“The Forestial Interior”: The Dislocation of Language in Walter Benjamin's Early Writings

Abstract

This essay places Walter Benjamin's early work at the center of a linguistic turn that differs fundamentally from the one commonly associated with the term. Rather than a theory of language, Benjamin makes the dislocation of language in human thought the central concern of a new topology of critique. Tracing this topology through the canonical early texts as well as their accompanying fragments and notes, especially Benjamin's unconventional solution to the Liar's Paradox, the essay argues that Origin of the German Mourning Play, culminating in the critical terms of allegory and symbol, is as significant an intervention in the theory of logic and language as the Tractatus and Being and Time. The concluding part of the essay, as a demonstration, attempts to reconstruct Benjamin's central insight into the theory of the symbol, seizing on the topological image, also from the Mourning Play book, of the symbol's “forestial interior” (waldiges Innere).

Keywords:

• Benjamin
• language
• logic
• paradox

Notes

The implications of Benjamin's Programm are, from an intra-Kantian point of view, a proposed solution to both the much-discussed aporia of the table of categories and the problem of synthetic judgments a priori. The true dimensions of this rewriting of transcendental logic, especially in its relation to the prior rewriting undertaken by Hermann Cohen and the Marburg school, are not touched on in this essay.

It would seem that Benjamin's dislocation of language also implies a dislocation of this relation. But it is possible that this intra-Kantian dislocation simply follows from the Kant interpretation of the Marburg School, and Hermann Cohen's rewriting of transcendental logic in particular.

This idea of the Copernican turn as essentially and structurally incomplete has been incisively put forward by Jean Laplanche. Benjamin, in the 1918 essay, also points out that Johann Georg Hamann—one of the recipients of the proofs of the first Critique—had put forward a similarly motivated early criticism of Kant in his Metakritik über den Purism der Vernunft (Benjamin, GS 2: 168; Hamann).

Gershom Scholem to Werner Kraft, August 3, 1917 (Scholem, Briefe an Werner Kraft 18).

This passage, I maintain, is to be read in a thoroughgoing Hölderlinian manner. In Benjamin's essay Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, it is the emergence and— literally— the entrance of Genius that grounds the essential difference between the two versions or capturings (Fassungen) of the poem. Equally, the head or caput—Haup—can be shown to be a Hölderlinian influence. I believe it is a reference to the very first spoken in Sophocles’ Antigone: Ω κoινòν ανταδϵλφoν 'Iσμηνης καρα. Both the Storr and Grene translations render this verse as “Ismene, sister of my blood and heart,” transposing the Greek expression into a familiar and connected imagery, the sisters’ sharing of “blood” and “heart” (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone 315; Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone 84). Friedrich Hölderlin's translation, however, exemplifying the “abyssal” method of literalization and fidelity to syntax Benjamin extols in the final lines of The Task of the Translator, has “Gemeinsamschwesterliches! o Ismenes Haupt!” retaining the Greek καρα as head or Haupt (Hölderlin, SW 2: 861). The very notion of tragedy's “Haupt des Genius,” then, can be said to contain the young Benjamin's two seminal readings of Hölderlin in an extremely condensed form. For a reading of the Hölderlin passage in its context, see the relevant sections in David F. Krell's The Tragic Absolute (Krell 250–79) and Silke Weineck's The Abyss Above (Weineck 60–64).

For this notion of Ent-Sprechen, the destitution and disactivation of performative language, Werner Hamacher has coined the term “afformative” (Hamacher, “Afformativ, Streik”).

See the classic study by Ernst Tugendhat (Tugendhat 5–6).

Even the earliest commentators on the paradox pointed out that it works only in the first person. As Alexandre Koyré writes in a perceptive essay on the Liar's Paradox : “[c]e qui empêche l’expression « je mens » d’avoir un sens et d’être un jugement, ce n’est pas la coïncidence temporelle du jugement et de son sujet, c’est la prétention à l’identité des deux; la prétention de mettre le jugement à l’intérieur de lui-même, à lui faire occuper la place du sujet. À la place du sujet se trouve un vide; ou encore on pourrait dire que notre phrase possède un sujet inexistant. Quelque chose est affirmé de « rien »“ (Koyré 14–15).

In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein is also at pains to establish more than one way of negating sense—for example, 5.5303: “Beiläufig gesprochen: Von zwei Dingen zu sagen, sie seien identisch, ist ein Unsinn, und von Einem zu sagen, es sei identisch mit sich selbst, sagt gar nichts.” Or a little earlier, in 5.2341: “Die Verneinung verkehrt den Sinn des Satzes” (Wittgenstein 83, 67). We can add Freud's name to this debate, who in one of his essays on the relation between psychoanalysis and linguistics picks up the title term from Carl Abel's 1884 treatise Über den Gegensinn der Urworte, translated as The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words.

It is worth noting that in the Notizen zu einer Arbeit über die Lüge, as well as the Kraus essay, the moral dimension follows directly from the relation “of language”: “Die Lüge hat eine konstitutive Beziehung zur Rede (sodaß Lüge durch Schweigen unsittlich ist). Die Wahrheit hat eine solche Beziehung nicht zur Rede, sondern zum Schweigen” (Benjamin, GS 6: 64). The lie has a constitutive relation to speech—a notion Benjamin raises again in Towards a Critique of Violence, when he insists on the original impunity of the lie (Benjamin, GS 2: 192) as proof of the nonviolent sphere of language. There seems to be, however, an argument to be made about the relation between this insistence on nonviolence and the notion of an immorality in language. In its relation to silence or falling silent, truth, as Benjamin's discussion of tragedy demonstrates, mirrors the lie's relation to speech. Immorality—an instance of the “immoral languagelessness” of Goethe's novel—is suggested by Benjamin through the monstrosity of a “Lüge durch Schweigen.” This interesting notion of “lying by remaining silent” is an option not available in the famous 1797 debate about the morality of the lie between Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant, but it would be the key to Benjamin's concept of morality. For Kant, of course, the very attempt (which he accuses Constant of making) to vindicate a right “of language”—the supposed right to lie—is “[d]as πρωτoν ψϵyδoσ” (Kant, “Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen” 425).

In an essay that also links the knowledge and lying in Benjamin, Peter Fenves has called this mendacity of language “aboutness”: “This “aboutness,” which inhabits every juridical claim and every judgment, is original mendacity. For mendacity is original to the extent that it effaces its origin, and the mark of this effacement lies in communicating something, whereas originality itself consists—and does not fall—in communicability, pure and simple. No longer able to communicate itself, language turns into a means of communication, and that means it turns into chatter (Geschwätz), to use the term Benjamin borrows from Kierkegaard” (Fenves, “Testing Right: Lying in View of Justice” 1103).

The distinction is Frege's from the second paragraph of the Begriffsschrift (Frege §2, 1–2). For a discussion of the scope of Frege's theory of assertion as linguistic action, see the recent work of Denis Vernant.

This idea of the paradox as the “deathbed” of ambiguity gains weight if we consider William Empson's classic study “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” where the seventh and final ambiguity, “the most ambiguous that can be conceived,” is contradiction, “when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context” (Empson 192). Empson does not base his idea of contradiction on the logical paradox, Widersinn, but on the Freudian notion of Gegensinn, a notion borrowed from Carl Abel's 1884 treatise on a purported linguistic phenomenon in ancient Egyptian languages, where one and the same word has opposite meanings. They share, however, the radical suspension of sense (Sinn) Benjamin claims for “pure language” liberated from communication. And, crucially, Empson begins this final chapter of his study by imparting his wish “to cast upon the reader something of the awe and horror which were felt by Dante at the most centrique part of earth, of Satan, and of hell” (Empson 196).

Compare to the following fragment from the notes on lying, “Grundlage der Moral: Das höchste moralische Interesse des Subjekts ist: sich selbst anonym zu bleiben” (Benjamin, GS 6: 59).

“Mit Gewalt erscheint der Zwiespalt gebändigt und die Einheit erreicht, indem er die Form des Romans durch die der Novelle gleichsam veredelt” (Benjamin, GS 1: 167).

Fritz Gutbrodt has established the link between the interruption of ambiguity—which I discuss under the heading of,,paradox“—and the idea of the expressionless: “das Ausdruckslose als Unterbrechung und Bannung [ist] nichts anderes […] als jener Augenblick, der im Werk die Zweideutigkeit seines Scheins unterbricht durch die entschiedene Doppeldeutigkeit seines Ur-Sprungs als einer Ur-Scheidung. Das Ausdruckslose ist nicht etwa das Fehlen des Ausdrucks. Es ist vielmehr das, was selbst nicht Ausdruck ist, weil es selbst unmittelbar und erst ausdrückt. Das Ausdruckslose ist in diesem Sinne das, was den Ausdruck löst: ihn ermöglicht und freigibt und dabei schon von ihm löst” (Gutbrodt 569).

To give just two examples from the critical reception of Benjamin's work that, despite the grand ambition of their own critical enterprise, are unable to give an account of the symbol in Benjamin, and even going so far as to reject its viability, see Menninghaus, and, more recently, Brodsky. In a postscript to the second edition of Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie, Menninghaus seems to have realized, “daß nämlich Benjamin, der Theoretiker der Allegorie, die ‘Sache des Philosophen’ und damit auch die eigene durchaus unter das Zeichen des Symbols gestellt hat. Aber auch dies, Benjamins positive und außerordentlich schwerwiegende Theorie des Symbols, erforderte eine Studie, die zu umfangreich für ein bloßes Nachwort ist.” I am indebted to Wolfgang Brumetz for pointing this out.

For a discussion of Benjamin's concept of “doctrine” or Lehre, see Peter Fenves's contribution to the Benjamin-Handbuch edited by Burkhardt Lindner (Fenves, “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie”).

It is in Hölderlin's own invocation of the Symposion, in Brod und Wein, that we find the poetic suturing of sobriety and light, bringing out what is already contained in the German “helle”:

Ein Weiser aber vermocht es

Vom Mittag bis in die Mitternacht,

Und bis der Morgen erglänzte,

Beim Gastmahl helle zu bleiben. (Hö lderlin, SW 1: 334, v. 206--09)

Samuel Weber makes the following distinction between the language of tragedy and the language of Socrates: “The purely dramatic language of the Platonic dialogue, which comes after tragedy, comedy, and their (Socratic) dialectic, is at the same time ‘this side,’ diesseits of them. This language thus functions in a way very different from the infantile, mute prophecy of the tragic hero: far from announcing the coming of God, Man, Community through the silent self-negation of the Self, it prepares the way for something that has already been: for the ‘Mysterium’ that the forms of Greek drama had ‘gradually secularized’ but that returns in this ‘purely dramatic language.’ Past, present, and future are thus no longer the clearly demarcated dimensions of a dialectic of self-realization: rather, they are facets of a repetitive process in which decisions, far from being decisive, turn abruptly against the deciders” (Weber 149–50).

A parallel account of such a spatiality of language in Benjamin through his critique of judgment can be found in Peter Fenves's The Genesis of Judgment: “Language, in short, is analogous to space, and analogy is the spatialization of the logos. In the analogy of language to space—analogy itself—the analogy of being is transposed to the point where it can disclose a transcendental dimension no longer derived from the forms and functions of judgment. […] Benjamin's suspension of judgment—his critique of judgment and his epoch—does not make room for the intuition of singular appearances or of eidetic objects, but instead opens up the space of language, opens language to its own special spatiality in which spiritual being can be imparted in the first place” (Fenves, “Genesis” 85–86). The “special spatiality” of language is not opened; it is given a determinate, “forestial” form.

See the sonnet Correspondances from the Spléen et Idéal section of Les Fleurs du Mal (in other words, not among those included in Benjamin's own Baudelaire translation):

La nature est un temple oú des vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles;

L'homme y passe á travers des fôrets des symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers. (Baudelaire 11)

This “image-speak” of linguistics goes at least back to one of the main interlocutors of the early Benjamin, Friedrich Schlegel, who in his post-Atheneaum years published Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Here, Schlegel, in a study already eschewing Romantic speculation for empirical reconstruction, attempts to study the ancient languages’ shared “Stammbaum, von der Wurzel bis zu den Hauptästen” (Schlegel 157). We should perhaps include Ferdinand de Saussure's famous representation of the linguistic sign in his Cours de la linguistique générale in this genealogy of trees, where the tree—split between the Latin arbor and the French arbre as signifiers and opposed to a generic (but clearly oak-like) image of a tree (Saussure 99). It fell to Jacques Lacan (although he did this having the benefit of Saussure's recently discovered anagrams) to perform the necessary reforestation of the Saussurian function through a reading of Paul Valéry's poem Au Platane (Lacan, “L’instance” 503–05). In the seminar on February 28, 1958, Lacan even speaks of “la forêt du signifiant” (Lacan, Le séminaire).