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Abstract
This article renders a close reading of those passages in Walter Benjamin's work where he uses the term “unscheinbar.” Arguing that this concept cannot be reduced to its privative prefix “un-,” the article explores how moments in time, objects or images that are not meaningful in themselves can nevertheless trigger an experience that is to be called such. The article analyzes Benjamin's ideas on friendliness, commemoration, melancholy, mémoire involontaire and photography with the purpose of understanding how a detail or fragment strikes us as significant, despite the fact that it cannot become visible as a unity or whole in its own right.
Notes
1 To my knowledge, so far almost no attention has been given to the specific meaning and philosophical weight of the concept unscheinbar in Benjamin's essays and books. For two very interesting essays that do mention the concept and have prepared the way for this article, see Sigrid Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste wahrer Philologie” in Walter Benjamin. Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008) 237–50 (the reference to “die Bedeutung des ‘Unscheinbaren’” is on 246), and Liliane Weissberg, “Circulating Images: Notes on the Photographic Exchange” in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 109–31 (the reference to the “unscheinbare Stelle” is on 110).
2 Walter Benjamin, “Goethe's Elective Affinities” in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1996) 351. In what follows, Benjamin's Selected Writings (vols. 1–4, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings) will be abbreviated as SW, followed by the number of the volume. The abbreviation GS refers to the edition of the original text in German: Gesammelte Schriften. Band I–VII, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991).
3 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London and New York: Verso, 1998) 31. In what follows, this text will be abbreviated as O.
4 See also Benjamin's statements that “knowledge is possession” (O 29) and that it “is open to question but truth is not” (O 30) and the definition of truth as an “intentionless state of being” and as “the death of intention” (O 36). For more information on this important distinction between truth and knowledge, see, for example, Beatrice Hanssen, “Philosophy at its Origin: Walter Benjamin's Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,” MLN 110.4 (1995): 809–33 and the chapter “Language” in Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2012) 9–27.
5 See, for example, the statement that “the representational impulse of truth is the refuge of beauty as such” (O 31).
6 For a brief but clear discussion of the relationship between these ideas and intuitions in Benjamin and Heidegger, see Rolf Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973) 90–91. In Tiedemann's opinion, Benjamin's ideas regarding this theme of Seinsvergessenheit are even more far-reaching than Heidegger's in that they are ultimately “irreconcilable with such [i.e., Heidegger's] flowing back into the originary, [irreconcilable] with the retreat into being, into ‘the’ event [‘das’ Ereignis]” (90). A more elaborate analysis of the similarities and differences between Benjamin's and Heidegger's views on this issue can be found in Willem van Reijen, Der Schwarzwald und Paris. Heidegger und Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 1998), esp. in the chapter “Sprache” 142–65. The most relevant reference in Heidegger's own work can be found in the famous chapter “The Work and Truth” in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and his conceptual distinction between truth as unconcealment (aletheia, Unverborgenheit) and truth as correspondence (Richtigkeit). I thank the anonymous reviewer of Angelaki for her/his suggestions in this regard.
7 See, for example, Beatrice Hanssen, “Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky),” MLN 114.5 (1999): 991–1013, and esp. the chapter “Trauerspiel and Melancholy Subjectivity” in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001) 60–107.
8 See, for example, Andrew Benjamin, “The Absolute as Translatability. Working through Walter Benjamin on Language” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, eds. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (New York and London: Continuum, 2002) 116: “The Fall becomes the moment staging the presence of the Absolute in terms that are, in the end, proper to it: namely, the necessary impossibility of the Absolute's actualization. With the Fall there is a retention of the Absolute.” In this regard, the most crucial passage in Benjamin's Language essay is the following: “[T]he Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives uninjured [unverletzt] and which has stepped out of name-language, the language of knowledge” (SW 1: 71; GS II-1: 153; translation modified). The reference to violence (verletzen is the German word for “to violate”) is not at all a coincidence, given Benjamin's recurrent interest in that concept. There is, moreover, a striking parallelism between the manner in which the concepts of abstraction, judgment and violence are connected here and the way in which this same connection will be reintroduced, five years later, in the essay “Critique of Violence” (in his discussion of the difference between the power of the law and genuine justice). I thank the anonymous reviewer of Angelaki for drawing my attention to this issue.
9 See also the statement that “the thing in itself has no word, being created from God's word and known in its name by a human word” (SW 1: 69). For the most substantial discussion of Benjamin's views on language, see Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995).
10 For more background about this discussion, see Rodolphe Gasché, “Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin's Theory of Language” in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986) 83–104, and Bettine Menke, “‘However One Calls into the Forest … ’ Echoes of Translation” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism 83–97. This same discussion is taken up by Benjamin in the essay “The Coming Philosophy” in which he describes the Kantian concept of experience (on account of the idealization of scientific knowledge) as “an experience virtually reduced to a nadir” (SW 1: 101). One could argue that this critical stance vis-à-vis Kant shows that, according to Benjamin, the modern concept of experience is highly antithetical to any genuine sensibility for “the necessary unveiling of things for us.”
11 See, for example, Miriam Hansen's claim that “[s]uperimposed upon the historical-materialist trajectory of decline is a less linear – though no less pessimistic – sense of belatedness, indebted to the temporality of Jewish Messianism” in Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique 40 (1987) 190.
12 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1999) 365 (J77a: 8). In what follows, this text will be abbreviated as AP.
13 For such readings that focus on the nostalgic and mournful element in Benjamin's views on modernity, see, for example, Andrew Benjamin, “Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Continuum, 2005) 156–70, Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera. The Historian as Chiffonnier,” New German Critique 39 (1986): 142–68, and Rebecca Comay, “The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism” in Walter Benjamin and History 88–101.
14 This argument about a negative ability runs parallel to and was inspired by Giorgio Agamben's ideas on potentiality as put forward in the essay “On Potentiality” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 177–84. See, for example, his reading of Aristotle's Metaphysics, the statement that “all potentiality is [also] impotentiality” (181) and his views on a so-called “potential not to be” (182): “[I]f a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such” (183). For other elaborations of similar intuitions in Agamben's work, see, for example, “Vocation and Revocation” in The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 23–26, and the essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in Potentialities 243–71.
15 Samuel Weber, “Introduction” in Benjamin's -abilities (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2008) 7. See also his “Impart-ability: Language as Medium” in ibid. 40: “Benjamin's -barkeiten [ … ] do not simply define their own virtuality in terms of the absence of what they name, but rather in terms of its radical alteration.”
16 As has often been noted, Aby Warburg's concept of Nachleben (“afterlife”) was highly influential. See, for example, Weber's Benjamin's -abilities, and Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste wahrer Philologie.”
17 In taking Benjamin's theologically inspired ideas to be complementary to his (Marxist) views on modernity, my reading of his work is in line with what Michael Löwy has called the “fourth approach,” that is, an alternative to the “materialist school,” the “theological school” and the “school of contradiction.” See Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On the Concept of History” (London and New York: Verso, 2005) 20. Despite the conflicting views of noteworthy friends and later scholars like Scholem, Brecht or Adorno there are many passages in Benjamin's work that back up this view that there is an essential and not a merely arbitrary relationship between his theologically inspired ideas and the socio-political ones. See, for example, his claim that “‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time” and that it can “easily be a match for anyone” but only on the condition that it “enlists the services of theology” (SW 4: 389). See also the statements that his “thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain” and that it is forbidden “to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts” (AP 471 (N8: 1)).
18 Like Confucius, Lao-tzu (sixth century bce) never founded a formal school. For that reason, movement and wandering belong to the most crucial characteristics of his thinking. See, for example, Lao-tzu's saying that “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving,” which sounds surprisingly similar to Benjamin's own statement that “[n]ot to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling” (SW 3: 352).
19 This intuition that there is a specific importance attached to people who pass on a truth or wisdom that is not otherwise available places the essay on Brecht in the same framework as the one on Kafka that was written one year earlier. Both essays, that is to say, revolve around a realization that “the consistency of truth has been lost” and the subsequent (deeply paradoxical) feeling that one has to “g[i]ve [it] up so that [one] could hold on to its transmissibility” (SW 3: 326).
20 See footnote 17, written by Edmund Jephcott: “Unversieglich literally means ‘inexhaustible,’ ‘everflowing’” (SW 2: 250).
21 For a very interesting reading of this passage, see Friedlander's chapter “Rescue” in Walter Benjamin 157–89, e.g., the statement that “[r]ecognizing the stakes of history would be bringing the present into a critical state” (169). See also the tension that Friedlander constructs around the concepts of empathy and melancholy on the one hand (“deadening the past [ … ] making every moment of it similarly powerless to affect the present” (164)) and a presence of mind to and construction of the past on the other (“a unique opportunity for transforming the present” (167)). For the closest reading of Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history and the difference with historicism, see Löwy, Fire Alarm, esp. 86–102.
22 For more on this idea about an irreducible distance that is preserved in the very moment of commemoration, and for an analysis of the criticism of the notion of empathy that it entails, see Löwy, Fire Alarm 46–49.
23 For only one out of many illustrations of this double form of disenchantment, see Benjamin's statement that “[h]uman actions were deprived of all value. Something new arose: an empty world” (O 139). For an extensive analysis of the religious and cultural background of this idea (and for the historical background of Benjamin's own interpretations), see Jane O. Newman, Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP and Cornell U Library, 2011) esp. chapter 3: “Melancholy Germans: War Theology, Allegory and the Lutheran Baroque” 138–84. For more in-depth analyses of the antinomies between life and faith and Benjamin's concept of melancholy, and for a comparison with the ideas of Aby Warburg, see, for example, Jochen Becker, “Ursprung so wie Zerstörung: Sinnbild und Sinngebung bei Warburg und Benjamin” in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) 64–89, Hanssen, “Portrait of Melancholy,” and esp. the chapter “Trauerspiel and Melancholy Subjectivity” in Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics.
24 See, for example, Jane O. Newman's statement in Benjamin's Library 167: “[T]he melancholy Baroque man is imprisoned in [a] ‘satanic’ melancholic paralysis.”
25 One could add to this idea the remark that each of these three instantiations of the “non-real” is of crucial importance to Benjamin's own writings. For more on the importance of the concept of “theatricality” in Benjamin's oeuvre, see, for example, Samuel Weber, “Storming the Work: Allegory and Theatricality in Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play” in Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham UP, 2004) 160–80 (the concept of “inauthentic simultaneity” (173) is very relevant here), and Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991). For more on the concept of “play”/“room-for-play” (Spielraum) see the work of Miriam Bratu Hansen, esp. “Play-Form of Second Nature” in Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2012) 183–204, and “Room-for-Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema” October 109 (2004): 3–45. For more on the notion of “study” and a relation with “the law as that which is [ … ] no longer practiced” (SW 2: 815), see Samuel Weber, “Violence and Gesture. Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes … ” in Benjamin's -abilities 195–210, Friedlander, Walter Benjamin 212–21, and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 50–55. Theatricality, play and study denote, each in their own way, not a mere suspension of the attachment to the outside world but an alternative manner of relating to it, that is, an ability to not disrupt one's investment in reality despite the awareness that it cannot in itself be regarded as meaningful. In an argument that runs parallel to Gilles Deleuze's views on non-sense, it can be claimed that what is non-real according to Benjamin is not opposed to what is real but only to the absence of reality (cf. infra).
26 On the issue of meaning understood as remains or a residue, see various texts written by Giorgio Agamben, e.g., “The Assistants” in Profanations (New York: Zone, 2007) 29–35 (“[T]he unfulfilled is what remains” (34)), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone, 1999) 164 (“[T]he remnants of Auschwitz – the witnesses – are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them”), and The Time that Remains.
27 On Aby Warburg's reading of melancholy's “consoling, humanistic message of liberation [humanistischen Trostblatt] from the fear of Saturn,” see his “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles: Ghetty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999) 644.
28 For these ideas on the link between meaning and contingency (and for the further development of the argument), I am heavily indebted to intuitions put forward by Arnold Burms and Roland Breeur. For a recent collection of essays by Burms (in Dutch), see his Waarheid, evocatie, symbool (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2011). See also Breeur's essays on Proust and “Over het voor-en nadeel van het leven voor de geschiedenis” [On the Use and Disadvantages of Life for History] in De tijd bestaat niet. Essays over domheid, vrijheid en emoties (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2012) 211–36.
29 See Weber, “Storming the Work,” e.g., 174:
[A]llegory is the traditional means of investing a manifestation with a signification that it cannot possibly have in terms of a purely immanent, self-contained structure. It thereby brings the signifying potential traditionally associated with a generalized transcendence to bear upon the claims of a localizable and individualizable secular immanence.
30 See Willem van Reijen, “Innerlichkeit oder Begriffsarbeit? Die Barockrezeption W. Benjamins und Th.W. Adornos” in Allegorie und Melancholie 19 (my trans.): “The experience of the absolute depravity [Hinfälligkeit] of our life and its meaning becomes the starting point of the idea of salvation.”
31 The original passage is:
[N]o sooner had I touched the topmost button than my bosom swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I shook with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The person who came to my rescue, who saved me from barrenness of spirit, was the same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I was no longer in any way myself, had come in, and had restored me to myself, for that person was myself and more than myself. (In Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain; Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random, 1932) 2: 113)
32 A mémoire involontaire is marked by the tension that characterizes all things unscheinbar since the inconspicuous nature of the experience enters wholly into the feeling that there is nevertheless something meaningful going on. See, for instance, the tension between “ruins” and “essence” and between “rest” and “vast structure” in the following sentence:
[T]he smell and taste of things remain poised a long time [ … ] amid the ruins of all the rest [la ruine de tout le reste]; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence [leur gouttelette presque impalpable], the vast structure of recollection [l’édifice immense du souvenir]. (In Marcel Proust, Swann's Way; Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random, 1932) 1: 36)
33 See Proust, Swann's Way 35: “I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light.”
34 Gilles Deleuze, “Eleventh Series of Nonsense” in Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004) 79.
35 Ibid. 80.
36 Ibid. 83:
[N]onsense does not have any particular sense, but is opposed to the absence of sense rather than to the sense that it produces in excess – without ever maintaining with its product the simple relation of exclusion to which some people would like to reduce them.
37 From this perspective, the term mémoire involontaire itself is misleading because it seems to connect the former Self with the fullness of a presence that it never had and the past with an impulse of self-revelation that is lacking. In this regard it is crucial to understand the paradox that the past that returns in a mémoire involontaire did not in fact pre-exist this moment of return: it is a past that differs from any former “present” (it was never fully experienced) and which is realized only at the moment of remembrance itself. See the description of the mémoire involontaire as a moment of “creation” where the seeking mind
is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance [quelque chose qui n'est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser], which it alone can bring into the light of day. (In Proust, Swann's Way 36)
38 See also Roland Breeur, “De tijd bestaat niet” [Time Does Not Exist] in De tijd bestaat niet 88:
Perhaps, what affects and moves the most in memories is not so much the fact that we develop ourselves as a unity, but that we, despite this development, nevertheless preserve something of the child we once were. If, still, we are touched by that past, it [is] rather [connected to] the awareness that it has disappeared forever and that it does no longer match who we are now. The past touches us as loss and not as the confirmation of a deep unity and continuity. (My trans.)
39 See, for example, the following claim:
Proust described not a life as it actually was [wie es gewesen ist] but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it [ … ] The important thing to the remembering author is not what he experienced [erlebt hat], but the weaving of his memory [Erinnerung], the Penelope work of recollection [Eingedenken]. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust's mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? (SW 2: 237–38; GS II-1: 311)
40 See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: Macmillan, 1911) 25: “[M]emory [ … ] covering as it does with a cloak of recollections a core of immediate perception, and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in perception.”
41 See ibid. 178: “My body is a centre of action, the place where the impressions received choose intelligently the path they will follow to transform themselves into movements accomplished.”
42 See Breeur's analysis of the difference between an organic and an atomic model of memory in “Proust. Herinnering in stijl” 186. For more on the signifying power of the detail, see Samuel Weber, “God and the Devil – In Detail” in Benjamin's -abilities, e.g., 244:
[T]he detail is that which detaches itself from what would otherwise be the pure self-sufficiency of the simple and unitary monad, and what, as detached, becomes capable of “mirroring” or representing that from which the monad has separated itself.
43 See the famous last paragraph of the Trauerspiel book:
In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last. (O 235)
44 For more on this relational and dislocated nature of a meaning “in between” objects, experiences or images, see Weber's above-mentioned “Genealogy of Modernity” 131–63, e.g., 136: “[T]he ‘totality’ of which Benjamin speaks does not signify the overcoming of originary incompleteness, but rather the deployment of the possibilities of differential relations that define the idea.” For an extensive analysis of similar intuitions in the work of Aby Warburg, see Georges Didi-Huberman, L'Image survivante. Histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002), esp. the chapter “Le Montage Mnemosyne: Tableaux, fusées, détails, intervalles” 452–505. For more on the concept of meaning as a Zwischenraum (“l'espace entre”) see 496–505.
45 For the clearest of many illustrations, see the statement that it is important to
carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. (AP 461 (N2: 6))
46 For a similar interpretation of Benjamin's essays on mechanically (re)produced images that does not, however, look at the concept unscheinbar, see, for example, Ariella Azoulay, “[Death's] Display Showcase: Walter Benjamin” in Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT P, 2001) 33. Azoulay's readings are, unlike mine, focused on the ethico-political dimension of the empowerment of the spectator's gaze, see idem, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone, 2008). For similar political stakes, see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Benjamin and the Political Economy of the Photograph” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) 53–58.
47 In this case, the non-sensical nature of the connection between the photograph and the future death of the fiancée can be taken quite literally since scholars have argued that Benjamin's identification of the woman in the photograph was mistaken (she is not Dauthendey's first wife, who committed suicide, but his second). See the reference to André Gunthert in Ariella Azoulay, “The [Aesthetic] Distance: Benjamin and Heidegger” in Death's Showcase 36.
48 For extensive analyses of what such “active” responses entail (and for the essential role of the body in such a response), see Susan Buck-Morss's views on a so-called “synaesthetic system” that revolves around a form of “sense-consciousness, decentered from the classical subject, wherein external sense-perceptions come together with the internal images of memory and anticipation” in “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992) 13. For an analysis of this shattering of an original unity and the response to such a multiplicity of meaning, see also Howard Eiland, “Reception in Distraction,” Boundary 2 30.1 (2003): 51–66, and Gertrud Koch, “Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin's ‘Work of Art’ Essay” in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) 205–15. For the way in which this relates to, amongst other things, the phenomenon of mimicry and gendered spectatorship, see also Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” e.g., 217–19.
49 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, 1982) 27.
50 Ibid. 42. It is very remarkable that, despite the profound differences between Benjamin's and Barthes's views on the significance of the “detail” in photographs, almost all commentaries focus only on the similarities. For some examples of this, see Hansen, Cinema and Experience 156; Azoulay, “[Death's] Display Showcase” 38, and Margaret Iversen, “The Art Seminar” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2007) 157. The only important reference to the difference between Benjamin's and Barthes's views that I could find is in Liliane Weissberg, “Circulating Images” 110:
In Barthes a particular detail like a shoe can evoke the appropriation of the image as memory. He can recall the past. For Benjamin, however, the unscheinbare Stelle should draw the photograph into the here and now, give evidence of its present currency. Memory is experienced in these seemingly invisible places not as a referent to the past, moreover, but to the future.
51 Barthes, Camera Lucida 55.
52 Ibid. 49.
53 Ibid. 55; my emphasis.
54 Ibid. 79. See also the following sentence: “What life remained would be absolutely and entirely unqualifiable (without quality)” (in ibid. 75).
55 Cf. ibid. 90–91. “The circle is closed, there is no escape,” writes Barthes contemplating a photograph of his deceased mother, “When it is painful, nothing in it can transform grief into mourning [ … ] Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory [ … ] but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”
56 See in this regard Benjamin's dictum that “the cracking open of natural teleology” is an “article” of his “politics” (AP 631 (W7, 4)).
57 For a clear elaboration of some of the key-features of Benjamin's concepts of fate, myth and guilt, see Friedlander, Walter Benjamin 112–38, esp. 114–18 (“Life and Meaning”) and the statement that “where meaningful forms of life disintegrate, the entanglement in life, namely the ambiguity of myth, takes over” (117). For the main features of the concept of myth in Benjamin's writings, see the introduction to Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity, 1996), in particular 9–13.
58 In this context, see also Friedlander's analysis of the important difference between tragedy (myth, fate) and Trauerspiel (history): “Tragedy [ … ] is not only an artistic form but also a mode of conceiving of the fulfillment of meaning in history as what makes it possible to bring an order to the contingencies of historical time” (in Friedlander, Walter Benjamin 125). See also the statement that “[i]n [tragedy] is realized the possibility of the closure of meaning, beyond all intention, or conscious use of language by its speakers [ … ] In contrast, the essential experience of the Trauerspiel is the failure of language to attain closure or fulfillment in meaning” (in ibid. 128).
59 See also Benjamin's statement that fate has no “autonomous time” and that its time “is parasitically dependent on the time of a higher, less natural life. It has no present, for fateful moments exist only in bad novels, and it knows past and future only in curious variations” (SW 1: 204).
60 See the statement in the Goethe essay that, for this reason,
no work of art may seem wholly alive, in a manner free of spell-like enchantment, without becoming mere semblance and ceasing to be a work of art. The life undulating in it must appear petrified and as if spellbound in a single moment. (SW 1: 340)
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