Alexander Gelley. Benjamin's Passages—Dreaming, Awakening. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-6256-4 (hardover); ISBN 978-0-8232-6257-1 (paperback).

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Notes

Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001), 79.

Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 2.1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 216. All references to Benjamin's writings are indicated in the text, following the editions Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996ff.), abbreviated “SW,” and Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), abbreviated “TAP.”

Benjamin, letter to Adorno, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Briefe und Briefwechsel, Bd. 1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994), 119.

Due to its mimetic approach, in the short passage that Gelley devotes to Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, he is forced to reproduce the symptomatic deadlock that Benjamin's reading of Marx already produced: “Commodity fetishism signified for Marx an aspect of the mystification, the pervasive self-deception, of bourgeois society that would inevitably be dispelled by the transformation of the capitalist system” (62). Marx's point, however, was not merely a critique of deception, mystification, or illusion but a demonstration of the material ground of these phantasmagorical forms. The fetishistic inversion of relations between humans and things does not veil or conceal anything; rather, it turns the revealed facts, the brute things, into the objective shell of social relations. In an unmetaphorical sense, things become “sensuously supersensuous” things (Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Vol. 1, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, Marx-Engels-Werke, Vol. 23, Berlin: Dietz, 1962, 85; Gelley himself rightly refers to this passage on page 62, fn. 49). Benjamin, however, following Georg Lukács, does not fully grasp the epistemological shift that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism performs; symptomatically, he tries to retranslate the language of commodity fetishism into Marx's earlier concept of ideology (a term that is distinctively absent from Marx's text of Capital I). In this vein, Gelley also reads commodity fetishism together with a passage from Marx's earlier letter to Ruge from 1843, which Benjamin quotes in the Arcades Project: “Reform of consciousness [Bewußtseins] not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or a political form” (Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris 1844, quoted in Benjamin, TAP: N 5,1a; cf. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: Werke, vol. 1, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, Berlin: Dietz, 1981, 346). The conflation of a mystification enacted by “sensuous supersensuous” things with mystifications of the consciousness is, in fact, suggested by Benjamin's reading of Marx. What Benjamin could not see in Marx's later text is filled with fragments of the earlier Marx. Gelley's presentation of Benjamin remains faithful to this symptomatic blind spot, implicitly pointing to problems that Benjamin's concept of phantasmagoria transforms into a theory of commodified perception. In all these attempts, including Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, an epistemological break is articulated, displacing the entire terrain of ideology and “false consciousness” to a materialist-aesthetic theory of denaturalized social forms.

Another question raised by Benjamin's concept of historical time concerns the revision of the traditional metaphysical understanding of the relation of actuality and potentiality; respective theoretizations can be found in Giorgio Agamben's, Werner Hamacher's, and Samuel Weber's writings on Benjamin. In the case of Gelley's take on dreaming and awakening, a revision of the relation of reality and modality could similarly lead to new theoretical insights.

Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 109.

Irving Wohlfarth, “Die Passagenarbeit,” Benjamin Handbuch. Leben - Werk - Wirkung, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006), 269, trans. mine.

Werner Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida's Specters of Marx,” in Ghostly Demarcations. A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 168–212.

Marx, Karl: Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Vol. 1, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, Marx-Engels-Werke, Vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), 66.

Cf. “Here commodity, like post-Babelic language, discloses—even in its degraded state—traces of a primal relation to creation and to nature” (83). A “problematic” reading would have to start with the implicit assumptions of the conjunction “like.”

Jacques Rancière, “The Archaeomodern Turn,” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 27–28; cited in Gelley, 190.