Late Sentences, Last Words: How Benjamin's Texts End

Abstract

What does one say, in the end? What might it mean for each moment, each sentence, to potentially be the last? This article considers some particular and perplexing tendencies in Walter Benjamin's concluding sentences. Although Benjamin's affinity for the fragment and his declaration that “the writer must stop and restart with every new sentence [mit jedem Satze von neuem einzuhalten und anzuheben]” (Origin 29; GS 1.1: 209) complicate any simplistic notion of a “last sentence,” the style and rhetorical pattern of the sentences that conclude (or avoid concluding) many of his works offer a miniature snapshot into the major concerns running throughout his thinking. Whether considering his complex theories of time, which trouble any progressive notion of history, the potential of dialectical images to awaken thought, or the insistence that his work remain “completely useless [vollkommen unbrauchbar] for the purposes of fascism” (SW 4: 252; GW 1.2: 473), Benjamin's “late” sentences speak to the urgency of his thought, the emergency of the coming end, and the impossibility of that which attempts to speak last.

Notes

See Wheen 376–81; Bushell 53; and Padover. Although Wheen's line seems to be part-folklore, part-fact, Marx's indisputable last written words were a note to his doctor specifying the address to send his bill to and admitting to his doctor that his one comfort in his illness was that “‘physical pain is the only ‘stunner’ of mental pain’” (381). Interestingly, this need to settle debts echoes Socrates's last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius. Pay it and do not neglect it” (Plato 118a). If we were to think this connection through further, we might turn to Derrida's “we owe ourselves to death [Nous nous devons à la mort]” from his Demeure, Athènes, which explores the relationship between death, debt, philosophy, and photography. The “end” can be thought of as a last chance to settle debts, as a moment which illuminates what we “owe” in various ways. Here, Marx and Socrates see to their debtors, and with Benjamin's last lines we might think of them bearing the weight of what he “owes” us as readers in the end.

See Derrida's Learning to Live Finally and his “Exordium” from Specters of Marx (xvi–xx) for further meditation on the layers of this “finally.” Interestingly, the cover and spine of Learning to Live Finally tout the book as “The Last Interview,” while the subtitle of the book's cover pages is simply “An Interview with Jean Birnbaum.” Here, too, we see the desire for the allure of the “last words” in this choice.

“To entail v.² oed. 1. Law. trans. To convert (an estate) into a ‘fee tail’ (feudum talliatum); to settle (land, an estate, etc.) on a number of persons in succession, so that it cannot be bequeathed at pleasure by any one possessor.”

As Sontag observes, “To miniaturize is to make portable—the ideal form of possessing things for a wanderer, or a refugee. Benjamin, of course, was both a wanderer, on the move, and a collector, weighed down by things; that is, passions. To miniaturize is to conceal” (124). We might think of many of Benjamin's last sentences as miniature, portable, collectable snapshots of his work.

We might read these last sentences as “uncanny” in the sense of either the Freudian or Heideggerian Unheimliche. Looking through Freud's lens, we would emphasize that the last sentence is not at home in the essay, but it is not at home in a way that is familiar, “for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old—established in the mind” (944). For Freud, the uncanny is not merely strange, but a strangeness that has “been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death” (945). Or, in other words, a strangeness that we have known in some way throughout the essay, but which only comes to the surface in the end. In a Heideggerian sense, we might read these last lines as uncanny in their “not being at home” within the text. They step out of and beyond the text and serve as a midpoint between text and silence. Last sentences think they are “at home” in appearing to be part of the text, but in “thinking they are homely,” they become “those who are unhomely” (Heidegger 76).

Many problems arise at the outset with the very premise of “the last sentence”: We can of course identify this “startling and uncanny” prose as a general description of Benjamin's rhetorical style or, as Sontag calls it, “freeze-frame baroque” (129). Certainly, many of Benjamin's most often-cited lines—such as, “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism [Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultue, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein]” (SW 4: 392; GS 1: 696)—appear nowhere near the end of his texts. I am not arguing for a reading of his final sentences as having a monopoly on complexity and interest in Benjamin's work, but simply for considering the tendency for the last lines to be so nearly unanimously startling in various ways. Also problematic is the fact that Benjamin was a writer and a connoisseur of the fragment, and we therefore might take each “last sentence” of each fragment as a “last sentence” in itself. And even within works that are not written in fragments we can see that the mode of the fragment is evident throughout Benjamin's writing in his tendency toward dense and declarative prose. Additionally, the premise of isolating any one sentence can only ever be an exercise, as these sentences exist within a larger work, and we might claim that no single sentence can be thought in isolation from the rest. Also, many of these works were unpublished during Benjamin's lifetime, or multiple versions exist, so identifying an agreed-upon “last sentence” can be tricky at times. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is Benjamin's thinking of the Jetztzeit or “Now-Time.” An analysis of his rhetorical strategies that re-creates a relationship to time within his work and considers the ordering and progression of his sentences cannot ignore Benjamin's complex and multiple theories of the relationship of past to present. While Benjamin's work addresses the historical, it is always invested in the historical as mediated and understood through language. Therefore, his theories of our relationship to historical notions of time cannot help but also inform our understanding of rhetorical time within his work. This complicates any identification of the “last” or “late” sentence, as the sentence that appears to come “late,” or to occupy the Now-Time for the reader of the last moment of a work, is already simultaneously “turned toward the past” and “shot through with splinters of messianic time” (SW 4: 392, 397).

The objection could be raised here that this is not the “proper” last sentence of the essay, as it is the last sentence of the “Epilogue [Nachwort]” in the latest version of the work from 1939; but this epilogue, with the identical last sentence, existed in the earliest versions of the essay, before this section was titled “Epilogue,” and was simply titled “XIX” and appeared as the final section of the essay. I have cited both the next-to-last and last sentences here as it is difficult to think of one without the other.

Here, again, one could squabble about this being the proper “last sentence” to Benjamin's “On the Concept of History,” as two additional fragments labeled “A” and “B” do exist and are consistently published with the work. Because the piece was never published during Benjamin's lifetime, we cannot know for certain what his intentions were with these last two sections, but they appear only in early drafts of the work and are nowhere to be found in his later drafts. On this basis I take the final sentence of section “XVIII” as the last sentence. See the editors’ footnote, SW 4: 400n28.

These last lines, in order of appearance, can be found in Benjamin (SW 4: 270; GS 1: 508), (SW 4: 396; GS 1: 703), (Origin 235; GS 1: 409), (SW 2: 218; GS 2: 310), (SW 1: 356; GS 1: 201), (SW 2: 46; GS 4: 348), (SW 1: 74; GS 2: 157), (SW 1: 263; GS 4: 21).

We might merely call these “dialectical reversals” “dialectical images” in Benjamin's thought, as they are often images of dialectical contradiction. The “definition” of Benjamin's “dialectical image” is multiple and contested—but Benjamin very specifically speaks of dialectical images in his work as not merely images of contradiction or opposition, but he explains that they are “dialectics at a standstill [Dialektik im Stillstand]” in which “the relation of the what-has-been to the now [kontinuierliche ist, ist die des Gewesen zum Jetzt dialektisch]” is “suddenly emergent [sprunghaft]” and what is most often overlooked is that: “the place where one encounters them is language [der Ort, an dem man sie antrifft, ist die Sprache]” (N2a,3; GS 5: 577). Although these last sentences are an encounter “in language,” they do not all have a complex relationship between the “now” and the “what-has-been”; therefore, I do not want to place all of the examples under the term dialectical images, and draw, instead, on the phrase dialectical reversals. As Michael W. Jennings explains, the “‘coming to legibility’” of the dialectical image “in no way depends upon changes in human cognitive capacity” but, rather, in the dialectical image “two historical moments are themselves intrinsically related to one another” (37). See Jennings for further elaboration of the place of the dialectical image in Benjamin's work.

These pairings appear in the last lines of the following texts: The Origin of German Tragic Drama (235; GS 1: 409), “Goethe's Elective Affinities” (SW 1: 356; GS 1: 201), “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” (SW 3: 285; GS 2: 505), “Moscow” (SW 2: 46; GS 4: 348), “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘The Poet's Courage’ and “Timidity’” (SW 1: 36; GS 2: 126), “One-Way Street” (SW 1: 487; GS 4: 148), “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” (SW 4: 407), “Old Toys” (SW 2: 101; GS 4: 515), “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (SW 4: 270; GS 1: 508), “The Author as Producer” (SW 2: 780; GS 2: 701).

We should also remember what Aristotle might have to tell us about the nature of “first lines”: “A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be” (Poetics part 7). Aristotle is specifically addressing tragedy in his discourse on “a beginning, a middle, and an end,” but tragic drama has long been a site for reflective thinking, which goes well beyond the scope of tragedy in its implications. I leave a consideration of the place of “first lines” for another time.

This claim echoes a moment from the New Testament when Paul states, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2.20).

It may be seen as a stretch to consider this last sentence as a “proper” last sentence within this collection of notes and fragments, never intended to be published, but the decision to place it last speaks to, at the very least, its chronological ordering within this compellation of notes and fragments and the editors’ logical choice of arrangement.

See Hanssen's “‘Dichtermut’ and ‘Blödigkeit,’” and Lacoue-Labarthe's “Poetry's Courage.”

See Les Back's “Beaches and Graveyards: Europe's Haunted Borders.”

See, for example, Hanssen's “Portrait”; Kittsteiner; Mosès; Werckmeister.