In a famous passage he writes, “No moral decision can come into being without verbal expression

14Deuber-Mankowsky arrives at much the same conclusion in Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, 265.

15Several critics have noted that Benjamin’s harsh rebuttal of Gundolf’s interpretation of the novel represents a more general critique of the George Circle with its glorifica-tion of the artist as a creator in the image of God and the elevation of the work of art to reality in its own right, rather than a play of appearances. See Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, 248–51; Beatrice Hanssen, “‘Dichtermut und Blödigkeit’: Two Poems by Hölderlin Interpreted by Walter Benjamin,” MLN 112 (1997): 810; and Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte: Schauplätze von Shakespeake bis Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 2004) 117–21.

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[ohne sprachliche Gestalt] and strictly speaking without being an object of communication” (GS I: 176). A decision must be articulated to amount to an ethical act, since only in speech does man attest to his freedom as a spiritual being, even if he remains constrained by the flesh. Benjamin adopts the traditional distinction between the body and spirit, but not as framed in the New Testament by Paul, who characterizes the spirit and the flesh as irreconcilable opposites in such statements as, “There is . . . no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:1–2). Benjamin relies instead on Cohen who interprets the body as the cause of man’s sins but not as an impediment to the expression of spirit. (As I have indicated, the body in its finitude limits man’s powers of judgment and thus leads him to err.) Only through self-recognition and self-purification is man able to achieve his correlation with God and to regain the innocence he had at birth. Cohen notes that the rabbis changed the text of God’s thirteen attributes for the service on Yom Kippur, so that the final attribute would read, “God renders [the guilty] innocent” (RV 260) instead of “he does not leave [the guilty] unpunished” (RV 259), as it does on all other days.

Benjamin employs a similar set of assumptions in his polemic against the glorification of virginity as the consummate expression of innocence:

Zwar gibt es, eine natürliche Schuld, so eine natürliche Unschuld des Lebens. Diese letztere aber ist nicht an die Sexualität—und sei es vernei-nend—sondern einzig an ihren Gegenpol den—gleichemaßen natürli-chen—Geist gebunden. (GS I: 174)

Virginity can be equated with innocence only if one considers the natural world to be so hopelessly fallen that the sole remaining tes-tament to virtue is the renunciation of all things earthly. But if one assumes with Benjamin that spirit is given in nature or, put otherwise, that it is as natural as sexuality, then innocence too can achieve expres-sion in the historical world as a positive phenomenon, as something that exists and shapes our experience. For Benjamin, innocence is manifested in character, which he defines as “the unity of individual, spiritual life” (GS I: 174) in a curious echo of Cohen’s concept of the “I” as “sovereign unity.”

Inasmuch as character is spiritual, it never assumes visible form. Its sole means of expression is linguistic; one is tempted to say it enters into the world as a verbal figure or Gestalt. For this reason, Benjamin

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later comments, “Truth is discovered in the essence of language. The human body is laid bare—a sign that man stands directly before God” (GS I: 197). Only in language is man exposed without cover of any sort, for only in language does his spiritual life take shape as his appearance retreats into the background; he appears to no one but God. This is why the articulation of a decision is central to any ethical act, and why ethics is inseparable from Judaism for the Benjamin of this essay, which is informed by Cohen’s notion of ethical monotheism. In one of the most overt references to Judaism and especially Yom Kippur, Benjamin writes, “Nur die Entscheidung, nicht die Wahl ist im Buche des Lebens verzeichnet. Denn Wahl ist natürlich und mag sogar den Elementen eignen; die Entscheidung ist transzendent” (GS I: 189).

Insofar as Ottilie never announces a decision and lapses into silence, she presumably is never registered in the Book of Life. She forfeits her autonomy as a physical and spiritual being and in the process becomes an aesthetic phenomenon subject to mythical forces, as chemical ele-ments are subject to the laws of nature. Benjamin points to this aspect of her being when he remarks, “In Ottilie’s figure the line between the epic and painting is transgressed” (GS I: 178). If Ottilie is more suited to the visual than the verbal arts, it is because in her silence she never amounts to a “person in action,” which was the basis of the epic for Aristotle. She does not speak or reach decisions, which for Benjamin constitute the signature acts of man, insofar as they reveal the contours of his inner life, his character, his freedom as a moral agent. Ottilie by contrast is not free, and not merely because she does not assert or manifest her character, but because in her silence she only appears to have a spiritual life. Or rather, her spiritual life exists in appearance only.

This is the cloak Otilie dons or the veil she wears. She is hidden by the semblance of a spiritual life, which is paradoxical in more than one respect, for it not only implies that her inner life is turned inside out and transformed into a semblance. It also suggests that the very innocence and nobility—in short, the character—one imputes to her is nothing but an enticing fiction or alluring, if false, impression. It is in this context that Benjamin remarks that virginity awakens instead of dampens desire and thus represents an ambiguous sign rather than an unequivocal one, which is a requirement for the expression of innocence. Ottilie is beautiful by virtue of the semblance of inno-cence that surrounds her figure and defines her every movement in the novel. And yet the fact that her innocence never amounts to more than a seeming reality raises a fundamental question for Benjamin: Is there truth to beauty? Does beauty have an essence?

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Benjamin devotes the final pages of his study to answering this question. He does so with a fervor unusual even for him given that the stakes of the matter are ultimately whether art can be divorced from myth:

Alles wesentlich Schöne ist stets und wesenhaft aber in unendlich verschie-denen Graden dem Schein verbunden. Ihre höchste Intensität erreicht diese Verbindung im manifest Lebendigen und zwar gerade hier deutlich polar in triumphierendem und verlöschendem Schein. Alles Lebendige nämlich ist, je höher sein Leben geartet desto mehr, dem Bereiche des wesentlich Schönen enthoben und in seiner Gestalt bekundet demnach dieses wesentlich Schöne sich am meisten als Schein. Schönes Leben, Wesentlich-Schönes und scheinhafte Schönheit, diese drei sind identisch. (GS I: 194)

At first glance, the passage would seem to be organized around two contradictory claims. On the one hand, Benjamin argues that every-thing “essentially” beautiful relies on the medium of semblance, and nowhere is the link between the two more evident than in that which is “manifestly alive,” which is to say in man. On the other hand, he tells us that all living creatures, and especially human beings, transcend the realm of the beautiful, which would suggest that beauty does not belong to, or is not part of, the essence of the human being. On closer inspection, however, these two claims are not as inconsistent as they first seem. If they appear irreconcilable, it is because the subject of the first claim (i.e., that beauty is tied to semblance) is the essence of beauty, whereas the subject of the second (i.e., that living creatures transcend the beautiful) is the essence of man. Beauty is not the dis-tinguishing feature of the human being; he can, however, only appear as such to his fellow men. Whenever the human being appears, it is as a beautiful phenomenon, because beauty is the essence of his appear-ance. For this reason, Benjamin can conclude the passage with the almost dizzying assertion, “Schönes Leben, Wesentlich-Schönes und scheinhafte Schönheit, diese drei sind identisch.”

This seeming circle brings Benjamin to the heart of his argument on the difference between art and myth. As mentioned previously, to draw this distinction Benjamin must show that art borders on and brushes life in much the same manner as a tangent touches the cir-cumference of a circle at one unique point.16 Benjamin readily admits

16Benjamin employs the metaphor of a tangent that touches a circle to describe the relation of a translation to the original in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” GS IV: 19–20.

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that the human being can only appear to others draped in a veil: the veil of beauty, which is the one form in which he becomes visible to his fellow men. At the same time he cautions that man’s appearance as a beautiful phenomenon does not suggest that beauty is merely a mask that hides man’s inner essence:

Nicht Schein, nicht Hülle für ein anderes ist die Schönheit. Sie selbst ist nicht Erscheinung, sondern durchaus Wesen, ein solches freilich, welches wesenhaft sich selbst gleich nur unter der Verhüllung bleibt. Mag daher Schein sonst überall Trug sein—der schöne Schein ist die Hülle vor dem not-wendig Verhülltesten. Denn weder die Hülle noch der verhüllte Gegenstand ist das Schöne, sondern dies ist der Gegenstand in seiner Hülle. (GS I: 195)

Benjamin categorically rejects the idea that beauty is the manifes-tation of a hidden truth, which he interprets as a gross distortion of the Platonic distinction between appearance and essence. Rather he contends that beauty is an essence that remains true to itself only when hidden beneath a veil or cloaked in a semblance. The polemic that Benjamin advances here is two-fold. On the one hand, he wants to dismiss the argument that beauty has no substance in itself, which is a position typical of the baroque as epitomized in Gryphius’s famous lyric “Es ist alles eitel.” On the other, he wants to resist the idea that beauty could exist apart from all appearance, since the latter would do nothing but invert illusion and reality and thus inaugurate a return to myth. Benjamin’s critique in this case is directed at the George Circle, which regarded beauty as the one true substance to be worshipped in art, which assumed the role of a cultic practice or religion. Benja-min stresses that beauty is neither a veil nor a veiled object, but the appearance of an object in a veil: “Dies ist der Gegenstand in seiner Hülle.” Hidden in a veil, the object can remain true to itself, even as it becomes manifest to others, for it becomes manifest only as that which is invisible or, more precisely, that which is withheld from sight. The appearance of something in a veil and as veiled constitutes beauty for Benjamin. Art never entirely discloses its object—indeed it could not without sacrificing itself as a medium of presentation—but it does expose the veil that makes the object visible as something mysterious, as something that is never exhausted by its artistic representations.

This is the relation of art to truth. Art reveals that something is hid-den that cannot be unveiled. It has the capacity to move its audience precisely because it makes known that something lies beyond the reach of aesthetics. For Benjamin, what holds the artwork open and insures its relation to life is a force he variously calls “the expressionless” [das Ausdruckslose], “the moral word” and in reference to Hölderlin, the

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caesura as a counter-rhythmic interruption (GS I: 181). Within works of art, the expressionless is a purely negative force. It punctures the illusion that a work of art produces and thus prevents it from becom-ing a totality, a myth. But if the expressionless is to have the function of a foreign element that disrupts and fragments the work of art, it also has to have a sphere in which it operates as a proper element or autochthonous force. Benjamin vacillates in identifying this other sphere as the religious or ethical realm. On the one hand, he wants to insist that in speech man lays himself bare; he throws off the veil of art and exposes his character by articulating decisions that give his life its distinctive shape. On the other, he wants to reserve this instance of transparency or nakedness for man’s encounter with God. Each of these strains is evident in the following two passages:

In der hüllenlose Nacktheit ist das wesentlich Schöne gewichen und im nackten Körper des Menschen ist ein Sein über aller Schönheit erreicht—das Erhabene, und ein Werk über allen Gebilden—das des Schöpfers. (GS I: 196)

Entdeckt wird die Wahrheit im Wesen der Sprache. Es entblößt sich der menschliche Körper, ein Zeichen, daß der Mensch selbst vor Gott tritt. (GS I: 197)

Benjamin’s impasse, if one could call it that, is the same as Cohen’s. Both need a guarantee that the human being has dispensed with all illusion, and the only authority they can invoke to judge whether this has happened is God, who sees what does not appear or, put otherwise, what does not take refuge in an appearance. It is in this spirit that Benjamin says that true reconciliation is “completely otherworldly and scarcely representable for the work of art” (GS I: 184). And yet the addition of the qualifier “scarcely” does suggest that reconciliation is on occasion registered on this side of the heaven-and-earth divide, in the phenomenal world. Benjamin accordingly offers that in the “conciliation [Aussöhnung] of one’s fellow men” reconciliation finds its “worldly reflection” (GS I: 184). His position is consistent with Cohen’s claim that the confessions of Yom Kippur must take place in public to signal one’s private trust in God’s goodness. Neither thinker, however, is entirely convincing on this point. Indeed both would seem to undermine the rigor of their arguments by insisting on the public performance of an act, which by their own admission can never be public.

More compelling is the turn the two take toward the affective register. The possibility of reconciliation is registered in hope, which

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Benjamin specifies is not a hope one maintains for oneself but only for those whose life has been dictated by fate:

Elpis bleibt das letzte der Urworte: der Gewißheit des Segens, den in der Novelle die Liebenden heimtragen, erwidert die Hoffnung auf Erlösung, die wir für alle Toten hegen. Sie ist das einzige Recht des Unsterblich-keitsglaubens, der sich nie am eigenen Dasein entzünden darf. (GS I: 200)

As Sigrid Weigel has noted, Benjamin rejects the conclusion of the novel in which the narrator anticipates the day when Ottilie and Edu-ard will reawaken and realize their love, which they had no chance to do in this world.17 Benjamin turns instead to a sentence five chapters earlier to locate the caesura of the work, the point where life punctures the aesthetic illusion. The sentence reads, “Die Hoffnung fuhr wie ein Stern, der vom Himmel fällt, über ihre Häupter weg.” The hope that the work awakens in the reader is not that Ottilie and Eduard will be resurrected as they are just now, but that they will have occasion to reconcile with God, so that they may finally disappear from our sight as they gain each other in love. Love, Benjamin tells us, is based not in the desire for happiness but in the premonition of a “seliges Lebens” (GS I: 196; my emphasis), which as Freud pointed out in his Schreber study (1910) has to be understood as both a blissful and a blessed life, a life of carnal pleasure as well as heavenly solicitude.18 While Cohen does not concern himself with either sensual pleasure or the afterlife, he nonetheless maintains the hope for a blessed life in the here and now, in which the finite individual can face his infinite Creator: “Die Erlösung braucht gar nicht hinausgeschoben zu werden auf das Ende der Tage, sondern sie haftet schon an jedem Momente des Leidens, und sie bildet an jedem Momente des Leidens einen Moment der Erlösung” (RV 274).

Just as suffering figures the possibility of redemption for Cohen, so too the shining (das Scheinen) of a spark in the night sky symbolizes for Benjamin the possibility of freedom from all semblance (Schein) in a realm beyond art—in life or the ethical sphere. For all the emphasis on the gulf between Benjamin’s early and late work, it is startling how consistent the image of a shooting star is. In “On the Concept of

17Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung, 111–12.18Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch

beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Dementia paranoides),” in Sigmund Freud: Studienaus-gabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, vol. 7, Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982) 156–58.

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History,” which Benjamin wrote almost two decades after the Elective Affinities essay, he states: “Das wahre Bild der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei. Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten” (GS I: 695). Here it is not the poet but instead the historical materialist who possesses the gift “to fan the spark of hope in the past” (GS I: 695). What Benjamin calls “the spark of hope” are the signs of a life that is not constrained by the representations of art or the political order. In this sense one can, and ought, to say that Cohen’s analysis of reconciliation and redemption provided Benjamin with a model of religious and ethical life that was achievable in the here and now, in this world.

The Johns Hopkins University


REVIEWS

Isabel Kranz. Raumgewordene Vergangenheit: Walter Benjamins Poetologie der Geschichte. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011. 285 pages.

If one takes seriously Irving Wohlfarth’s comment, “Almost all of Benjamin’s works that were written between 1927 and 1940 circle like satellites around the half-covered sun of the Passagenarbeit,”1 one would hesitate to undertake the task that Isabel Kranz has set for herself: to attempt an integral, immanent interpretation of the “Passagen-Werk,” as Rolf Tiedemann called it in his 1982 edition, though some have questioned the propriety of the term Werk. Kranz is well aware of the risks and in the early part of the book has guarded against any facile assumption regarding the unity of the Passagenarbeit. The great value of this book is to test the usefulness of a largely intrinsic reading, or werkimmanente Lektüre, of Benjamin’s project.

This book raises many questions that have beset interpreters of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as the 1999 Harvard edition calls the text, and if it does not resolve them, it does much to articulate them. The archive of handwritten excerpts and commentary that Benjamin put together between 1927 and 1940 and left to Georges Bataille for safekeeping was stored in the Bibliothèque Nationale during the war. Although the material was not published until 1982, rumors about its content played a significant role in literary-political debates in the prior decades.2 When the work finally appeared, it had become part of the charged discourse that accompanied the discovery of Benjamin by the postwar generation. His elevation to a preeminent place among modern thinkers was fed by passionate debates reflecting divergent and, in some cases, radically opposed ideological positions. This is perfectly in line with Benjamin’s own conception of the meaning of a work, where the afterlife is as intrinsic to the work as its antecedents and its contemporary impact.3 The intractable nature of the work—the sheer mass of data and the apparent miscellany of the selections—was explained in terms of either the “fragmentary” mode of Romantic writing or as “montage” and “citation” in a modernist sense. In

1Irving Wohlfarth, “Die Passagenarbeit,” in Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Stuttgart, Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2006) 252.

2Cf. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, “Ce que taisent les manuscrits: les fiches de Walter Benjamin et le mythe des Passages,” in Penser, classer, écrire: de Pascal à Pérec, ed. Béatrice Didier et al (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1990) 105–118.

3Cf. GS VI: 172.

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short, one could say that a reductive monumentalization of the Passagen-Werk blocked a more considered approach to Benjamin’s writings of the 1930s.

Even now, some three decades after its publication, the Passagenarbeit has elicited few comprehensive studies. Irving Wohlfarth puts the matter pointedly in the title of a recent essay, “Warum wurde die Passagenarbeit bisher kaum gelesen? Konjektur über eine Konjunktur.”4 His own essays on the project, including the one here cited and a lengthy contribution to the Benjamin-Handbuch, go in a different direction than Kranz’s book in focusing on the status of the Passagenarbeit in the context of Benjamin’s later writings.

Kranz must be credited with producing one of the few detailed, systematic studies that examines the whole of the Passasgenarbeit, including what she aptly calls the “Paratexts” in Gérard Genette’s terminology. This material includes the drafts, letters, and two “Exposés” prepared for the Institut für Sozialforschung. She does not deal in detail with the Baudelaire materials (Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” Konvolut J, and the Zentralpark fragments), but this topic is outside the scope of her study. Hers is by no means the first detailed study of the Passagenarbeit. This distinction must be accorded to Susan Buck-Morss’s pioneering, but still in many ways authoritative book, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989). What is more, Buck-Morss developed two concerns that are given less attention in Kranz’s book, namely, the messianic and the analysis of commodity fetishism.

In one of the methodological reflections on her project, Kranz undertakes a close reading of the very first entry of the Passagenarbeit that includes both an excerpt from a nineteenth-century publication (an 1852 Illustrierter Führer durch Paris) and a commentary by Benjamin. The short excerpt from the guidebook provides a succinct account of the Passagen as architectural and commercial urban constructs, an account intended to convey the novelty, convenience, and likely profitability of the arcades. Benjamin notes that this excerpt is “the locus classicus for the presentation of the arcades,” whereupon Kranz, terming this a “Kommentar,” adduces a passage from Benjamin’s writ-ings on Brecht’s poetry from the text “Zur Form des Kommentars” (GS II: 540) and tries to derive from it a consistent rationale for all the citations in the Passagenarbeit. In the Brecht essay, Benjamin does indeed offer a definition of commentary as a distinct mode or genre that is contrasted with apprecia-tion (Würdigung). His point is to make clear that the poems, as objects of commentary, are already marked as “classic” and thus not subject to the evaluative criteria that would be implicit in an appreciation. Kranz tries to apply the same principle to all the excerpts in the Passagenarbeit. “Nur klas-sische Texte werden demnach kommentiert,” she writes, “aber auch: jeder kommentierte Text wird zu einem klassischen. Die Aussage, man habe es im

4Irving Wohlfahrt, “Warum wurde die Passagenarbeit bisher kaum gelesen? Konjektur über eine Konjunktur,” in Topographien der Erinnerung, ed. Bernd Witte (Würzburg: Köningshausen & Neumann, 2008) 26–62.

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obigen Zitat mit einem ‘locus classicus’ zu tun, ist demnach performativ zu verstehen: Die Tatsache, dass die Textstelle kommentiert wird, etabliert den Pariser Führer als Klassike.” (114). Here, I think, Kranz overstates her point. There is no reason to take the use of “locus classicus” in the Passagenarbeit entry to justify the transposition of “classical” from Brecht’s poetry to all the cited entries in the Passagenarbeit. But in wanting to claim a “classic” status for these citations Kranz certainly touches on one of the crucial issues of the Aufzeichnungen und Materialen, as the entries that make up the Passagenarbeit in the Gesammelte Schriften are labeled. What principle(s) guided the selection of the citations? How did Benjamin plan to utilize them? Most of the selections are from French sources in the Bibliothèque Nationale and are not accom-panied by commentaries. At the same time, there are a number of entries, especially in Konvolut N, in which Benjamin reflects directly on the methods and issues of the project. Still, there is no simple answer to just what guided Benjamin in the selections that he made, copied, and then classified under the thirty-six topic headings of the Konvoluten. In tracing and glossing many of the excerpts, Kranz provides new perspectives on some of the major themes of the Passagenarbeit. Thus, in a section on “Das bürgerliche Interieur,” she traces the complex permutations of this theme, drawing on both Benjamin’s sources and more recent historical scholarship.

Kranz’s main thesis may be summarized by the title of one of her sub-chapters, “Paris als Ort und Topos” (121). Topography, as she develops it, is both spatial and textual, loci and topoi. The geographic coordinates are linked to a textual archive deeply embedded in the city’s history. She traces the provenance of a number of obscure excerpts in vaudevilles, panorama writings, and travel literature. Her analysis of the status of detritus (or Lumpen, Abfall) is illuminating, and her label “Abfallverwertung als Programm” aptly characterizes one major aspect of Benjamin’s intention. Her gloss on entry N 1a, 8, is especially relevant in this connection. Benjamin wrote, “Aber die Lumpen, den Abfall: die will ich nicht inventarisieren sondern sie auf die einzig mögliche Weise zu ihrem Rechte kommen lassen: sie verwenden.” Kranz is certainly right to highlight Verwenden as one of the central textual strategies employed by Benjamin and to relate this to montage and citation. And while her rhetorical gloss is shrewd, as in her remark, “Unter Verwenden lässt sich demnach eine Art der räumliche Neubetrachtung, des Drehens verstehen” (104), she might have expanded the implications of Verwenden to include the sense of application and putting to use, which would be consistent with the performative and political aims of the Passagenarbeit.

This political dimension is especially prominent in Konvolut N, where we find numerous formulations that anticipate “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” The fact that Benjamin referred to this text as “theses” suggests a kind of perfor-mative valence, an orientation toward a future fulfillment, though Benjamin pulls back from any markedly eschatological formulation. (He thus refers to “eine schwache messianische Kraft” in the second “Thesis” [GS II: 694].) In the Passagenarbeit Benjamin cites a conversation in which he told Ernst Bloch

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“wie diese Arbeit—vergleichbar der Methode der Atomzertrümmerung—die ungeheuren Kräfte der Geschichte freimacht, die im ‘Es war einmal’ der klassischen Historie gebunden liegen” (GS V: 578). What is at issue is what I would call a retrograde temporality, a theory of counter-history that serves as the basis for the lightening outbreaks that Benjamin will characterize in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” as messianic. The entry N 3, 1 is the most trenchant of such formulations in the Passagenarbeit. Here the key motifs are linked in a continuous series: time as a function of realized legibility; the “now” (Jetzt) as a particular recognizability; truth charged to the bursting point with time and thus altogether devoid of intention (i.e., the causal chain of human projection); the image (Bild) as constellated fusion of present and past, crystallized as “dialectics at a standstill”; and finally the dialectical image as “den Stempel des kritischen, gefährlichen Moments, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt” (GS V: 578). The phrase “zur Lesbarkeit kommen” in this entry only reiterates what was already formulated in the 1921 essay, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” As that essay makes clear, a task (Aufgabe) is imposed on the translator—and he stands for the historian or reader tout court—that is far more exacting than mere receptivity. The essay puts forth a conception of language that stresses the provisional status of historical languages and, correspondingly, the provisional condition of historical time. “Provisional to what?” one may ask. That is the task or burden of the translator, of all read-ers insofar as they are alert to the “present-now” (Jetztzeit). This anticipates the performative dimension of the Passagenarbeit: to realize a textual medium that would have the kind of capacity that Benjamin ascribed to fashion and to revolution—“der Tigersprung ins Vergangene,” as he put it in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte (GS I: 701).

Kranz by no means neglects the idiosyncratic mode of temporality in the Passagenarbeit. She addresses this especially in Chapters 3 and 4. Here she nuances what in the book title appears as a predominantly spatial focus through the idea of Hohlform:

Die Hohlform als Erkenntnismodell anzusetzen, impliziert demnach eine komplexe Zeitstruktur: Da einer Hohlform ein Abdruck vorausgeht, ist ihr ein Modus der Ver-gangenheit eigen. Doch weist sie andererseits ex negativo auf ein Positive voraus und erlaubt damit einen Blick in die Zukunft. Die Passage als Hohlform zu betrachten bedeutet also, sie in eben jenem Modus des Passierens zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft, als ‘Wechselspiel zwischen dem noch Lebendigen und dem schon Toten’ [Geor-ges Didi-Huberman], sie letzlich als dem Futur II verpflichtet zu verstehen.” (154)

This feature is developed in Chapter 4, “Zukunftsräume,” and especially in the discussion of “Futur II, als vergangene Zukunft.” Kranz explores the notion of past (or lapsed) futurity in fascinating ways: as enclosure (Gehäuse), excavation, relic, and ruin.

It might seem Kranz imposes a form on Benjamin’s project that goes beyond the fragmentary residue of the Passagenarbeit, whether it is one she attributes to Benjamin or herself constructs. But her book seeks to respond to multiple,

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in part intractable issues. It is impossible to know where Benjamin might have taken the project—whether toward a veritable Passagen-Werk, as Adorno urged, or toward a series of explorations that would have been difficult to bring together under a single cover. The Passagenarbeit remains open-ended, in process, but in its afterlife (Nachleben) it must inevitably give rise to explora-tions like Kranz’s. Certainly few are as well equipped to undertake this task as she is, both through her command of the text and her sense of its potential. Her book has the great merit of allowing us to reconsider the Passagenarbeit in a fresh and provocative way.

University of California, Irvine ALEXANDER GELLEY

Paul North. The Problem of Distraction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 248 pages.

Paul North’s inquiry into the “problem of distraction” opens with the para-doxical observation that despite its ceaseless invocations in popular discourse and the apparent self-evidence of the concept, the meaning of the word distraction, and even its validity as a real phenomenon, has never been less clear. For this reason, North begins by distancing the common understanding of the word, rooted in its “marked” opposition with attention, from what he refers to as “primal distraction”: a non-attentional form of distraction which is both irreducible to diversion, or attention to the lowest degree, and funda-mentally problematic for the traditional ontological schema which binds it to the subject. As North asks, “How would distraction appear if it were released from its subordination to attention, to perception, to the subject?” (6). North’s answer to this question entails a return to a problem which haunted Aristotle’s metaphysics and was subsequently banished from Ancient Greek thought, namely the possibility of “not-always-thinking,” to mē aei noein, the periodic non-thought which interrupts cogitation. The challenge facing North’s project is thus to “produce a genealogy of not-always-thinking” (9), which captures its periodic resurfacing in the wake of Aristotle without recourse to a reified “history of the history of thought,” or what Gilles Deleuze called “images of thought.” In dissociating the thought-act with its respective historical image, North provides an historically-informed account of “primal distraction” that is nevertheless “barely recognizable as history” (11), what he refers to as a Geistesabwesenheitsgeschichte, which dispenses with the temporal continuity of thought-images and, at an ontological level, the correspondence between thought and being.

In the prologue and across the book’s five diverse chapters, North pin-points the resurfacing of “not-always-thinking” first in seventeenth-century

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France with the rise of French moralism, specifically in the works of Jean de La Bruyère and Blaise Pascal, and later in twentieth-century Germany, corresponding to the philosophical dominance of phenomenology and the significance it attributed to structures of thought and consciousness. The predominant figures of this constellation include Franz Kafka in fiction, Martin Heidegger in philosophy, and Walter Benjamin in cultural criticism, each of whom made distraction (Zerstreuung) central to their writing. What sets the work of these figures apart for North is that it concerns itself with “deformation, disintegration, and ceasing to be” (15), and hence a “tendency toward not-thinking and a release from being” (ibid.). In this, it distinguishes itself from the philosophical and aesthetic tradition, which held fastidiously to a principle of formation, whether it be of transcendental ideas, sublime images, or homogeneous narrative.

Following his first chapter on Aristotle, in which he draws out the onto-logical implications of not-always-thinking for a theory of primal distraction from the aporias of Aristotelian nous, North shifts from a metaphysical to an empirical and descriptive account of distraction with La Bruyère’s figure of “the distracted one” (le distrait). In contrast to Aristotle, La Bruyère is less interested in the possible transcendent and universal etiology of distraction than in presenting a detailed image of it, one which in part reflects the chang-ing social, economic, and theological circumstances of the Grand Siècle, with its “almost hopeless mixture of dispositions, mutations, degenerations, types, and half-types against which the eighteenth century would mobilize its army of analytic classifications” (52). The importance of La Bruyère’s portrait of the distracted one for North’s study are manifold, but what unites the various moments of his analysis lies in the heterogeneity and profound ambiguity of le distrait: as an “untimely” figure belonging neither fully to the present nor the past, and at once both individual and collective by virtue of being a “collection of examples” (71) lacking particularity, the distracted one could hardly be said to be a “type” at all. Rather, as an “aggregate of unthinking acts” (37) and “missteps, mistakes, and stupidities” (71), La Bruyère’s le distrait becomes the “face of distraction” par excellence. By relinquishing any claim to being or subjecthood, the figure of the distracted one both anticipates the nascent arrival of secularity and modernity through its ironic absentminded-ness and metaphoric “diversion” from the way of God and divine truth, and at the same time embodies a democratic ethos that is resolutely out of joint with the aristocratic customs of its time.

After placing La Bruyère’s Les Caractères in dialogue with Pascal’s Pensées, refining the tension between the secular and the theological underlying their two opposing forms of “not-thinking”—the latter a “(negative) image of grace, degenerate humanity glimpsed from a divine perspective” and the former “remov[ing] the hope of such an image” (55)—North brings together the ontologico-noetic problems foregrounded in the first chapter with the social-critical themes of the second through a close reading of Kafka’s Der Bau. As North carefully demonstrates, the polysemous meaning of Zerstreuung in Der

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Bau encompasses not only the political qua the “antipode to diaspora” (76)—a tale in which there is no community, only solitude and the paranoia of immi-nent existential threat—but also the temporal, spatial, and noetic dispersals at work in the text. For North, the relation that Kafka establishes between the excessive thought-activity of the narrator and the onset of Zerstreuung in the tale suggests an “interest in and understanding of a counterpoint to thinking” (86), an aesthetics of not-thinking which places emphasis on the limitations of consciousness and even the impossibility of thought. This sets Kafka in direct opposition to the philosophical tradition of self-critique, in which the failure of thought is remedied only by further thinking. Moreover, read in conjunction with his critical response to an article by Max Brod on aesthetics and Brentano’s descriptive psychology, Kafka appears as an early critic of the phenomenological theory of art in that he denies its very pos-sibility by maintaining an incompatibility between art and consciousness. As North writes of Kafka: “Art is received, it seems, when it escapes notice com-pletely. It only counts as received when one has to look at it again at every turn and ask, perhaps, how is one supposed to think about it?” (94–95). The hermeneutic challenge posed by Kafka thus entails what North describes as “distracted reading,” an elusive form of “reading without thinking” whereby the text ought to be read “as if it had not been written for us” (108).

The next chapter concerns Heidegger’s writings of the late 1920s, including Sein und Zeit and his Marburg lectures on logic, as well as later works such as “Was heißt Denken?” which North sees as repeating, but also inverting, Kafka’s formulation of the problem of distraction. While both Kafka and Heidegger understand not-thinking in a mode which is other than pure thinking—either as the deficiency of reflective access and the minimization of thinking, as in Kafka’s case, or as Dasein’s distraction from the dispersal of existence, for the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit—Heidegger, North argues, ultimately seeks a way out of falling into distraction through a reorientation toward the “dissipating tendency” that is “less than dissipated” (110), even if that means delving more deeply into the problem of Zerstreuung and the question of existence. North begins his analysis by examining the unresolved problem of transcendence in Sein und Zeit—namely, the unexplained “aprioricity” of being over beings and hence the ground of fundamental ontology—and the way in which this problem gets taken up for the first time in the Marburg lectures in the mode of Zerstreuung. According to North’s reading, the modalities of this term are extensive and touch upon nearly every facet of Heidegger’s philosophy. Never-theless, the key distinction for North lies between Dasein’s ontological dispersal “among different ways of encountering beings” (111) and the hermeneutic dissipation, which “hides the meaning of being from Dasein” (112). Heidegger in this way attempts to resolve the problem of Being’s aprioricity, but only by paradoxically circumscribing “transcendence within existence” (113), locating the fundamental Grund of both being and time in Zerstreuung—what North here calls the “movement of existence’s interpretability” (114).

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Yet where North parts ways with Heidegger is over the latter’s insistence on the reciprocity between the structural “wholeness” of the ontological hermeneutic and “dispersal-dissipation” of Zerstreuung. As North points out apropos this formulation: “all existence is a product of dispersal, but dis-persal itself is never, in a word, dissipated” (117). This provides North with an angle from which to problematize Heidegger’s notion of care (Sorge), the fundamental basis of Dasein’s facticity, for although “one encounters the grounds of existence carelessly”—that is, by means of Zerstreuung—“this carelessness is an expression of [ . . . ] the operation of care” (130). In other words, the necessity of care in Sein und Zeit stands opposed to the possibility of an aleatory “dispersal of dispersion,” even in the Marburg lectures where Heidegger grants Zerstreuung ontological priority over care and establishes it as the ground of transcendence—a radical position, which Heidegger is said to briefly entertain and then quickly retreat from. A potential “release from care” and an encounter with the “groundlessness of Being” through an ontological analysis of transcendence are thus both for North insights which Heidegger’s inquiry into the question of the meaning of Being open up, yet—akin to being itself—remain at least in part unexplained, unresolved, and covered up.

The final chapter of North’s study, titled “Time Wears Away,” concludes with an analysis of Walter Benjamin’s attempt to produce a theory of distrac-tion. The key difference between Benjamin and the previous two figures discussed by North is that, while Benjamin unites “Kafka’s concern with art and Heidegger’s concern with philosophy” (143), he is also said to transform distraction from a purely temporal problem (whether formulated in terms of transcendence and finitude or immanent repetition in existence) into something which possesses a determinate “historical movement” (144). Pick-ing up on the peculiar phrase “reception in distraction” (die Rezeption in der Zerstreuung) from Benjamin’s essay on the technological reproducibility of artwork, North inquires into the possibility of a “different kind of reception” for Benjamin, one which would liberate experience—whether aesthetic, politi-cal, or phenomenological—from the Kantian critical paradigm of experience as always already “knowledge of experience” (151). North finds a suggestive solution to this question in Benjamin’s writing on color, where Benjamin introduces a modality of experience that he calls “reine Empfänglichkeit” (153), a “pure receptivity” unconstrained by the categories of understanding. The possibility of an experience that is higher than knowledge and in which form and conceptual schema have loosened their grip on thought is indica-tive, for North, of Benjamin’s proclivity toward a “theory of un-formation”: as opposed to the succession of aesthetic forms, the “reception in distrac-tion” deforms the entire “perceptual-mental order on the model of a color manifold” (155). From here North turns toward a discussion of the political stakes of Benjamin’s notion of “pure receptivity,” what he calls—following Benjamin—a “politics of pure experience” (156). Contrasting Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s writings on film along this point, North reads the former as

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deploying the concept of Zerstreuung ultimately in order to reinforce, along Hegelian lines, the encounter of the masses with their own reflected image in artwork, whereas for Benjamin Zerstreuung by definition involves a “suspension of apperception” (166), which disunifies what is received in experience and deforms the unity of the mass’s self-image.

Of course, as North makes clear throughout this chapter, Benjamin’s theoretical reflections would be in a certain sense unthinkable outside of his wider considerations of the historical changes in art (Benjamin’s account of “aura” and reflections on the medium of film) and sociality (the “quantative to qualitative” shift from groups of individuals to the modern “masses”). At the same time, North sees both history and theory itself as objects of theo-retical inquiry for Benjamin. Hence, not only does Zerstreuung become for him the “ground for the occurrence of any historical turning point” (156), but so too does theory—homologous to film’s communicable “wearability” (Verschleißbarkeit), according to Benjamin—become “wearable theory,” that is, a theory of Zerstreuung which is itself “subject to the Zerstreuungen of experi-ence” and the “wearability” of time, unable to continue functioning in the same manner after the “revolution in apperception wrought by film” (174). Concluding the chapter on a skeptical note with this insight, North writes: “In this way it is an open question whether [theory] ever was or will be convinc-ing, with what intention we should receive it, or whether we are still living under its historical sign” (174).

North’s study is a formidable work of comparative literature, spanning a diverse array of historical epochs, geographic spaces, and intellectual-historical reference points. Whether explicating the aporias of Aristotle’s De anima, parsing the social and theological contours of seventeenth-century France, or analyzing the literary and philosophical works of twentieth-century Ger-many, North ably demonstrates in each of these cases his intellectual agility in oscillating between the close reading of texts and intense theoretical and conceptual rigor. While the sheer negativity and daunting scope of his theory of distraction at times throws its nominal conceptual unity into question—though one suspects this is likely by design—North’s book marks an important contribution to literary criticism and contemporary debates in critical theory, be they political, ontological, hermeneutic, or otherwise.

The Johns Hopkins University BRYAN KLAUSMEYER

Peter-André Alt. Ästhetik des Bösen. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2010. 714 pages.

Peter-André Alt‘s Ästhetik des Bösen begins with a debate within Hegel regarding the appropriateness of evil as the object of aesthetic study. On the one hand,

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the philosopher of the end of art programmatically asserts the irrelevance of “das Böse als solches” in his Lectures on Aesthetics, while on the other hand, he continually addresses specific instances of evil in literature as celebrated by the Early Romantics. Alt offers a program which makes up for Hegel’s theo-retical and systematic failure, arguing that around 1800 evil disappears as an identifiable figure in the outside world governed by the divine and reappears obscurely within mortal man. Literature, in response, draws on new forms to make evil appear in the context of its post-enlightenment withdrawal.

Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Jonathan Littell, the 700-page study demonstrates an impressive scope, attention to context, and focus on detail. It invites numerous readings, with distinct threads following not only Ger-man, French, English, and American literature (among others), but also the history of religion, psychoanalysis, French Theory, and German Idealism. In order to speak to the broader movement of the investigation, however, I wish to suggest that it may be more than simply a kind of encyclopedia, as Alt at times modestly implies. He writes in the introduction that his goal is to open a “phänomenologisches Spektrum” of the evil in literature and in terms of method, he asserts a combination of historical and typological approaches. In this sense, Alt employs the term “Ästhetik” in the title in a restricted manner, offering broad chapter headings that organize insights into specific works of literature, such as “Verlagerung durch Introspektion,” “Wiederholung als Erscheinungsform des Bösen,” and “Ästhetische Lust an der Überschreitung.” While he eschews the term “Begriffsgeschichte,” his book largely follows his-torical contours, albeit with significant exceptions.

We might be satisfied with the pleasure of non-doctrinaire categorization and the author’s evident joy in the specifics of literature’s dark side. Looking at evil “als solches” frees it from the subordination to classical moral greatness that Hegel prized. In this context Alt does not seek to define evil but opens up a “Konstellation” of topics including, for example, breaking taboos, the disgusting, the perverse, and the sick. At the same time, however, reading through Alt‘s typological descriptions over the course of literary history also teaches us something about the spur that evil gives to literature by refusing to present itself in its essence, about the challenge of describing and confronting the furtive modes in which evil comes into appearance.

Alt carefully delimits his study in aesthetic terms while pointing to the horizon of a reemergence of the importance of moral questions for literature in the 20th century. Especially in terms of German Studies, it will be helpful to indicate a few points on Alt‘s trajectory from the decline of Enlighten-ment and renewal of formal experimentation “around 1800” to the collision of literature and ethics following Auschwitz. The first chapter, “Vorspiel im Mythos,” investigates efforts to account for the origin of evil in stories of a fall. The story of the Garden of Eden allows that which logically appears as a contradiction—an evil that exists before the fall—to become perceptible in the course of narrative differentiation. Looking forward to 1800, Alt draws from this a broader implication of the power of literature to grasp in stories

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that “was sich dem Verstand entzieht” (75). His reading of Goethe‘s Faust in the next chapter provides an anchoring point for his investigation, which at its core departs from the rationalism of the 18th century. Indeed: “Mephisto ist eine Verkörperung der Paradoxie, die es bedeutet, ein Teufel unter den Bedingungen der Aufklärung zu sein” (101). The paradox has two main components. In terms of the body, Alt points our attention to the Witch’s Kitchen scene, where Mephistopheles remarks that his monstrous corporeal characteristics of Nordic lore have been lost, leaving only a feather to identify him. Conceptually, Mephistopheles serves both a subordinate function of the divine in accordance with Leibniz‘s idea of theodicy (thus in a sense moving forward) and at the same time reflects back on the history of his reception, at times a cynic at others a seducer, at times a provoker, at others a murderer. To this extent, while he appears to be trapped within his historical options, he escapes them by failing to ever present himself in a singular or stable manner.

In this example we see how Alt’s interpretations generally proceed along a double path. First, he clearly presents the dominant scholarly reading of the text in question and places it in a greater context. He also, however, keeps his sights set on the problem of evil as that which escapes context, frequently by scrambling reflective codes. This escape powers the inquiry‘s narrative and allows a broader sense of phenomenology to be employed in a description of the study.

Chapter 3 establishes the move to the autonomy of art from morality in the work of Schlegel and the other Early Romantics. When art turns to evil it is both the most free from former restrictions and at the same time the most powerful. For the purpose of this inquiry, Kleist lines up with Early Romantic authors, and in a compelling section, Alt employs Kant as an illuminating philosophical foil. He first draws three varieties of evil from Kant‘s 1793 text Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft that he also finds in Kleist. The difference is that while Kant insists on the decision to follow the maxim that distinguishes a good world from an evil one, Kleist employs figures of the third that disrupt this opposition and demonstrate the relativity of evil. To take just one of the three examples, Die Familie Schroffenstein tells a story of a family overcome with affect, never able to calculate or reflect on their acts. Indeed when Rupert looks into the water he sees the devil’s face not as an image of his inner essence but on the very material of the waves. In this context, Alt provocatively aligns Die Familie Schroffenstein with Derrida’s descrip-tion of Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” as a space where God is driven from the stage to create a non-theological space. Kleist shows evil without foundation, without the lower limit offered by Kant. Throughout, Alt deploys the work of other recent theorists such as Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze in a judicious manner in conjunction with readings from classical and modern Germanistik (in this section including Müller-Seidel, Peter Szondi, and David Wellbery). There are also compelling sections for those working on the history of evil in psychoanalytic terms, an approach that more thoroughly informs Terry Eagleton’s On Evil (2010) and Laurence Rickel’s The Vampire Lectures (1999).

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In the final chapter, Alt identifies the sudden end of the purely aesthetic approach to evil and the return of the ethical dimension in literature after Auschwitz. Now key works that engage the Holocaust explicitly reject aesthetic language–as when Imre Kertész’s character György Köves says that he would not use the word “entseztlich” to describe the concentration camps. Instead he describes them prosaically. Alt links this demystifying endeavor in an illuminating manner to Arendt’s much debated proposition on the “banality of evil,” emphasizing that for Arendt it was meant to indicate Eichmann’s lack of demonic profundity, not the fact that evil had become an everyday occurrence. This new attempt to think banality and evil together without recourse to the earlier categories of irrationalism distinguishes the work of Arendt and Kertész from that of Adorno, who otherwise orients thinking of the relationship between evil and literature in the post war period with his saying: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

If we remember that Hegel claimed to have sublated evil in his earlier work before discounting it even as a topic in his Lectures on Aesthetics, we can effectively guard against the impulse to wrap things up dialectically in the present volume. Alt does appear to move in this direction when he appeals to Luhmann’s concept of culture, which, he emphasizes, exists parallel to the moral sphere of norms. Culture shows that things can be different, “daß das Leben prinzipiell auch anders—z.B.: ohne [die Sphäre der Moral]—möglich wäre” (548). Moving beyond this disjunction, however, Alt insists that aesthetic judgment must nonetheless take into account the norms of social reality. One submits to literature, but moral principles kick in even in the midst of this submission. In other words, the very provocations of evil literature depend indirectly on the values of morality, which must be taken into account.

Returning to the Hegelian perspective with which I opened this review I would be tempted to extend the results of the study beyond Alt‘s sense of the “phänomenologisches Spektrum” that, in a spatial mode, expands what can be perceived. When the Ästhetik des Bösen examines “das Böse als solches,” it does not look for an essence, but follows the links of the “als” through what seem to be a number of instances that challenge a pre-given moral standard. In reading this study, however, one also becomes attuned to an important temporal dimension. In an analogy with the narrative aspect of Hegel’s Phän-omenologie des Geistes, I would suggest that on another level the Ästhetik des Bösen encourages the reader to immerse himself in the sucessive instances of evil in literature that challenge moral values along the way. Unable to reach a stable „als solches“ or essence of evil, it offers a kind of phenomenology of evil spirits that tests one through ever-changing figures that potentially modify moral principles over time. Beyond its stated conclusion of the paradox of evil in literature, reading Alt‘s study suggests that the quest to show evil is itself an ethical one, that literature, with its new forms and figures struggles to display power dynamics that attempt to stay hidden and rule from behind the scenes.

Bard College JEFFREY CHAMPLIN

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Bethany Wiggin. Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. xiii + 248 pages.

In her study Bethany Wiggin examines what she calls the “French chapter” in the history of the novel. This is the period around 1700 marked by France’s political and cultural hegemony in Europe. As Wiggins points out, French has to be understood not in national but cultural terms. In early modern, pre-national Europe, “French” referred not to a political or national entity but to the international language of letters that became both the language of “France’s champions as well as its most scathing critics” (5).

Second, France’s cultural impact has to be understood in terms of its rene-gotiation and appropriation at the local level (4). “French” was the label not simply for products and practices of cultural export, but also for the results of a work of cultural translation and appropriation governed by a double bind of admiration and rejection. This double bind is evident, for instance, in Opitz’s Buch von der deutschen Poetery (1624), which employs the model of the French Pléjades to encourage the cultivation of a German poetics expressly opposed to French fashion. “Fashion” and “novel” figure in Wiggin’s study as sibling terms. Both are representatives of a newness that inhabits the work of translation itself as Fremdheit or “the element of resistance in the process of transformation” (9). This nod towards Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture is part of the terminological strategy of Wiggin’s study, in which she employs terms that go beyond categorizations within a positively established concept of “literature” and instead focuses on the forces that accompanied the emergence of this concept and made it possible. Bourdieu’s notion of the “literary field” as well as Michel de Certeau’s concept of “pouching” are Wiggin’s two guiding terms that allow her to describe the French chapter in the novel’s history as an age of translation, in which the French novel led a truly transnational life within a European network of literary exchange and translation.

Wiggin maps out the space between three key players in this network: Paris, London and Leipzig, with a particular focus on the latter. The focus on Leipzig and the German book market ensures that Wiggin’s project contributes to a transnational history of the novel: “The view from Leipzig, the Saxon Klein-Paris, reveals more accurately the scope of the novel’s transnationalism” (7). Significantly enough, in focusing on the transnationalism of the novel as it was present in Leipzig, Wiggin reconquers terrain for German literary history, which had been more or less abandoned once Auerbach declared German literature belated. Wiggin’s study aims to counteract the “disciplinary effects of narratives that tell the novel’s national rise” (10).

The study consists of four chapters and a conclusion, entitled “Robinson Crusoe Sails on the European Market,” that tells the reader about the turn from the French romance to the English anti-novel. The first two chapters examine the commodification of letters through the printing press and fashion. “French” spelled fashion and thus determined the currents of the market for

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what Wiggin aptly calls “print novelties” (19), i.e., occasional poems, pam-phlets and single-page prints that were characteristic for early modern letters in which the printed text made the elitist art of poetry available to a broader audience as well as a broader circle of authors, who spawned new poetic forms in turn. French romances and nouvelles became a crucial part of this poetic fashion. Wiggin’s second chapter is dedicated to the pan-European fashion of French gallantry, which was inextricably intertwined with the literary fashions but also the polemics against the novel. Wiggin shows through numerous examples how the fashionable romances and nouvelles were intertwined with the pan-European fashion of French gallantry. Indeed literature became the field in which not only models of, but also polemics against, gallantry were presented, which then shaped the narrative forms of the novel.

The work of the previous two chapters comes to fruition in Chapter 3, “1688: The Roman Becomes Both Poetical and Popular.” The description of a Bourdieuesqe literary field exposed to the dynamics of the market, fashion, and cultural influences allows Wiggin to describe convincingly the popular nouvelle as an almost hybrid literary form closely related to newspa-pers and other periodicals. Thomasius’s own periodical of literary reviews, Monatsgespräche, exemplifies the merging of journalistic and novelistic modes of writing. A second example would be the incorporation of Huet’s Traité de l’origine des romans into the text of Eberhard Werner Happel’s novel Der insu-lanische Mandorell (1682). Wiggin argues that one of the novel’s protagonist, the Asian prince Covvattiar, could be regarded as embodying the novel as described by Huet. Just as the Prince travels through Asia and beyond on an educational trip, so too the novel travels along the “geographical and histori-cal trajectory on which culture and power were translated across times and places” (114). And while the novel accompanies the rise and fall of empires, much like French “effeminate” gallantry does in the eyes of its enemies, it is French female virtue that interrupts the “translatio studii et imperii logic” of Huet’s treatise. The classical novels of Madame de Scudéry rescued the genre from its own decadent tendencies: “Scudery’s virtue, her sexual body (or lack thereof), anchored French glory at its pinnacle.”(120)

This pinnacle of French glory anchored in a woman’s virtue also marks the point in Wiggin’s book where it becomes most obvious that her history of the novel is organized along two narrative lines. Wiggin’s contribution to the novel’s history is at the same time a book on women in literature and female writers around 1700. According to Wiggin the story of the import and domestication of the French novel has to be told as the story of the import and domestication of the unruly (French) woman. Wiggin opens this line of argument in her discussion of fashion and fashionable poetry in Chapter 1, in which she points out that fashion is often yoked to the feminine and the effeminate poet, which represents the Feindbild of the literary establishment. Wiggin quotes Harsdörffer’s characterization of poetry “as a fallen woman, brought low by a confusion of the furor poeticus with a furor sexualis.” (49) The threat of the furor sexualis is also present in the discourses on gallantry. Gal-

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lantry served to “transcend the sexual and to purge male-female interactions of any corporeality” (65). As a model for an “elegant,” desexualized interac-tion between the sexes, gallantry made women’s participation in the world of letters essential. With the polemics against gallantry, however, a new type of woman entered the literary stage: the “gallant female,” the politically and eroti-cally cunning “lady in waiting” who embodied “effeminate French” gallantry and, like Harsdörffer’s “fallen woman,” threatened to corrupt the German man. Interestingly enough, Wiggin points to the role gallantry played in the articulation of national identity: The figure of the fashionable French she-devil served as a trope within a discourse that aimed to defend the “German” character against seductive French fashion. But, most importantly, gallantry opened the door for an implicit discourse on the educated, well-read woman and a critique of women’s role in marriage: For the “unruly French woman” the tyranny of the institution of marriage was less desirable than the company of books. The domestication of the novel, as Wiggin discusses in Chapter 4, played out “in two interrelated ways: [it] rendered the fashionable short form in the vernacular for the domestic markets and, sometimes, tamed its unruly French women.”(148) Talander’s novel, Amazoninnen aus dem Kloster (1696), exemplifies this domestication, in presenting the anti-marriage rhetoric of the Amazons, who nevertheless give up their freedom for the bonds of love and marriage (170).

Although Wiggin’s study certainly holds many valuable contributions to the field of gender studies, it is principally interested in the implications that the rhetoric of the female has for the productive potential of the Roman as a new genre. This becomes clear in Chapter 4, where Wiggin argues that the ascent of the female writer and the blurring of the line between “writers and their characters” provided audiences with insight into “how history was determined by the politics of representation” (161–62).

Wiggin’s argument on the role of the representation of women in the seventeenth-century European novel is intertwined with the book’s focus on the effects of commodification on the genre. She builds here on Olaf Simons’ groundbreaking work Marteaus Europa oder Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde (2001). Moreover, in its methodological framing her book connects beautifully with the work currently being done in the field of early modern or enlighten-ment studies in Germany. In particular one could point to the notion of the Kulturmuster coined by Daniel Fulda.

All in all, Wiggin presents a richness of material that makes her book an excellent source for the student and scholar of early modern literature alike. She is well aware that virtually all the material she presents is unknown to readers and provides them with enough information and narrative to become acquainted with the material. Her original analysis and elegant writing style should inspire readers to embark on their own journey into the fascinating field of early modern literature.

George Washington University MALTE WESSELS


Contributors

Ira Allen is at work on two doctoral degrees in Rhetoric and Composition at Indiana University and Media and Communication at the European Graduate School. He is writing a dissertation on the ethical fantasy of rhetorical theory and another on an approach to writing constitutions that would account for rhetorical power. He translated thirty articles in The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, edited by Stanley N. Katz.

Jeffrey Champlin is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College. He received his PhD in German Languages and Literatures from New York University in 2011 with a disserta-tion on violence and political representation in Arendt’s political philosophy and literary texts by Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Making of a Terrorist: Classic German Rogues and is editing a forthcoming volume entitled Terror and the Roots of Poetics.

Peter Fenves is the Joan and Serepta Harrison Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of several books, most recently Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth and The Messianic Reduction:Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time.

Pierfrancesco Fiorato is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Sassari. He is the author of Geschichtliche Ewigkeit. Ursprung und Zeitlichkeit in der Philosophie Hermann Cohens (1993) and has published widely on neo-Kantianism and German-Jewish thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also the Italian editor and translator of several of Hermann Cohen’s works. He has participated in international conferences and research projects on the thought of Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Rosenzweig at universities across Europe and North America.

Alexander Gelley is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction and essays on the modern novel and literary theory, and is the editor of Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity. His research interests

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include Romanticism, contemporary theory, and German-Jewish literature and culture. He is preparing a book on Walter Benjamin’s later writings.

Werner Hamacher is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and the Emmanuel Levinas Professor at the European Graduate School. He has taught in the Humanities Center and the German Department at the Johns Hopkins University and was also a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. His books include pleroma—Reading in Hegel and Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Litera-ture from Kant to Celan. He is editor of the series Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics at Stanford University Press.

Bryan Klausmeyer is a PhD student in the German Program at the Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German thought and literature, specifically representa-tions of systematicity and subjectivity in transcendental philosophy and early German Romanticism, as well as theories of criticism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenological approaches to literature.

Marc de Launay researches and teaches German philosophy at the CNRS (École normale supérieure, Ulm). His areas of specialization are Nietzsche, Neo-Kantianism (Hermann Cohen, Heinrich Rickert), and contemporary Jewish thought. He is also the translator of numerous German philosophical works, including texts by Kant, Schelling, Lessing, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Scholem, Habermas, and Blumenberg. Most recently, he has pub-lished Qu’est-ce que traduire? (Vrin 2007) and Lectures philosophiques de la Bible (Hermann 2008).

Julia Ng is a PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University and has conducted archival research in Paris, Vincennes, Berlin, and Jerusalem with the support of the Josephine de Kármán Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Paris Program in Critical Theory, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She writes on literary theory, political philosophy, and architecture theory, and most recently published on Walter Benjamin and material agency. She is currently completing a dissertation on “impos-sibility” as a condition for life, power, and agency that considers Benjamin’s and Scholem’s mathematically-inflected revision of Kant and the work of the science fiction novelist, Paul Scheerbart.

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Gérard Raulet is Professor of the History of German Ideas at the University Paris-Sorbonne and Chair of the Weimar Culture Research Group at the Foundation Maison des sciences de l’homme / CNRS. He has published sev-eral books on Benjamin, including Le caractère destructeur. Esthétique, théologie et politique chez Walter Benjamin (Paris, 1997), Walter Benjamin (Paris, 2000), Positive Barbarei. Kulturphilosophie und Politik bei Walter Benjamin (Münster, 2004). He has also published Critical Cosmology: Essays on Nations and Globali-zation (Lexington Books, 2005), Das Zwischenreich der symbolischen Formen. Ernst Cassirers Erkenntnistheorie, Ethik und Politik im Spannungsfeld von Historismus und Neukantianismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), and La philosophie allemande depuis 1945 (Paris, 2006).

Paula Schwebel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp. She received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2011 with a dissertation entitled Walter Benjamin’s Monadology. Schwebel has been a fellow at the Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center and the Leo Baeck Institute. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the transformation of the concept of creation in early modern “natural history,” which considers the implications of Benjamin’s interpreta-tion of Leibniz.

John H. Smith holds the Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Studies at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung and Dialectics of the Will: Freedom, Power, and Understanding in Modern French and German Thought. His most recent book is Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought (Cornell University Press, 2012). He is currently working on the function of infinitesimal calculus in the German philosophical and literary tradition.

Rochelle Tobias is Professor of German at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatu-ral World and has a study forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press entitled Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Literature in the Twentieth Century. She is cur-rently working on a project on Rilke and the problem of images.

Malte Wessels is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at George Washington University. He received his PhD in German from the Johns Hopkins University in Spring 2011. His doctoral thesis, Enthusiastische Modelle—Epistemologische Subjektivität im Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts, examines the emergence of mod-ern fiction within the discourse of eighteenth-century cosmology, aesthetics, and epistemology.

MLN 127(3) April 2012 (German Issue - Benjamin, Scholem, Cohen)

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Transcript of MLN 127(3) April 2012 (German Issue - Benjamin, Scholem, Cohen)