Essays – 1995-96

Essays: 1995–1996

Daniel Ross

Table of contents

“The historian is a prophet facing backwards”—Friedrich Schlegel and Michel Foucault

1

Beginning to read Heidegger on death and anxiety

31

Bernstein and Adorno on praxis

60

The pilot, the master, and the cyborg: three exemplary figures in the history of philosophy

72

Notes toward a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”

96

Breathing space

110

Bibliography

129

“The historian is a prophet facing backwards”—Friedrich Schlegel and Michel Foucault

1995

The distinguishing characteristic of modern writing is its close relationship to criticism and theory, and the determinative influence of the latter. Friedrich Schlegel Please… Leave poor German Romanticism alone! Paul Piccone

2

I Why not leave German romanticism alone, for it does indeed seem to be poor? Martin Heidegger criticises Novalis for understanding language as subjectivity, “that is, within the horizon of absolute idealism.”1 The charge of subjectivism is also Carl Schmitt’s, for whom romanticism reduces to an emotionalism and a type of narcissism. Despite a moment of enthusiasm for the French Revolution, this is merely a transitory feeling. The impossibility of romantic political commitment due to this aestheticisation of politics, Schmitt argues, culminates in a romantic convergence of Idea and State, and consequently with the prescription: “assent.”2 The inherent conservatism of romanticism is revealed to Schmitt in the teleology of the intellectual and political lives of the romantics. It is the unfolding of the lives and works of the romantic personalities, even long after having left behind or even repudiated their romantic origins, that reveals the inevitable destination of the romantic psychology. Another critique of the romantics is suggested from a quite different political perspective by Edward Said, but once again the argument is constructed teleologically. Said argues that Orientalist racism, anti-semitism and protoFascism are “literal products” of Friedrich Schlegel’s (among others) Oriental and philological investigations. 3 According to this schema, romanticism is both a moment whose possibility lies in pre-given social and political conditions, and the setting in motion of a sequence whose teleology is the horrors of twentiethcentury racism. Furthermore, this link between the linguistic theories of Orientalist-romantics such as Schlegel and an unfolding institutionalised racism, is argued for within what Said claims to be an affiliation to the theories of Michel Foucault.4 To propose, therefore, that there is something in early German romanticism that is still worthy of attention, to propose further that this worthiness is in part a consequence and not in spite of the romantics’ Orientalist and philological interests, and to propose finally that there is a resonance between romantic concerns and the concerns of Foucault and that the thought of the romantics may illuminate the texts of Foucault (rather than merely vice versa), is to challenge some aspects of received political, philosophical and historical wisdom.

3

Foucault himself touches tangentially upon German romanticism and Orientalism when, in The Order of Things, in a consideration of the history of classification, he reflects upon the births of philology and linguistics. The turn of the nineteenth century, according to Foucault, marks a significant moment in the history of science and philosophy, a disruption of the supposed continuity of scientific progress. By contrasting the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, by bringing them into a constellation from his vantage point in the twentieth, Foucault aims retrospectively to unfold an epoch in the history of the study of language. Whereas previously interpretation aimed to locate, etymologically, the divine Word, the union of world and God at the origin of language, in the nineteenth century interpretation “reveals” that we are governed and paralysed by language, that we cannot get beyond language by getting behind it, but can only uncover “language in its crude being.”5 In short, it was no longer believed that the truth of language lay beyond or before language in its historical (and divine) origin, but in the form of language itself, in its grammar and in its essence. This moment signals the birth of philology and linguistics. From this genealogy Foucault draws another, more general, historical conclusion: “Philology, as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse, has become the modern form of criticism.”6 The turn of the nineteenth century, then, is also significant in the history of criticism. 7 That Foucault links philology and criticism, and that the genealogy of both can be traced beginning from the same moment, is not coincidental. Schlegel’s published fragments, which appeared between 1797 and 1800, provide a site for the examination of the twin figures of philology and criticism. Two aims, and two corresponding methodologies, suggest themselves for this examination. If there is a commonly held picture of German romanticism as a reactionary mystical subjectivism, a commonly held alternative paints it as a radical break with the past, an embrace of a new type of historical consciousness, supportive of the Revolution

and sceptical of

romanticism is the

dogmatic religion.

difficulty of

accepting

or

What characterises

early

rejecting either

these

of

interpretations.8 Moving beyond weighing romanticism’s “positive and negative sides” necessitates taking seriously its philosophical concepts and drawing out their intentions.9 This means unfolding Friedrich Schlegel’s work on a philosophical theory of criticism. Thus the first aim and methodology consists of a critical reflection upon Schlegelian criticism, an attempt to systematically elaborate Schlegel’s fragmented critical theory. Such a methodology is susceptible to accusations of circularity as well as “teleologicality,” though it avoids the psychological teleology of Schmitt and the historical teleology of Said. Of course, and first off according to Schlegel himself, if there is a teleology at work here, it is 4

infinite and ideal. The obvious paradox (or contradiction, perhaps) of this method is that it appears to depend upon the coherence, the validity, not to mention the existence, of the object of inquiry for its own possibility. Perhaps Schlegel’s idea is unfolded only at the price of its ruin, but this ruination also therefore characterises the critique. The second aim and methodology is to bring into constellation two moments in the history of philology and criticism: Schlegel’s published fragments and Foucault’s chapter on the birth of philology and linguistics in The Order of Things. The aim in bringing together these two textual moments is somehow to illuminate the relation between the past and present of philology, of criticism, and of history. Quickly, too quickly, if Schlegelian romanticism represents a repressed moment in subsequent intellectual history, and Schlegel’s encounter with India represents a repressed moment in the understanding and self-understanding of Schlegelian romanticism, then perhaps Foucault’s historical and exegetical methodology in The Order of Things is in part symptomatic of a return of the repressed and in part represents a working through of this dual repression. Furthermore, in contrast if not in opposition to Foucault, if Schlegel’s romantico-philologico-criticoOrientalist moment signifies the opening of the history of the present, even if it is a history necessarily characterised by repression, then it is perhaps because criticism has become the modern form of philology. A great methodological difficulty haunts the second of these stated aims and methodologies, however. Is it in fact possible to identify, beyond the categories in which they are placed, these two moments of intellectual history? Can one chapter of one work in the career of one of the most dynamic thinkers of the twentieth century be isolated as a “moment” and analysed as such? The problems are worse for a consideration of the Schlegelian moment, for in this case the claiming of a boundary for this moment is not only dubious temporally and intellectually, but also authorially—Schlegel’s fragments in the Athenaeum were not even identified as the fragments of Schlegel but published collectively with those of his brother August Wilhelm, Schleiermacher and Novalis. By what authority might Friedrich Schlegel’s particular fragments be isolated? Further, by what authority may Schlegel’s three collections of fragments be considered as belonging to a single moment? The first violence of interpretation in this critical manoeuvre consists of setting a boundary to a work on the basis of an authorial subject. And, as we know, this is an interpretative violence firmly rejected by the subjects Schlegel and Foucault and their works. Even assuming the possibility of a legitimate boundary to a fragment collection, a method that resorts, orders, connects, logically constructs a theory of their overall meaning presumes a meaningful relation of fragment to fragment. The legitimacy of this relation 5

appears unlikely to be granted by the fragments themselves, particularly a collection which notoriously proclaims the autonomy of the fragment. 10 The violence in ignoring some fragments in favour of others for the sake of a systematic presentation, and in drawing from the fragments conclusions which perhaps Schlegel himself would not have recognised, is evident. Perhaps the most that can be claimed as a defense is that this procedure, which in some ways creates boundaries and in other ways ignores them, which in some ways posits an authorial subject and in other ways refuses to recognise the currency of authorial intention, is to some extent authorised by Schlegel’s own editorial attitudes, and his statement that “words often understand themselves better than those who use them.”11

II That Friedrich Schlegel began to theorise an aesthetic criticism at the end of the eighteenth century was a critical response to neoclassical aesthetic theory. As such a parallel with Foucault’s account of the development of philology becomes immediately apparent. Whereas “Classical knowledge was profoundly nominalist,” a view legitimated via a theory of language that depended upon the claim of an original God-given system of names, from the nineteenth century “language began to fold in upon itself,” becoming “one object of knowledge among others.”12 Similarly, the neoclassical aesthetic theory was a codified, hierarchised system, a theory of Art, and the legitimacy of this system was established via a perfect and original Classical art. Schlegel, then, intended to liberate the work of art from Art as the classification of works—the work of art became an autonomous object. The significance of this parallel is indicated by the fact that Schlegel’s intention of folding the work in upon itself was targeted against what neoclassical aesthetics intended to guarantee—that behind art lay reality, that art was a form of the representation of reality, that it was mimetic.13 Schlegel’s first paper on ancient Greek poetry in fact adopted a neoclassical aesthetic, but this was rejected before it had even been published. What led him away from neoclassicism was the question of classification: whereas in neoclassicism genre is immutably given, Schlegel wished to make of genre a philosophical and aesthetic problem. We already have so many theories about poetical genres. Why have we no concept yet of poetical genre? Perhaps then we would have to make do with a single theory of poetical genres. 14

6

That is, Schlegel was drawn to ask, first, what it means to divide poetry into genres and, secondly, for a concept of genre at all, something deemed unnecessary by the neoclassicists, for whom genre is merely that division inherited from antiquity (even if the substance of this inheritance is the subject of internal disputation).

Schlegel

wished

to

replace

a

“pragmatic”

with

a

“philosophical theory of the poetical genres.”15 He identified the most basic query left unanswered by neoclassical classification: “Should poetry simply be divided up? Or should it remain one and indivisible? Or fluctuate between division and union?”16 The beginnings of Schlegel’s answer can be seen in two further fragments: In poetry too every whole can be a part and every part really a whole.17 A classification is a definition that contains a system of definitions.18

Classification can no longer consist merely of a division according to identity and difference within a hierarchy. If every part is a whole and every whole a part, this implies that genre is monadic. The hierarchy of genres and the totality of works no longer conform respectively to the form and content of Art. In constituting a system classification is already content, already the work of definition. The question necessarily becomes what Schlegel intends by “system.” The implication thus far is that aesthetics is inflected toward philosophy, but this does not mean that art is subsumed by philosophy. If Schlegel was fighting neoclassical orthodoxy with one hand, with the other he was battling what he saw as the Kantian subordination of art to reason and understanding. For Schlegel art was not opposed to philosophy by a lack of systematicity. But to Schlegel a system is not merely a set of logical propositions following one upon another—it cannot be a “regiment of soldiers on parade.”19 That Schlegel could write the following cannot be reduced to a mere love of contradiction: “It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.”20 If Schlegel’s is a philosophical aesthetics, it is because his is also an aesthetic philosophy. This aesthetic philosophy has a twofold motivation: “a longing for the infinite and the training of the Understanding.”21 Schlegel opposed Kant’s subordination of aesthetic ideas to a finite reason, aiming instead to establish aesthetic autonomy above and beyond all reason. The unification of the systematic and the wholly unsystematic occurs in infinite “ideas”—the idea is systematically constituted through concepts, but these are transcended by the idea itself. Like Kant, Schlegel did not believe in intellectual intuition. The idea is incapable of being directly experienced, but the mode of writing adopted by the romantics—the fragment—symbolises the idea, not as that which lies behind the

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fragment, but as the condition of presentation of the idea. Fragmentation is the condition of the system because it is constitutive of universality itself. Although the system is the idea of totality, “even the greatest system is merely a fragment.”22 Classification, in that it contains a system and refers to an idea, bears a relation to the infinite, and for Schlegel the idea is that which lies concealed in the work. The system and its opposite are united in the work of art, a unity which is each time singular. As Gasché puts it, “Only because the absolute is the fragment is there an absolute—absolute individuality.”23 The question of genre, therefore, leads to a consideration of the work in its singularity, and to the historical limits of any division of works. 24 The infinitisation of classification is thus simultaneously its dissolution. The historicity of the system-as-fragment is indicated by Schlegel’s references to philology. Schlegel states that the poet must also philosophise and, if he is to be “more than a mere contriver and artisan,” will “have to become a philologist as well.”25 For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the fact that ancient texts are said to exist only in fragmented form is not merely incidental, and philology and fragmentation are linked by the concept of the ruin. 26 Furthermore, and against neoclassical views, if there is anything in ancient literature which speaks directly to the present and commands the modern artist, it is this fragmentation: “Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.”27 On the other hand, “as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and content.”28 Although ancient and modern works exist as fragments, there is as yet nothing fragmentary. 29 That is, the fragmentation of the system constitutes its historicity, not only as a philological ruin, but also as an openness to the future immanent to the work— hence Schlegel uses “fragment” synonymously with “project.”30 The fragment and the

fragment

collection are

always

incomplete, and this philosophy

of

incompleteness suggests an essential character of deferral.31 The idea is that which always remains to be realised. Every real entity is historical and “all systems [are] individuals just as all individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency.”32 If the fragment is the idea in presentation, and if the idea springs from the “imagination,” then the fragment brings into view the general question of the relation of romantic idealism to “consciousness.” The fragment, therefore, is a locus for discussion of the relation of the subject to “reflection”, and such a discussion will lead from a consideration of the system-fragment to Schlegel’s aesthetic theory proper. For Fichte reflection is a finite activity of consciousness limited by a transcendental subject which grounds reflection and in effect is

8

capable of intellectual intuition of itself. The one modification by Schlegel to the Fichtean scheme, according to Benjamin, was to make reflection itself, rather than the subject, the centre of the system. 33 Rather than a progressive thinking of the self, reflection becomes a thinking of thought in itself. In so doing Schlegel anticipated the “decentring of the subject,” for reflection takes subjectivity itself as an object, and thus object and subject dissolve in the reflective process. Reflection becomes an infinite process, an “ever-intensifying emptying of phenomenality toward appearance.”34 Benjamin writes that “such pure thinking of the thought of the I leads only to eternal self-mirroring, to an eternal series of mirror-images.” But this is not the narcissistic subjectivism of the romantic subject asserted by Schmitt. If the work bears a relation to thought but thought which expands beyond all limit, then thinking becomes the formation of a “formless thought, which is directed towards the Absolute.”35 The consequences of a concept of infinite reflection for a theory of art may be stated simply: if reflection is not founded upon the subject, what has the subject as creator to do with the work? The romantics conceive of the work of art not as subjective expression, but as the surpassing of all subjectivity, not in the name of reason, but rather of the absolute singularity of the reflection of creative freedom. In fact, we can go so far as to say that the medium of reflection is no longer the self but art, and that the work becomes the “centre of reflection.”36 The work of art becomes the demand for the sacrifice of the finite subjectivity of the artist who, therefore, forms a higher caste (artists "are Brahmins"), ennobled not by birth but by “free self-consecration.”37 Schlegelian aesthetic philosophy is thus neither a rationalism nor a subjectivism. The subject is not an adequate category for the intuition of the infinite, yet the infinite is not simply inaccessible. Might this “non-intuitive intuition”—as Benjamin calls the reflective act in which the subject is dissolved—be found in language?38 From a consideration of system and classification as idea, as that which lies beyond language, we are led via the fragment back to the word or concept as the essence of the Absolute: For the term, the concept, contains for him the seed of the system; it was, at bottom, nothing other than a preformed System itself. Schlegel’s thinking is an absolutely conceptual, that is, linguistic thinking. Reflection is an intentional act of the absolute comprehension of the System and the adequate expression for this act is the concept.39

And it for this reason that, from Schlegel’s initial consideration of the concept of genre, we are led to literary criticism as the site where aesthetics meets philology. Schlegelian anti-subjectivism, according to Benjamin, applies as much to the critic as to the artist, for if the “critique of a work is […] its reflection,” then this is not

9

the reflection of the critical self or the elaboration of authorial intention but “the unfolding, the germination” of the immanent core of the work.40 “The subject of reflection is the work of art itself” and, although an external process, criticism does not reflect upon a work, but rather intends “the unfolding of the reflection […] in a work.”41 Subjectivity, if we insist on retaining the term, is explicitly a nonegological phenomenon, and reflection is not a property of the ego but a process of unfolding of the idea within the work. Criticism, therefore, is not the placement of a work in a formal scheme, a classificatory system, on the basis of the similarity of its form to the model of its genre (in which case criticism would also be an account of the failures of the work, the list of its differences from its designated generic model). Rather, criticism is the completion of the essence of the work. “Criticism is not to judge works by a general ideal but to search out the individual idea in each work.”42 Although it is not the task of criticism to compare the work to a species of form, this does not mean that romantic criticism was not interested in form altogether. On the contrary, that the work is the centre of reflection implies that the task of completion consists of uncovering the immanent form of the work. But as form is not a question of correspondence to an ahistorical model, neither is it to be understood as rigid textual structure. As form constitutes the essence of the work, as the structure of its immanent tendencies, then it is perhaps better understood as a constellation of formal moments.43 The form of the work is that which is unfolded in the critical movement. The form is the limited expression of the infinite in the work, and hence in some way its ultimate content. The task of criticism is reflection upon the form as the infinitisation of its idea, as Weber writes: If criticism arises (ensteht) out of the work and in this sense depends on it, the work in turn refers to an idea of absolute reflection which, however, it restricts and dissimulates precisely by giving it shape. This restriction is lifted and reflection reinstated through the process of criticism. 44

Weber’s account, following Benjamin’s, immediately suggests a problem in the romantic concept of criticism—how can the absolute be restricted by the form of the work? If reflection in the work is limited, then criticism, reflection that goes beyond the work, is necessary for reflection to be infinite.45 If criticism is the completion of the form of the work, therefore, it is also its dissolution into the infinite idea of criticism, the medium of art. Where form is finite, criticism renders the absolute. The work achieves completion only “at the price of its ruin.”46 But how can criticism be the unfolding of reflection in rather than upon a work, unless the idea of the work and the idea of criticism are fundamentally continuous? 10

That criticism is the task of unfolding the idea of the work contained in its form raises a more general problem: by rendering the absolute finitely, the romantic concept of criticism brings to the fore the relation of art to the divine. If the idea achieves infinity through dissolution into the medium of art, does not the work—as in neoclassicism—become subordinated to a divine Art. And does not the absolute therefore become profane, a divine formalism? The idea of the work is dissolved into the Idea of ideas, but for Schlegel this is God.47 Does not Schlegel’s “liberal formalism” at the level of the individual work, therefore, dissolve into a “radical mystical formalism” at the level of the absolute, as Benjamin puts it?48 This contradiction is illustrated by two of Schlegel’s geometrical metaphors for philosophy. In an essay on Lessing, he compared the “paradox of philosophical life” with the parabola, whose lines can “only appear as a fragment because one of their centres lies in infinity.”49 Philosophy, because of the absence of a single, unified centre, in other words because it is aesthetic or linguistic, and because the absolute is singular each time, is destined, within the finitude of appearance, to incompletion and fragmentation. Criticism, as philosophical aesthetics, reveals the idea of the work, but this idea appears finitely in the form of the work and in criticism, because it transcends both. On the other hand, a fragment by Schlegel states that “Philosophy is an ellipse. The one centre, which we are closer to at present, is the rule of reason. The other is the idea of the universe, and it is here that philosophy and religion intersect.”50 Here philosophy is the encompassment of reason and an idea outside reason, the universe. Schlegel still rejects a philosophy that would imagine itself as a circle with reason or understanding as its centre (this would correspond to the idea of a system as a regiment of soldiers). Although it has more than one centre and these are separated, however, philosophy remains a whole. There thus appears a change in the attainability of wholeness which corresponds with an inflection of philosophy toward religion rather than aesthetics, toward mythology rather than the singular work. Of course, a parabola is itself an ellipse, but an ellipse with one centre taken to infinity—Schlegel has taken a centre from infinity and returned it to the profane world.51 The problem, therefore, is whether the romantic concept of criticism is posed as an idea (an ideal), or as a concept, attainable and actual, and whether this distinction is sustainable. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue that this apparent contradiction is better understood as a necessary paradox. If the form of the work contains the idea, then it is reflection upon the form that exposes the idea, but this critical exposition is an account of, as they say, “the formation of form,” the unfolding of form itself. 52 Criticism is thus the dissolution of form into the medium of “formation,” and the absolute is identified with unfolding as such, beyond any actual form. In 11

this account, which must self-reflectively involve the dissolution of the form of criticism, actual works, actual forms, become suspended moments.53 It is their condition of suspension which produces the fragmentation of the work, and it is through the fragmentation of their form that works symbolise the absolute, symbolise unfolding as such, as their origin and their dissolution. It is through symbolisation that profane meaning is transcended. Schlegel’s interest in religion beyond mere reason ought be understood as “religion within the limits of art.”54 Thus Schlegel refers to “symbolic forms” and to “allegory” as the “means whereby the appearance of the finite is brought together with the truth of the infinite and thus dissolved away in it.”55 This is precisely the meaning, also, of the very last Athenaeum Fragment, number 451, where unfolding as such is a chain of inner revolutions, a chain of suspended moments. Universality is the successive satiation of all forms and substances. Universality can attain harmony only through the conjunction of poetry and philosophy; and even the greatest, most universal works of isolated poetry and philosophy seem to lack this final synthesis. They come to a stop, still imperfect but close to the goal of harmony. The life of the Universal Spirit is an unbroken chain of inner revolutions; all individuals—that is, all original and eternal ones—live in him. He is a genuine polytheist and bears within himself all Olympus. 56

The dissolution of the form of the work, therefore, is into the medium of reflection, the progressive unfolding of art, which Benjamin refers to as “the idea of a continuum of forms.”57 The continuum of forms is what has been referred to here as unfolding as such. The continuum of forms is the condition for and guarantee of romantic criticism, for it is the assumption of the possibility of objectively immanent critique. Criticism, reflecting upon the finitude of the work of the present, is an anticipation of the “invisible work” signalled there—romantic criticism is an unfolding toward the future. 58 If the coherence of the continuum of forms is the radical mystical formalism of romantic criticism, then it is also a recognition that the origin of any classification in the present does not lie only in its history: “How we ought to classify is something that we often learn from the Ancients; but we ourselves must add the basis for the classification in a mystical way.”59 If romantic criticism is philological it is also projective: projects demonstrate an openness to the other of history—they are “fragments of the future.”60 This programmatic aspect of criticism is realised in Schlegel’s wellknown description of romantic poetry as “a progressive, universal poetry,” for the “romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.”61 Although criticism is the unfolding of this form, such poetry “can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterise its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free.”62 Profane criticism cannot characterise its 12

ideal—that is, criticism must abandon the last vestiges of teleology, the last vestiges of a pretension to classification, and itself become ideal. Criticism of romantic poetry can only succeed if it is romantic poetry which, consequently, “should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.”63 But if romantic poetry is the division and union of the work and criticism, then it is also their dissolution, either as a formal structure, or as an object capable of being classified. If the work is the auto-sacrifice of the creative subject, therefore, criticism is both the sacrifice of the work and the auto-sacrifice of critique. Thus the “keystone” of romantic poetry has the form neither of the poem nor criticism as separate genres, but is “the philosophy of the novel.”64 In his “Letter About the Novel,” he states that if the novel is incapable of being fitted to any genre, it is because its individuality as a mixture of forms make it “already an exception.”65 As that which is always-already an exception, even naming the novel is to approach the idea too closely with the tools of classification. That is why Schlegel detests the novel in so far as it claims to be a genre. The novel names the dilemma of the simultaneous inadequacy and necessity of classification, of naming. As such, romantic poetry would have to be its own description and its own critique: “such a theory of the novel would have to be itself a novel […] The things of the past would live in it in new forms.”66 As work and criticism, the novel is the unfolding of the forms of the past—it is the dissolution of genre because it subsumes the history of styles, of forms, of genres, within itself. The novel is the form which can “reflect on itself at will, […] mirror back any given stage of consciousness, in ever new reflections, from a higher position.”67 The infinity of reflection demands reflection not only upon itself as an object, but reflection upon itself as a moment in the history of the unfolding of forms. Such a reflection of and upon the continuum of forms, according to Benjamin, thus demands a wholly systematic yet wholly discontinuous form: The writing style of the novel should not form a continuum, it must be a structure articulated in each of its periods. Each small piece must be detached, limited, its own whole.68

There is, in fact, a fragment in which Schlegel admits that the essence of a critique of the continuum of forms must be entirely systematic, yet discontinuous and finite, and it is perhaps more surprising than it ought to be that this fragment concerns the writing of history: There are works, particularly comprehensive historical works, that in all their individual component parts are beautifully and attractively written, but as wholes are unpleasant and monotonous. To avoid this, the coloration, tone, and even the style would have to be changed and made strikingly different in each of the various

13

large blocks that make up the whole; in this way, the work would become not only more variegated, but also more systematic. It is clear that this kind of regular alternation is not the result of chance; here the artist has to know precisely what he wants to do in order to be able to do it. But it is equally clear that it would be premature to call a work of poetry or prose art before these works have reached the point of being completely structured. The possibility that genius could be made superfluous by this requirement is something that needn’t worry us, since the leap from the most vivid recognition and clearest perception of what needs to be done to its actual accomplishment will always be infinite.69

III Having followed romantic criticism to the point at which it intersects the writing of history, we must return to Foucault. Foucault writes of an historical event—the demotion of language from divine word to one object among others. A consequence of this was a shift from the question of the exoteric historical origin of language to the philological study of the history of language as an evolving set of structures. 70 According to Foucault, there were three “compensations” for this demotion of language, the last of which is “the appearance of literature, of literature as such.”71 The entire romantic philosophico-critical project can be seen as the inauguration of this “compensation,” for Foucault describes the advent of literature as a break “with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations.”72 Concerned with itself as a manifestation of language, literature curves back upon itself, “as if its discourse could have no other content than the expression of its own form; it addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity.”73 Foucault’s account of literature, therefore, follows exactly the romantic conception of the work as the subject of reflection. “Folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing,” he concludes, literature “has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its own being.”74 Foucault’s remarks, taken as a statement about romanticism as a moment in the unfolding of the present, are supported by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, who speak of the ideal of literature as “perfect closure upon itself.”75 The fact of this curvature upon itself, Foucault argues, means that, although they are twin figures, “literature is the contestation of philology.”76 It is at this point that we must question Foucault’s account, in so far at least as it applies to early German romanticism. Or, rather, we must complicate it substantially. Apart from the emergence of literature, the other compensations for the demotion of language, according to Foucault, are the recognition of its significance for scientific discourse, and the critical value placed upon its study as a

14

container of history, “an ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory.”77 To Schlegel, however, science, criticism and history are inseparable from art. Literature is precisely the transcendence of the classifications of poetry and criticism and, as we have seen, the consequence of this is that the artist is at once scientist, philosopher, critic, and philologist.78 Furthermore, this should be understood to mean that science, criticism and philosophy are subsumed by literature, and that this occurs not through the development of an ahistorical symbolic logic, but in the same movement as their subsumption to philology. All of these compensations, then, are for the romantics one compensation, and this is so precisely because the division of literature and philology, their classification as separate genres cannot, upon reflection, be infinitely maintained. If literature curves in upon itself, it does so whilst simultaneously expanding to infinity. The closure of language upon itself is at once the encompassment of the universe by language. This infinite expansion of literature is manifest in the romantic interest in Orientalism. Schlegel flirted with a romanticised conception of pantheism and even saw it as “the system of pure reason.”79 He eventually decided, however, that it depended upon a “merely abstract and negative concept of infinity,” the consequence of which was that “the deep living feeling of infinity […] must […] dissolve itself in this shadow and false concept of the one and all, so difficult as it is to distinguish from nothing.”80 This very ambiguity about the nature of the infinite and the inescapability of its abstract, negative aspect, however, characterises Schlegel’s entire philosophy, as we have seen. Romanticism, as a consequence of the ambiguity of the absolute, always hangs precipitously over the abyss of its dissolution into the infinite. The Athenaeum lives only at the moment of its autosacrifice. And this abyss is depicted implicitly in Novalis’ statement that “Philosophy is the theory of poetry. Philosophy teaches us what poetry is, that poetry is the one and the all.”81 How does Novalis’ understanding of philosophy differ from Schlegel’s understanding of pantheism? Only in that, if the one and the all is philosophical, then it is for Novalis also necessarily poetic. This disjunction can be interpreted in two ways, which may reduce to a conjunction. On the one hand, that poetry is the one and all could mean that poetry, that is, Literature, provides access to the infinite. The thesis of the singularity of each truly romantic poem, which might be called Schlegel’s polytheism, would then be confirmed in opposition to the pantheism he flirts with and eventually opposes. 82 On the other hand, Novalis might mean that the infinite is essentially poetic, that is, that the Idea of ideas remains essentially and eternally a fragment. Poetry as the infinite, or the infinite as poetic, aesthetic, incomplete. If these interpretations converge, it is because the discontinuous form of romantic poetry is the symbol for 15

and the truth of the continuity and the discontinuity of, the unfolding and the destruction of, the continuum of forms. In any case, the closure upon itself of language or literature (for these are in essence unified at the site of philology and translation) infects all thought with its consequences. Schlegel’s rejection of pantheism was based upon his perception that it twice ignored the profound consequences of this infection: firstly, by making the absolute universally present and absolutely profane, that is, by failing to render it linguistic; and secondly, by failing to locate the absolute in the singularity of the ideal work of art.83 But we can still ask: to what extent is Schlegel’s disillusionment with pantheism motivated by a wish to rescue his own polytheism, for was there ever more than an infinitesimal gap between them? The analogical association of grammar and natural science is assumed by Foucault to be a consequence of the fact that throughout “the Classical age” words were merely privileged elements of the natural order. 84 The history of philology, then, would be the history of the dislodging of language from nature. When Schlegel makes such associations, then, are they merely relics of an epoch in the process of transformation, or is there a more complex relation developed through a consideration of Indian philosophy and religion? The Dialogue on Poetry, which appeared in the Athenaeum in 1800, reflects Schlegel’s Orientalist interest when he writes of the earth as “that one poem of the Godhead of which we too are part and flower.” If nature is “the first, original poetry without which there would be no poetry of the word,” he adds, it is because it is “the unformed and unconscious poetry that stirs in the plant and shines in the light.”85 Nature is both unconscious poetry and the poem of the Godhead. If “unformed” refers to a poetry before poetry, a longing for a formlessness as the origin of form, then “unconscious” indicates not “instinctive” but a divine pre-subjectivity. The source of religion for the romantics was “in the unconscious or in the Orient,” and thus for Schlegel the source of religion is the Orient as the absolutely unconscious, as divine presubjectivity, the truth of the moment prior to and inaugurating freedom and the unfolding of form. 86 Although the language of poetry is, in the Orient, associated with the natural, this is so in a manner which questions the classical understandings

of these ideas. The “ever-welling spring of poetry and

imagination,” the freedom of the absolute, is for Schlegel the “unfathomable abyss” between the idea of infinite perfection and the imperfection of the visible world.87 If the abyss referred to in this discussion of the doctrine of emanation is moral, then it is also and even especially the linguistic abyss, for Schlegel’s philosophical and philological

Orientalist interests were inseparable. If the

doctrine of emanation is best seen as a “system of reunion with the divine essence,”88 therefore, then to reunite the poetry of the letter with the “unformed 16

and unconscious poetry” of nature requires a new, infinite poem. And this is precisely Schlegel’s view. Such a poetry would be “the dissolution of all form in the process of symbolisation,”89 and hence this “allegory” of divine being, this “artwork of nature,” would contain and conceal “the seeds of all other poems.”90 The novel, as we have seen, is the culmination of the process of unfolding by being the expression of unfolding as such, by subsuming all styles and genres within itself. Schlegel refers in similar terms to this infinite poem, but in this case it is described in terms of the need for a new mythology. Mythology was the centre of ancient poetry but modern poetry, he argues, lacks such a “focal point.”91 It is more than coincidence that Halbfass describes India as a “focal point”92 within German romanticism (and the echo of philosophy as parabola and/or ellipse is heard in this description), for already in 1800 Schlegel had written that “we must look for the pinnacle of Romanticism” there. 93 August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote that “mythology is nature in a poetic garment” and that myth, “like language, is a general, a necessary product of the human poetic power, an arche-poetry of humanity.”94 The Orient was, according to Friedrich Schlegel, “the actual source of all languages, all the thoughts and poems of the human spirit.”95 Language, poetry and myth, associated by the romantics, are united in their Indic origin. For Friedrich Schlegel mythology and poetry are one and inseparable. And if ancient poetry was a single, indivisible, perfect poem, he asks, can such poetry live once more and in a greater and more beautiful way? Schlegel’s two conclusions follow logically: first, that philology is “one of the essentials for a universal and progressive religion”96; and second, that to accelerate the genesis of the new mythology, the other mythologies must also be reawakened according to the measure of their profundity, their beauty, and their form […] In the Orient, we must look for the most sublime form of the Romantic.97

But it is precisely this formulation of a new mythology, this new religion derived from criticism, this overcoming of the question of the origin of language in favour of language as the finite structure for the presentation of the infinite that, according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “ultimately lead to a general linguistics.”98 It was because India represented to Schlegel not merely original, mythical nature, not merely original language, but original nature as linguistic and mythological that pantheism was ever able to suggest itself as a “system of pure reason.”99 In which case, rather than literature and philology being the opposing consequences of and compensations for the separation of language from external history, this development in the history of the study of language is

17

entirely a consequence of the union of philology and literature at the site of religion and Orientalism. Schwab argues that the consequence of the discovery of Sanskrit, of a language which pre-dated the Bible, was that the history of languages was no longer a matter of religion. 100 Foucault essentially agrees that language and religion diverge at this point, but argues that it would be false and inadequate to explain this divergence on the basis of this most important Orientalist discovery. 101 Against Foucault’s minimalisation of the significance of the German romantic Oriental fascination it can plausibly be argued that Schlegel’s Orientalist moment opened the possibility for the modern history of linguistics. What must further be argued is that this possibility was opened, not through the disconnection of language and religion, but through their inextricable co-presence in the romantic constellation. Foucault argues that “the new philology,” the analyses of Oriental languages by Schlegel and Bopp, did shift the linguistic focus from the relative value of languages to their internal structure. 102 But Foucault’s account of Schlegel’s work itself indicates that the fact that Sanskrit became an object of analysis for Schlegel was a product of its relation to his entire aestheticotheological project. Sanskrit was more than merely an example of a language of the structured, organised, inflectional type (as opposed to the fragmented, mechanical “agglomeration of atoms” represented by Chinese at the other pole of Schlegel’s scheme). 103 And Schwab tells us that although Schlegel “gave up” (but not until 1808) the idea that Sanskrit was the most ancient language and the idea that the ancient was the simplest, it is clear (since he retained the belief that the earliest must be the most intelligent) that the position of Sanskrit in relation to Chinese, and in fact in relation to all known languages, was privileged because of its internal structure. Foucault does not see the religious value of Sanskrit for Schlegel because he only admits one manner of conceiving a relation between language and the divine. But the value of Sanskritic structure according to Schlegel is its absolute difference from anything like a divine Word, the fact that it is highly organised and yet flexible.104 The complexity yet flexibility of Sanskrit is the measure of its ability to reflect upon the complexity of ideas in their historicity. Sanskrit, to the extent that it serves as a name for the unification of literature and philology around the question of the absolute, is very much a religious problem—the internal history of language is encompassed by criticism and translation because this internal history is itself a medium of reflection, another continuum of forms, a means to access the infinite. If language has become an object, then, it has become an object of reflection. As such, the being of language,

18

the object par excellence, is constituted as a distance from the subject. But if the subject is not the ego but the work, the poem, then the reflective essence of poetry is a distance within itself, the distance constituted by language as a structure and a product of history. Sanskrit is privileged and exceptional, and its literature is privileged and exceptional, because of its almost illimitable proximity (and not its identity, for romantic religion is “progressive” because the origin is irretrievably absent) to the Absolute as structure and history. Sanskrit poetry is divine because the structure of the language is soberly poetic. Language, therefore, through criticism returns to religion. Criticism returns to Schlegel’s statement that God is the Idea of ideas, but now with the conviction that the totality of all works is a work. 105 And if the culmination of romantic criticism is absolute sobriety, then the romantic concept of religion must take the form Schlegel gives it in the name of language: “In the world of language or, what is much the same, the world of art and culture, religion necessarily assumes the guise of a mythology or a bible.”106 The absolutely sober, absolutely critical and self-critical novel, the marriage of literature and philology, can only be a bible. The ambiguity, the contradiction even, is that this form, whose origin is absolute freedom and infinite reflection upon unfolding as such, is the dissolution of form, a work (and therefore discontinuous in its ideal) and yet somehow also itself an unfolding. The “bible” crosses the unfathomable abyss of language and nature, of idea and concept—it is the unity of ideal formlessness and the interruptive writing which if the unfolding of form as such. As such, Schlegel may not avoid the entirely negative and abstract concept of infinity that so bothers him. 107

IV After spending so long treating early German romanticism as a moment in history, it is only reasonable to allow a word on the romantic view of history. Gasché agrees with Foucault that the moment of romanticism is the opening of an epoch and that this is the epoch of criticism, the epoch of absolute sobriety.108 If romanticism is the unfolding of the present as the epoch of criticism-as-philology, however, then this is as the union of language, history and religion. And, true to the romantic desire to create its future from the absolute freedom of its reflections, it is no surprise that Benjamin saw the “centrepoint of early Romanticism” as the generation of the thinking and living of a higher sphere in which religion and history coincide. 109 Benjamin considered history, along with art, as the spheres of romantic fulfilment of the absolute medium of reflection. Thus history is not a compartment of the romantic system of philosophy, but itself

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a form of the medium of reflection. 110 In a posthumous fragment Schlegel wrote that “Critique of philosophy and philology are the same thing.”111 This might be understood to be saying that criticism of the system of the idea and criticism of the history of the idea are identical. They are identical because they both imply everything that is suggested by criticism as the unfolding of the idea. 112 Structural and genetic, or structural and phenomenological accounts of the origin of the idea imply each other. Although this process may have a non-temporal aspect, the unfolding of the continuum of forms is history. But what are the forms of history, beyond the stereotypical interpretations of romanticism as a belief in a Golden Age at the origin113 and a steady future progress to infinite perfection? 114 Schlegel frequently refers to various epochs of history, usually characterised according to their poetry, but it would be a mistake to view his philosophy of history as the classification and arrangement of a sequence of epochs. Or, rather, if the question of the form of history is put in terms of epochs, then the romantic concept of form must be recalled carefully. For the form of the works was described not as a rigid structure but as a constellation of formal moments. The form of the work is suspended in the constellation of genres, the frozen instant that is the work as eruption of form and an interrupting of the continuum. The continuum is this eruption and interrupting. The form of history, then, must also be seen as moments of suspension within a continuum of forms. The epochs of history are not rigid and wholly self-contained structures, but the structure of history is the unfolding of forms which exist as ideas only through their suspension, only through the eruption of interruption which is history as an object, a chain of inner revolutions.115 The poetry that defines each epoch exists to a greater or lesser degree in every epoch. And although we have explained this concept of historical form on the basis of the concept of literary form, it is plausible to suggest that the idea of the form of the work as a structure of suspended moments depended upon two things: first, the association by the romantics of literary history and history in general; and second, this immanent romantic concept of the epoch as the suspended moment of historical form. History may be aestheticised, but the concepts through which the aesthetic idea is constituted were already historical. It is possible to see the self-creation of Schlegel’s position in the history of the present, fragmented epoch as the confirmation of one of his own fragments: “The poetising philosopher, the philosophising poet, is a prophet. A didactic poem should be and tends to become prophetic.”116 The history of the present would then be, more or less, the unfurling of his system taken as embryonic prophecy. If we accept Schlegel, if we accept Foucault, that the history of the present can be traced as an epoch beginning with the birth of German romanticism, then we 20

must accept that the opening of this present is constituted in an Orientalist moment. Foucault himself effaces this opening to the other at the origin he represents. And if The Order of Things is a moment in this unfolding of the works of the present, of the discontinuous continuum of the forms of literature and philology, of criticism and history, then Foucault nonetheless demonstrates the traces of this origin. Or, more accurately, this origin, this opening to the other as the origin or condition, is continuously (in Schlegel, in Foucault, everywhere in between) re-inscribed, re-discovered, re-traced, even as it is continuously reeffaced, re-repressed.117 According to Schlegel’s own conception of history, however, it would be an error to see the romantic moment as a clean break, a moment of historical presence, or the beginning of a new era. Early German romanticism is an idea in history, the unfolding of which began before Schlegel, the completion of which lies in the future. If Schlegelian historical criticism, or critical history, is an act of selfcreation, then this work is also always already in the midst of auto-sacrifice. The names “Schlegel” or “early German romanticism,” according to the ideas thereby named and regardless of the systematicity of the exposition, signify nothing more than an idea, a suspended moment. It is only if such a suspension is possible, only if the epoch can become an idea, that the history of the present can be referred to as the epoch of criticism-as-philology. Is not to speak of the history of the present as a continuum, is not to speak of an idea that unfolds in “modern forms,” already to invoke, however qualified and surreptitious, a modernity as embryo and tendency, hence as idea, hence as the possibility of a teleology culminating in an accessible infinite? Although history is the unfolding of the moments toward and yet still of the present, and not the history of a homogeneity or a sameness, Schlegel gives us every reason to wonder whether in history such moments are ever present. It is only as the ideal of reflection, as criticism, and with a secret glance toward the divine that such a moment exists. This is the final meaning of the fragment by Schlegel that states—and here in the present we cannot fail to hear the echo from Schlegel’s future of another wholly historical yet perhaps secretly theological backwards-facing figure, an angel which reminds us of what is at stake in our conceptions of history—“The historian is a prophet facing backwards.”118

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Notes

1Martin

Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz and Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 134. 2Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1986), p. 120. 3Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1983), p. 264. 4Ibid., pp. 222–3. 5Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Tavistock and Routledge, 1970), p. 298. 6Ibid., emphasis added 7Thus, for example, Samuel Weber writes that Schlegel and Novalis can “be considered the founders of modern criticism,” and Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy state that “Romantic criticism thus decidedly opens the entire history that leads to the present.” Samuel Weber, “Criticism Underway: Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Concept of Criticism,” in Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson and Herbert Marks (eds.), Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana, 1990), p. 309; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY, 1988), p. 111. 8Cf. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota, 1993), p. 352. On the politics of the early romantics see Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge, 1993), pp. 54–71, and p. 300. Cf. Reinhold Aris, History of Political Thought in German from 1789 to 1815 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1936), ch. 9.

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9Walter

Benjamin, cited in Rodolphe Gasché, “The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics,” Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992), p. 436. Benjamin was one of the first to recognise this and to attempt to do so. His early thesis unfortunately remains untranslated. Works on or influenced by this thesis include the book by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy and the articles by Gasché and Weber already cited, as well as John McCole Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1993), ch. 2; Christopher Kubiak, “Sowing Chaos: Discontinuity and the Form of Autonomy in the Fragment Collections of the Early German Romantics,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994), 411–49; Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Manchester: Manchester, 1986), chs. 4–5; Irving Wohlfarth, “The Politics of Prose and the Art of Awakening: Walter Benjamin’s Version of a German Romantic Motif,” Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 131–48; and Marcus Paul Bullock, Romanticism and Marxism: The Philosophical Development of Literary Theory and Literary History in Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Peter Lang, 1987). 10On these methodological complications and impossibilities, see Christopher Kubiak, “Sowing Chaos.” 11Schlegel, cited in ibid., p. 426. 12Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 296. 13See Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, pp. 1–3. 14Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota, 1991), p. 8, Critical Fragment 62. The Critical Fragments were Schlegel’s first set of published fragments, and were followed by the Athenaeum Fragments and the Ideas. 15Szondi, On Textual Understanding, p. 78. 16Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 90, Athenaeum Fragment 434. 17Ibid., p. 2, Critical Fragment 14. 18Ibid., p. 31, Athenaeum Fragment 113. 19Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 23, Athenaeum Fragment 46. 20Ibid., p. 24, Athenaeum Fragment 53. Already in the Critical Fragments Schlegel had written (ibid., p. 14, Critical Fragment 115), “The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.”

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21Schlegel,

cited in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester and New York: Manchester, 1990), p. 43. 22Schlegel, cited in Gasché, “Foreword: Ideality in Fragmentation,” in Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, pp. xi–xii. 23Ibid., p. xxx. 24Schlegel raises in an almost “Foucaultian” manner the question of classification and history: “Genuine classification is historical, as much from the point of view of knowledge (principio cognoscendi) as from the point of view of existence (principio existendi)” (Schlegel, cited in Szondi, On Textual Understanding, p. 83). That history infects the classifications of both knowledge and existence implies that the essence of classification is subject to history: “All systems are historical, and vice versa” (ibid., p. 84). 25Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 54, Athenaeum Fragment 255. 26Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 42. 27Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 21, Athenaeum Fragment 24. 28Ibid., p. 27, Athenaeum Fragment 77, emphasis added. 29Cf. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 27, Athenaeum Fragment 77; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 48. 30Gasché, “Foreword,” Philosophical Fragments, p. xii. 31See Kubiak, “Sowing Chaos,” p. 425, and Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 43. 32Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 51, Athenaeum Fragment 242, emphasis added. 33McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, pp. 91–2. 34Szondi, On Textual Understanding, p. 63. 35Benjamin, cited in Weber, “Criticism Underway,” p. 311. 36Benjamin, cited in Weber, “Criticism Underway,” p. 310. 37Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 106, Idea 131, and p. 108, Idea 146. If “truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas,” as Benjamin puts it, then “truth is the death of intention” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 36, emphasis added). Art is divine auto-sacrifice, and in this process the artist becomes the “mediator” of divine poetry. Sacrifice is the term linking the aesthetic and the religious, a link constituted not on theological grounds, but as the consequence of romantic speculative idealism (see Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 98, Idea 44, and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 70).

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38Benjamin,

cited in Gasché, “The Sober Absolute,” p. 442. cited in ibid. 40Benjamin, cited in ibid., p. 90. 41Benjamin, cited in ibid., p. 93, emphasis in original. 42Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, cited in McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, p. 96. Also, in ibid., the following: “Criticism compares a work with its own ideal.” 43McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, p. 97. McCole is following Benjamin, and he notes that “moment” as a concept characteristic of German idealism refers “to the tendency to produce motion (‘momentum’), it signifies the dynamic features of a point in logical development” (ibid.). 44Weber, “Criticism Underway,” p. 312, emphasis added. 45Ibid., p. 313. 46Benjamin, cited in McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, p. 99. Cf. Gasché, “The Sober Absolute,” p. 444. 47Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 95, Idea 15. 48McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, p. 102. 49Schlegel, cited in Bullock, Romanticism and Marxism, p. 37. 50Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 104, Idea 117. 51At this point the question of the historical variance of Schlegel’s views, even across the three volumes of the Athenaeum, becomes significant. The tone of his third series of fragments, the Ideas, is definitely more “theological” and less “aesthetic” than the earlier series, although this distinction is in no way absolute. These differences are indicated some years later by Schlegel himself (cited in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 75, emphasis added): 39Benjamin,

In their beginnings (in the earliest issues of the Athenaeum), criticism and universality are the predominant goal; in the following issues, the spirit of mysticism is the most essential. One should not be upset by the word: it indicates the announcement of the Mysteries of art and science, which, without such Mysteries, would not deserve their names. But above all, it indicates the most vigorous defense of symbolic forms and their necessity, against profane meaning. 52Lacoue-Labarthe

and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 77. 53Kubiak sees Schlegel as vacillating between assertions of the infinity of reflection and of the possibility of a Fichtean ground (e.g. in concepts such as Witz). Like Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Kubiak sees this vacillation less as a failure of nerve and more as an “enduring conflict.” See Kubiak, “Sowing Chaos,” pp. 444–8. 54Lacoue-Labarthe

and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 77.

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55Schlegel,

cited in Bullock, Romanticism and Marxism, p. 44. Such “symbolic forms” are clearly a defence against the possibility of something like a symbolic logic. Foucault argues that at the point when language became a philological object, and the possibility of a universal language legitimated by a divine and ancient origin was ruled out, the development of a symbolism whose intention was a transparency to reason became inevitable (Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 297). Symbolic forms, then, can be seen as a denial of the possibility of symbolism transparent to thought, precisely on the grounds that to attain the absolute requires a relation to history (as the unfolding of symbolic form). 56Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 93. 57Benjamin, cited in McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, p. 101. 58Benjamin, cited in ibid., p. 103. 59Schlegel, Fragments on Literature and Poetry 190, cited in Szondi, On Textual Understanding, pp. 84–5. 60Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, pp. 20–1, Athenaeum Fragment 22. 61Ibid., pp. 31–2, Athenaeum Fragment 116. 62Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, pp. 31–2, Athenaeum Fragment 116. And this is so because romantic poetry is “still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected” (ibid.). 63Ibid., pp. 50–1, Athenaeum Fragment 238. 64Ibid., p. 53, Athenaeum Fragment 252. 65Schlegel, “Letter About the Novel,” in Leslie A. Willson (ed.), German Romantic Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 108–9, emphasis added. 66Ibid., p. 109. 67Benjamin, cited in McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, p. 104. 68Benjamin, cited in Weber, “Criticism Underway,” p. 316. 69Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, pp. 89–90, Athenaeum Fragment 432. It might be thought that Schlegel is advocating a patchwork of styles as an empiricist type of historical relativism, however Schlegel argues explicitly and convincingly against just these types of empiricism and historicism, and in favour of a theorised yet historically open method that

26

anticipates Foucault (Philosophical Fragments, p. 49, Athenaeum Fragment 226): Since people are always so much against hypotheses, they should try sometime to begin studying history without one. It’s impossible to say that a thing is, without saying what it is. In the very process of thinking of facts, one relates them to concepts, and, surely, it is not a matter of indifference to which. If one is aware of this, then it is possible to determine and choose consciously among all the possible concepts the necessary one to which facts of all kinds should be related. If one refuses to recognise this, then the choice is surrendered to instinct, chance, or fate; and so one flatters oneself that one has established a pure solid empiricism quite a posteriori, when what one actually has is an a priori outlook that’s highly one-sided, dogmatic, and transcendental. 70Foucault,

The Order of Things, p. 294. This is an echo of Raymond Schwab’s account, which attributes this development to Bopp, the philologist upon whom Foucault concentrates. Cf. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia, 1984 [1950]), p. 179. 71Foucault,

The Order of Things, pp. 296–99. 72Ibid., p. 300. 73Ibid, emphasis added. 74Ibid. 75Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 11. Cf. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 45, Athenaeum Fragment 206; and Kubiak, “Sowing Chaos,” p. 428. 76Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 300. It is frequently possible to read these twin figures as figures in accounts of romanticism, philology, and Orientalism. Thus, for example, Bopp versus Mallarmé (Foucault), Novalis versus Humboldt (Heidegger), and Anquetil versus Galland (Said reading Schwab). See Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” p. 116 and p. 133; Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, p. 257. 77Ibid., p. 297. 78Cf. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 54, Athenaeum Fragment 255. Also, ibid., pp. 81–2, Athenaeum Fragment 404, emphasis added: There is no philologist without philology in the original sense of the word; that is, without interest in grammar. Philology is a logical emotion, the counterpart of philosophy, enthusiasm for chemical knowledge; for grammar is surely only the philosophical part of the universal art of dividing and joining. By the artistic development of this sense, we arrive at criticism, whose substance can only be the classical and absolutely eternal. 79Schlegel,

cited in Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay on Understanding (Albany: SUNY, 1988), p. 79. 80Schlegel, cited in ibid., p. 77, emphasis added. Thus Schlegel rejected Buddhism because he concluded that the essence of its doctrine was “that everything is nothing” (ibid.).

27

81Novalis,

cited in Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, pp. 193–4, emphasis added. 82Cf. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 93, Athenaeum Fragment 451. 83This is not to deny, however, the significance of other factors in Schlegel’s rejection of Indic pantheism, such as his “discovery” of “superstition” and “materialism” in Indian religion. The point, however, is that these were not discoveries of “facts,” but precisely of an unpleasantly profane “absolute” in Indian religion. Cf. Dorothy M. Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (Albany: SUNY, 1994), p. 59. 84Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 280. 85Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, cited in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, pp. 92–3. 86Ricarda Huch, cited in Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, p. 219. If the Orient and the Unconscious are associated for Schlegel, then it is equally true that Indian religion had to become unconscious, had to be repressed by Schlegel, for the same reasons that Schlegelian romanticism had in some ways to become unconscious in the history of philosophy—because it represented an impossible desire or an impossible moment. 87Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, in Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680– 1860 (Bloomington and London: Indiana, 1972), p. 359. 88Ibid., emphasis added. 89Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 94. 90Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, cited in ibid., p. 93. 91Schlegel, “Talk on Mythology,” in Willson, German Romantic Criticism, p. 96. 92Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 72. 93Schlegel, cited in ibid., p. 75. 94A. W. Schlegel, cited in Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, pp. 158–9. 95Schlegel, cited in Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 75. 96Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 49, Athenaeum Fragment 231. Unsurprisingly, this is suggestive of the description of romantic poetry as universal, progressive poetry, for this religious call is the outcome of nothing other than romantic criticism applied to its philological and Oriental interests. Thus the second conclusion, where the new mythology reawakens all the old mythologies, corresponds to Schlegel’s statement that in the

28

novel, which is at once the theory of the novel, the forms of the past would live again. 97Schlegel, “Talk on Mythology,” in Willson, German Romantic Criticism, pp. 100–1, emphasis added. 98Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 93–4. 99Thus, in On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, Schlegel notes “some truly marvellous concordances” between mythology and language “which cannot be attributed to pure chance” and hence formed “an incontestable relationship” (Schlegel, cited in Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, pp. 168–9. 100Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, p. 168. 101Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 252. 102Ibid., p. 285. Cf. Figueira, The Exotic, pp. 60–1. 103Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 283–4. 104Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, p. 175. Foucault himself cites Schlegel as arguing that in the inflectional system (as opposed to the system of combinations represented by Chinese) “each root is like a living and productive germ, every modification of circumstance or degree being produced by internal changes; freer scope is thus given to its development, and its rich productiveness is in truth almost illimitable” (The Order of Things, p. 284, emphasis added). 105Cf. Gasché, “The Sober Absolute,” p. 447. 106Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 97, Idea 38, emphasis added. 107Cf. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 358: From these and many other contradictions in whose midst romanticism unfolds—contradictions that will contribute to making literature no longer a response, but a question—let us, in ending, retain this one: the romantic art that concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject also defines for itself the ambition of a total book, a kind of Bible, perpetually growing, that will not represent the real but replace it, for the whole can only be affirmed in the non-objective sphere of the work. This Book, say all the great romantics, will be the novel. Schlegel: “The novel is the romantic book.” Novalis: “The novel alone is able to absolutise the world, for the idea of the whole must dominate and entirely shape the esthetic work.” 108Gasché,

“The Sober Absolute,” p. 450. Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 110. 109Benjamin, cited in Bullock, Romanticism and Marxism, p. 87. 110Cf. McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, pp. 106– 7. 111Schlegel, cited in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 147 n. 16. 112The

task of bringing together system and history, being and structure, after taking each to its extreme, at the site of language, is precisely 29

Foucault’s characterisation of the modern age. Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 298–9. 113Effectively refuted by Schlegel’s criticism of neoclassicism: “one must be essentially modern to have of antiquity a transcendental point of view” (cited in Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 356, emphasis in original). 114Cf. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 60, Athenaeum Fragment 303, and p. 65, Athenaeum Fragment 326. 115See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, pp. 109–10. 116Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 52, Athenaeum Fragment 249. 117It has been beyond the scope of this paper to stage Foucault’s relation to “the Orient.” If this interest in “the Orient” is discovered afresh each time it is not only because there exists a continuous desire for the other, but also because these other discourses are not entirely other to the history of Western discourse, at the very least since the time of Schlegel. On Foucault and Orientalism, see Uta Liebmann Schaub, “Foucault’s Oriental Subtext,” PMLA 104 (1989), pp. 306–16. 118Ibid., p. 27, Athenaeum Fragment 80.

30

Beginning to read Heidegger on death and anxiety

1995

“Division Two” of Heidegger’s Being and Time opens with a question: “What have we gained by our preparatory analysis of Dasein, and what are we seeking?” 1 A question is being asked of Division One, is being made of Division One (which was itself the consideration of a question), that appears straightforward enough. We have arrived at a place, the conclusion of Division One, and hence at a place for summation, for reflection and for reappraisal of the question asked and the direction followed. We are asked, or asked to ask, what has been gained, hence a question of calculation, of profit and loss; and we are asked, or asked to ask, about the goal or the end of this asking, about the desire, or the idea, that guides the progress, the movement forward, of the work (we are asked to think about the work’s technicity). But while on the surface Heidegger is once again opening out the work to a more general consideration, a more encompassing perspective, can we not see in the tone, the feeling, in the language, in the philosopher’s projected attitude, an economic concern, a desire for gain? The economic metaphorics of Heidegger’s opening question further suggests concepts of gain and loss measured according to an idea of origin and destination. We are seeking something—this states both that there is an idea (hence a secret idealism), an initial point (but a point which is also the guarantee, or the contract that guarantees, our concept of gain, that the question is one from which we hope to profit, profit defined in advance as the arrival at the place anticipated at the moment when the seeking began) and, we assume, an end, a place at which we finally arrive or, failing our arrival, where we assess where we have ended up, how much we have gained or failed to gain, and the value of the journey undertaken, where value seems given in advance by the question itself. But of course this is absurd. It could never be legitimate to take the opening rhetorical sentence of a major philosophical work, and propose to offer the beginnings of a critique of that work on the basis of the metaphors, the rhetorical devices or the tone of that single sentence. To pick out the phrases “what have we gained” and “what are we seeking,” from one sentence of a text, even if it is the opening sentence (but only of the second part), and to analyse this language as though it was a pure signifier of meaning in spite of anything that might follow, is methodologically fraught. Only the extremest and most questionable literary approach to philosophy could presume to see through the single application of a 32

single trope in a single, opening, sentence. Before an analysis of Heidegger’s language or tone could confidently be performed, it seems prudent to ask what Heidegger understands by the language he employs. To open straight onto the meaning of a word or phrase here and there, without concern for the argument of the work, with its content, is to assume that the words or phrases exist in a vacuum, that they are static, or that we can know what they mean in advance of the work itself. On the other hand, this brings the question of interpretation itself into the foreground. We have, sketchily, suggested a distinction, between language or tone on the one hand and argument on the other hand, between form and content, figure and meaning, which we have used to undermine a particular interpretation of a question by Heidegger. It has been argued that language, tone, form, figure, can only be considered after a proper consideration of the content, the argument or the meaning of the work, and this has in part been argued on the basis of the nature of the work itself. That is, a literary or stylistic analysis of a sentence in Being and Time as an opening interpretative manoeuvre has been rejected partly because we choose to understand the work in advance—as profound, as of significance, as demanding an effort from the reader, as sacred. We choose to say that it is wrong to weigh so hastily a work that has so much to say about meaning, about language, as well as about tone or mood. But this statement, that the argument, the content, the meaning, must be considered first (which, strictly speaking, if we are not to judge in advance even before the first explicit—that is, written—interpretative manoeuvre, ought to apply to all works) tends finally to make of figure, of language, of tone, only an epiphenomenon, only a remainder, what remains to be discussed after all serious discussion has been resolved. Now Heidegger himself argues that “feeling” is not to be taken as epiphenomenal of thinking, nor as something which can be subtracted from experience to arrive at truth. 2 This argument about the relation of feeling to thinking may be translated into a linguistic relation between the tone of an argument and the meaning, the truth, or the content of an argument. Through a consideration of Heidegger’s argument, then, we are told that although it is certainly not enough to presume to offer an interpretation of the language, the feeling, without a consideration of the thinking involved, neither is it sufficient to presume to subtract the language or the feeling from the argument in order to arrive at the true interpretation of the thinking. Through this translation, then, Heidegger’s argument becomes nothing more than a restatement of the by-now familiar impossibility of either accepting or rejecting the distinction between form and content, the impossibility of understanding meaning in its “totality.” One thing, therefore, which may be gained through a consideration of Heidegger’s understanding of the relation of thinking to what he 33

calls in “What is Metaphysics?” “feeling” or, in Being and Time, “state-of-mind” or “mood”, is a conception of the close links between these “affective” or “subjective” questions (without presuming too quickly that what we are talking about is a property of a subject) and questions about language and representation. “What have we gained by our preparatory analysis of Dasein, and what are we seeking?” One significant and unmistakable part of Heidegger’s answer to this question is the conclusion that “our existential analysis of Dasein up till now cannot lay claim to primordiality.”3 Up till now, that is, the analysis has been fragmentary and partial, it has failed to bring to light “the Being of Dasein in its possibilities of authenticity and totality.”4 Piotr Hoffman’s account of Division Two, for example, consists largely of an elaboration of these two concepts which rise up so early in Division Two. 5 While Hoffman could not be accused of offering a critique of Heidegger solely by reflecting upon Heidegger’s characterisation of what has not been gained from Division One, he nevertheless intends, on the basis of an argument constituted largely around what he hears in these concepts (“authenticity,” “totality”), to demonstrate Heidegger’s inability to avoid complicity with the subjectivist tradition. Whatever intricacies of argumentation and distinction Heidegger may deploy, in using concepts such as “authenticity” and “totality” Heidegger cannot fail, for Hoffman, to bring to mind the history of attempts to ground the subject. But once again caution must be urged, for today the temptation to leap into an analysis of mood, of tone, of trope (surely now the evidence is piling up—we have heard question and answer) is hard to resist upon the hearing of such “ideological” notions as authenticity and totality. Especially when (historical-political) context is taken into account. This is what Heidegger then argues: This signifies, however, that we must first of all raise the question of this entity’s potentiality-for-Being-a-whole. As long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be. But to that which is thus outstanding, the ‘end’ itself belongs. The ‘end’ of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, to existence— limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein. If, however, Dasein’s Being-at-an-end in death, and therewith its Being-a-whole, are to be included in the discussion of its possible Being-a-whole, and if this is to be done in a way which is appropriate to the phenomena, then we must have obtained an ontologically adequate conception of death—that is to say an existential conception of it.6

At this stage, evidently, authenticity and totality remain questions for Being. In Heidegger’s concept of “outstanding [Ausstand],” so the translator tells us, we can hear a continuation of economic language, of a metaphorics of debt.7 But we must be careful before claiming we know what is implied in this language. As long as Dasein is, in so far as Dasein is, there is something outstanding in it. There is in it,

34

in so far as it is, something which stands out from it, and to which it owes something, owes itself. But can we say the end of Dasein is the discharge of its debt, for “the ‘end’ itself belongs” to that which is outstanding? That which is outstanding is not what belongs to the end, hence it is not the case that the end is defined by the totality or authenticity represented by the settling of a debt. The end, identified by Heidegger as death, belongs to that which is outstanding. Understanding the meaning of this is Heidegger’s call for an ontologically adequate conception of death.

Whether due to Heidegger’s inclinations or to pressure placed upon him to extend the insights of Division One, Division Two has been seen as less carefully worked out and as more “existential” than the earlier part.8 Yet Heidegger’s attempt to present an ontologically adequate conception of death relies upon and extends the ground he has already prepared there. In particular, Heidegger draws upon his existential analysis of anxiety or dread offered in section 40. Supposing for a moment that Heidegger’s “conception” of death in Division Two reflects a “less carefully worked out” “existential” perspective rather than an ontologically adequate account of Dasein, we are left with a question: Does his account of anxiety in Division One represent an adequate piece of fundamental ontology misused by Heidegger at a less careful moment, or rather a corrupt germ of subjectivism which inevitably grows and infects the subsequent text? According to Heidegger, anxiety represents a particular “state-of-mind” in which Dasein reveals itself to itself, it “provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein’s primordial totality of Being.”9 Thus Heidegger’s account of this distinctive “stateof-mind” grounds a thinking of both Being and death. There is something to be gained if we seek in this direction, something beyond a psychological or phenomenological description of a mood in relation to an object. It is therefore worth asking how it is that for Heidegger, according to whom Dasein is not merely subjectivity, a particular “state-of-mind” can be privileged as bearing a relation to the true nature of anything at all.10 Dreyfus helps us to see that the translation of “Befindlichkeit” as “state-ofmind” simplifies and distorts a delicate point in Heidegger’s thinking. Dreyfus argues that for Heidegger “the sense we have of how things are going is precisely not a private mental state,” and that Befindlichkeit conveys rather “being found in a situation where things and options already matter.”11 Similarly, “mood” is not to be understood as a condition of the subject, a characteristic, or something which can be simply subtracted from experience to arrive at objectivity or truth; “we cannot get clear about [moods], and we cannot get clear of them.”12 On the other

35

hand, mood is not merely that condition of Dasein which defines its finitude or withholds access to Being, since for Heidegger anxiety provides a phenomenal basis for grasping Dasein in its primordial totality. But anxiety can only provide such a basis if it is type of mood specifically distinguished from average everydayness and its moods. Anxiety functions as this basis only by having an unusual relation to mood itself, since Dasein’s absorption in the “world” of its concern, its finding itself in a situation where things matter, does “manifest something like a fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself.”13 Such flight is possible only to the extent that that from which one flees is brought before oneself. The turning away from that from which one flees makes possible the consideration of that from which one flees. Anxiety is the state in which that from which all moods manifest a fleeing is brought before Dasein. Heidegger reverses the psychoanalytic account of repression, in which every anxiety has a fear at its origin. 14 Fears are characterised as a perceived threat from an entity within-the-world, and hence fear itself is an absorption in the world of Dasein’s concern. Fear brings forth entities as that with which Dasein is concerned to flee from, hence fear does not bring Dasein to face itself, since Dasein is no such entity. Thus the turning-away of falling is not a fleeing that is founded upon a fear of entities within-the-world. Fleeing that is so grounded is still less a character of this turning-away, when what this turning-away does is precisely to turn thither towards entities within-the-world by absorbing itself in them. The turning-away of falling is grounded rather in anxiety, which in turn is what first makes fear possible.15

Heidegger concludes that if anxiety cannot be characterised as a fear of entities, then no thing at all can be the object of Dasein’s anxiety. Anxiety is distinguished from ordinary moods in which just at the moment they “bring us face to face with beings as a whole they conceal from us the nothing we are seeking.”16 In contrast, “anxiety reveals the nothing.”17 Anxiety is the unheimlich state-of-mind of Dasein in the face of an entity which it does not know, which is close by, is there yet nowhere. “So if the ‘nothing’—that is, the world as such—exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.”18 Heidegger notes that this does not mean that the world is absent, but that entities recede to utter insignificance. [The world] collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance. In anxiety one does not encounter this thing or that thing which, as something threatening, must have an involvement.19

At another point he writes: “Anxiety robs us of speech.”20 Anxiety as the world falling away from itself into insignificance, the emptying of meaning, is already

36

suggestive of the phenomenon of mourning. Benjamin: “Mourning is the state of mind in which feeling revives the empty world in the form of a mask.”21 Anxiety as a feeling brings forth the emptiness of the world, makes apparent the origin—it is a response to Dasein’s own potentiality-for-Being. Anxiety revives the world, for Heidegger, by reviving the possibility for authenticity. The appearance of the world as filled with entities of significance to Dasein is revealed through anxiety as constituting merely a fearful response to the condition of Dasein itself, but this condition is revived through anxiety through the effect of individualisation: But in anxiety there lies the possibility of a disclosure which is quite distinctive; for anxiety individualises. This individualisation brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being. These basic possibilities of Dasein (and Dasein is in each case mine) show themselves in anxiety.22

The question of Heidegger’s “authenticity”, perhaps, becomes a question of the profundity of the revival achieved by mourning. But we are moving too quickly here. In “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger claims that we usually lose ourselves altogether among beings in a certain way. The more we turn toward beings in our preoccupations the less we let beings as a whole slip away as such and the more we turn away from the nothing. Just as surely do we hasten into the public superficies of existence.23

Anxiety revives the possibility of authenticity because it is a universal condition of experience or, if we prefer, the universal potentiality for the experience of the impossibility of experience—the possibility of the experience of the impossible, in Bataille’s terms. “But this implies that the original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping.”24 Thus what is at stake here is a question of repression. Everydayness is a “dimming down” of the uncanniness of anxiety. That kind of Being-in-the-world which is tranquillised and familiar is a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse. From an existential-ontological point of view the ‘not-at-home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon.25

This conclusion, that the uncanniness of anxiety is “more primordial” than the familiar moods of everydayness, is in fact a restatement of the assumption that enabled the analysis of anxiety in the first place. That assumption, as we have seen, was that a mood could be found which revealed the phenomenality of moods in general, that could reveal the place from which moods originate. Mood in general is the concern for entities within-the-world, concern symptomatic of the repression of the failure of such entities to otherwise stand out for Dasein. Anxiety, as we have seen, is what makes fear possible. 37

Heidegger appears to be presenting a phenomenology of the condition of psychology, or of the possibility of psychoanalysis. Benjamin writes that “Every feeling is bound to an a priori object, and the representation of this object is its phenomenology.”26 Conjoining Heidegger’s analysis of fear and anxiety to this statement, it might be concluded the feeling of fear is bound to the a priori structure of anxiety, and that the representation of anxiety by Heidegger is that which brings forth an adequate phenomenology of fear, in fact of mood in general to the extent that it is characterised by fear. But this is too simple, for anxiety is precisely that feeling for which no object, no being, can be located. Anxiety is precisely that which resists the intentionality of phenomenological description. The structure of anxiety unveils the hidden desire of phenomenology to attach objects to feelings, we might say, and which further locates the source of this desire as that nothing which is brought near to Dasein in the “experience” of anxiety. Phenomenology is then a fearful philosophical need for a concern with entities within-the-world. In that case Heidegger is offering (though of course he would never have said so himself) a psychoanalysis of phenomenology. As illustration of this far-fetched sounding interpretation we might re-name the pair fear-anxiety, as fear-Fear, or anxiety-Anxiety, according to French psychoanalytic conventions. Derrida writes the following in a context that is not as far from our discussion as may at first appear: In French, the metapsychological capital letters (the Unconscious, PerceptionConscious, the Self, Pleasure, etc.) refer, through their artifice, to a semantic transformation foreign to phenomenological reduction and to the quotation marks that indicate it. The domain of psychoanalysis extends to the ‘ground of notthought [impensé]’ […] of phenomenology […] The capitalised words must thus both ‘designify’ and refer back to the ‘foundation of meaning,’ by means of figures ‘absent from rhetorical treatises.’ 27

Anxiety robs us of speech. It presents us with an allegorical account of Dasein: the emptiness of the world and the finitude of Dasein are presented in a story. This is the story of what follows from the experience of anxiety, but it is allegorical because the story depends upon speech, and yet is a story of the inadequacy of language. The structure of anxiety must be an allegory because the story begins with the possibility of an experience of anxiety, and yet the end of the story is the impossibility

of

experience

and

the

inadequacy

of

language

for

the

phenomenological description of this end. The allegory itself is a movement of emptying of meaning. Heidegger’s allegory revives the world in the form of a mask bearing an anxious visage. Derrida’s context is the phenomenological psychoanalytic theories of Abraham and Torok, theories developed particularly in the direction of a theory of two structures of mourning, to be understood in terms of a distinction (introjection-incorporation) that parallels in interesting fashion 38

that between Heidegger’s concepts of fear and anxiety (and this in spite, it will be remembered, of the reversal of the conventional psychoanalytic understanding of the relation of these terms). But once again we are moving too quickly.

* * *

But everything that has been said thus far has been said too quickly. As already noted Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety displays a symptomatology suggestive of mourning. Anxiety reveals the nothing, it collapses the world into insignificance, it individualises, it arrests falling. But do we really understand this on the basis of what Heidegger gives us in Section 40 (or, if we think we do, is this because he is, or we think he is, or we are, smuggling in something else than what is explicitly referred to)? In short, is the “nothing” here nothing to do with death? On the contrary, anxiety and Being-toward-death are linked by more than an analogical similarity of argumentation. Unless that character of Being-in-the-world that provokes anxiety and the collapsing of significance can be presented, anxiety remains an inexplicable phenomenon. The description of anxiety offered by Heidegger foreshadows his account of Being-toward-death. Is death merely an emblematic concretisation of the truer abstraction of the finitude of Dasein, or is death the condition of possibility for the anxious revelation of the nothing? The answer to this question should not be presumed too quickly to be that to focus on “death itself” would constitute “errancy,” that it would be to errantly think death merely in terms of demise or perishing. Is it not the case that we need Division Two to answer that question? If that is not the case, is this because Heidegger’s account of anxiety in Division One is adequate and hermetically sealed, or rather that it is suffused by, haunted by that which follows it? John Sallis puts this in the following terms: Even the projection structure, existence as such, which bears the entire weight of Heidegger’s analysis, begins now to slide under the weight of the analysis of death as both ownmost and other most, as a possibility that is utterly nonpresentable, and as a possibility upon which Dasein would always already have projected.28

What does this signify for the argument that Division One is thought solely from the question concerning truth of Being, without elevating man to the centre of beings, but that this is inverted or distorted toward an anthropocentric metaphysical humanism in Division Two? According to this conception the pure phenomenological description of anxiety offered in Division One might be seen as the production of a tool which may be more or less useful, more or less well

39

applied, toward an understanding of the modes of existence of Dasein. We are then free to assess the success of its application (as something ready-to-hand) in Division Two in the service of an account of Being-toward-death, but the positive or negative conclusions of this assessment will leave the description of anxiety itself untouched. Rather, what we are suggesting here is that anxiety and death are linked at their core and, if this suggests that the disease supposedly afflicting Division Two might also have infected the earlier part of the work, we must nevertheless not be too hasty in consigning the emphasis in Division Two upon death to a weakness for idealism or the subject, nor to the surfacing morbid obsessions of “Germanic” thought. What is death, for Heidegger, in Being and Time?

Heidegger’s use of “outstanding” and its economic resonance has been noted, and this continues in the opening paragraphs of Chapter I of Division Two, “Dasein’s Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards-Death.” Is it correct to state that there is an economic tropology at work in Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenon of death? The aim in Chapter I is to “bring the whole Dasein into our fore-having,” and the problem is to understand whether or how Dasein as a totality (we return finally to the question of totality) can be so brought—that is, whether the concept of totality is appropriate here—when it is understood that Dasein exists towards the future, “ahead-of-itself.” Heidegger describes this problem in the following terms: ‘As long as it is’, right to its end, it [Dasein] comports itself toward its potentialityfor-Being. Even when it still exists but has nothing more ‘before it’ and has ‘settled [abgeschlossen] its account’, its Being is still determined by the ‘ahead-of-itself’. Hopelessness, for instance, does not tear Dasein away from its possibilities, but is only one of its own modes of Being towards these possibilities […] The ‘ahead-ofitself’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’. It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled [eine standige Unabgeschlossenheit]. Such a lack of totality signifies that there is something still outstanding in one’s potentiality-for-Being.29

The concept of totality here is presented in terms of a settling of accounts. The totality of Dasein will have been achieved when there remains nothing outstanding, at the point at which all debts are paid, at which everything which is owed to Dasein, belongs to Dasein, is given, or is returned, or has been gained or claimed by Dasein as its due. Hence Dasein seems, in achieving totality, to do more than merely acquire totality. Rather, as a settling of accounts, this acquisition is a

40

return of what is outstanding, a reappropriation of what has been exchanged. Dasein has sacrificed its totality in its Being-ahead-of-itself, and hence this aheadof-itself depends upon the memory of this exchange or sacrifice, the memory of what is lost to Dasein or given up in the past: the potentiality for Being total seems according to this economic metaphorics to depend upon the continuity of a memory (whatever is understood by memory here—not necessarily conscious). But, as Nietzsche has reminded us, if economics depends upon the existence of a being which can remember, then this should be taken to indicate that memory is not a primordial condition of existence but a consequence of the violent irruption of economics. Can we see here the beginnings of a Bataillean-Nietzschean “deconstruction” of Heidegger here, a suggestion that his account of Dasein, its temporality, and its totality (and, eventually, its relation toward its own end in death), is reliant upon a mythology of restricted exchange, a secret grounding of Dasein in a metaphysical-rational-economic subjectivity detectable at the metaphorical level? Of course, things are not this easy, for it is Heidegger himself who introduces such a critique of the metaphorics of economy, beginning with the very next paragraph. Here, if Heidegger is retaining his economic language, it is only (so it seems) in order to make the extremely Bataillean point that the final gain is in fact the absolute loss of Dasein: But as soon as Dasein ‘exists’ in such a way that absolutely nothing more is still outstanding in it, then it has already for this very reason become “no-longer-Beingthere” [Nicht-mehr-da-sein]. Its Being is annihilated when what is still outstanding in its Being has been liquidated. As long as Dasein is as an entity, it has never reached its ‘wholeness’. But if it gains such ‘wholeness’, this gain becomes the utter loss of Being-in-the-world. In such a case, it can never again be experienced as an entity. 30

If Dasein is economic, in other words, it is not an economy of static values, a Dasein on the utilitarian path of progress to final fulfilment, a ritual exchange legitimated by the timeless truths and values of the sacred hearth of the oikos, but rather one subject to the greatest of reversals. This brings into question the limits of concepts such as gain, loss, value. For Heidegger a conceptualisation of Dasein where its outstandingness is understood economically is possible only on condition that these limitations are kept constantly in mind. In Section 48 Heidegger continues his discussion of the death of Dasein as something outstanding—“we must try to decide how inappropriate to Dasein ontologically are those conceptions of end and totality which first thrust themselves to the fore”—in order that they be positively assigned “to their specific realms.”31 Thus Heidegger continues his “formal” analysis of death as something outstanding for Dasein. If we suggest that Dasein’s constant lack of totality is something outstanding which finds an end in 41

death, Heidegger tells us, then this is to imply that totality is something that “belongs” to Dasein: “Outstanding, as a way of being missing, is grounded upon a belonging-to.”32 To speak of outstanding in this way, in a way that suggests a debt, is to suggest that in approaching death Dasein, which previously has been “not yet all together,” increasingly fills itself up to achieve totality in the final instance. Dasein would then be an increasing “sum,” which is in the end “paid off.” But to speak of an increasing sum—that is, to speak of an economy of discrete or continuous gain—is to perversely make of Dasein a being, something ready-tohand or present-at-hand. Hence Heidegger concludes that “this lack-oftogetherness which belongs to such a mode of togetherness—this being-missing as still-outstanding—cannot by any means define ontologically that “not-yet” which belongs to Dasein as its possible death.”33 Death exceeds the calculable.

In death Dasein gains wholeness at the moment it loses its Being-in-the-world. But if death is the end of Dasein, for whom is this end a loss? Does Heidegger retain those characteristics of economy in general that he seems to be rejecting in his critique of the economy of death as something outstanding? Does a subjectivity continue on as a remainder to experience the loss in death and hence to ground Heidegger’s account of death as loss? Or is the loss of which he speaks an aneconomic loss in the sense that the Being of Dasein is not lost in the way in which entities within-the-world are lost? Consider the following sentence by Heidegger: Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain.34

Here is a remainder, a remaining subject, for whom death is a loss. But Heidegger points to this loss in order to delimit in what way Dasein does not experience its loss of itself, and in what way Others fail to experience Dasein’s loss. The sentence before the one we have just cited ends by stating that “the authentic Being-come-to-an-end [Zuendegekommensein] of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience.”35 In general, Section 47, “The Possibility of Experiencing the Death of Others, and the Possibility of Getting a Whole Dasein into our Grasp,” is a critique, a positive assignment to its specific realm, of the concept that one can grasp death through the experience of the death of others. That is, a critique of the possibility of representing death, a critique of the idea of experiencing death through a representative, a critique, finally, of the logic of sacrifice.

42

Heidegger’s critique of sacrifice does not merely consist, however, in a condemnation of the delusion that one may experience the death of the other. Nor does it consist in the claim that Others’ experience of the death of Dasein necessarily reduces that death to an event of significance in the way in which entities within-the-world are of significance. Although death marks the moment for Others when Dasein ends in order to become something present-at-hand, in Heidegger’s discussion of funeral rites it is clear that the corpse remains more than merely “an item of equipment.” In tarrying alongside him in their mourning and commemoration, those who have remained behind are with him, in a mode of respectful solicitude. Thus the relationship-of-Being which one has towards the dead is not to be taken as a concernful Being-alongside something ready-to-hand.36

What are funeral rites? Heidegger is not denying that they are a form of mourning whereby the withdrawal of attachment in the transition from Dasein to corpse is socially managed. He is not denying that a “function” of funeral rites (to use not uncommon ethnological terminology) is to conceal the anguish of death from the community in a manner that could be characterised as “fallen.” It is not his point that in tarrying alongside the dead the community treats the corpse as though Dasein had never been lost, nor is his the converse point that the “function” of funeral rites is to deny that the corpse ever was living. In tarrying with the dead these things may occur, but what does this show about death? The rituals of mourning are an extraordinary response to the sudden rising up of death where everyday understanding had lived as though it were not a problem for it. The complexity of these ritual mediations is produced by the impossibility at the time of death of merely living in a fallen, everyday manner. Whatever else mourning may be, the tarrying-with which is its condition is a phenomenon which, precisely in its tranquillising mechanisms for hiding death’s dreadfulness, can bring Dasein face-to-face with mortality. Compare Hegel: Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or it is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. 37

This passage appears to represent an analysis analogous to Heidegger’s in which the rites of death hold the key, through what they are intended to conceal and to tranquillise, to bringing death more clearly into the light of understanding, and in 43

which only through grimly staring face to face with death does Spirit win its truth in utter dismemberment. Yet Hegel continues in a way which suggests to Kojeve and to Bataille that Hegel simply reproduces the logic of mourning and the logic of sacrifice. Hegel continues as follows: This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.38

If this tarrying with the negative is nothing more than a means to Being and subjectivity, then this suggests that Hegel provides an example of sacrificial logic— the grimness with which death is faced is part of an exchange that offers true subjectivity, that gives life or philosophy. And if facing death does not return the Spirit to totality, Hegel at least demonstrates the relation of subjectivity to a concept of authenticity. We might hear in his invocation of “magical power” either a step outside this logic or the evidence of his final capitulation to it, in which case Hegel’s text becomes an anthropological example of a ritual attitude toward death.39 But this question, which we have declined to answer, suggests a problem that has been building here for some time. We appear to have been treating what we have referred to as “the logic of sacrifice” and “the logic of mourning” as essentially interchangeable, but surely they are much more easily seen as opposed. Is it not the case that sacrifice is a process in which the community of sacrificers attempts to increase its proximity to death, while also to make of the dead merely a sacrificial gift in an economy which, though with the gods, is concerned essentially with appeasement, and consequently with worldly gains; whereas in mourning it is the isolation and separation—the distance—from the dead that is contemplated, and the falling-away of worldly significance that is the effect? That is, is not sacrifice a concernful act, a fearful response, whereas, as Heidegger has just told us, the tarrying-with of mourning is precisely not to be taken as concernful? But while these two logics must be thought in their specificity, when they are thought “primordially” in the way that Heidegger asks us to think about death, this opposition dissolves. If we have given indications of the way in which Hegel follows a logic of mourning, it would not be difficult to show that, in his concern for truth in utter dismemberment, his call for strength in staring death in the face, Hegel’s tarrying-with follows equally a logic of sacrifice. This problem can be put in another way: in sacrifice the aim is to experience death through the manufacturing of its representation, but in mourning, at least

44

as it is given to us by Heidegger, the issue is the falling-away of representation and experience in general. Thus for Bataille sacrifice and representation are united in their origin as a fallen response to death much as exchange and memory are united by their origin for Nietzsche: This difficulty [the necessity of living at the moment of the impression of death] proclaims the necessity of spectacle, or of representation in general, without the practice of which it would be possible for us to remain alien and ignorant in respect to death, just as beasts apparently are. Indeed, nothing is less animal than fiction, which is more or less separated from the real, from death. 40

Representation is nothing more than the logic of sacrifice itself. Philosophy, in its obsession with representation, is nothing more than a sublimated response to the same impossibility that prompted violent and bloody sacrifice. Hegel’s entire project for Bataille reduces to the ultimate attempt at representation, at tarryingwith the dead in order to live spectacularly at the moment of their presentation. Such a critique of philosophy as succumbing continuously to a sacrificial logic, which we cannot flesh out here, already suggests an affinity with Heidegger’s critique of philosophical truth since the pre-socratics as representational. In terms of his account of the experience of the death of the Other, Heidegger rejects the idea that death can be “represented” for the living.41 One person may die in place of another and hence represent them, but such “sacrifice” means nothing in terms of any individual Dasein’s end as its ownmost possibility. Heidegger’s critique of sacrifice is precisely that in the representation of death, or in Dasein’s being represented in death by someone other, Dasein’s death entirely fails to be presented. Nevertheless, the unconcernful aspect of mourning suggests that for Heidegger this state-of-mind reveals something more than this representational logic. If all mourning is tempted by the thought that death is really the end of Dasein, then it is also inevitably accompanied by a remainder signified by mourning’s tarrying with the dead, in which a logic beyond the representation of a living-on of the dead is suggested. This impossibility of placing the dead in the world of entities or in a world “beyond,” the impossibility of representing them in a place, and the disruptive effect of this impossibility upon the logics which deal with death representatively, is indicated by Bataille in terms that precisely mirror Heidegger’s account of the experience of the death of others: Death destroys what was supposed to be, what has become a present in ceasing to be. The obliteration of what was supposed to continue being leads to the error that consists in believing that what no longer exists nonetheless is, in some other form (that of a ghost, a double, a soul […]). No one believes in the pure and simple disappearance of the one who was there. But this error does not carry the conviction that prevails in the world of consistent things. The error is in fact always accompanied by the consciousness of death. It never completely obliterates the consciousness of death. 42

45

* * *

We are now, finally, able to begin to answer the question we asked long ago: what is death, for Heidegger, in Being and Time? Mourning is a tarrying-with death and it brings before the mourner the possibility of one’s own death. Nevertheless mourning as understood by Heidegger remains fallen in that in mourning death is taken for an event rather than a phenomenon, an event that befalls the other. However much the mourners are brought before the fact of their own finitude, in mourning the experience of death can only be represented in a perception, a perception dependent upon the maintenance of a relation. With death, however, “Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”43 Being its ownmost possibility, an experience of death which is dependent upon a relation, either to Others or to entities, is a failure to truly experience what death is: If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone. This ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time the uttermost one.44

Death is Dasein’s othermost possibility in that its Being ahead-of-itself as death is something which it cannot outstrip. “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.”45 But, Heidegger emphasises, this character of death is not something which subsequently occurs, an event at some point in the future which if contemplated may produce fear or horror. This would then be a psychological account of an attitude toward death as an event in Dasein’s future. Heidegger’s example is the dying man whose impending end is close enough that it cannot be ignored and consequently produces a psychological reaction. The psychology of the fear of death is the extension of this situation to the psychological and empirical condition of life as such. Alternatively, an account of the attitude of mourning or the attitude of sacrifice might lead us toward such a psychological understanding—in both these attitudes death-as-an-event-forDasein (either befallen by some Other or produced as a spectacle) would appear to be the crucial factor. But Heidegger wishes to reject all such accounts because “a psychology of ‘dying’ gives information about the ‘living’ of the person who is ‘dying’, rather than about dying itself.”46 This is to fall into the understanding of average everydayness in which death is a mishap, an event, something occurring within-the-world. It might be postulated that sacrifice and even mourning seem to offer logics of the understanding of death more aware of the death of “the Other”

46

than does the fear of one’s own death. Possibly, however, this is less to do with any essential differences between the phenomenologies of these states-of-mind, so much as an essential affinity between them. For what is shared by these statesof-mind is the reversibility of self and other, that is, the fact that the death of the other or the imagination of death in general always functions as a representation of, a symbol for, the end of ourselves. And if this means that the death of the “they” is a cause of fear for Dasein, then it is equally the case that the death of Dasein produces anxiety in the “they,” and hence that it is the “they” which wishes to repress death, to make of it merely a event. Thus if this fallen understanding of death-as-event displays a peculiar psychologism, it is at once a psychology which, like all repression, is the outcome of social existence: The “they” gives its approval, and aggravates the temptation to cover up from oneself one’s ownmost Being-towards-death. This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that, in Being with one another, the ‘neighbours’ often still keep talking the ‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillised everydayness of the world of his concern. Such ‘solicitude’ is meant to ‘console’ him. It insists upon bringing him back into Dasein, while in addition it helps him to keep his ownmost nonrelational possibility-of-Being completely concealed. In this manner the “they” provides [besorgt] a constant tranquillisation about death. At bottom, however, this is a tranquillisation not only for him who is ‘dying’ but just as much for those who ‘console’ him. 47

Thus we see the sense in which mourning is the “they” concerning itself “with transforming this anxiety into fear in the face of an oncoming event.”48 Mourning is the regulation of the comportment towards death, a prescription of codified and temporally finite rituals which “alienates” Dasein, but also a set of proscriptions, “a matter of public acceptance that ‘thinking about death’ is a cowardly fear, a sign of insecurity on the part of Dasein, and a sombre way of fleeing from the world.”49 This set of prescriptions and proscriptions, this matter of public acceptance is, fittingly, espoused by King Claudius, a king both representative of the worldliness of average everydayness, and fearful for his place in it: Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, / To give these mourning duties to your father; / But you must know your father lost a father; / That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound / In filial obligation for some term / To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever / In obstinate condolement is a course / Of impious stubbornness, ‘tis unmanly grief, / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschooled; / For what we know must be, and is as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense, / Why should we in our peevish opposition / Take it to heart? Fie, ‘tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried / From the first corpse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so.’50

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But, then, how is it that Heidegger, as we have previously seen, can write that in mourning something more than a Being-concerned is involved? What alternative have the living to a psychology of dying? How is Dasein able to stand before death as its ownmost possibility and yet not make of death something represented? Why is it that despite all attempts to hide death or to make of it merely an occurrence, or to deny its occurrence by a “belief” in a life after death, Bataille argues that such attempts inevitably lack conviction for an underlying “consciousness of death” remains? Heidegger and Bataille seem to be pointing to a type of truth, knowledge, consciousness (they all appear inadequate here) which exceeds and is more primordial than that which derives from everyday existence, or from concern with the world of entities. One’s own death is something certainly known, yet no authentic representation of it may be held or revealed to it. We never know beforehand the precise circumstances of our own death, nor the precise moment of its occurrence, just as we never know beforehand the “experience” of that moment. Yet Heidegger writes that falling everydayness, in its flight, attests phenomenally to the truth of death and to its certainty. Dasein must have access to a truth itself more primordial than the sum of Dasein’s uncovered knowledge. And thus it is that Heidegger states that although “truth” signifies the uncoveredness of some entity, “all uncoveredness is grounded ontologically in the most primordial truth, the disclosedness of Dasein.”51 The origin of that awareness that leads Dasein to flee death in all its fearful responses, in fact the origin of “psychology” in general in Heidegger’s terms, must be something fundamental to Dasein itself. If death is something primordial for Dasein it is because “if Dasein exists, it has already been thrown into this possibility.”52 Dasein’s thrownness into death is of a character more primordial than “any explicit or even any theoretical knowledge” (hence representation or “experience” of the death of others) of death and, hence, more primordial than any psychology (for instance, any psychology of fear, i.e., fear of demise) dependent upon such “knowledge.” We are, therefore, justified in associating Heidegger’s critique of the average everyday attitude toward death with Bataille’s critique of sacrifice for at the core of both is a critique of representation as truth. Being-towards-the-end is not an attitude of Dasein but a mood which belongs essentially to Dasein’s thrownness, a “basic state-of-mind of Dasein.” We are thus led by Heidegger back to the state-ofmind outlined in Division One: Thrownness into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive manner in that state-of-mind which we have called “anxiety.”53

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Moving too quickly we note that this amounts to “the fact that Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end.”54 In Division One we saw that anxiety manifested a fleeing from the fact of Being-in-the-world, yet in Division Two the anxious awareness of death stems from a primordial condition constitutive of Dasein itself. If there is a truth before Being-in-the-world, it is the uncanny truth of only Beingin-the-world, of Being-nothing-other-than Being-in-the-world, and of having always been delivered over to death. Thrownness is thrownness towards death, anxiety is anxiety in the face of death, living is dying. Dasein’s existence, facticity, and falling, which have been understood in Division One as responses to anxiety, as fleeing in the face of Being-in-the-world, are now understood as fleeing from the uncanniness of one’s ownmost Being-towards-death. This is the source of the emptying of significance associated with anxiety: existence, facticity, and falling are constitutive for the existential conception of death—even “Being-towardsdeath is grounded in care.”55 Being-in-the-world, being anxious, dying, is equally to be wholly individualised, to be utterly alienated, to be entirely other than the world. Fleeing in the face of Being-in-the-world becomes now (was it ever anything else?) no more and no less than fleeing in the face of death. Nothing distinguishes these two flights and anxiety as a basic state-of-mind of Dasein becomes Dasein’s awareness of its own impossibility. Consequently Heidegger’s conclusion: “Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety.”56

The question we have been asking amounts to, “Which comes first, anxiety or death?” Is anxiety always in the end an anxiety in the face of death, or is deathanxiety merely one particular fear which, even if therefore attesting to a more primordial

anxiety,

is

nevertheless

only

one

more

aspect

of

average

everydayness? In still other words: How are death and anxiety related—is death the heart underlying the structure of anxiety or is this to make of death an event, an entity, or an “object” of anxiety? The “obvious” answer would be that the account of the structure of anxiety, in Division One, precedes the account of the structure of death and that, as this suggests, the “transphenomenology” (to borrow from Abraham and Torok) of anxiety is more primordial than any object within-the-world, prior to any intentionality. Death would be more than merely a case eliciting anxiety, for we would not on this understanding expect anxiety to be caused by various things in various cases (there is only anxiety itself—as soon as it is merely a case, as soon as it is understood in connection to a specific aspect of existence, it becomes a fear), but it would be no more than a structure particularly apposite for the exposition of an already present anxiety. This picture, however, has been complicated by the understanding of death itself, for Heidegger’s account

49

of Being-towards-death replicates the structure of anxiety perfectly, to the extent that he declares that it is essentially anxiety. Does death, then, lie behind and before anxiety? Is death the origin and essence of the anxious structure of Dasein? Such a reversal, although tempting, would be to misunderstand Heidegger, unless we ask the question of what death has now become. For now death, no longer an event or mishap, can neither be opposed to life, and has become in fact not merely the threat of the end of life, but the threatened condition of life itself. The primordiality of Dasein’s anxiety is its thrownness into death, which is itself nothing more than the impossibility of Dasein’s existence: The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual. The more unveiledly this possibility gets understood, the more purely does the understanding penetrate into it as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualised,’ nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be.57

The uncanniness of existence, the ability of the familiar to become unfamiliar, the proximate to be as far as possible from everything actual, is for Heidegger that death is Dasein’s ownmost and othermost possibility. The significant question, therefore, is not the respective primordiality of death and anxiety: if anxiety is not merely a subjective phenomenon, and death not merely an event, this is because Dasein and Being-in-the-world—anxiety and death—share a primordial relation. 58 But now we return to the question of Heidegger’s understanding of “totality” and “authenticity.” Joan Stambaugh asks a similar question to our own, and one which directly suggests itself now: “Which is more ‘primordial’—authenticity or inauthenticity?”59 For although we have here Heidegger apparently stating that the origin of anxiety is Being-in-the-world and Being-towards-death, hence the primordial truth of the inadequacy of all knowledge in relation to Dasein, hence something like the finitude of Being, despite this Heidegger still argues that Being-a-whole is an issue and that the inauthentic understanding of death we have just comprehended is based on the possibility of authenticity.60 The question for Heidegger is the following: what type of relation can Dasein have to the “truth” of death? Heidegger’s language in describing the possibility that is death shows the inadequacy of ordinary knowledge, as we have seen, but it also shows the fundamental link between representational and economic thinking. Death “signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence […] this possibility offers no support for becoming intent on something, ‘picturing’ to oneself the actuality which is possible.”61 The impossibility of representing death means the impossibility of calculating death. Authentic existence, if there is any, must not inscribe the measureless impossibility of existence within a restricted economy.

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If death is a possibility then authentic Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being. So Heidegger’s thinking goes. Authentic existence is an anticipatory understanding of Dasein’s ownmost and othermost possibility. Heidegger begins this account of authentic existence with the following recapitulation: “Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility.”62 Death, like anxiety (we need not have added), individualises. Dasein “has been wrenched away from the “they”.”63 We might think here that Heidegger surreptitiously returns to a mysticism or metaphysics of the subject in which an authentic, totalised, individual contemplates itself purely. Heidegger does not exactly make death a mere property belonging to Dasein, but the relation between them remains a contract between individuals: Death does not just ‘belong’ to one’s own Dasein in an undifferentiated way; death lays claim to it as an individual Dasein. The non-relational character of death, as understood in anticipation, individualises Dasein down to itself. This individualising is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It makes manifest that all Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-Being is the issue. Dasein can be authentically itself only if it makes this possible for itself of its own accord.64

In describing Dasein as “authentically itself” only when the inevitable failure of Being-with-Others is recognised, does he not secretly forget the essential nature of Dasein as Being-with-Others in order to ground authenticity in the subject? Does Heidegger really avoid this problem or does he merely evade it when he states shortly after that “Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self.”65 In relating Being-alongside and Being-with to ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than the they-self, then, does Heidegger “dim down” the relation of Dasein to its other? Before concluding that Heidegger is guilty of perpetrating an ego-centric idealism, it should be remembered that it was always important to Heidegger to differentiate between Being-with-Others and the “alienation” or “repression” of Dasein typical of a relation to the “they.” We might see this as Heidegger’s attempt to deny that “ideology” is only false consciousness. The “they” represents convention, common opinion, average everydayness, but a more compelling, more profound Being-with-Others also characterises Dasein. Others lay claim to Dasein in the same manner as death—a claim that cannot be settled cheaply, perhaps— and in fact it may not be stretching Heidegger too far to say that it is in death that Others lay claim to Dasein. For authentic existence, if there is any, implies also an understanding of Dasein’s othermost possibility. But just as anxiety is not a feeling

51

aimed at an object, so too “understanding” in this case is not a subjective phenomenon, a representation aimed at an entity within-the-world: “It must be noted that understanding does not primarily mean just gazing at a meaning, but rather understanding oneself in that potentiality-for-Being which reveals itself in projection.”66 But if, in this rejection of “gazing” and of “picturing” death, we see a continuation of Heidegger’s critique of representation, we also see its deepening. We have not yet completed the sentence in which Heidegger refers to picturing. He writes: “In accordance with its essence, this possibility [of Dasein’s death] offers no support for becoming intent on something, ‘picturing’ to oneself the actuality which is possible, and so forgetting its possibility.”67 We might think here that Heidegger is returning to a simple economy of memory, in which Dasein, in understanding death, retrieves what has been forgotten by average everydayness. It is time to cash in the analogy that we drew long ago between Nietzsche’s interlinking of memory and economy and Bataille’s interlinking of sacrifice and representation. What forgetting is Heidegger forbidding here? It is the forgetting of the impossibility of “picturing,” of representation of Dasein’s death. For Nietzsche reason involves a double forgetting: the forgetting of the origin of reason, guilt and memory in the calculation of economy; and the forgetting of the origin of economy in violent death. Bataille repeats this critique: knowledge involves the forgetting of its origin in the logic of representation; which itself forgets its origin in the impossibility of the experience of death which results in sacrifice. For Heidegger, what is forgotten in representation, in gazing upon meaning, is its origin in fear, and what is forgotten in fear is its origin in Being-inthe-world, its origin in death. Hence Heidegger here is not calling for a remembrance, a thinking of the self that will recover it in its plenitude, so much as a remembering of what had always-already been forgotten, a forgetting which cannot be got behind. But if this is a remembering of a forgetting, it is also a leaving behind of average everydayness, a forgetting of what it was that made forgetting seem to allow an economy that could be closed, a forgetting of forgetting. It is only if this strange logic can be made to make sense, in which remembering forgetting and forgetting forgetting converge, that Heidegger’s authentic existence can avoid the contradiction of returning to a type of selfpicturing. And only if this logic makes sense can others lay claim to Dasein as victims of a sacrifice more primordial than one which would picture them as representations of Dasein’s own future death. Perhaps this relation of remembering forgetting to forgetting forgetting is something more than analogous to death as both ownmost and othermost possibility, both a return to the self in its totality and individuality, and yet a total loss of self, a forgetting of self, an unrestrained sacrifice to that which is Other 52

than Dasein: “Anticipation discloses to existence that its othermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached.”68 Death escapes representation, and authentic existence involves not only a profoundly solicitous Being-with-Others, but a sacrificial gift of Dasein beyond any exchange with the “they.” It is not the fact that the deaths of others are represented to Dasein which compels it, but it is the fact of death, anxiety not limited by Dasein’s own end but, perhaps, including Dasein’s Being-with-Others who die, Dasein’s mourning, which lays claim to Dasein’s impossibility of existence, in a measureless exchange, a sacrifice beyond all calculation. If Heidegger has faulted in his “logic,” here, it is perhaps that he emphasises Dasein’s ownmost possibility over its othermost possibility. But if this contrast cannot be relegated merely to a stylistic consideration, if it is necessarily a part of the content and hence consequential for his argument, then we must also take note of what explicit statements there are. If death as involving Dasein with itself, as individualising Dasein is emphasised, it must also be noted that Heidegger explicitly condemns any understanding of death which fails to consider Dasein’s othermost possibility, and the true nature of Dasein as including Being-withOthers. Authentic existence must anticipate, and hence understand, the indefinite certainty of death. But although we have seen that this understanding is no mere gazing at a meaning, nevertheless it must be accompanied by a state-of-mind, and a state-of-mind particularly which brings Dasein face-to-face with its thrownness. It is at this point that Heidegger, finally, as we have seen, concludes that “Beingtowards-death is essentially anxiety.” In Division One Being-in-the-world was the source of Dasein’s anxiety. In anxiety the world loses its significance, and we might be forgiven for thinking that Heidegger is replaying here some metaphysical distinctions between world and self, between inner and outer. But this anxiety is equally manifested in the loss of meaning of Dasein’s own understanding of itself. It is only in Division Two, however, in Heidegger’s account of death, that anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its othermost possibility, and it is only in the consideration of an authentic existence in relation to death that this is brought clearly to light: In this state-of-mind [anxiety], Dasein finds itself face to face with the “nothing” of the possible impossibility of its existence. Anxiety is anxious about the potentiality-for-Being of the entity so destined [des so bestimmten Seienden], and in this way it discloses the othermost possibility.69

Thus, perhaps, Division Two represents not Heidegger’s tendency to fall into an average everydayness characterised by a secret idealism and subjectivity, so much as the opening of Dasein into the possibility of an existence authentically involved 53

with others. Such an opening to others is not dependent upon the gazing upon the deaths of others, yet it is dependent upon death, a death which “shatters” one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached, and which demands a sacrifice beyond any which would reduce death to an element in a restricted economy. If this is the case, it leaves the question of what this looking which is not a gazing might be, what exactly Dasein is brought face to face with in an anxiety which does not merely reduce Being-with-Others in its authenticity to the “they,” and suggests the questions Rebecca Comay asks in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “auratic moment”: What is the sense of this economy? If looking is a “gift,” what kind of gift would it be that would carry with it the expectation of a reciprocation or countergift? What kind of “transfer” would convey from humanity to nature the essential properties of social intercourse. And whose projection, exactly, is this? Does the expectation of reciprocity begin with the looker or the looked-at object? How does the one who only “believes himself to be seen” manage to open his eyes to return a gaze which might not, in the first place, exist? From where would the “funds” of memory be replenished? If looking is always an “investment” (Belehnung) which assumes a returning dividend and even perhaps a supplementary surcharge (Aufschlag) on its contribution, how exactly would such an economy function? Or, to pose the question very simply: Is the auratic moment already inscribed within the restricted economy of restitution and exchange which marks the egological order of the Same? Is the reciprocity of the gaze subsumed within the totalising order of appropriation and return-to-self—the narcissistic movement of Lacan’s Imaginary, or what Levinas calls “l’avidité du regard”? Or is a more “generous” (Levinas)—that is, more “general” (Bataille)—economy at play?70

Heidegger himself ends the chapter with a set of questions formulated in very different language, but not entirely incongruent with Comay’s. For even at the end of this chapter, after the consideration of an authentic relation to death, Heidegger has questions about whether such an economy, an economy relating fallen being and authentic existence, could ever function as actual Being-in-theworld for an actual Dasein: The fact that an authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole is ontologically possible for Dasein, signifies nothing so long as a corresponding ontical potentiality-forBeing has not been demonstrated in Dasein itself. Does Dasein ever factically throw itself into such a Being-towards-death? Does Dasein demand, even by reason of its ownmost Being, an authentic potentiality-for-Being determined by anticipation?71

Needless to say, these questions exceed the limits of this chapter. We might only add that Heidegger goes on to write the following: “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualised potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakeable joy in this possibility.”72

54

Notes

1Martin

Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 274. 2See Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, rev. and expanded edn. (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 100. 3Heidegger,

Being and Time, p. 276. (Emphasis in original unless otherwise stated.) 4Ibid. 5Piotr Hoffman, “Death, Time, History: Division II of Being and Time,” in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge, 1993), pp. 195–6. 6Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 276–7. 7See translators’ footnote, ibid., p. 279. 8See, for example, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: MIT, 1991), pp. vii–viii. 9Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 226–7. 10The history of Heidegger’s attitude to anxiety post- Being and Time and “What is Metaphysics?” is an important question which, unfortunately, cannot be pursued here. 11Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 169. 12Ibid., p. 173. In “What is Metaphysics?” p. 100, Heidegger writes: “What we call a ‘feeling’ is neither a transitory epiphenomenon of our thinking and willing behaviour nor simply an impulse that provokes such behaviour nor merely a present condition we have to put up with somehow or other.” 13Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 229. 14This reversal is noted by Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 181. 15Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 230. 16Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” p. 100. 55

17Ibid.,

p. 101. Being and Time, p. 232. 19Ibid., p. 231. 20Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” p. 101. 21Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 139. 22Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 235. 23Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” p. 104. 24Ibid., p. 106. 25Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 234. 26Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 139. 27Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), pp. xxxi–xxxii. 28John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana, 1990), p. 133. 29Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 279. 30Ibid., p. 280. 31Ibid., p. 285. 32Ibid., p. 286. 33Ibid., p. 287. 34Ibid., p. 282. 35Ibid. 36Ibid. 37Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford, 1977), Section 32, p. 19. 38Ibid. 39Cf. Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” Yale French Studies 78 (1990), pp. 20–1: “By associating it with sacrifice and, thereby, with the primary theme of representation (in art, in festivals, in performances), I have sought to demonstrate that Hegel’s reaction is fundamental human behaviour. It is not a fantasy or a strange attitude, it is par excellence the expression endlessly repeated by tradition. It is not Hegel alone, it is all of humanity which everywhere always sought, obliquely, to seize what death both gave and took away from humanity.” 40Ibid., p. 20. 18Heidegger,

56

41Heidegger,

Being and Time, pp. 283–4. Whereas the translators emphasise the distinction between Heidegger’s use of “vertreten” as “to represent” in the sense “deputising” for someone, and his use of “vorstellen” as a “representation” or “idea” of something, for the purposes of this argument it is the coincidence of these two understandings and the possibility of sliding between them that is significant. 42Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volumes II & III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 216. 43Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 294. 44Ibid. 45Ibid. 46Ibid., p. 291. 47Ibid., pp. 297–8. 48Ibid., p. 298. 49Ibid. 50William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2, lines 87–106, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Volume III: Tragedies, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford and New York: Oxford, 1987), pp. 1125–6. 51Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 300. 52Ibid., p. 295. 53Ibid. 54Ibid. 55Ibid., p. 303. 56Ibid., p. 310, emphasis added. 57Ibid., pp. 306–7. 58This argument concerning the relation of death and anxiety was suggested by an article by Joan Stambaugh on authenticity in Being and Time (see next note). Hoffman makes a similar point when he writes that care and the sense of one’s mortality are “equiprimordial” (Hoffman, “Death, Time, History,” p. 201). 59Joan Stambaugh, “An Inquiry into Authenticity and Inauthenticity in Being and Time,” in John Sallis (ed.), Radical Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Martin Heidegger (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities, 1978), p. 154. 60Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 303. 61Ibid., p. 307, emphasis added. 62Ibid.

57

63Ibid. 64Ibid.,

p. 308.

65Ibid. 66Ibid.,

p. 307, emphasis added. 67Ibid., emphasis added. 68Ibid., p. 308. 69Ibid., p. 310. 70Rebecca Comay, “Framing Redemption: Aura, Origin, Technology in Benjamin and Heidegger,” in Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott (eds.), Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1992), pp. 144–5. 71Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 311. 72Ibid., p. 358.

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Bernstein and Adorno on praxis

1995

The chapter of Richard Bernstein’s The New Constellation entitled “Heidegger’s Silence? Ethos and Technology,” revolves around what seems to me to be a rather perverse judgment concerning Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism. * Bernstein’s judgment—and he cites George Steiner in support as one who “speaks for many,” thus identifying a collective for whom this “truth” is true—is that “what is most scandalous” is “not what he did and said in 1933–4, but his refusal after 1945 to confront directly and unambiguously the full horror of the Shoah and the barbaric crimes of the Nazis.”1 According to Bernstein, Heidegger’s silence or virtual silence after 1945 is scandalous because “this is the time when there were no longer any serious doubts about the full horror of the Nazi regime.”2 Bernstein’s judgment is not only that Heidegger had a responsibility to confront this horror, but also that this responsibility stems from what he said and did during the Third Reich. It is not Heidegger’s support for the Nazis that is to be condemned; rather, it is his failure to confront this support, explain it, clear up once and for all these matters and how they relate to his “philosophy.” What is scandalous for Bernstein is that Heidegger did not perform an act of contrition. At the end of his paper Bernstein concludes that from Heidegger’s philosophy can be drawn the “damning” reasons for his silence, the reasons that “Heidegger never expressed any remorse for his responsibility for supporting the Nazi regime.”3 The perversity of this judgment by Bernstein is the assumption that some kind of authentic remorse, a genuine apology, could be offered by Heidegger that would satisfy the demand for retribution. Bernstein wants Heidegger to pay for his crimes, but because Bernstein is a rational and ethical man, he expresses this as the demand for an endless explanation from Heidegger and an endless declaration of his wilful culpability (endless because no matter what Heidegger had offered it could be taken, rightly, as a self-interested display, an exhibition, of remorse). Bernstein is prepared, as a rational and ethical man, to offer almost infinite understanding of acts committed in 1933 or 1934, because he can logically conceive of a man not perceiving the nature of the politics of the Nazis, but when these doubts are removed, the conscious subject ought to feel their responsibility to publicly account for their decisions in the past. The scandal, for Bernstein, is not what Heidegger did, not even that he got away with it, but that he never said sorry. Heidegger’s crime, then, was not any actions he may have committed 60

before 1945; rather, his true crime, in Bernstein’ s eyes, was to fail to publicly recognise and atone for his errors, his failure to pay for his crimes. This is the final supremacy of value exhibiting itself as the value of sheer exhibition. Bernstein judges that this failure to display remorse, this refusal to publicly wish to be a different and better kind of person in the future, springs from Heidegger’s philosophy after the War. Showing this link, and condemning Heidegger’s philosophy for justifying this absence of remorse—which for Bernstein is the “horrendous ethical-political” consequence of this philosophy—is Bernstein’s main agenda.4 Bernstein’s method of demonstration is to return to Aristotle, and to the discussion which Heidegger himself has admitted is of “special importance,” the discussion of the various “intellectual virtues.”5 Heidegger’s philosophical error, according to Bernstein, is to distinguish only poiesis and techne, and consequently to fail to distinguish the quite separate and autonomous intelligence referred to by Aristotle as phronesis: Heidegger “never does justice to what distinguishes praxis from poiesis, or phronesis from techne.”6 Heidegger had an intellectual responsibility to at least consider phronesis, considering its importance to Aristotle, since “why should we think that the response that modern technology calls forth is to be found by ‘re-turning’ to techne and poiesis, rather than phronesis and praxis?”7 This amounts to a failure on Heidegger’s part to recognise the “pluralistic character” of life in the polis, “where the clash of doxa prevails,” a lack of “sensitivity to the ambiguity and contingency of our everyday public engagement, our everyday involvement with other human beings in their otherness.”8 It reflects an “intellectual hubris” on Heidegger’s part, always valuing “thinking” the “highest,” always preferring “poetic dwelling” to ethical action, “always focusing on extreme (and simplistic) contrasts” and consequently letting “all other distinctions fall by the wayside.”9 Because of this hubristic inability to perceive anything beyond his own thinking as “essential” or “true,” Bernstein reasons, Heidegger can “dismiss the difference between motorised agriculture and mass murder.”10 For Heidegger, according to Bernstein, “the only response that is really important and appropriate is the response to the silent call of Being, not to the silent screams of our fellow human beings,” a logic by which “‘mere’ human responsibility for Auschwitz is absolved.”11 Heidegger is “blind and impervious to mundane suffering,” Bernstein sarcastically concludes, because “it is all part of the epochal history of being.”12 The appeal of Bernstein’s turn to praxis is that it names a problem widely recognised. Its appeal lies in its recognition that the game of politics is properly played not with absolutes, that it is pluralistic and demands sensitivity to the ambiguity and contingency of our everyday public engagement. The appeal of a politics of praxis is that it deals with people “in their otherness,” in other words 61

that it is about “coping,” hence that it is a politics of living, in the sense that it is about “real life”—in Heideggerian terms, it names the art of politics that follows from our thrownness into existence, community, or lack of community. Praxis names also that condition of politics that necessitates deciding now, the continuous urgent need for action and decision, demanded by our collective futures, or lack of futures. Bernstein writes: “our destiny does not rest solely with ‘the thinkers and the poets’ […] There is an urgent need to nurture phronesis in our everyday lives as citizens.”13 The problem with Bernstein’s turn to praxis is that, if it names the problem of politics, it perhaps substitutes a name for a resolution, or even for adding anything to a discussion of the problem. Bernstein’s paper is notable for the complete absence of any discussion of what praxis “has to do with” any actual politics, even at an “abstract” level, beyond invocations of plurality, otherness, sensitivity, etc. This of course is precisely Bernstein’s charge against Heidegger, but Bernstein is trying to open a space in political philosophy for praxis by claiming to offer such concreteness where mere thinking cannot. He tries to open this space by claiming this word, praxis, as the name of an insight leading to an original formulation of politics. But in the attempt to open and claim this space, praxis is perhaps somewhat blind to the “qualities” associated with praxis in other philosophies. It is perhaps rather too eager to declare the space vacant, too eager to close off discussion of other philosophies, rather too ready to let the absence of the word “praxis” be conclusive in its assessments of those rivals, rather too ready to dismiss any relation between praxis and any other type of thinking such as instrumental reason or action, rather too pragmatic in its thinking. For instance, Bernstein justifies his turn back to Aristotle by noting the special importance of his discussion of poiesis and techne, but he does not really consider the reasons for the importance of Aristotle to Heidegger. Aristotle fulfils a dual role for Heidegger, “both founding the effective history of metaphysics and harbouring the critical seeds for the overcoming of metaphysics.”14 That is, Aristotle’s philosophy forms both the “cornerstone” 15 of Western metaphysics yet, as its origin, also contains at its core a residue of a more primordial thinking (which Heidegger detects perhaps more clearly in both Heraclitus and Sophocles, to give two names), hence providing the measure of the failure of Western philosophy. Bernstein simplifies this, by treating Aristotle merely as an authority which is not thoroughly digested by Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Aristotle’s place in Heidegger’s thought can be seen in the distinction between physis and techne. Physis is the process by which a being becomes what it is from out of itself. The origin of the end of the being lies in itself, such as the ripening of 62

a piece of fruit. It is not something exterior to itself that “makes” or causes the thing, or that the thing is indebted to. But this fact of its end contained within itself means also that the thing already contains within its essence its own end, its death. Heidegger writes: “physis is the self-producing removal […] of itself.”16 Rather than forming an organic unity, then, physis reveals something of what Adorno meant when he said that it is best to think of nature as a fragment, “a work tampered by death.”17 Aristotle distinguishes techne by noting that the origin of this mode of coming into presence lies outside the thing, and that its end lies in its gradual decay, or else in its upkeep, which lies outside itself also. Techne is understood according to a model of production, in which a subject is supposed that is responsible for the making of the thing. The completed object produced through techne is the coming-into-being, the representation of the design in the mind of the producing subject. Techne, therefore, is linked to an economy of production, an economy of the subject, and an economy of representation. To the extent that techne is separated by Aristotle from physis, a separation not claimed by previous philosophers, therefore, it founds metaphysical thinking. This separation of techne from its historical origin in physis and its being taken as a matter of the production of a subject results in techne degenerating into either aesthetics or technology. 18 But if Aristotle founds this separation, according to Heidegger, then he also contains the seeds for a rethinking of techne which is neither a subjectcentred making nor an organic unity.

Thus in “The Question Concerning

Technology” Heidegger writes that the “fourth participant” in the Aristotelian four causes of the finished sacrificial vessel is the silversmith, but not as a causa efficiens. 19 This seems strange because only a couple of pages before he has written of the same example: “(4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.”20 This seeming contradiction reflects Heidegger’s attempt to rethink techne through Aristotle in a way which does not merely reproduce the metaphysical economies of the subject and production. The silversmith is responsible for the chalice, but not as the subject who designs and executes the chalice through work. That is, the silversmith is responsible in a way that goes beyond the technological understanding of techne as a means to an end and a human activity. Bernstein continually pushes Heidegger into a rigid separation between techne and poiesis that replays the distinction that Heidegger tries to overcome. He keeps undoing Heidegger’s work by pushing techne back toward instrumental reason, and pushing poiesis back to “poetry.” That which Bernstein insists is “an extreme (and simplistic) contrast” is in fact an attempt to think how it is that aesthetics and technology have come to occupy such apparently separate realms in the history of the West. Bernstein insists upon this “contrast” in part to open the space for the 63

re-entry of praxis, but the question he must answer is how he intends to found an autonomous realm for praxis that is not contaminated by the technological understanding of being. Aristotle, if we are referring to him for authority, himself writes of phronesis as demonstrated by the man “who is capable of aiming in accordance with calculation at the best for man of things attainable by action.”21 What praxis is Bernstein advocating that is neither a means to an end nor a human activity? Bernstein’s inability to see that praxis involves questions of techne and poiesis is reflected in his mis-comprehension of what he mis-takes to be Heidegger’s ethical position or non-position. Bernstein continually puts to Heidegger a series of ethical questions that presume definitions of responsibility and subjectivity that Heidegger is questioning. He asks: “But still, we want to know what this […] has to do with ‘ethics’”22; or “But what are we to do?” 23 Bernstein recognises that Heidegger is telling us that this is the wrong question, but he continues to ask it, and worse, even gives us Heidegger’s “answer”: But what are we to do? In one sense, Heidegger is telling us this is the wrong question to ask. For this question still tempts us to think that human activity can counter or master this danger. Rather the answer to the question, ‘What are we to do?’ is to ponder, to recollect, to reflect, to question, to think, to prepare, to wait.24

Bernstein’s interpretation is that Heidegger’s telling us that this is the wrong question is really telling us to do nothing ethical or practical, to continue to merely poetise or philosophise. But Heidegger’s point is that Aristotle is not necessarily right in separating poiesis and techne and phronesis, just as he is not necessarily right in separating techne and physis. Bernstein continually pushes Heidegger toward a valuation of a poiesis wholly distinct from praxis, that is, nothing to do with ethics. But in continually pushing Heidegger toward making distinctions and valuations he does not make, he is simultaneously condemning him for failing to make those distinctions. This strategy is replayed in Bernstein’s example of Heidegger’s lack of ethics. This example is the part of the original, unpublished text of the lecture titled “The Question Concerning Technology” that reads: Agriculture is now motorised food industry—in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as blockading and starving of nations […], the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. 25

Bernstein is shocked by Heidegger’s use of the phrase “in essence the same” to describe industrial agriculture and the gas chambers. The “incommensurability”26 of these two phenomena itself stands as a condemnation of a thinking which, “from the ‘heights,’” lets “all other distinctions fall by the wayside.” That is, all 64

other distinctions apart from, in Bernstein’s words, “poetic dwelling and pondering one’s true abode, one’s ethos.”27 And apart from the distinction whereby, this time in Habermas’ words, “the history of being is thus disconnected from political and historical events.”28 Bernstein refers sarcastically to Heidegger’s distinction between the correct and the true, whereby the true danger is not homelessness, the destruction of the earth, or the possibility of fascism, but rather “the threat to saving man’s essential nature, restoring our true ‘dignity,’ keeping alive meditative thinking that ponders our dwelling, our ethos.”29 Because “nothing else counts as essential or true except pondering one’s ethos,” for Heidegger according to Bernstein, “even the extermination of Jews seems merely an event equivalent to many others.”30 The use of “equivalent” here adds a value judgment absent from Heidegger’s discussion. Bernstein takes it that Heidegger’s concern with ethos can be entirely separated from a true concern with ethics, that Heidegger’s concern with the true is as opposed to the correct. But Heidegger’s claim is to search for the true by way of the correct. In that case it is not that homelessness, the destruction of the earth, and the Holocaust are not the “real plight,” but that they point toward what must be thought in order to save humanity. Heidegger is not saying that people concerned with these issues are wrong, but perhaps that they search for the solutions in the wrong way. Heidegger does not say that the destining of revealing is the danger as opposed to concrete identifiable dangers, but that it “is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such.”31 And if we may extend what Heidegger says about the true and the correct, in that case the true danger, danger as such, must be sought by way of all the dangers Bernstein correctly identifies. Bernstein, therefore, agrees with Habermas’ assessment (which itself has a heritage in Adorno) that Heidegger engages in an “abstraction via essentialisation” in which ethico-political concerns at an ontic level are lost in the aestheticising move to poiesis. Against this assessment I would cite Rebecca Comay who writes on Benjamin and Heidegger in the following terms: And if the era of art’s mechanical reproduction gives the Gestell its historical determination as the triumph of Ausstellungswert—the final supremacy of value exhibiting itself as the value of sheer exhibition—the ‘turning’ in this case would involve precisely that minute (but utterly uncompromising) shift from spectacle to performance. Or, as Benjamin puts it, in a formula too easily dismissed (and of course far too easily recited)—and it is unnecessary to insist on the Heideggerian syntax of this formulation—the turn from the ‘aestheticisation of politics’ to the ‘politicisation of art.’ […] A turn, we might paraphrase, from the Gestell as the perfection (but also the exhaustion) of the Weltbild to Ereignis as the flicker of remembrance; from the spectacular reduction to the image to the performance of historical action. Only action, for Benjamin, could give to memory its authentic movement—this is what the politicisation of art is all about—rupturing the static Weltbild of the contemplative order of vision with the (in every sense of the word) ‘ecstatic’ concentration of the Messianic. If Being’s ‘oblivion’ here reaches its limit

65

(as Heidegger insisted), this is because its recognition (as Benjamin insisted) involves also the ontic identification of those who were, in fact, most forgotten: the victims of history whose fragile image appears fleetingly in the most reified recapitulations of the present. Such an ontic memory would not be inconsistent with the remembrance of the ontico-ontological difference: indeed the very finitude of that difference should have, strictly speaking, required precisely such attention to the specific differences that are the stuff of history. Such attentiveness would have easily redeemed Heidegger’s notion of ‘historicity’ from the sneering charge of ‘abstractness’ which both Adorno and Benjamin—not without some justice, but without real cause—were to insist on levelling […] Unlike Heidegger, Benjamin gives the Gestell a name—fascism—and a specific material place—capitalism. For more than one reason, he had to. Only thus could the final spectre of aestheticism be contested.32

With these references to Benjamin we are led back towards critical theory. But for Benjamin, according to Comay, only action could give to memory its authentic movement, only action could rupture the world-picture of Enframing. Benjamin here would seem to be opposing not only Bernstein’s Heidegger but Adorno who, in “Resignation,” appears clearly to be rejecting praxis. He writes: “Only thinking could offer an escape […] The leap into praxis will not cure thought from resignation.”33 Praxis represents for Adorno in this piece nothing more than a tendency toward repression, the “prohibition of thinking” and its replacement by an atrophied, calculative thought symptomatic of Gestell: “thinking, employed only as the instrument of action, is blunted in the same manner as all instrumental reason.”34 Praxis becomes “increased production of the means of production.”35 In his call for an infinite and unfettered thought it is notable that Adorno positions himself against the Marxist “dogma” of the unity of theory and practice, aligning himself more closely with the “critical criticism” of the Young Hegelians. Adorno seems to fit Bernstein’s caricature of Heidegger more accurately than does Heidegger, for Adorno explicitly and unreservedly defends the ethics of thinking regardless of its relation to action: “thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance,” he writes and, in an extremely Heideggerian formulation, “Open thinking points beyond itself.”36 But before resigning ourselves to this opposition between Benjamin and Adorno, and concluding that Adorno’s position amounts to a betrayal of Benjamin and a crossing over to the side of Heidegger (at least as drawn by Bernstein), it is worth looking at Adorno’s critique of praxis more closely. Perhaps it turns out that despite appearances Adorno, like Heidegger, is instigating a rethinking of action and/or techne, rather than a wholesale rejection. Adorno notes that “[d]istance from praxis is disreputable in the eyes of everyone.”37 He describes the attitude to praxis prevalent in political philosophy in terms that almost suggest he has in mind Bernstein’s espousal of praxis against instrumental reason:

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Whoever restricts himself to thinking but does not get involved is weak, cowardly and virtually a traitor. This hostile cliche on the intellectual is to be encountered with deep roots within that branch of the opposition that is in turn reviled as intellectual without any awareness thereof on their part. Thinking activists answer; among the things to be changed is that very separation of theory and praxis. Praxis is essential if we are ever to be liberated from the domination of practical people and practical ideals. 38

Adorno here is pointing toward a gap in the theory of praxis, its tendency to cover over those aspects of the philosophy of praxis congruent with the disreputable aspects of instrumentality through the incantation of the word “praxis” or the chant “the unity of theory and practice.” What Adorno then offers is a historicopolitico-philosophical account of why, today, such an incantation predominates. Whereas for Marx it was the possibility of action which animated the call for praxis, today “one clings to action because of the impossibility of action.”39 The call for action and the suspicion held for those who hold back represent a desire for immediacy—a philosophy allowing immediate contact with everyday public engagement, immediate relief of mundane suffering. Every moment of thinking not directed toward useful action is a moment lost and an act of hubris on the part of the thinker. But this desire for immediacy cannot be satisfied in a “thoroughly mediated and obdurate society” and results, unfortunately, in the construction of what he calls a “pseudo-reality,” and consequently in “pseudo-activity.”40 In this pseudo-reality immediacy is declared, but the illusion can be maintained only by the sacrifice of “autonomous thinking.” The demand for praxis and the demand for immediacy mean that “only reaction is possible and for this reason the reaction is false.”41 That is, pseudo-activity is the type of praxis that results from the capitulation of thinking in the face of the absence of obvious possibilities for change. Praxis demands unmediated and immediate contact with concrete reality, and becomes “the acceptance of any small change as one step on the long way toward total change.”42 Activity becomes pseudo-activity, which results in a politics of “mere theatre,” an activity which consists of valuing exhibition “as a substitute for satisfaction, thus elevating itself to an end in itself.”43 Suffering caused by the obstinacy of the technological understanding of being results in anger toward the person who expresses it. What is demanded is a theatre of action in which the person admits their culpability, both in terms of their person and their philosophy. What is demanded is not punishment for the crime, but the spectacle of an act of self-punishment, a substitute for satisfaction. This becomes an end in itself in the same way as instrumental reason and instrumental action become ends in themselves. Praxis as a philosophy mimes the instrumental society it is symptomatic of—demanding immediate satisfaction through an economy of subjectivity and an economy of representation. These economies are evident both

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in Bernstein’s attitude toward Heidegger’s silence, and in the tendency of praxis philosophy to proclaim by incantation its unmediated and immediate relation to everyday reality. They are evident also on the pseudo-real collective subjectivity which he identifies, those few who “speak for many,” upon which Bernstein depends in his condemnation of Heidegger’s silence rather than his practise. By contrast Adorno recognises the impossibility of immediacy and the consequent need for a thinking which points beyond itself. Such a thinking thinks the truth of praxis by way of the correct diagnosis of praxis. Hence Adorno claims that such a thinking “takes a position as a figuration of praxis,”44 and here figuration should be understood as a step outside the economy of representation and toward Benjamin’s conception of allegory. Such a thinking cannot demand as its foundation the tactical concern with the avoidance of danger: “no security is granted it by existing conditions nor by the ends yet to be attained.”45 To conclude we may compare two passages. The first is the concluding passage of “Resignation,” and the second a passage from “The Question Concerning Technology” cited by Bernstein, the passage to which he responds, “But what are we to do?.” Both passages display that ethics, if there is any, is the demand for closest attention to suffering in the ontic world, and that hope, if there is any, springs from the thought that attends such suffering, but that the thought which arises from this attention can offer no guarantee. The universal tendency toward suppression goes against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness prevails; thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Whoever refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him has not resigned.46 But we are thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and now in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.47

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Notes

*This

paper was given for the “Hermeneutic Circle” postgraduate seminar, organized by Michael Janover. 1Richard J. Bernstein, “Heidegger’s Silence? Ethos and Technology,” in The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1991), p. 80. 2Ibid., p. 85. 3Ibid., p. 134. 4Ibid., p. 120. 5Ibid. 6Ibid., p. 124. 7Ibid., p. 122. 8Ibid. 9Ibid., pp. 131–2. 10Ibid., p. 133. 11Ibid., p. 134. 12Ibid., p. 137 and p. 135. 13Ibid., p. 126. 14Dennis J. Schmidt, “Economies of Production: Heidegger and Aristotle on Physis and Techne,” in Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott with P. Holley Roberts (eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 1990), p. 148. 15Martin Heidegger, cited in ibid., p. 147. 16Heidegger, cited in ibid., p. 154. 17Theodor W. Adorno, cited in ibid. 18Ibid., p. 156. 19Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 8. 20Ibid., p. 6. 69

21Aristotle,

The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford and New York: Oxford, 1925), p. 146. 22Bernstein, “Heidegger’s Silence?” p. 88. 23Ibid., p. 114. 24Ibid., pp. 114–5. 25Heidegger, cited in ibid., p. 130. 26Ibid., p. 133. 27Ibid., p. 131. 28Jürgen Habermas, cited in ibid., p. 133. 29Ibid. 30Ibid., pp. 133–4, emphasis added. 31Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 26. 32Rebecca Comay, “Framing Redemption: Aura, Origin, Technology in Benjamin and Heidegger,” in Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott with P. Holley Roberts (eds.), Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1992), pp. 160–1. 33Adorno, “Resignation,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 173. 34Ibid., p. 174. 35Ibid., p. 172. 36Ibid., p. 175. 37Ibid., p. 171. 38Ibid., p. 172. 39Ibid. 40Ibid., pp. 172–3. 41Ibid., p. 173. 42Ibid. 43Ibid. 44Ibid., p. 175. 45Ibid. 46Ibid. 47Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 33, cited in Bernstein, “Heidegger’s Silence?” p. 114.

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The pilot, the master, and the cyborg: three exemplary figures in the history of philosophy

1996

What is going on at this “mini-conference”?* The conference title appears to make a claim: that the first word, “cyborg,” has something to tell us about the rest of the words, about “bodies,” about “technologies” and about something called “the posthuman condition.” Something, perhaps, such as that cyborgs make apparent the condition of plurality of the body and technology, bringing the unity of these concepts into question. Or that a new epoch has arrived, in which the interconnectedness of bodies and technologies consigns to the past the concept of the human which previously had ordered existence. At any rate a claim is being made for the word or concept “cyborg,” that it names something which now can or needs to be taken seriously, whether this claim is a report on a recent historical development, or a performative act. Thus if, in this mini-paper, the word or concept “cyborg” is taken seriously, then it cannot be ruled out that it is only within this mini-conferential forum that these reflections will appear serious.

I What is going on with the word “cyborg”? If we turn to the science fictional sources for the word they will tell us that “cyborg” is short-hand for the concept “cybernetic organism.” Cybernetics is defined as “the science of systems of control and communications in living organisms and machines.”1 Cybernetics, then, already implies a way of taking organisms and machines together. It takes them together as capable of producing knowledge for a science of systems of control and communications. Cybernetics derives from the Greek word kubernetes, meaning steersman or pilot, and from kubernan, which means to steer, to guide, or to govern. Cybernetics and governor thus have the same etymological origin. Both derive from the Greek word for the art of government, but where government is first the art of the ship’s pilot. Plato invokes this dual concept of the art of steering and the art of government in the Republic, precisely at the moment when he wishes to prove that it is the philosopher, and not the populace, that is fit to govern. This political philosophy, this politics of the philosopher-as-politician, this philosophy of the politician-as-philosopher, is cast in the form of a parable. The key to this parable is

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the analogy that Plato constructs between the philosopher-ruler and a ship’s master. It may happen that this master of the art of pilotage, the ship’s master, is overthrown by the sailor population in favour of the man who, by contrast, most cunningly allows them to rule themselves. In this case the true pilot will be derided as useless, a babbler, a stargazer. For whereas the true pilot attends to the winds, the seasons, the sky and the stars, this art so often goes unrecognised by those unskilled in it.2 How is the philosopher’s art like the art of the kubernetes? In the Phaedrus Plato describes true being as dwelling in a place, a place which is no place, beyond the heavens. “Reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it.”3 Reason is thus that which governs the soul, and it does so by steering the way to the place beyond the heavens where the Ideas lie. The philosopher is the master of the art of governance of the soul. The philosopher’s right to rule, Plato permits us to conclude, derives from his mastery of the art of steering. Kubernetis is a techne, a means to an end and a human activity. Its end lies beyond itself in the destination, it is the production of a change of place, the technical accomplishment of a journey. The arrival at the destination is the coming into being of the completed journey. The completed journey is the making present of the idea of the change of place, the design of the journey, in the mind of the steersman (or whomever has conceived of the journey and charged the steersman with its accomplishment). Kubernetis, therefore, implies an economy of production, an economy of the subject, and an economy of representation. Plato’s description of reason as the soul’s pilot thus makes of reason a means and an activity of the thinking subject, a steering toward the destination where true being, in the form of the Ideas, dwells. Kubernetis, lying at the heart of Plato’s conceptions of the philosopher’s navigation of the way to the Ideas, and the legitimacy of the philosopher’s right to govern, forms the hidden, inadequately thought, cornerstone of Platonic, and consequently Western, metaphysical thinking. This art of movement is a static foundation for ordering thinking. If cybernetics, then, is defined as the science of systems of control and communication, this is in accord with a Platonic conception of the art of the kubernetes. And who would deny that these understandings of steering and ruling, of governance, name what is required for the accomplishment of these activities? Who would deny that they are correct? It is somewhat surprising to discover, then, that in another place Plato treats the art of kubernetis somewhat sardonically, and in opposition to philosophy. Philosophy, Plato tells us through Socrates dialogue with Callicles in Gorgias, may lead us to something more than mere saving and being saved—it may lead us to a position which demands the sacrifice of our lives for the sake of truth. The kubernetes, on the other hand, like the man who submits to the tyrant’s will, like 73

the court-room advocate, is concerned merely with the conservation and preservation of life. The pilot’s art, an “orderly” art, is likened by Plato to rhetoric, that is, to the art of communication or persuasion, in that it saves “our goods,” “our lives,” and “our bodies” from “the gravest dangers.”4 It does not stand resolutely forth against the tyrant and the false to lead the way to true being. This denigration of kubernetis as a mere safekeeping is incongruous when compared to its crucial place in Plato’s conception of what is highest—the Ideas and the philosopher-ruler. How are we to explain this incongruity? Kubernetis and cybernetics draw around each other a constellation of themes involving governance and control, orderly rhetoric and communication, philosophy as the mastery of the governance of the soul, and a science of systems. In short, they name the inextricable entanglement of order as command or rule and order as system or structure. Cybernetics, when applied to organisms, studies the control of organisms, but a control through communication, a conducting. The modern science of cybernetics is illuminated by the Platonic kubernetes and vice-versa. But perhaps this mutual illumination reveals not an essence of cybernetics or an Idea of kubernetis so much as the metaphysical understanding of these concepts. They are understood as arts or sciences, where these are interpreted on a productivist basis, technologically. They display a mutual theology of reason and structure, a will to will. What unites them is not the singularity of a truth which they together name, so much as their being already the forgetting of a primordial possibility. The primordial essence of kubernetis, the critical seeds for the overcoming of this metaphysical conception, may be secretly hidden in the incongruity of Plato’s denigration of it as a mere safekeeping in the face of danger. 5 Plato uses the figure of the steersman to elaborate a metaphysical, technical understanding of philosophy and politics. Perhaps it is in order to conceal this metaphysical, technical thinking, and to save his conception of philosophy from a contamination by the metaphysics of the steersman, that he then needs to reject, or to eject, the steersman himself as a technical, calculative thinker. What is the danger faced by the kubernetes? Plato describes this danger as lying outside the navigating, as what must be countered by the steersman. Perhaps, however, this danger is not something faced by the kubernetes but rather something which is revealed in kubernetis itself. In “Olympian XII” Pindar, like Plato, draws the connection between the maritime art of steering and the land-based human world of war and politics. But for Pindar this connection refers not to a technics of ordering so much as to human doing as a following. Pindar writes: “I beg you, daughter of Zeus the Deliverer,/ Watch over Himera’s wide dominion,/ Saviour Fortune. At your will/ Fast ships are steered on the sea,/ And on land stormy wars and assemblies at 74

council.”6 It is not man the navigator, man the ruler, that is the governor. Here it is the gods which steer, on land and at sea. Heraclitus refers to wisdom as knowing the plan which “steers all things through all things.”7 The human art of steering is not a static ordering, a taking command or a guiding. Rather, as the accomplishment of a journey, the sending that achieves a movement toward a destination, it is a pushing off into the fullness of the essence of a voyage. 8 But as this pushing off steering is also a submitting and a following. It is not a challenging of the water or the ground to allow a way through. Rather it is an openness to the rule of the gods, an openness to the way shown by the seasons, the water, the sky, the winds, the stars. To be able to steer means to know how to receive a gift from the gods of a safe journey through danger, to be open to the reception of a granting. If it is an achievement at all, it is only as the humbleness of an inconsequential accomplishment.9 Steering does not save bodies, lives and goods by an act of mastery. Rather this saving, if it happens, happens through a pondering of the gravest dangers. At another point Pindar writes that “The great mind of Zeus/ Is pilot of the doom of men whom he loves.”10 The danger of kubernetis is revealed in the sense of being harboured forth in the essence of kubernetis itself. The danger comes from the goings-on of kubernetis, in its technics. The journey undertaken kubernetically is a leaving the harbour, an unsecuring, a pushing off into danger, and a way into the possibility of doom and catastrophe. As a pushing off into a way it is a destining, and it is as a technics, as a pushing off into a sending that orders, that it harbours forth the gravest danger. Kubernetis, if it is a saving, is so in a threefold sense. Firstly, it is a harbouring forth of saving in the course of a step into the way of gravest danger and doom. Navigating is not the journey itself, but the movement which, while staying within the harbour, is the unsecuring from the harbour. Secondly, if it is a saving, it is the sheltering through the danger. And lastly, if it is this first movement of unsecuring, kubernetis is nevertheless also the possibility of saving in the sense of rescuing from the danger or the catastrophe which has already occurred, and to which it can only respond afterwards, lately. In sum, then, kubernetis is a mode of bringing forth, a way of revealing, in the sense of Heidegger’s term Entbergen.

II Cybernetics is already a challenging forth not only of information or machines, but of bodies, a way of taking bodies technologically and metaphysically, in relation to machines, systems, control and communication. What more, then, is

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going on with the word “cyborg”? Returning to the dictionary, we discover an aspect of cyborgs which we have not encountered through a consideration of cybernetics. The relation between bodies and technologies described by the word “cyborg,” we are told there, is of a specific kind, and not just any interrelation, conjunction or confusion. Cyborgs relate bodies and technologies by producing the effect of “extension”: “A person [not a very posthuman beginning, we note] whose physical tolerances or capabilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by a machine.”11 A cyborg is an organism extended, a reaching further out into the world, an increased capacity for action, an extended capacity for producing or achieving change or movement without oneself being moved. The cyborg is extended in its ability to be a source of action, to achieve actions beyond itself yet belonging to itself. The cyborg rules or governs actions over an extended terrain. The cyborg steers actions further out into the world without needing to step out of the safety of home, or to push off from the safety of the harbour. The extended physical tolerances of the cyborg mean an increased capacity for stepping out or pushing off into the danger while remaining securely at home. The Aristotelian language of this definition—capacity for or source of action, for producing movement without being moved, to extend beyond oneself while belonging to oneself—is not accidental. The source or rule for this description of the cyborg is a set of oppositions which govern Aristotle’s discourse. Most abstractly, these are energeia and dynamis, and praxis and poiesis. But the language of these oppositions surfaces also in Aristotle’s understanding of a tool. Tools are instruments for making or moving a thing, and hence are the basis of work. Tools extend our capacity to act, to reach out into the world, our ability to produce, to achieve movement in nature or the world. When governed properly, tools extend the range of our actions. They are a piece of property, belonging to us yet separate from us, meant for production, and hence with their ends outside themselves. Thus they serve poiesis, and are governed by a techne. The Greek word for tool, of course, is organon. Organ and tool are given the same word in Greek. An organism is the organisation, the structure, the order of a set of organs. It is thus the ordering of a set of tools governed or conducted by the soul. This conception of the organism as a set of tools under the governance of the soul is the condition which underlies cybernetics. Cybernetics is the science of the governance, the control, the conducting, or ordering of the organs or tools of the organism by the soul, the science of the communication of this ordering. There is, therefore, a sense in which the concept of the cyborg is doubly redundant. Firstly, cybernetics, as a science of the ordering, as controlling, structuring, and communicating, of machines and organisms, already implies a taking of machines and organisms together as technical beings. Secondly, the concept of organism, in 76

its Greek origin, already implies an order of organa, of tools, under the governance of an ordering controlled by and communicated from—conducted by— the soul.

III What has been offered thus far might be considered an account of the productivist, technological, metaphysical understanding underlying the concept of the cyborg, framed self-consciously within Heideggerian discourse on technology. This account culminated in the demonstration of the origin of cybernetics in a technical concept of steering and governing, and a demonstration of the origin of the concept of “organism” in the idea of the tool as an extension of productive capacity. Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of organa, however, does not occur in the course of an account of production but, rather, as a preliminary to the discussion of slavery. Aristotle describes the slave as a tool and as a piece of property. While tools are things for production, property is for action. By this Aristotle means that poiesis has an end outside itself in the thing made, whereas the end of praxis lies within itself. Whereas praxeis are complete in themselves, hence with no limit, poieseis are incomplete, and their limit lies in the forms, the products, which constitute their outcomes. Since life is praxis, says Aristotle, slaves, although tools, serve praxis. 12 From this apparent contradiction we can learn, perhaps, not only about Greek conceptions of slavery, but also about the relation of praxis to poiesis in Aristotelian discourse. Aristotle goes on to describe the slave—a piece of property and a tool—as belonging to the master, while the master does not belong to the slave. The slave is an organ of the master. Slaves not only belong to their masters, they are living yet separate parts of the master’s body. 13 The slave is an extension of the master, an extension in all the senses encountered in the description of a tool. (There is more than a little room for thinking about the forms of sexuality enframing this discourse of the master and his organs of extension.) We might think there is something cybernetic about the slave: as a tool for controlling, ordering and producing, as a piece of property, the slave, we might say, is dehumanised or alienated from his human existence. In being a tool of the master there is something mechanical about the slave, something of an interrelation of person and machinery. Cybernetics is in a sense knowledge of the art of slavery. Yet still Aristotle describes the slave as serving praxis. Although the slave is a tool and a piece of property, it is the master that is extended in the master-slave relationship. The master appropriates the slave for

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his own actions, extending his capacity to act, to reach out into the world, and to move it without himself moving. Hence it is not the slave that is the cyborg but the master. The master over the slave is the primordial cyborg. The master is only a master to the extent that he has tools, organs, separated from his body yet part of it. The master is only a master to the extent that he has slaves to govern in the same way as the soul governs the organs of the body. The difference in natures that justifies the existence of natural slaves, according to Aristotle, lies in the way the slave participates in reason, logos. Whereas reason belongs to the master, for the slave reason is something which can be recognised or perceived, but which lies beyond possession. Reason is the property of the master, a part of him, while for the slave reason lies outside. This explains why, despite being a tool, the slave serves praxis rather than poiesis. While the slave is an instrument of production, the slave serves praxis in the sense of being governed by the praxis of the master. The slave is a productive tool in the sense of having an end beyond itself, for the slave’s end is the master’s rule. Thus the slave has a limit in the master’s will. The master’s end lies not in directing the slave, for this is a question of production, of use, but in his own praxis, in choosing to be for his own sake and in the governance of citizenship. The master has no limit, in that, existing for his own sake, his praxis and his logos is a process of movement always beyond himself. Slave’s lack the intellectual virtue associated with praxis, they lack phronesis, because praxis is mastery and possession. Slaves follow phronesis and logos in the sense of not possessing them as property and as object of mastery.14

IV What is the significance of this discussion of slavery and praxis? We shall draw from it two threads. Firstly, it problematises the arguments of those who claim that Heidegger’s mistake in his discourse on technology, or his mistake in his discourse generally, or his guilt, or his guilty philosophy, is shown by his forgetting, his neglect, his passing over, his evasion, his erasure of praxis. Such arguments frequently ask us to turn back to Aristotle’s Ethics, in order to retrieve a way of being, specifically a way of being ethical, a concern with human plurality, a way of being in relation to others, a way of remembering the finitude of humanity and of comporting oneself within that finitude, a way of living which doesn’t reduce to contemplation. In making thinking a poiesis Heidegger forgets another way of being. Heidegger forgets, neglects, passes over, evades or erases ethics because his ethos of openness to revealing cannot answer the question, “What should we do?”15

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The basic premise of such arguments, derived from Aristotle, is the separation of praxis from poiesis. Such arguments present themselves as a humanism, a living, a remembrance of humanity’s fullness, or a coping with humanity’s inevitable finitude, as opposed to the abstraction and grandiosity of mere thinking. They refer to Aristotle in order to defend a concept of action which navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis represented by passive contemplation and thoughtless technicity. But such arguments fail to sufficiently ask themselves why Heidegger did not turn to the ethics of praxis, a question that has many possible answers. Aristotle too wished to distinguish praxis from poiesis, in order to make the master the lord of technicity yet still not a technical thinker. For Aristotle praxis is distinct from poiesis as the agent is from the tool, as the soul is from the body, as the master is from the slave. Returning to Greece to escape technicity or passive contemplation, to escape action or thinking as techne, as poiesis, through a resuscitation of praxis, is a reactive attempt to rescue praxis and preserve its autonomy over against acting and doing.16 Thus, as Robert Bernasconi points out, in so far as praxis is understood through a distinction from poiesis, it remains a technical interpretation of praxis. 17 The reactive technicity of this invocation of praxis over poiesis, or phronesis over techne, is shown in the respective positions of the master and slave in relation to phronesis and logos—the master is master of these capacities, in contrast to the slave which can only perceive and hence follow the master’s phronesis and logos. The concept of the freedom of the subject of praxis is technical precisely to the extent that it is intended to indicate a freedom from technicity. (This is not to say that it might not be possible to formulate a transformed, non-technical conception of praxis with reference to Aristotle. There is evidence that Heidegger did indeed take seriously the question of praxis, and the need to begin to think again the “essence of action,” as he put it in the first line of “Letter on Humanism.” According to Franco Volpi Heidegger, in his 1926 lecture course on ancient philosophy, brings himself deliberately into proximity with Aristotle when he concludes, significantly, with a definition of human being: “zoe praktike tou logon echontos [the practical living being that has logos] is the essence of human being. The human being is the living being that has, in accord with its type of being, the possibility to act.”18 A question that cannot be addressed here might be posed of Heidegger’s philosophy generally in its relation to Aristotle: what is the relation between Dasein’s ecstatic constitution and the technical capacity for extension revealed in the craftsman’s relation to the tool or the master’s relation to the slave? And, with the above question in mind, what is the relation of Dasein in Being and Time, and the 1926 definition of human being, to Heidegger’s later reflections on humanism in, for instance, 1946?) 79

There are two commonly encountered attitudes to Aristotle’s discussion of slavery: firstly, to condemn him on the grounds of barbarism, with more or less empathy for the time in which he was writing; and secondly, to point out that now, of course, we know that there are no natural slaves, and hence Aristotle’s entire discussion falls into the realm of the hypothetical. What is common to these positions is the unquestioning assumption that we, universal humanists that we are, are, whatever may have been in the past, civilised, living in a post-slavery condition. What is obscured is the possibility that this “humanism” maintains a continuity with the uncivilised past precisely through a secret dependence on a theory and practice of slavery.19 This theory and practice of slavery in the secret heart of humanistic discourse and humanistic society, has never been so predominant, and has never been so massively overlooked. Today’s slaves go unnamed, though they are everywhere to be found, and in fact everywhere are proclaimed masters. For the later Heidegger, rethinking the essence of action means thinking an idea of action which precedes the distinction between praxis and poiesis, and precedes the distinction between theoria and praxis. What Heidegger is at pains to point out is the dependence of such humanisms upon a technical conception of praxis, which means that they are inevitably reactive in that they define the human in opposition to what is rejected as the inhuman, whether it is machine, animal, barbarian, or slave. Humanism does not imply a universalism in the present. As Lacoue-Labarthe points out, Nazism is a humanism in the sense of a philosophy and a praxis of the becoming universal of a master-race. 20 But, and this is the second thread we are drawing from the discussion of slavery and praxis, Heidegger does not mention slavery in his account of techne, just as Aristotle does not mention slavery in his discussion of the intellectual virtues, but only in the Politics, in its proper place, in a discussion of the household. The slave is an economic, technical matter, a question of oikonomia, a matter of the appropriate attitude toward property and tools. The arrangement of Aristotle’s discussion itself shows the predominance of a technical, economic interpretation of praxis. But Heidegger, although clearly rejecting the technical interpretation of praxis, also ignores the slavery of ancient Greece. According to Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism,” “we encounter the first humanism in Rome.”21 Although this is a product of the encounter with Greek civilisation (late Greek civilisation is stressed), humanism clearly refers first to the standing of homo romanus over against homo barbarus. Yet Aristotle notes that for nonGreeks the slave and the female are given identical status, and derives from this that non-Greeks are incapable of being masters, and ought properly to be ruled by Greeks. The non-Greek and the slave are by nature identical.22 The civilised 80

human has three essential characteristics: he is male and Greek, and is not a slave. In what way does this structure differ from Roman humanism? What is revealed by Heidegger’s apparent differentiation here? What is important to Heidegger here is history—Heidegger continually justifies his re-interpretations, of thinking, of poiesis, of techne, by the claim that they refer to what is earliest, most primordial. This reference to history structures Heidegger’s distinction between action and the essence of action, between technology and the essence of technology. The essence of technology is not there before technology, yet the interpretation of the essence of technology is in some way meant to refer to something more primordial than the instrumental, anthropological definition of technology. We are entitled to ask whether and in what way tools and slavery were already there at the beginning, just as Heidegger asks in Being and Time about the relative primordiality of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. The reference to primordiality is a sheltering of the essence of technology from technology itself, just as Aristotle attempts to shelter praxis from poiesis, just as Plato wants to shelter philosophical kubernetis from the technical art of the kubernetes. 23 It is to the extent that Heidegger wishes to shelter this primordiality that he constitutes tradition as a unity to which the primordial is other. Perhaps it is in the sheltering of this reference that a secret humanistic contamination is revealed. And perhaps this contamination disturbs Heidegger’s entire discourse on technology which, after all, is nothing more than the elaboration of the statement that the essence of technology is nothing technological. And down what tangled paths, through what troubled waters, might we then be lead by Heidegger’s infamous attempt at such a sheltering in 1935, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, a sheltering whose every phrase seems to resound with the themes being questioned here today? “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)—have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.’”24 What appears as a “scandalously inadequate” attempt to save National Socialism from humanism may, we are suggesting here, in the same gesture be repeating Plato’s contaminating sheltering of the philosopher from the kubernetes. And, to compound the tortuousness of the path which is here being followed, Heidegger’s statement about National Socialism in An Introduction to Metaphysics occurs precisely in a paragraph which recognises Plato’s conception of being-as-Idea as the original source of the metaphysical contamination of philosophy. Plato is the first contaminator, the prototypical value-philosopher, but he himself has also 81

been subsequently contaminated by the entire history of metaphysics which is nothing more than the taking of Plato’s Ideas as values. Plato allows us to perceive the

contamination by subjectivism, by humanism,

of

what is

peddled,

economically, in Zarathustra’s marketplace, as National Socialist philosophy. Hence, according to Heidegger in 1935, thinking through Plato is also the means by which to shelter from subjectivism, from humanism, from philosophy, from kubernetis, an inner truth which opens up the space for a free relationship to National Socialism. And we should not be surprised by the constellation which has emerged into view here, for when talking of the kubernetes, that is, of the pilot, the conductor, the guide, the governor, the leader, who do we name, technologically, between Greek and German, those “most powerful and most spiritual of all languages,”25 but the Führer? It should be noted, however, that exactly the same economy is present in any discourse about the essence of technology or the essence of humanity which proposes a logic of temporal succession. This is true even where the succession is reversed. Thus at several points in this paper the idea of the “posthuman” has more or less directly been brought into question. The attempt to theorise or to declare performatively the arrival of the posthuman presupposes, just as much as the revealing of a primordial technological essence, a distinction between the technological (or the cyber-technological, however we would think this) and its essence, and relies upon a categorisation of what is early and what is late. Such a discourse remains reactive, even if the values attached to these distinctions are rethought. The point here is the tendency in any schema of the early and the late for it to become a matter of values, a tendency toward a more or less latent humanism, subjectivism, romanticism or aestheticisation.

V A number of possibilities begin to open up for a discourse (not necessarily productive) on the relationship between the discourses of Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. This can only be suggestively indicated here in point form. 1. First, however, it is necessary to indicate one way in which Heidegger is not being juxtaposed to Benjamin. Heidegger is not being opposed to Benjamin on the grounds that, whereas Benjamin thinks history as the forgetting of its victims and anonymous toilers, Heidegger expunges the victims from the history of being or stands condemned for his silence regarding them. The question of what is referred to as “Heidegger’s silence” cannot be dealt with today, but we can state that most of those who frenetically condemn Heidegger for this silence founder

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upon the question of what Heidegger ought to or could have said beyond the most obvious. And the most obvious is the least meaningful when it comes as a statement from the criminal before sentencing. This is so not because of the criminal’s lack of remorse, but because of his knowledge and the knowledge of the law that what is being played out is the public ritual of remorse. And it is only so long as it is the most obvious that is being said that the public secret can be kept. As much as Benjamin, Heidegger can be said to be pondering Aristotle’s definition of law (which appears in the course of his discussion of slaves as property): law is an agreement which provides that all that is conquered in war be termed the property of the conquerors.26 It is not difficult to trace through Heidegger’s works an interest in, a concern with, and a response to the violence behind and before the law. What Benjamin and Heidegger ask us to think is from what position we might judge the guilt or innocence of such an interest, concern, and response. The question of what Heidegger ought to or could have said about National Socialism and the Holocaust is the question of what we ourselves have to say about it, of what we can say that is adequate, or of whether and in what way it may lead thinking toward silence. 27 Which is to ask, what is revealed in the frenziedness, the ordering that blocks revealing, of the discourse on Heidegger’s silence (which is not to say that all discourse referring to Heidegger’s Nazism is necessarily technological, although it might be)? Could this be a falling into technological interpretations of ethics, and thus a failure to hold always before the eyes the extreme danger? Steiner (a source, a guide, a leader amongst those who define Heidegger’s crime as his post-war silence) refers to the cadence of the everyday as “frenetic inertia.”28 I propose to describe as “phronetic inertia” two phenomena whose connection ought to be thought: firstly, the frenzied technological ethics which has just been described (and just possibly this is the character of ethics as such); and, secondly, the attempt to delimit or distinguish a pre- or non-technical realm as such. Phronetic inertia is the stalling which occurs as a result of the attempt to ward off the evil demon nihilism by frantically bringing together something called “ethics” with what Heidegger calls, however generally, “metaphysics” or “technics” or the “average everyday.” It is the inertia that results from a philosophical repression, and it is hard to deny to Heidegger the claim of diagnostician (but does he provide the cure? does he want to? or would this be mere preservation where the more drastic methods of the philosopher-ruler might be overdue?). Whatever conclusions might be drawn from the suggestion that Heidegger’s distinction between

technology

and

the

essence

of

technology

is

always-already

contaminated (which, following Derrida, we are putting here), it cannot be denied that it is Heidegger who proposes locating the true by way of, not by detouring 83

away from, the correct. Ge-stell, “enframing,” as danger as such, is to be pondered by way of dangers as they are interpreted technologically. This is why the extreme danger must always be held in view, though not merely stared at, if the capacity for saving is to be fostered. 29 2. Derrida has brilliantly traced a metaphysics, an economy of the hand in Heidegger. 30 Derrida traces the hand across the texts of Heidegger, noting the ways in which the hand is drawn into discourses on thinking, on logos, on speaking, on writing. He argues that “the hand cannot be spoken about without speaking of technics.”31 Heidegger’s discourse on the hand is split between the hand as the figure of metaphysics (the hand that writes, the hand that gives something, the hand of production) and the hand as what is threatened by metaphysics (the hand that thinks, that gives itself, that constitutes that which is before all production, that holds speech safe), and this split is thought in terms of the primordiality of the hand versus the hand which has forgotten its primordial essence. The hand negotiates between distinctions, so that whereas at one point Heidegger refers to writing as metaphysical compared to speech, writing may also be a now rare handwork (replaced, for instance, by the typewriter), a representative of primordiality itself, in an era of Ge-stell. 32 The hand represents Heidegger’s attempt to hold onto the earliest which has slipped from grasp. This splitting or doubling of the hand repeats the reactive technological gesture which distinguishes praxis from poiesis, or technology from the essence of technology. Is it not possible to see in all these gestures a navigation of Aristotle’s analogy, in De Anima, between the soul and the hand? There, in the course of distinguishing the intellect as the form of forms, Aristotle describes the hand as the tool of tools, that is, the organ of organs, both an organ and yet not an organ, but the exemplary organ. 33 Is the hand the organ of organs of the body, the exemplary case of the governance of the body by the soul, or is it the tool of tools in the sense of the tool that governs the use of tools, the tool that makes possible the use of all tools, the exemplary tool in the sense that is the condition of all productive use of tools? Might we not see the entire of Heidegger’s discourse as structured around what the hand might name here as a problem for thinking, reason, discourse or logos? Might not his entire discourse be structured by a secret valuation of one navigation of the problem of the hand over another? What might be achieved, then, from an encounter with Benjamin who, in the Artwork essay, apparently refused to mourn what he equally perceived as the passing away of the hand? Benjamin wrote there of a devolution of the tasks of hand and tool to eye and lens, but equally of the loss of aura, which is the loss of a power of the eye. Hand and eye are the two philosophically exemplary organa (I say philosophically exemplary, to indicate what organa may be covered up, 84

cloaked, in this economy of technicity of philosophy, and thus this does not mean that other organa may not be at least as important for structuring philosophical discourse, just that they remain invisible, not pointed at in the same way). The destruction or decline of the aura is thus the loss of the power of or capacity for extension, in the sense in which the aura was the appearance of a distance, no matter how near, hence separated from direct perception yet belonging to it (cf. Heidegger, in “Letter on Humanism”: “Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from man” 34). Like Heidegger, Benjamin sees the danger and the possibility of redemption in the thoroughgoing permeation of reality by equipment and, despite all differences of reaction, he sees the possibility of a saving arising from a moment of reality free from all equipment emerging forth from this thoroughgoing permeation. Benjamin’s analogy for the camera operator’s penetration into the heart of reality is the surgeon which, whatever else it indicates, means literally hand-work, and refers to the common source of the Greek words for hand and for cutting. Thus the hand has, from the earliest, always been the hand-as-a-cutting-tool. 3. In “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger writes the following: “When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.” What is meant by this reference to the constellation, to the stellar? He goes on: “The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass.”35 Looking into the essence of technology we behold not poiesis nor Ge-stell, but the coming to pass of revealing and concealing, the genealogy of the essence. But by using “constellation” Heidegger

indicates that this coming to pass is nothing

genealogical, it is not the tracing of a path, a progression, an arrangement according to a law. The arrangement Heidegger refers to is more mysterious, more stellar. Does this primordial, stellar mystery, “constellation” constitute the other side of Ge-stell, the escape from Ge-stell which secretly admits that Ge-stell itself is something technological, even though it is from the consideration of Ge-stell as the danger that the saving power may grow? Does this make “constellation” auratic as, reactively, it takes over the function of the realm which escapes technicity? Hence does it make Heidegger the philosopher-as-stargazer described by Plato? Thus Benjamin writes, “Are not the stars with their distant gaze the Urphänomen of the aura?”36 Yet it is Benjamin who is known as the thinker of the “constellation.” It is Benjamin who, in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel, propounds a type of thinking which leads not to knowledge but to “timeless constellations”37; and who in the Passagenwerk sees the dialectical image emerge from the caesura of 85

thought precisely at the moment when “thinking reaches a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions,” a constellation which is described in the previous fragment as “a constellation of dangers.”38 The philosopher, according to Plato’s parable, is only taken for useless and stargazing, precisely by those who are governed by their bodies, hence by a certain technicity (despite it being the philosopher who, according to Plato, is the truly skilled in the art of kubernetis). Philosophy is hence a poiesis, not a contemplating, thoughtless staring, or gazing, but a navigating by, a finding direction by or being directed by, a reading of, the stars. Does this allow us to begin to think what Benjamin means when he writes, in “On the Mimetic Faculty,” of a writing before all handwork? “‘To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, the dances.”39 All this needs endlessly to be followed out.40 4. A

methodological distinction

(though

all the

previous points are

methodological and more than methodological too). Heidegger’s method, when questioning concerning technology, is to posit that the essence of technology is nothing technological, and to ponder that postulation, to follow it where it leads. Where it leads is to destining, a starting upon a way of revealing, a “sending-thatgathers.”41 We might well ask whether Heidegger’s constellation, which we have already speculated is the other side of Ge-stell, is this other side precisely via a transformation of destining, a making of destining not a sending-that-gathers but a scattering. This is where Benjamin is led when he asks about the essence of technology—to

a

scattering,

a

distraction

(Zerstreuung,

cf.

destruction,

Zerstorung), the distraction of the cinemagoer, which is Benjamin’s hope for the growth of the saving power. To imagine that redemption can now, today or one day, after the advent of cinema, be found in pondering, in concentration is for Benjamin nothing more than to return to auratic conceptions and, we might add, to be reactively technical—it is a shocked response. 42 Pondering, concentration, return to a subjectivity, a subjectivism, which imagines itself a guide, a steering, even if it is a following. Thus methodology, to retain a vulgarly technical concept, needs to find an alternative to the following of a way. Rather than following a way, method, according to Benjamin, is a detour along the way. Heidegger, perhaps, is too direct, too much the pilot. Heidegger refers to the history of revealing, the history of poiesis, as a straight line of admirable simplicity.43 This is not to deny all the claims put forth by Heidegger that he is not advocating the passive contemplation of theoria, but rather something prior to the distinction between theoria and praxis. Perhaps, however, Heidegger failed to adequately think distraction, or was distracted from doing so by the shock of the technological. Perhaps Heidegger received a shock, an impression so powerful 86

that it turned him away from the object of horrified contemplation, that disrupted his subjectivity so that it could never be faced, which distracted him, and from which he never completely recovered. Just perhaps, for does evidence for such shock exist, or could it? And would this shock be Heidegger’s explanation, his excuse, the obstacle which diverted him from the path, or would it be to the extent that he really was shocked, that he really was distracted that, despite himself, he still has something to say? Perhaps he failed to take certain detours. Detours, for example, into the technological. Heidegger, for example, like Aristotle, failed to take a detour into the question of slavery. It is not so much a question of his failing to clear a path for his thinking, for it is the success of his clearing a path which, in Benjamin’s terms, represents the danger. Rather, it is a question of what detours failed to be followed, down what roads he follows which examples. Yet the detour being followed here, through Benjamin’s idea of distraction, comes to a blocking of the way when it is remembered that it is in The Origin of German Trauerspiel, not the Artwork essay, that Benjamin formulated his conception of method as a detour, and that he did so precisely on the grounds that this is what is most proper to contemplation. 44 Yet another detour would be required to get around this roadblock.

VI Let us boldly go where no man has gone before, to the troubled waters likely to be encountered with any introduction of a neologism. Rather than Ge-stell, then, I propose a new name, which is terribly unaesthetic precisely because of its connotations of contamination by what is most of-the-present, the latest technology, the fashionable as opposed to the lasting (if not the always already obsolete): “cybernet.” This name is proposed not on the grounds that it escapes contamination by technicity, but on the contrary that it maintains a different relation to its own contamination and technicity, an admission of being neither wholly within nor beyond technicity. Thus the “cybernet” in every way follows Ge-stell—what is added or taken away from Ge-stell is not something false. Ge-stell undoubtedly refers to what is correct, yet (and this reference to Heidegger’s distinction is ironic precisely to the extent that it is a contaminated distinction) we can say that it is not true. In guiding us toward an understanding of Ge-stell Heidegger, despite everything he has said, relies on a unity of technology and a unity of nature. Once Heidegger introduces Ge-stell he continually invokes “nature” as that which is set upon, challenged forth, by

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modern technology. Heidegger tends to forget his own insistence upon the kinship of techne and physis as poieseis, already noted in An Introduction to Metaphysics. 45 What Heidegger tends to forget is not human plurality, but the plurality of technology, the plurality of the essence of technology. As a destining that is a sending-that-gathers, the history of revealing, the history of the essence of technology, tends to become a one way street. When Heidegger writes about “constellation” we can detect a flicker of remembrance, but the contamination that enters the discourse when we set constellation over against Ge-stell ends up bringing into question the possibility of talking about the essence of technology at all. The cybernet, if it exists, is the weave of essences of technologies. It is, therefore, not a singularity but a constellation. The cybernet remains a harbouring forth, securing, rescuing, pushing off into, also an ordering, steering, governing, controlling, conducting, communicating. Heidegger tried as hard as possible to deny that Ge-stell is that which governs technology along its way, yet there remained an inevitable sense in which it appeared as the guide of technology as Plato saw logos as pilot of the soul, as Aristotle saw the soul as pilot of the body. Strangely it is not by denying the technicity that one avoids this trap but, rather, in admitting its contamination its capacity for governance is transformed. As a net, the cybernet is a trap, just as it is a covering, a protecting, a confining, a holding, a delimiting. All of these must be thought in and beyond technicity. Thus it is a tool, a piece of equipment, including as a piece of equipment in a game. These are things which Ge-stell both is and is not. The cybernet is a navigation of the Scylla and Charybdis of Ge-stell and constellation, yet it remembers that the problem defined by the myth of Scylla and Charybdis was the impossibility of steering between the dangers. The cybernet is approached not by pondering the essence of technology but by navigating at once toward and away from technology. But it is navigating by following a granting, by forging a way, and by detouring along the way. It is a harbouring forth that is always on the verge of turning back to the security of the harbour without ever reaching a destination. It is a following, submitting to technology, yet it is also a guiding, a steering, not through a subject, not through the making subject of itself, but through the continual negotiation of a constellation of dangers, the dangers of imagining a fixed relation to a fixed object named technology. The cybernet is an openwork fabric, neither simply hand-woven nor the tight-knit product of a loom. It is, therefore, more like Heidegger’s tangle of many loose threads.46 Paraphrasing Heidegger, we might say that, although they may be dangers, cyborgs or the internet are not the dangers, nor the saviours, as such. Yet neither is the danger or the possibility of redemption, if there is one, something entirely 88

uncontaminated by the technical world. Paraphrasing Rebecca Comay on Benjamin’s distinction from Heidegger we can say that, unlike Ge-stell, the cybernet names the dangers, names which have remained unchanged since the time of Benjamin and Heidegger, although the forms these names are found in may have changed: these named dangers are of a governance—fascism—and of a journey through/ordering of/pushing off into/out of a place—capitalism.

89

Notes

*This

paper was given at the “Postgraduate Mini-Conference” entitled Cyborgs—Bodies, Technologies, and the Posthuman Condition, held at The Graduate Centre, University of Melbourne, on 1 June, 1996. 1Entry for “cybernetics,” in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. in chief Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 2Plato, Republic VI, 487d–489c, in The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton, 1971), pp. 724–5. All quotations from Plato are taken from this edition. 3Plato, Phaedrus, 247c, in Hamilton and Cairns, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, p. 494. 4Plato, Gorgias, 511b–513c, in Hamilton and Cairns, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, p. 293–5. This is not to argue that the pilot and the rhetorician are identical for Plato. But where do these practitioners of the arts of, respectively, control and communication, differ? The difference is little more than the pilot’s unpretentiousness, his recognition of his place as functionary, as technician, the simplicity with which he recognises his limited role. Kubernetis is an art in the sense that it brings forth its end— the safe bringing forth of passengers through danger—without regard to the meaning of the lives of those passengers: its end lies outside itself. The advocate performs the same task, but incurs the wrath of the philosopher Plato, for whom the art of communication and the value given to it by society serves to obscure the clarity of philosophy in its difference. Thus the difference between the advocate and the pilot in this dialogue is precisely that the advocate may be mistaken for the philosopher, that the nonphilosopher may lose or fail to possess the means to distinguish them. If there is still something philosophical about the kubernetes, it is in the humility with which he accepts the magnitude of his distance from the philosopher, from the philosopher-ruler, from the government.

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5Cf.

Dennis J. Schmidt, “Economies of Production: Heidegger and Aristotle on Physis and Techne,” in Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E. Scott, and P. Holley Roberts (eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 1990), p. 148. 6Pindar, “Olympian XII,” 1–5 in The Odes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 129. 7Heraclitus, Fragments (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto, 1987), Fragment 41, p. 31. 8Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, rev. and expanded edn. (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 217. 9Ibid., p. 262. 10Pindar, “Pythian V,” 122–3, p. 186. 11Entry for “cyborg,” in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 12Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair and Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 1255a1–1255a8, p. 65. 13Ibid., 1255b, p. 73. 14See Eugene Garver, “Aristotle’s Natural Slaves: Incomplete Praxeis and Incomplete Human Beings,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1994): 173–95. 15See, for example, Richard J. Bernstein, “Heidegger’s Silence?: Ethos and Technology,” in The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1991). 16Cf. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 218. 17Robert Bernasconi, “The Fate of the Distinction Between Praxis and Poiesis,” in Heidegger in Question (New Jersey: Humanities, 1993), pp. 21–2. 18Heidegger, cited in Franco Volpi, “Being and Time: A ‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics,” in Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the Start (Albany: SUNY, 1994), p. 210. See also Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics θ 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana, 1995), ch. 2, on dynamis meta logou, and Walter Brogan’s discussion in “Heidegger and Aristotle: Dasein and the Question of Practical Life,” in Dallery, Scott and Roberts, Crises in Continental Philosophy, p. 139. 19Cf. Walter Benjamin, “N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress],” in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History

91

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1989), [N 5a, 7] p. 56: “Barbarism inheres in the very concept of culture: taken as the concept of a hoard of values that is independent, not of the production process from which those values emerged, but of the process in which they survive. In this way, they serve the apotheosis of the latter, no matter how barbaric it may be.” 20Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 95–6. This claim is in a sense empirically confirmed by Hugo Ott in his biography of Heidegger. In the chapter entitled “Philosophy derided, or: what is humanism?” Ott reveals the internal disputes over the concept of humanism, and over what constitutes the true, proper National Socialist variant of humanism. This dispute over humanism is in fact conducted as an argument between humanisms, thus in a sense within humanism. Furthermore, Heidegger’s perceived antihumanism, or his relativising concept of humanism (as Ott puts it), is the basis in 1941–42 for censorship of Heidegger (diluted to censorship of references to Heidegger). And what is even more significant for our discussion, the point at which Heidegger elicits National Socialist ire is the point at which he locates the joint origin of humanism and metaphysics in the thought of Plato. Listen to Heidegger: The beginning of metaphysics in Plato’s thought also marks the beginning of “humanism.” This term is to be seen as essential to this discussion and therefore understood in its broadest possible meaning. In this sense “humanism” refers to the process encompassed by the beginning, development and end of metaphysics, whereby man moves in all kinds of different ways, but always knowingly, towards a centre of being in the world, without thereby becoming the highest entity of being in the world. The term “man” can refer here to mankind or humanity in general, the individual or a community, a nation or a group of nations. Within the fixed metaphysical framework of being in the world the aim is always the same: to lead “man” as defined here, the animal rationale, to the liberation of his capacities, the certainty of his destiny and the safeguarding of his “life.” This may take the form of shaping his “moral” attitudes, redeeming his immortal soul, developing his creative, powers, training his intellect, cultivating his personality, awakening his public spirit, disciplining the body—or a suitable combination of some or all of these “humanisms.” Each of these endeavours is a metaphysically determined attempt to encompass man in greater or smaller orbits. As metaphysics comes to perfection, so too “humanism” (or anthropology, to use the Greek term) strives to take the most forward and extreme—which is to say, absolute—”positions.”

Heidegger, “Plato’s Theory of Truth,” cited in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 286–7. We cannot begin to offer a commentary on this passage, but we can at least note two points. Firstly, that although here the “beginning of ‘humanism’” is marked in Plato’s thought, it is only a few years later that Heidegger, as we shall see, will write that humanism is first encountered in Rome. Without too quickly wishing to claim that there is necessarily a contradiction here, there is at least the suggestion that by the time of the “Letter on Humanism” National Socialism, in its essential relation to humanism, is understood as a repetition not of Athens but of Rome. Secondly, that this joint origin of metaphysics and humanism is understood with reference to a conception of humanism as the mere safekeeping of life. As we have noted, however, it is precisely this conception of kubernetis that Plato rejects in order, we have speculated, to safeguard his own political philosophising. Does Heidegger then repeat Plato’s initial act of decontamination? We might just as easily say that it is Heidegger who diagnoses the unavoidability of this contamination, even if we determine that at this point Heidegger believes that the term

92

“humanism” is precisely what should be avoided. On the historical and philosophical intricacies of Nazism as a humanism, see also Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard, 1993). 21Heidegger,

“Letter on Humanism,” p. 224 (emphasis added). 22Aristotle, The Politics, 1252a, p. 57. 23See Jacques Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium,” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987), pp. 180–1. 24Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven and London: Yale, 1959), p. 199. I have cited the version Heidegger published in 1953 because his alterations, not coincidentally, resound with the themes Heidegger was grappling with in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953, expanded from a paper given in 1949), themes with which we are attempting to deal here. As we now know, what Heidegger actually said was “What is nowadays touted as the philosophy of National Socialism, but in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with the inward truth and greatness of National Socialism, is given to fishing around in these murky waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.’” Heidegger, cited in Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 294. In 1935 Heidegger’s attempt to clear the waters is a sheltering operation to protect the ideal of National Socialism from the value-laden philosophies of National Socialism. In 1953, then, he finds it necessary to shelter this sheltering, to conduct a double process of sheltering, a double insulation of his thought, in which his thought is protected not only from contamination by National Socialist philosophies of values, but from identification with Nazism at all. What has shifted in the change from “of National Socialism” to “of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)”? In both cases Heidegger is claiming his thought as a thinking of the essence of National Socialism, but in the latter variant the meaning of the “of” has shifted, no longer signifying (at least this is Heidegger’s intention) a “belonging to” National Socialism. What in 1935 was the problem in terms of a saving (of what—Germany? philosophy? Europe?) in 1953 is the problem in terms of being itself the signifier of supreme danger. This formulation of the shift from 1935 to 1953, when viewed in the light of “The Question Concerning Technology,” naturally leaves everything still to be determined in terms of the relation between the saving power and the danger in Heidegger’s thought. 25Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 57. 26Aristotle,

The Politics, 1255a, p. 71.

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27See

Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Silence,” in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990). 28George Steiner, Heidegger (London: Fontana, 2nd edn., 1992), p. 99. See p. 123 on Heidegger’s silence as “very nearly intolerable.” 29Cf. Rebecca Comay, “Framing Redemption,” in Dallery, Scott, and Roberts (eds.), Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1992), pp. 160–1. 30Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1987). 31Ibid., p. 169. 32See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” pp. 246–7. 33Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), ch. 8, 432a, p. 210. 34Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 234. 35Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 33. 36Benjamin, cited in Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179–224. 37Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 34. 38Benjamin, “[N],” [N 10a, 3] and [N 10a, 2], pp. 66–7. 39Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1978), pp. 162–3. 40Cf. Comay, “Framing Redemption,” pp. 155–61. 41Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 24. 42Cf. Peter Larsen, “Benjamin at the Movies: Aura, Gaze and History in the Artwork Essay,” Orbis Litterarum 48 (1993), p. 121. 43Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 46. Cf. Comay, “Framing Redemption,” p. 156. 44See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 28. 45Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 16. 46Heidegger, cited in Comay, “Framing Redemption,” p. 156.

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Notes toward a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”

1996

Framing Walter Benjamin’s fifteen theses in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” are a preface and an epilogue which place them into an explicitly political context, and in which it becomes clear that of crucial importance to Benjamin’s thinking is the question of the proper response to the dangers represented by capitalism and by fascism. In the preface Benjamin argues that Marx’s analysis of the emergent capitalist mode of production was constructed in order to be of prognostic value, and Benjamin himself wishes to repeat this analysis, but in relation not to the economy but to the more slowly changing realm of culture and art. He would like to “brush aside” certain aesthetic concepts, such as “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery,” which he judges as leading toward fascism. 1 In the epilogue, Benjamin argues more generally and more specifically for a relation between aesthetics and fascism. More generally, that is, because it is not certain aesthetic concepts so much as aestheticisation in general which characterises fascism. More specifically, because Benjamin offers an explanation of the precise nature of this fascist tendency toward aestheticisation. Fascism is nothing other, he argues, than the attempt to organise the proletarian mass but, rather than responding to their legitimate desire to change the property structure, instead by giving the proletariat “a chance to express themselves […] The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”2 This gap between desire or demand, and expression, is a type of alienation that reaches its widest point in the Fascist ability to experience its own destruction as pleasurable. “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.”3 Benjamin’s response, given in the name of communism, to the alienation represented by the aestheticisation of politics, is an apparent inversion: “Communism responds by politicising art.”4 The challenge of Benjamin’s theses is to grasp this opposition. At first glance Benjamin appears to be offering something like a theory of technological determinism, in which not only the content of artworks, but the nature of art itself, and in fact the nature of perception in general, changes historically in accordance with the development of technique. Benjamin’s focus in this regard is the invention of photography and film which, he argues, fundamentally shift human perception and the idea of art. This shift occurs, he claims, because of a leap in reproducibility brought about by these developments. 96

This leap had two immediate consequences for art: firstly, it meant reproductions of existing artworks could be easily produced and disseminated; secondly, it meant the introduction of film and photography as new art forms themselves. 5 Benjamin’s theses largely take the form of asking about the meaning of these two consequences. The invention of photography struck at what Benjamin refers to as the authenticity of the work of art. This is most obviously the fact that a painting, for example, exists in only one place at any one time. The authenticity of the work depended upon its possession of a unique history, a testimony of that unique object’s “experience.” This authenticity of the work is lost with the photographic reproduction of a painting because photography is able to bring forth new perspectives on a work (e.g. microscopic, or X-ray photography), and because the painting will meet the viewer halfway. That is, the viewer’s experience of the work no longer involves a crossing of paths at a unique moment between the individual and the unique work. What is lost is the authority of the original object. To view a painting previously meant encountering it in the same way it was encountered by everybody, and most likely for a long time past. To encounter the work meant to step into the domain of tradition, and this authority of the art object depended upon this attachment to tradition. The combined effect of the existence of a plurality of copies, and of meeting the viewer in a plurality of possible situations, was a “tremendous shattering of tradition.”6 At this point Benjamin introduces the central concept of his theses—aura— which is initially defined negatively as that which decays with the invention of technical reproduction. In order to elucidate this concept Benjamin offers a view of the origin of art in the cult. Art’s original use stemmed from its service to the ritual of a cult, and this ritual use value was the basis of the authenticity of art even in later ages. The magical aura of the artwork stems from its ritual origin, and the maintenance of the aura depends upon a continued relation between art and its ritual function. Even during the Renaissance when art had no explicit ritual or religious function, this ritual aspect is maintained in the cult of beauty. And with the final decline of ritual indicated by the invention of photography, art makes a last ditch effort to save the aura by developing a theology of art, the idea of l’art pour l’art. Mechanical reproduction, however, ensures that this emancipation of the artwork from a dependence on ritual is finally achieved. But if art can no longer rely on the authenticity derived from an association with ritual, then the function of art is profoundly altered. Benjamin argues that when art can no longer be based on ritual, it “begins to be based on another practice— politics.”7 Thus the positive political potential of the decay of aura is revealed.

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This apparent technological determinism has been attacked by Peter Bürger on the grounds that Benjamin’s history of art is too simplistic. Benjamin ignores important differences in the ritual function of art between medieval and bourgeois art. To reduce the idea of l’art pour l’art to a reaction to the loss of aura advented by photography is implausible, and denies more general considerations of the function of art. Bürger does not deny that a “reritualisation” of art occurred with the notion of l’art pour l’art, but he offers a partial defense of this idea. Bürger argues that the idea of l’art pour l’art was part of a movement of self-critique of art associated with the enlightenment critique of religion. Benjamin ignores this progressive aspect by forcing the entire history of art into one function defined as ritual. If this progressive aspect is limited, it is not primarily because it was a reaction to photography, but because of more general material social changes, most importantly the ever-increasing division of labour, and the consequent separation of the artist from other realms of experience. If Benjamin reduces the emancipatory potential of art to certain technological developments and to these alone, ignoring art’s potential for self-generated critique, Bürger argues, then this supposed emancipation becomes merely a continued enslavement to technology. 8 In order to mount a defense of Benjamin against Bürger it is necessary to look more closely at the concept of aura, since it is supposedly in the decline of this phenomenon that the contemporary political potential of art lies. Photography facilitates the decay of the aura, as we have said, by meeting the viewer halfway, and by the multiplication of copies. But Benjamin also argues that these two effects of photography mirror a twin desire of the masses, which form the social bases of the decay of the aura. These are the desire to “bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly”; and the desire to overcome “the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”9 Overcoming the aura hence means overcoming uniqueness and distance. Thus Benjamin defines the aura as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”10 This, however, is still to define the aura negatively, in terms of what is lost when it decays. To try to approach the aura more positively, Benjamin relies on a methodological detour, drawing on the perception of natural objects for an understanding of the aura of historical objects: “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”11 Peter Larsen draws several conclusions from these two analogies with the aura of the artwork. Firstly, that they are based on a visual perception, that they are the figure of “a subject looking at an object.”12 Secondly, and consequently, that the aura is not of the object, the mountain range or the branch, but rather a characteristic of the relation to the object, or of the experience of the object. But this is more than an 98

analogy, since elsewhere Benjamin describes the aura as in fact “the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man.”13 Thus the examples of the branch and the mountain range are already in a sense metaphoric transpositions of the aura. Benjamin goes on: “The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”14 The distance and uniqueness of the aura are thus to some extent clarified. The uniqueness of the aura lies in the uniqueness of the gaze, and the distance, however close it may be, is the distance between the looking subject and the subject as looked at. Each gaze that falls upon us is individual, and the exact meaning of the gaze, the precise intention of the one who is observing us, remains a mystery. Hence the contemporary desire to overcome the aura, to overcome distance spatially and humanly, to overcome the uniqueness of every reality, is the desire to overcome the unique distance of the gaze of the other. Benjamin appears to have defined the aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by a process of double transposition, or by a double metaphor. Firstly, he has defined the aura of the artwork by reference to natural objects, and secondly the aura of natural objects has been defined by reference to human relations. We could also say that the aura of the artwork thus represents a double alienation, since it is the transposition of a transposition, or the fetishisation of a historical object treated as a natural object, itself fetishised by being treated as a human relation. But even this is too simple, for the human gaze from which these transpositions derive, is itself, according to Benjamin, a fetish, a cult formation. It is for this reason that early portrait photography was an example of resistance to the decline of aura, the ultimate retrenchment in the human countenance. “The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.”15 Human expression, the gaze, is itself auratic, and it is only with Atget, and the emptying of the portrait from photography, that the aura is emancipated. This emancipation, however, is not of humanity, or of the uniqueness of the human individual, for this, too, is mythical, “an objectified distance.”16 But if Benjamin rejects the gaze of the other as a mythological mystery, how is a practice of politics opened up with the loss of aura? To answer this question requires examining how Benjamin understands film. Benjamin puts forth a number of arguments concerning the nature of film. He argues that the reception of the screen actor is different to the stage actor, because his performance is broken up into individual shots, because he cannot respond to the audience. That is, the actor forgoes his aura. He argues further 99

that this places the audience in a new position, whereby rather than identifying with the actor, the audience actually identifies with the camera. The lack of presence of the actor means that the audience is able to avoid personal contact and, like the camera, takes the position of the critic, of testing the actor. The lack of aura dispels the mystery of identification, and leads to a type of objectivity. Distance is overcome, and the audience, via the camera, and like the surgeon objectively cutting into the body, penetrates deeply into reality. He argues also that film enables a mass progressive reaction to the loss of aura, whereas more traditional art forms (Picasso, surrealism) which also responded to the loss of aura, produced a reactionary response from the public. This is supposedly because media such as painting are ill-suited to collective experience. Movements such as surrealism, by virtue of their dependence upon traditional media, invite the viewer to an auratic reaction, to contemplation of the work, and simultaneously deny the validity of this individual response. Film, on the other hand, invites a non-auratic response, and hence the audience is able collectively to enjoy this loss of aura, and equally to respond critically. But because film presents a fragmented, cut-up, yet incessant stream of images (the shock effect of the film), it interferes with the ability of the audience to concentrate, to freely associate, to contemplate the meaning of its experiences. Thus the mode in which this progressive potential of film is awakened is one of distraction rather than contemplation. What the audience learns gradually to perceive through the habitual distraction of film, according to Benjamin, is, firstly, humanity’s relation to apparatus, to technology (specifically to the technology of representation) and, secondly, humanity’s relation to its environment. Where the aura is dispelled, the relation of subject and object comes into view. Aura is the mystification of this relation, and film is the potential for learning about this relation. All the aspects of experience, of both the natural and the technological world, which previously have been veiled by the aura, are opened to examination by the camera. Benjamin understands this through the metaphor of psychoanalysis: “Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man […] The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”17 All the aspects of experience which are habitual or perceived only in a distracted form are unconscious. The optical unconscious is not uncovered in the depths of experience but in the surface of experience, that which is passed over in experience as merely everyday but which frames experience in general. The shock effect of the film deflects the audience from the object. In fact, the shock is that with the loss of aura comes the fragmentation of the object. The aura of the thing was in fact its thingness, its mythical constitution of a distance 100

from the subject and as an object of contemplation. But the shock effect rebounds also on the viewing subject. In becoming a distracted subject, in discovering the optical unconscious, the subject as the centre of reason and perception (the basic assumption of the auratic mode of contemplation) is thrown into question. 18 There is another consequence of the optical unconscious, which illuminates why these modes of shock and distraction offer political potential. As Hansen points out, with the idea of the optical unconscious Benjamin “readmits dimensions of temporality and historicity into his vision of the cinema.”19 The unconscious, even the optical unconscious, defines a gap between a present experience and one which has been lost to consciousness. The optical unconscious represents that aspect of past experience which can no longer be brought voluntarily to consciousness. And thus the aura is not only a spatial distance but a temporal one. Aura is a “strange weave of space and time.”20 Perhaps in referring to the contemporary desire to overcome distance humanly as well as spatially, Benjamin had in mind not a cult of the unique subject, not a desire to bring the human subject into immediate presence, but a dispelling of the aura surrounding that aspect of historical experience which is apparently irretrievably lost to consciousness. That Benjamin conceived of this temporal aspect of the optical unconscious is shown by his association of the aura, and specifically of the mystique of the gaze, with Proust’s mémoire involontaire.21 The political potential located in film lies with its ability to uncover what is lost in historical experience through the dissimulation of the aura, and film does this by shocking us into awareness of the optical unconscious. In other words, the experience of the aura is the fleeting perception of what in history must normally remain hidden. 22 We can now begin to see why Bürger misreads Benjamin when he argues that the aura is a concept employed by Benjamin to produce a falsely concrete history of art’s relation to technology, and when he argues that Benjamin fails to perceive the role of art’s self-critique. Bürger fails to take seriously the complexity of Benjamin’s concept of aura. The aura marks the repression of the historicity of the object and, as always, repression leads only to the continual return of the repressed. It is the presence of the aura, then, that explains art’s history of selfcritique, its tendency to lead beyond the inadequacy of its present. 23 Rather than denying that art responds to its own inadequacies, Benjamin explicitly argues that art creates a “demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.”24 Benjamin’s example was Dada, which he saw as destroying the aura through shock, and hence as anticipating and as demanding the introduction of film. Bürger claims that Benjamin cannot explain this 101

“pioneering” aspect of Dada, but this is only because he ascribes to Benjamin a concept of aura which is nothing more than a name for what gets discarded in a materialist process of secularisation. 25 What this example shows, however, is that every art form contains the seeds of its own overcoming, that every art form points beyond its own existence, and that it does this through what the aura contains and conceals. Aura defines what is absent in the present, but an absence which is a potential. The aura is in fact always concealed in the present, and is viewed only in retrospect.26 Bürger thus mistakes for a simple historical category what in fact represents a difficult epistemological problem. Benjamin does not fail to perceive that film may be auratic. He discusses the film studio response to the loss of aura by the creation of the cult of the movie star, the personality as commodity, and the creation of “spectacles and speculations.”27 If the aestheticisation of politics represents the fascist appropriation of film, we can only wonder how much of contemporary cinema Benjamin would have deemed to be tainted by a fascist aesthetic. Furthermore, Benjamin notes the impossibility of the political potential he locates in film being actualised “so long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion,” that is, so long as property relations remain essentially unaltered. 28 The loss of aura, therefore, clearly does not represent a clean break. Here, perhaps, is a clue to Benjamin’s continuous description of aura via metaphor. Aura eludes final definition in the present because it represents what fails to appear in the present. To speak of a final loss of aura is always to speak in terms of a possible future, as pointed out by Geulen. 29 The concept of aura fulfils a dual role as analytical concept when referred to the historical past, and as a political concept when referred to the present. As a political concept it represents that unconscious aspect of experience in the present perceivable only from the future, and which, from such a utopian future, will be apparent as that from which we presently remain to be emancipated.30 It is the ambiguity of the concept of aura, the necessary uncertainty of its definition (or, in Benjamin’s terms, its dialectical nature), his attempt to think the concept from the ground of our possible future redemption as much as from its historical past, that finally represents Benjamin’s attempt to provide an understanding of art which is of prognostic value. The determination of the success of this attempt today lies as much in the future as it did in 1936.

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Postscript As should be clear from the elusiveness of the concept of aura, to ask about the meaning of Benjamin’s theses today is always a project fraught with virtual impossibility. We could ask about changes in the reception of cinema today, about the meaning of television or even more contemporary phenomena such as the digitalisation of aural and visual art. How have these phenomena revealed auratic aspects not yet apparent in Benjamin’s time? What do they say about the current state of the potential claimed by Benjamin? Are we closer today to a cinema that leads us toward a conceptualisation of the optical unconscious, or are we more entangled in spectacle than ever? These are important questions, but rather than attempting to answer them directly I will ask a different and perhaps less crucial question. How might printmaking be seen to have responded to the phenomena described by Benjamin? Benjamin mentions the woodcut briefly in the first thesis as significant in that for the first time graphic art became mechanically reproducible.31 In a footnote he remarks that the woodcut struck at the root of authenticity.32 Also in his genealogy of reproduction, he mentions the lithograph as significantly achieving, through its abilities to produce many copies and to accelerate the process, a new stage in which graphic art was able to keep pace with the printing of words. Thus the lithograph “virtually implied the illustrated newspaper.”33 It was, however, only a matter of decades before the invention of photography, and thus the lithograph was in a sense still-born. Are we thus to see the significance of printmaking as lying entirely in the past, and as existing in the present only as a minor and residual form? Perhaps it is this status as a remnant that defines printmaking’s significance. In a footnote, Benjamin analyses Cubism and Futurism as deficient attempts (compared, for example, to Dada) to “accommodate the pervasion of reality by the apparatus.”34 These movements failed to adequately respond to the demand that film eventually satisfied. Benjamin notes that they did not try to use the apparatus as such, “but aimed at some sort of alloy in the joint presentation of reality and apparatus.”35 We might describe printmaking as a medium which in general takes the form of such an alloy. If photography, as Benjamin noted, “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved upon the eye looking into a lens,” then printmaking’s joint presentation of reality and apparatus consists of its demand for a persistent interrelation between hand and apparatus.36 Does this interrelation represent merely an archaic form or has it potential to illuminate aspects of the optical unconscious? Is it not that

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printmaking is in a unique position to demonstrate the interrelation of hand and apparatus precisely because of its apparent archaism? Printmaking invokes a forgotten memory of the prehistory of mechanical reproduction. By virtue of having opened the history of mechanical reproduction it sits on a boundary between an archaic and a modern form of experience. The woodcut, therefore, reminds us of something primitive, yet it is also the opening of an epoch of industrialism. We might say the same of pottery-making or woodworking, and perhaps the only distinction to be claimed for printmaking is that, in constituting a type of graphic art, that is, in being primarily a visual art, it offers the artist greater scope for bringing into a constellation this primitive aspect of technique with modern conditions of perception and experience. How? Perhaps a good example of printmaking which opens up perspectives on a type of optical unconscious are the prints of Antoni Tàpies.37 At first glance much of this work appears to fit neatly into abstract expressionism. Thus, like much of printmaking, this work might be seen to be an attempt to produce painterly effects through different means. In some ways this is so. Everything about these prints, however, suggests a distance from expressionism. The emphasis on grainy textuality, on the multiple means by which marks and lines are produced, on the multiplicity of techniques, all point toward an explicit statement of distance from painting. Unlike abstract expressionism in painting, printmaking cannot instantly create its effects. Printmaking is defined in opposition to painting by the time, thought and attention required for every one of the many moments necessary for the final production of a print, from conception, to the choice of type of print, to the selection of means for markmaking, to the selection of inks and the inking process, to the actual printing. Tàpies’ focus is on the process, on the technique, and if the result is expressive this is only through a complex relation of human reality to apparatus. What his prints depict as much as anything is the process of their formation. Thus the artifice of any semblance of the expression of the artist’s emotional state is highlighted. The auratic nature of abstract expressionism, with its tendency towards the idea of pure art or l’art pour l’art as the last resistance of art to the destruction of aura, is exposed in Tàpies’ prints precisely to the degree that it mimics the form of abstract expressionist painting. But if the idea of the artist expressing his true being through the work to some extent recedes in this type of printmaking, perhaps we can also say that it constitutes an expression of technique itself. That is, it begins to show us in what way technique itself is already a form of expression, an expression for instance of the relation of reality and apparatus, of hand and tool. Tàpies’ prints, while obviously man-made, somehow remind us of natural or primitive marks. Some of the works seem like a gigantic photographic enlargement of a microscopic detail 104

from some more conventional work, reminiscent of Benjamin’s claim that such photography can illuminate the optical unconscious by providing new perspectives and hence destroys the claim to authenticity of the work. These prints focus attention on the surface, revealing aspects of the optical unconscious involving the prehistory of technology in general, the forgotten origin of humanity’s markmaking on the world. If through this association there is the danger of a reauraticisation of art by reference to a mythological past, the obvious modernity of the works serves to demonstrate that such a past is a history of the loss of aura. Thus, perhaps, it is not necessarily only the most modern technological developments which give us clues to the ways in which we unconsciously perceive and react to the artwork, and to art as the expression of work.

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Notes

1Walter

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 211–2. 2Ibid., p. 234. 3Ibid., p. 235. 4Ibid. 5Ibid.,

pp. 213–4. 6Ibid., p. 215. 7Ibid., pp. 218. 8Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), pp. 27–34. 9Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 217. 10Ibid., p. 216. 11Ibid. 12Peter Larsen, “Benjamin at the Movies: Aura, Gaze and History in the Artwork Essay,” Orbis Litterarum 48 (1993), p. 115. 13Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, p. 184. 14Ibid. 15Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 219. 16Rodolphe Gasché, “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,” in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 193. 17Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 230, emphasis added. 18This line of argumentation is largely based on the reading of Gasché. See Gasché, “Objective Diversions,” pp. 194–8.

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19Miriam

Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’,” New German Critique 40 (1987), p. 217. 20Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (Verso: London and New York, 1979), p. 250, emphasis added. 21See Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 184, where he writes the following: “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of the mémoire involontaire. (These data, incidentally, are unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend support to a concept of the aura that comprises the ‘unique manifestation of a distance.’ […]) Proust’s great familiarity with the problem of the aura requires no emphasis. Nevertheless, it is notable that he alludes to it at times in terms which comprehend its theory: ‘Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them.’ (The ability, it would seem, of returning the gaze.) ‘They believe that monuments and pictures present themselves only beneath the delicate veil which centuries of love and reverence on the part of so many admirers have woven about them. This chimera,’ Proust concludes evasively, ‘would change into truth if they related it to the only reality that is valid for the individual, namely, the world of his emotions.’” 22See Alison Gill and Freida Riggs, “The Angst of the Aura,” in Tony Fry (ed.), R/U/A/TV? Heidegger and the Televisual (Sydney: Power Publications, 1993), p. 94. 23See Gasché, “Objective Diversions,” p. 194. 24Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 230. 25Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 29. 26See Gill and Riggs, “The Angst of the Aura,” p. 96. 27Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 226. 28Ibid., p. 224. 29“The theory of aura is the attempt to describe history not only in practical terms, but theoretically as well from a position for which no factual ground exists as yet. In other words, the concept of aura must mark out and localise itself in the essay itself. Aura belongs to the vocabulary of a possible, futural historiography. As anticipation of the future, the aura

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achieves intervention in history, stating, in this manner, what is now. That the specificity of traditional art consisted of its aura, can show itself only, when and in so far as it has lost this character. The perception of aura arises from its loss.” Eva Geulen, quoted in Gasché, “Objective Diversions,” p. 202, n. 3. 30See Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” p. 210. 31Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 212–3. 32Ibid., p. 237, n. 2. 33Ibid., p. 213. 34Ibid., p. 243, n. 20. 35Ibid. 36Ibid., p. 213. 37See Deborah Wye, Antoni Tàpies in Print (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991).

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Breathing space

1996

We are the dogs who are crushed by the silence, who long to break through it, literally to get a breath of fresh air […] Our generation is lost, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier ones. I can understand the hesitation of my generation, indeed it is no longer mere hesitation; it is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times; and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time? But I fancy I understand the hesitation of our forefathers too, we would probably have acted just as they did; indeed I could almost say: well for us that it was not we who had to take the guilt upon us, that instead we can hasten in almost guiltless silence toward death in a world darkened by others. Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”

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On February 7, 1964, the day before Siegfried Kracauer’s seventy-fifth birthday, Theodor W. Adorno gave a talk, entitled “Der wunderliche Realist,” in honour of his lifelong friend. * Despite some criticisms of Kracauer’s work by Adorno, Frankfurt School hagiographer Martin Jay claimed that “the barbs in Adorno’s birthday tribute were submerged in the generally positive and appreciative tone of the piece.”1 What appears submerged, and what plainly visible on or above the surface, however, is largely a function of the position from which one is viewing, or chooses to view. That Kracauer viewed things from a somewhat different perspective is demonstrated by his note, affixed to his copy of Adorno’s paper, which characterised the “tribute” as “this emotionally laden, slanderous article of TWA who does not shrink from telling falsehoods.”2 What is it that Kracauer sees, and that Jay recognises only to deny, as though these “barbs” could be perceived only by the members of the inner sanctum, or by the close family that would understand the familial context that situates such friendly jabs? Family and friends: these figures are appropriate, not merely to fit intellectual history into a pre-determined Oedipal narrative, but rather because Adorno’s piece itself is so suggestive of a complex interrelation between philosophy and psychology, of intellectual fathers and sons, an interrelation in which these positions are not clearly given but are a site of struggle over the course of decades. If Adorno begins as Kracauer’s pupil, reading Kant with him on Saturday mornings, 3 the tale ends with Adorno, now the father of Critical Theory, assisting his old, and less successful friend to republish some of his earlier work (The Mass Ornament, his novel Ginster), and hence helping him, in the words of Jay, to “achieve a modest degree of immortality.”4 Or taking his measure, not for the “sport jacket and cap” that “[i]ntellectually, as it were, Kracauer dresses up in” (CR 67), so much as measuring him for a coffin. A number of discursive strategies are used by Adorno to ensure Kracauer’s modest degree of immortality (and Adorno insists—why?—that no patronising ought be mixed in with a reading of Kracauer [CR 73]), not the least of which is his noting a virtue of Kracauer’s, giving credit for it, making a gift of it, an offering, only the better to take it away later. As we shall see. How to more clearly define the “author’s image,” to sketch “Kracauer’s spiritual character, guided more by its potential than by what was concretely 111

realised” (CR 58)? How to express Kracauer’s unique insight? This is Adorno’s problem, and his first poisoned gift to Kracauer. Even to ask it is to presuppose something about the relation of “objectivity” to “subjectivity,” of “truth” to a way of seeing. A unique insight may be one previously unseen, unrevealed, or it may be a vision “unique” to the subject which experiences it, that is, peculiar to Kracauer. Asking this question sets up Kracauer for Adorno’s critique, for it is the uniqueness of Kracauer’s insight, his refusal to capitulate in the face of Others’ reason, in the face of what Kracauer himself clearly sees, clearly must see, that is the basis for this critique. In holding firm to his own subjectivity, to his own unique insight, Adorno argues, Kracauer not only sacrifices objective truth. Kracauer’s stubborn subjectivism represses his own awareness of the limits of that subjectivity, and hence he fails to be true to himself, to do justice to his unique subjectivity. All this follows from Adorno staking a claim for Kracauer’s originality. How to express Kracauer’s unique insight? In Adorno’s view, “what pressed for philosophical expression in him was an almost boundless capacity for suffering”—a sensitivity, an ability to perceive and expose the suffering that lies behind the idea (CR 59). Kracauer transforms experience/suffering into the expression of a vision, the vision of homeless spirit: Kracauer’s experiential stance remained that of the foreigner, transposed into the realm of spirit. He thinks as though he had transformed the childhood trauma of problematic membership into a mode of vision for which everything appears as it would on a journey (CR 67).5

If Kracauer rejected his early (ten-year) career as an architect, the “primacy of the optical that architecture requires remained with him in sublimated form” (CR 61). What Kracauer expresses is “sober seeing,” and this “primacy of the optical” is nothing more than a re-expression of the intimate relation of suffering and expression itself, for “the oppressed may well become master of their sufferings with such a gaze” (CR 61). Positive and appreciative enough. Yet immediately Adorno draws us to question, as though there is still something contaminating about this relation between suffering and the idea, something too material, as though Adorno is uncomfortable with establishing too close a proximity with an idea which smacks a little of ressentiment. In the same paragraph Adorno writes that Kracauer’s thinking is “more contemplation than thought” (CR 61), that is, a thinking that is barely thinking at all. This is a theme endlessly repeated in Adorno’s “tribute,” which talks of the great constructions of philosophy (not Kracauer’s major, we are told) as remaining essentially alien to Kracauer (what has happened to the “exceptionally gifted” pedagogical Kant exegesis of Adorno’s youth?), of an 112

amateurish thinking on his feet, of an aversion to unrestrained thought, of a tendency toward theoretical inconsistency and hence impotence within reality, of the moviegoer’s naïve delight, all to characterise his friend’s unthinking thought. Kracauer’s capacity for the transformation of suffering is taken away from him: even before Kracauer’s move to Berlin in 1930 “he had decided to abjure his capacity for suffering and vowed to be happy” (CR 70). And Kracauer’s primacy of the optical is taken away, too, through what, speaking Freudian (and it is Adorno himself who here—symptomatically?—refers to Freud), looks like a patricidal operation, a reduction of the father, the adult, to the infantile. For Kracauer’s suffering is seen, in the last paragraph of Adorno’s piece, not as the transformation of childhood trauma, but as the legacy of that trauma as an inability to grow up and a compensatory, futile determination to be a real adult (Kracauer’s childhood dream, in all its brevity—“A foreign tribe has robbed me”— is cited [CR 74–5]). 6 Kracauer’s half-thinking is a fearful reaction, a need to see the

benignness

in things,

a

philosophy

of

just proportions

leading to

“moderationism,” an undialectical incapacity to penetrate reality that, in the end, lets reality stand as it is (all these are Adorno’s phrases). Kracauer’s primacy of the optical, Adorno ends his paper, is a reification of the world of objects as substitute for the human world rejected by the child which suspects it has been abandoned. In attempting to lure indiscernible life from objects, Kracauer’s philosophy is thus a paranoid, perverted Lebensphilosophie. Something about Kracauer seems to invite this reduction to the psychological. At least, it seems as if Adorno holds him responsible for it. Kracauer appears to Adorno as a man with no skin, as though, paranoiacally, everything external attacked his “defenseless interior,” as though he defends himself only by “giving voice to his vulnerability” (CR 59). Adorno writes as though he is compelled to dwell on Kracauer’s “interior” because of the latter’s shameless unveiling in public, his giving voice to what ought, for the sake of philosophical integrity if not public decency, remain concealed, unwhispered. Adorno is resentfully drawn against his will through Kracauer’s provocative exhibitionism to attack precisely at the point Kracauer expects, at the relation of his theory to his psychology, to his experience. And thus it is that Adorno’s critique of Kracauer’s supposed refusal to maintain theoretical consistency presumes

that

Kracauer’s

fault lies in a

brash

display/defense of subjectivity, as though Kracauer believes he can overcome inconsistency by holding his ground against all argument through a bravura show of personality alone. But “the conflict between experience and theory cannot be conclusively decided in favour of one side or the other but is truly an antinomy and must be played out in such a way that the contrary elements interpenetrate one another” (CR 64). So Adorno sententiously berates. 113

That theory and experience are intertwined in Kracauer’s work is a theme which recurs frequently in commentary upon it, even in those readings of the last few years which have begun an admirable reassessment of its political and philosophical implications. These more contemporary readings are conducted against the dismissals by film theorists of Kracauer as a naïve realist, as well as against Adorno’s reading of him as finally an anti-philosophical, conservative individualist. They engage in a rescue operation that tends to read as philosophical and political caution what Adorno reads as, really, a failure of vision. And in the course of these re-readings, the antinomy of theory and experience is once again taken up, though now Kracauer is given a sympathetic hearing. This is especially so for the pieces he wrote during the Weimar Republic for the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung, a selection of which are collected in The Mass Ornament. Thus Thomas Levin, in the introduction to this volume, refers to Kracauer’s “curious mixture of subjectivity and objectivity,” and of a “frequent and often disarming alternation between the impersonal voice of abstract theoretical discourse and utterances in first person,” a “visible rhetorical indication of the fact that his theoretical analyses are almost always at some level also a reflection of his own experience.”7 In the new reading, this is understood not as a false bravado on the part of Kracauer’s subject, but instead as “an autophenomenology of subject formation in the modern era” (MO 27). What for Adorno is an egocentric, egotistical idealism disguised as “concreteness,” is re-evaluated as the coming together

of

materialism

and

phenomenology

via

the

mechanism

of

a

contemplation and expression of subjectivity. One consequence of this tendency to read Kracauer as autophenomenologist is that Kracauer’s writings become a narrative with an essential correspondence to the narrative of his life. Kracauer’s works tell a story: what has changed in the more recent appropriations of his work is less that his pieces are taken seriously as works of philosophical significance, and more that the narrative into which they are placed has become more complex. The Adornian narrative, to the extent that it attempts to find value in his works, seeks to bracket off his later, particularly postwar works, as those that followed his decision to abjure suffering and let reality stand as it is. The new narrative, to the extent that generalisation is plausible, tends either to ignore the later works or to read them through the Weimar essays, but secondarily to bracket off the early Weimar essays from the later ones, or to claim that there is development from the early to the late Weimar essays, in which it is only in the works of the middle to late 1920s and the early 1930s that Kracauer’s full flowering is to be found. Thus in the new narrative the true Kracauer is to be found between an early period in which he found his feet, and a later, somewhat less interesting, or even complacent, Kracauer. 114

This first transition, from the early to the middle Kracauer, is characterised by a shift from philosophy to sociology; from metaphysics to ideology-critique; from a concern with the societal loss of depth, of meaning, to an interest in reading the surface phenomena of society and the landscape of daily life; from a pessimistic, lapsarian tone to a new faith in the revelatory and transformative possibilities of mass culture. While these re-readings are overdue, and have illuminated facets of Kracauer’s work that have lingered in the shadows unobserved and unheard for many years, there is also in these new Kracauer stories something of the advance guard, a new kind of selective reading, and an unwillingness not only to offer critique but to consider what questionable continuities there might be from the Adornian reading to their own. For the target is not only Adorno’s reading of Kracauer but the politics of Adorno’s work on mass culture in general, a newly advanced front in a battle usually waged via Walter Benjamin. The persistent motif of this new reading is that access to truth must now be by way of the profane. Adorno is the stern father now, and Kracauer the understanding uncle. Thus Miriam Hansen concludes that the methodological difference between Kracauer and Adorno “comes down to the issue of class.” By acknowledging socially stereotypical and alienated behaviour as part of his own experience, Kracauer refuses to let his intellectual privilege deceive him as to his actual social status—which, unlike Adorno’s, was all too close to the urban employees whose habits of consumption and leisure he studied. 8

My intention, however, is not to arbitrate between or rewrite these narratives of Kracauer as “clowning” existentialist (CR 62) or working class intellectual hero. Neither is it to dispute the fact that such narratives increase our understanding of Kracauer’s work. Undoubtedly it is possible and worthwhile to trace the migrations of Kracauer’s understanding of “reality” through the 1920s, although even in the earliest piece (1920–21) included in The Mass Ornament, on Georg Simmel, Kracauer is already focusing, following Simmel himself, on the obscure, the forgotten, or the unlikely, as the gateway to truth. As in the following: “The core of mankind’s essence is accessible through even the smallest side door” (MO 237). And undoubtedly, also, in the chronologically last piece included in the volume, on the proto- or hyper-fascistoid group known as the Tat circle (1931), he still manifests a faith in a historical “reality” marked by the triumph of truth and justice over might and race, that in retrospect all too clearly shows the hallmarks of indomitable liberal spirit in the face of coming apocalypse, but also a hope that stems, however understandably and however strategically, it must be said, from a failure of thought to measure up to the situation (MO 117–8). It is not my intention, then, to argue for or against a certain “positivity” or “negativity” that might be traced in Kracauer’s work. What is remarkable in the 115

readings of Kracauer by Adorno and more recent writers is the extent to which they can be mapped, point by point, with Kracauer’s own narrative of the work of Simmel in that very early paper just mentioned. Kracauer’s account of the work of the man who, more than any other, was his own intellectual father, begins with a topological definition of the philosopher as “rooted in the centre of his essence” (MO 231), but this is only in order to qualify Simmel’s status as a philosopher. For though to the extent that Simmel is a philosopher a “core idea” can be found, Simmel’s work derives less from a fundamental principle than from experience. The difference between a core idea and a fundamental principle that Kracauer is attempting to convey is shown in his claim that a core idea does not provide a key that opens all the doors to all the interiors of Simmel’s philosophy, but rather provides a “cross section,” that points toward a law of relation between his works and ideas (MO 232). 9 Simmel aims to rid every phenomenon of its “being-untoitself,”

to

demonstrate

the

inextricability

of

every

spiritual/intellectual

phenomenon from every other, that is the manner of its being embedded in the contexts of life. He “snuggles much closer to his objects” (MO 242) than the transcendental idealists with their abstractions, but this is only the better and more concretely to “conquer” the world “by spreading out in all directions from the individual phenomenon (MO 240). But Simmel’s virtue, à la Kracauer in Adorno’s eyes, is simultaneously the mark of his failure. According to Kracauer, Simmel’s “self does not possess the metaphysical depth” to move from a working out of the relation of things to their core content (MO 238). He is led by the philosophical drive to master totality along two paths: the first, “epistemological” path, is a relativistic denial of the absolute, a renunciation of the possibility of grasping totality. The second path is a “metaphysics of life,” a Lebensphilosophie which subsumes all Simmel’s insights into the relations between objects to the emergence and endless unfolding of the inner principle of life, the rhythm of the stream. This is a contradiction of the epistemological path, in that the mere lawfulness, form, or structure that Simmel unfolds is now explained, an origin is postulated in the attempt to grasp totality. But at the same time this life-principle is a justification of the renunciation of totality, and an attempt to overcome the dichotomy of subject and object. If life is a principle, it is the principle before all principles, the principle that leads beyond principle, beyond the principle of structure (we are really in close proximity here to the statement that the principle which unifies pleasure and reason leads beyond these, beyond itself): “Life is after all always more than life; it wrenches itself free of itself and encounters itself as a sharply defined form. It is simultaneously the stream and the firm shore” (MO 239–40). Life beyond life: this principle leads Kracauer to guide Simmel to a defense of the apparent subjectivity 116

of his dependence upon experience. For experience, as more than subjective life, is a mode of vision, a means of truly seeing: Simmel never engages in acts of thought that are not supported by a perceptual experience of some sort and that cannot accordingly be realised through such an experience. He always describes what he has seen; the entirety of his thought is basically only a grasping of objects by looking at them (MO 257).10

It is unnecessary to point out to what extent Kracauer’s critique of Simmel mirrors Adorno’s critique of Kracauer; nor to what extent every criticism of Adorno’s is anticipated by Kracauer four decades previously as the position against which he wishes to define himself. It is equally unnecessary to point out the degree to which Kracauer’s intellectual thought inherits Simmel’s way of thinking (and the degree to which Adorno inherits from Kracauer), and hence the extent to which Kracauer’s critique of Simmel’s work, despite his characterisation of it as ultimately a failure, simultaneously functions by anticipation as a defense against the same kind of arguments which he subsequently faced from Adorno. But if we put these questions of generational debt and inheritance to one side, it is only the better to focus on the matter over which disputes of ownership arise, and everything which we will subsequently have to say on Kracauer is probably equally applicable, in one form or another, to Simmel and to Adorno also. With the last quotation given from Kracauer’s reading of Simmel, it appears that Adorno’s reading of Kracauer’s primacy of the optical is confirmed. Experience is, for Kracauer, a matter of vision. But vision is nothing other than the apprehension of space. For Kracauer experience—that is, the question usually identified and supposedly resolved by the name of “subjectivity”—is a question of the architecture of space. This spatial/architectural problematic, however, turns out to involve the auditory as much as the optical idiom (and “idiom” is first of all that “property” of a language which makes it the “property” of a people or an area—who

speaks

through idiomatic language?).

The

spatial/architectural

problematic in Kracauer turns out to be a description of the inextricable intertwining of the visual and the audible, of sight and sound, and the politics of Kracauer’s thought unfolds through a negotiation of this entanglement. Kracauer’s spatial politics is visible in two pieces not included in The Mass Ornament. In 1925, in “Shape and Disintegration” (“Gestalt und Zerfall”), the title of which alone is a declaration of such a politics, Kracauer writes that “the new shape [das Gestaltete] cannot be lived unless the disintegrated particles are gathered and carried along.”11 Experience is fundamentally the experience of shape, and politics is the advancement of the disintegration of shape to the point of absolute destruction at which a gathering can begin that restores experience to the point where shape can once again be lived. Space today is not lived in, for the 117

spaces which are inhabited today reflect unconscious desire rather than a true experience

of

shape.

In 1930 this problematic

remains

unchanged,

as

demonstrated by Kracauer’s reading of the architecture of unemployment offices: Every typical space is created by typical social relations which are expressed in such a space without the disturbing intervention of consciousness. Everything that consciousness ignores, everything that it usually just overlooks, is involved in the construction of such spaces. Spatial structures are the dreams of a society. Whenever the hieroglyph of any such spatial structure is decoded, the foundation of the social reality is revealed.12

The politics of architecture is a question of consciousness, that is, of experience and reason. That is, further, reason and experience—“reality”—for Kracauer are a question of the manner in which we apprehend space, and the way in which we are apprehended by space. The “conceptual homelessness” which accompanies the economic proletarianisation of the middle classes noted in the piece on the Tat circle, “The Revolt of the Middle Classes” (1931), is literal: there is no space in which one is any longer at home. In “Travel and Dance” (1925), Kracauer describes space as having achieved a kind of homogeneity, one place is like the next, with the consequence that people are equally at home in their homes as elsewhere, or rather that “they do not feel at home anywhere at all” (MO 66). Travel has lost its meaning, it is undertaken for its own sake, it is a transformation in space which reveals the unfulfilled desire for a transformation of space. The colonial spirit manifested in Simmel’s desire to master totality, to conquer the world by spreading out in all directions from the individual phenomenon has its analogy in modern travel (MO 73): “We have fallen for the ability to have all these spaces at our disposal; we are like conquistadors who have not yet had a quiet moment to reflect on the meaning of their acquisition.” It is the availability of space that prevents the possibility of a quiet moment, for there is no space away, no space away from space. Matching this lack of silence, this unavailability of a place quiet enough to be able to hear ourselves, is a type of blindness that follows from the illumination of all secret spaces (MO 299): “When all geographic hideouts have been photographed, society will have been completely blinded.” Is Kracauer’s piece on the Tat circle to be understood as simply, without wishing to undermine its significance, an example of ideological intervention, as Kracauer himself tends to present it? Is it then a manifestation of that turn to empirical reality that by the 1930s had political efficacy as its primary goal? Something more, I suggest, is going on here. Kracauer begins his critique predictably enough with the concept of Volk, but shortly we are confronted with the strange sentence, “A Volk presents itself physically in space” (MO 109). This

118

statement is the point from which Kracauer launches his critique. It is this relation to space that he questions; it is perhaps in the fact that “the notion of space dominates Die Tat so thoroughly” that the importance of this circle lies (MO 109). Space for Die Tat means firstly the landscape, the land, and hence the nation as a geo-political formation. Existence is a relation of landscape, of earth, to blood and destiny (and we might extrapolate here to the National Socialist—but by no means exclusively so—paranoid and claustrophobic apprehension of space, and its concern about the filling of space within Germany, the need for imperial expansion as itself something organic, and about the danger from the “metaphysically empty” spaces to the east and west). What this concept of space expresses is a will to the organic, and hence a mythological space. What motivates this last essay of the collection, perhaps, among all the seemingly more immediate concerns, is the need to create a distance from this expression of and impression upon, the “younger generation.” Kracauer’s wish is to create a distance from Die Tat which establishes that concern with the question of space itself is not the irrational aspect of their politics. What Kracauer is responding to, perhaps, is the fear that the concern with space is itself a völkisch, a Germanic, an idiomatic lingustico-geo-political concern, or the need at least to defend his own preoccupation with space-as-a-modern-phenomenon. This preoccupation persists through many of the earlier pieces, not least of all in the section from his unpublished analysis of the detective novel, “The Hotel Lobby” (1922–25). Here the hotel lobby serves as a side door through which contemporary reality emerges. The lobby is a place, like the house of God, in which guests congregate, but unlike the latter the lobby accommodates all who have gone to meet no one—the guests are thus “guests in space as such” (MO 175). The lobby encompasses the guests; it is a space that does not refer beyond itself. It is thus aesthetic, in the Kantian sense of isolated and without content. The lobby reveals the aestheticisation of the world, the impossibility of living in space. The exemplarity of the lobby consists in what its inhabitants inevitably are, or rather, fail to be. They vanish into the void, or “stand superfluously off to the side” (MO 179). In the lobby people exist namelessly. Whereas people lose their names in the house of God in order to better receive the bestowed word, the anonymity of the hotel lobby stems from a purely exterior existence, a non-being and reactive false aesthetic affirmation of estrangement—a “reaction without content” as he says in 1931 (MO 116). But here the apparent lack of an interior might equally signify its impenetrability: “If they [the hotel guests] possessed an interior, it would have no windows at all” (MO 183). This windowless interior, this infinitely inaccessible space, an interior tomb or crypt (people have become “ungraspable flat ghosts”), 119

this suggestion of a repression beyond the unconscious, a missing part of subjectivity the psychic effects of which can at best be read hieroglyphically, that is in encrypted form—what is implied in all of this? Kracauer immediately continues: “…and they would perish aware of their endless abandonment, instead of knowing of their homeland as the congregation does” (MO 183). Is Kracauer erecting this space (the homeland, the congregation) as merely another (premodern) spatial ideology, to be noted, to be thought through, but not to be mourned? Or, on the contrary, does it not seem that Kracauer himself has a mortgage in this homeland lost, that the concept of homeland remains meaningful to him? And if we agree on this, does the meaningfulness of the homeland for Kracauer signify its presence, its plenitude, or is it that Kracauer himself, over the years 1922–25, has failed to wait, has reacted without content? Lastly, has Kracauer realised and repudiated in 1931 his own previous false affirmation of mythological space, or is the piece on the Tat circle itself a reactive attempt to extricate space from the contamination of Volk? Back in the hotel lobby, Kracauer continues: And the fleeting exchange of glances which creates the possibility of exchange is acknowledged only because the illusion of that possibility confirms the reality of the distance. Just as in the house of God, here too namelessness unveils the meaning of naming; but whereas in the house of God it is an awaiting within the tension that reveals the preliminariness of names, in the hotel lobby it is a retreat into the unquestioned groundlessness that the intellect transforms into the names’ site of origin. But where the call that unifies into the “we” is not heard, those that have fled the form are irrevocably isolated (MO 183).

Is space for Kracauer ideally a space for the “we,” a space in which people can really be in the same place, or is it an interior which one can really possess or inhabit for oneself, in which case to hear the call that unifies the “we” threatens to collapse interior space? The obligatory silence of the hotel lobby compels one downwards to an encounter with the nothing, whereas the silence in the house of God signifies “the individual collecting himself as firmly directed self” (MO 181). Is not Kracauer perpetrating the crime of which he accuses the Tat circle—namely: making of the people an absolute principle, with the secret and contradictory corollary that the individual is also taken as an absolute principle—and hence, as Adorno accuses, affirming the isolation he here appears to condemn? 13 Or are we failing to hear subtly enough a difference between the Volk and the “we”? Should we understand the difference between these two signifiers, if there is one, as lying at the centre of their respective meanings, or is it merely a matter of ideological encrustations upon the meaning of Volk, and a certain vague, abstract theologism hinted at in the “we”—that is, surface features—which do not touch the core of meaning which they have in common? In defining the “we” by a “call”

120

which is no longer audible, a dream which has been forgotten for the thousandth time, is Kracauer not saying that the space in which the two absolute principles of the individual and the people could be “unified” can be nothing other than the space that the gods have, currently, declined to occupy? Perhaps in this thought there is a clue to an even earlier text by Kracauer, “Those Who Wait” (1922). Here Kracauer deals with the experience of those who live mostly in the loneliness of the large cities. Here too Kracauer is interested in the loss of inner being, with confinement, and with a suffering due to an existence in an empty space (MO 129). The temptation to repress this suffering, to wall it up, can be seen in the reactive positions of the skeptic-as-a-matter-of-principle (Max Weber is the example), and in the short-circuit person who too quickly capitulates to a mysticism or an unlikely hope—the dual temptation which Kracauer accuses Simmel of succumbing to (and of which Adorno accuses Kracauer). What is the alternative? Kracauer here, in 1922, says waiting. This waiting is virtually everyone’s accusation against Kracauer, whether or not they think he eventually or temporarily overcomes it—waiting as inactivity, as contentedness, as pessimism, as quietism. And when we think of history’s subsequent course in Germany, does not such a call stand condemned? Undoubtedly, and undoubtedly the unfolding of Kracauer’s later work shows the attempt to move beyond this call to wait to something “positive,” but just as much Kracauer’s own resistance to such a move. This ambivalence draws us to linger awhile with Kracauer’s “waiting.” What is this waiting? It is both negative and positive, we are told. Negative, as a type of dauntlessness, an ability to hold on, to hold out, a hardness upon oneself, a vigilance against religiosity, a maintenance of the “furthest possible distance” (MO 139). Positive, as an openness, as tense activity, as engaged self-preparation, a long path, a leap requiring a lengthy approach. A move from the theoretical self to the entire human being, that is beyond subjectivity and objectivity. The entire problematic or dialectic of theory and experience validated in recent readings of Kracauer stems from this conception of the space of subjectivity as simultaneously a holding on in the void and an openness leading outside oneself. It is difficult not to hear in this problematic, and in each of its motifs (and this could be the focus of an entire paper itself), Heidegger’s account of authenticity or ownmost being in Being and Time (1926). Furthermore, despite the claim that this type of hardness upon oneself is a holding out against religious need, it is notable that the engaged self-preparation, this “hesitant openness,” a tarrying “in front of closed doors” (MO 138), is a “preparation for transformation and for giving oneself over to it” (MO 140). We won’t dwell on the ambiguous nature of this transformation, this giving oneself over, which we may hear as political or theological—in short, “messianic” 121

or “of spirit.” Once again it is difficult not to hear in it the voice of Heidegger (born, incidentally or not, in the same year as Kracauer), though perhaps it is the similarly ambiguous Heidegger who speaks more than two years after Adorno’s Kracauer speech, more than twenty years after the end of World War Two, more than forty years after Kracauer’s “Those Who Wait”: Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.14

According to Kracauer’s reading (1931), there is an analogous ambiguity in Kafka: does the “breakthrough” (an idea continuously invoked by Kracauer) occur only after death, or is the city, the dwelling, to be destroyed by a gigantic fist, as foretold in myths and legends? Kafka is unclear: “‘I have never been in this place,’ Kafka says, ‘Breathing is different’” (MO 278). In the world which surrounds us, breathing is difficult—why? Kafka sees, says Kracauer, labourers building everywhere. They build masonry “so thick that no sound can get through to us […] the doors lack keys, and the few holes that do appear are immediately walled up again” (MO 269). The walls have become impermeable, we are cut off from the true word. Against the Buber-Rosenzweig bible translation, Kracauer writes, “Along with truth, language has departed as well” (MO 193). But if the outcome of this withdrawal is unclear, perhaps knowledge of its origin may still be gathered, a cryptic knowledge which momentarily illuminates the darkened stage on which is played out the endless succession of fathers and sons (and their openness to surprising reversals), and where the history of philosophy is merely one, particularly exemplary, example. Kafka represents for Kracauer the possibility of this moment, the interminable moment of waiting before the door of the law (but for it to open or to fall from its hinges?). According to Kafka, we are told by Kracauer, “the building that one generation after another constructs is sinister, because this structure is to guarantee a security that men cannot attain. The more systematically they plan it, the less they are able to breathe in it; the more seamlessly they try to erect it, the more inevitably it becomes a dungeon” (MO 268). Like an unsatisfying or unfinished detective novel, we end in a place with more questions than answers. Kracauer tells us that, if the Volk presents itself in space, in temporal terms it asserts itself as the state. The state is a structure, a construction, an edifice, across time, between generations, an attempt to define a space, the nation, as the eternally present. These are the buildings that confine us, that make silence impossible, that guard the secret laws in public, that

122

constrict breathing. Breathing space means equally time to breathe, a pause. Perhaps “space” and “time” always refer to the possibility or impossibility of there being breathing space. But is this to be understood as a “principle of life” at the joint origin of space and time, as the entry of the human into perception, into the categories? Thus is this Kracauer’s Lebensphilosophie, his answer to the rationalising neo-Kantians? Or is breathing space on the contrary the possibility or impossibility of a pause in life, a place or a moment which escapes the endless Heraclitean stream, the chance or the wish to exceed the endless return to the human (yet equally an answer to the neo-Kantians)? The desire for breathing space, while it may be desire for quiet, does not, it seems, necessarily imply quietism. Is the desire for breathing space, for a moment away, merely hesitation, or is it the wish to interrupt the endless frenetic motion of “modernity”: how should we understand hesitant openness, the holding on to, the engaged selfpreparation of waiting? How, or with what resources, would Kracauer judge the Heidegger of 1935 for whom the darkening of the world is the draining of the power of spirit, of pneuma? Does the dream of breathing space, to escape the constructions of the generations of building labourers for a moment, imply an ideology of fresh air, of health, of the landscape, a mythology which affirms the purely exterior as the out of doors? What is the place of Hegel’s ghost in this idiom? Does breathing space imply something organic, some kind of unity or materiality, or conversely something of spirit, of the warm breath of the soul, the origin which animates or inflames before all life, all rational psychology or pneumatology (and is “conversely” appropriate here)? Or does the desire for breathing space imply that human existence passes in a way in which it is just barely possible to draw one’s breath, to breathe in, in preparation for speech or action, or just in anticipation, before the possibility is finally closed off? Is a rhetoric of breathing, that is, an implicit affirmation of a principle of life, or is every inhalation an engaged self-preparation for the exhalation of giving voice, and every exhalation, and hence every act of speech, contaminated by the premonitory anticipation of the final outward breath? What is the politics of speech, and what is the meaning of silence if/when language has departed? How to read Kracauer, Adorno, Heidegger, Kafka, politically?

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Notes

*This

paper appeared as a review article discussing Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament in the journal ædon in 1996. 1Martin Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia, 1985), p. 220. 2Siegfried Kracauer, cited in ibid., p. 235. 3As recounted, or pre-emptively confessed, by Adorno at the beginning of his tribute. See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,” in Notes to Literature, volume two, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia, 1992), pp. 58–9 (hereafter referred to in parentheses in the text as CR, followed by a page number). Jay refers to a “platonically erotic bond” between them. See Jay, “The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer,” in Permanent Exiles, p. 158. 4Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer,” p. 225. The republication of Kracauer’s novel is mentioned by Adorno, and in one of his positive and appreciative remarks he refers to the fact that when this novel was republished, its final chapter was “wisely omitted” (CR 70). According to Jay, however, who fails to comment on Adorno’s praise of Kracauer’s wisdom, it was Adorno himself who persuaded Kracauer to drop the chapter (“Adorno and Kracauer,” p. 225). 5A foreigner in the realm of spirit—might this relate also to Adorno’s assertion that philosophy remained alien to Kracauer, and Hegel in particular (CR 60)? Is Kracauer’s problem, in Adorno’s eyes, that he is ignorant of Hegel, or rather that he is too close to a certain distasteful spirit of Hegel, that he is haunted by the spectre of Hegel? The relation of the Adornian reading of Kracauer to a certain Hegel cannot be explicated here, but it must at least be noted that it is not only in the question of the relation of subject and object, or theory and experience, that a Hegelian problematic is visible, or a Hegelian tone heard. This echo reverberates, for 124

instance, in the association of philosophical expression and suffering (and a certain concrete refusal of the exterior), which is to be found in Hegel at the core of his thinking of the knowledge of spirit, that most “concrete” of sciences. It is audible, that is, at the moment when Hegel is thinking through the relation of spirit as self-possession, to nature as spirit’s presupposition, its truth, and yet also what vanishes as its result. Here then is Hegel defining spirit: “This is why the essence of spirit is formally liberty, the absolute negativity of the concept as self-identity. According to this formal determination, it can abstract all that is exterior and its own exteriority, its own presence: it can support the negation of its individual immediacy, infinite suffering: that is, conserve itself affirmative in this negation and be identical for itself. This possibility is in itself the abstract universality of spirit, universality which-is-for-itself.” This is in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 15, §382. I have, however, followed the translation which appears in Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1989), p. 118. 6This entire, long, concluding paragraph ought really to be read clause by clause. Particular attention needs to be given to Adorno’s characterisation made, and then taken away, of Kracauer’s “primary compulsion” as “[u]sing spirit to protect spirit.” As in the Hegelian spirit’s refusal of exteriority, so too Kracauer withdraws into an “individuality enclosing itself within itself to the point of inaccessibility.” What Adorno may be heard as offering in his critique of Kracauer is a critique of Hegel on the grounds that in this relation of spirit and space there lurks an agoraphobic refusal of external reality, the political consequence of which is “an individuality impervious to hope, [which] becomes the mask of hope.” 7Thomas Y. Levin, “Introduction,” in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard, 1995), p. 27 (hereafter referred to in parentheses in the text as MO, followed by a page number). Cf. Miriam Hansen, perhaps the major figure in the anglophone world in this process of re-reading Kracauer, who writes in the same vein that “a number of Kracauer’s essays from the mid-1920s onward display a remarkable shift in perspective, within one and the same text, towards the mass-cultural object under discussion [… T]hese essays tend to build up an impersonal distance by way of a sociological,

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culturally critical, or philosophical reflection, only to switch, at a particular point, to the voice of personal experience, to identification and participation.” See Miriam Hansen, “Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer’s Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture,” New German Critique 54 (1991), pp. 71–2. 8Hansen, “Decentric Perspectives,” p. 73. 9“While the living unity of the work he has produced can be empathetically reexperienced, it can never be deduced from a fundamental principle that is rigid and alienated from life. Still, in so far as Simmel was a philosopher, one can venture ahead in his work until one comes upon a core idea that is located in a conceptual sphere and serves as the anchor for most of his works. This would simultaneously provide a cross section of his philosophy which, however, would admittedly not reveal all aspects of his conceptual edifice. In exactly analogous fashion, it is only in the rarest cases that the architectural cross section of a building reveals the structure of the entire house, the disposition of all the interior rooms” (MO 232). 10Kracauer continues: “Once one has become aware of the core principle of Simmel’s thought, one also gains access to the deeper reasons that account for the entire formal appearance of his philosophy. Critics have, after all, reproached Simmel often enough for the affectation of his style and his occasionally sophistic subtlety—as if all this were only incidental trimming and could just as well be eliminated without significant consequences for the core of the thought!” (MO 257). Style as the expression of vision, of experience. 11Kracauer, cited in Hansen, “Decentric Perspectives,” p. 54. 12Kracauer, cited in Levin, “Introduction,” MO, pp. 29–30, emphasis in original. 13Cf. Martin Heidegger in 1935, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven and London: Yale, 1959), pp. 143–4, where Heidegger appears to refuse both parts of the double affirmation we are tentatively tracing in Kracauer: “Only as a questioning, historical being does man come to himself; only as such is he a self. Man’s selfhood means this: he must transform the being that discloses itself to him into history and bring himself to stand in it. Selfhood does not mean that he is primarily an ‘ego’ and an individual. This he is no more than he is a we, a community.” 14Martin Heidegger, “Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National

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Socialism: Questions and Answers, trans. Lisa Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 57.

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