JF

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Dear J.F.,

Thoughts:

As tempting as it may be to detail why and how you are wrong—wrong about Benjamin’s supposed “full fidelity” to the dialectic,³ tragically mistaken about fascism deserving an exceptional status of enmity,⁴ and dead wrong about what these unnamed and uncited “scholars of Benjamin” supposedly believe—the fact is that we are not interested in fighting over whether Benjamin truly belongs in our camp or in yours. We will leave it to ideology’s adherents to seek adherence to their ideologies.

It is not that we concede the point, but rather that if Benjamin doesn’t fit under your tent, neither will he fit under any other. As Michael Löwy put it in his introduction to Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”:

We usually classify the various philosophies of history by their progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic character. Walter Benjamin does not fit into these classifications. He is a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, a Marxist opponent of ‘progressivism,’ a nostalgic who dreams of the future, a Romantic advocate of materialism. He is, in every sense of the word, ‘unclassifiable.’

While we would not choose the same words as Löwy here, there can be little doubt that Benjamin’s thought is characterized more by its promiscuity than by fealty to anything, much less something so rigid as the dialectic. Löwy goes on to say:

It is futile, then, to attempt to recruit him into one or other of the two main camps contending for hegemony on the stage (or should we say the market?) of ideas: modernism and postmodernism.

It is not hard to see how the same could be said of Marxism and whatever camp we might be accused of contending for (nihilism? ahistorical anti-civilizationism? mysticism?). We do not demand Benjamin’s belonging to our camp, if indeed we feel part of any camp (we do not), and if we resist your claims to his belonging to yours, it is partly in the spirit of debate, to be sure, but it is also from a sensation we can only describe as ethical in nature. Not because we feel an obligation to “save the dead,” as you claim a proper reading of Benjamin would persuade us is our duty. (The dead? Which ones?) It is rather that to recognize someone is to experience an ethical bond with them, especially in cases where the conditions elicit the instincts of preservation.

If we have almost no desire for a battle over ideological claims to Benjamin’s legacy, we have even less for a contest over his interpretation by the academy at large. Your claim that anyone working in this field would disagree with us doesn’t have the sting that you might have intended. You may, for some bizarre reason, be their sycophant, but our project (much like your writing) is not academic, and neither is it constrained by the dominant opinions of experts in their fields. Further, if the majority of Marxist academics do offer such a simplistic reading of someone so enigmatic, we would read this as a call to scandalize their comfortable certainty. What’s more, you seem to have missed that our project could be understood, in a certain light, as an attempt to undermine the academic operation of sterilizing and de-clawing rebel thought. Just as we argued that Edelman’s work functions to pacify Hocquenghem through the banality of form, those working in this field (you, by extension) labor to stultify the subversive qualities of Benjamin’s thought through the tired routine of Marxist analysis. We have to ask what motivates you to affirm the fidelity of a man otherwise celebrated for his promiscuity? Forgive us if we read your inquiry as another effort to capture what remains ineffable, as the labor of a dogmatist, an ideologue.⁵

To invoke Benjamin himself with regard to critical reading:

If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Where for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of experience.

We’ll leave your accredited experts the task of picking through the materialist ashes; our gaze remains fixed on the dancing flames.

What we are interested in questioning at the moment is the line of inquiry which leads you to conclude that our piece betrayed Benjamin or his “Theses.” First, however, we should make clear that any attack of ours on communism, whether in the first issue of the journal, in these pages, or elsewhere, is hardly motivated by a desire to score points as you suggest. If that was our interest, we would have simply mentioned the mass graves of communism and left it at that. In our engagement with Benjamin, we saw fit to recognize and appreciate his deviations from Marxism because, for us, such deviations are what interest us in the figures of the past. Insofar as a figure of history only seems to us to be a blurred face among many, we are incapable of recognizing him, much less conversing with her. Insofar as another figure appears only as the political face of some movement or other, they are incapable of holding our interest. But when we can sense a fragment of the past deviating from its course, resisting progress itself, then in a flash this fragment is alive and present with us and, however briefly, we grasp a bit of truth. Even you must admit that few if any would be interested in Benjamin’s thought if he clung dogmatically to the method of the dialectic. Clearly, the enchantment of his life’s work lies elsewhere.

This elsewhere is undoubtedly to be found in Benjamin’s mystical thought. It is interesting that you make some half-hearted effort to criticize us for neglecting his Jewish identity, when your entire reading is an attempt sever his thought from its Jewish influence. You describe this central dimension of his thought as an “unfortunate,” “dizzying pastiche of historically and theoretical [sic] distant figures and notions.” Your characterization reads as particularly nasty when compared to Gershom Scholem’s assertion that Benjamin was “a theologian marooned in the realm of the profane,” or his celebration of Benjamin’s “intuitive affirmation of mystical themes which walk a fine line between religion and nihilism.” Benjamin himself often described being torn between his ‘cultic’ and ‘communist’ desires. As he says in a letter to Scholem regarding his ‘conversion’ to Marxism:

If I were to join the Communist Party someday (something that, in turn, I am making dependent on one last twist of fate), my stance would be to behave always radically and never logically when it came to the most important things…. [T]here are no meaningfully political goals.

Where you would dismiss the fire for the ashes you prize, we recognize these ashes as meaningless and seek only the warmth of what you’d excise.

It is interesting that you write, however obliquely, of betrayal in relation to Benjamin. How can we betray someone who had no sense of the firm commitment you find in him? Is it not strange, that one who is dead can command one’s attention so? We also feel this when we read the “Theses,” though not, it seems, in the way you do. Not as a responsibility to save some faceless mass of corpses, nor a loyal party member. We read the “Theses” not as a warning against recasting history, but to the contrary as an invitation to cast history away and to recognize in the past the faces of friends.

Now as to your questions:

1. Jargon aside, it is unclear how you concluded that our reading of the “Theses” holds the future in a position of privilege. We can only guess this was by juxtaposition with No Future, or perhaps simply because the future is a sort of default orientation one can hardly help but privilege. If the former, we might remind you that in that piece we only privileged the future as a subject in order to attempt to articulate how and why it captivates us, and ultimately to refuse it. If the latter, then we can only say that we are of course not free from this condition, though in turning to Benjamin, we were reminded to turn away from the future, if only for a time and more as gesture than as a break. We could even say that the reading of his “Theses” we presented was intended to be a reminder, or an invitation, in turn.

As you say, chronic realism was not the subject of our reading. In fact, since your letter kindly introduced the phrase to our ears, we can think of no term more fitting to describe the condition infecting this society. In the future we may even employ the phrase ourselves, if you don’t mind. Chronic realism: the debilitating belief—long-term or life-long, and resistant to medication—in consensus reality. A bit too Crimethinc? We’ll work on it.

It is true that in some very strange and inevitable way, there will be a future, even if there is not one for me, or you, or even humanity. One might cast one’s vote for plurality and say that there will be no Future, that instead there are many futures. This position is preferable, but is made troublesome by what it inherits—nearly everything—from the conformist view of the future which it means to deviate from.

What remains—what may always remain—is how we intend to orient ourselves with regard to a future we have disavowed, at least in its political forms. Because what is at stake is more than a mood; it is a question of ethics, though far less straightforward than ethical questions are supposed to be. Here, where your line of inquiry leaves off, ours begins.

2. Certainly, the progressivism and anti-civilization thought you mention are not square nor can they be placed squarely, but can only be erratically played against each other. The great heap of wreckage that Benjamin calls history is what we’d call Leviathan—Death itself which captures the living. Progress can only describe a view from within this monster, as the refinement of its mode of capture, and also as the decimation and accumulation of countless bodies. Benjamin calls it a storm which blows us out of paradise. While we agree with Benjamin that we cannot return to paradise, we must also insist that history can be read and lived in a way that tends to inspire and strengthen us, rather than merely squashing human beings into the gross narrative of progress. We might consider your inquiry in light of Benjamin by returning to Löwy again as he outlines Benjamin’s interest in the past through the lens of German Romanticism:

One might define the Romantic Weltanschauung as a cultural critique of modern (capitalist) civilization in the name of pre-modern (pre-capitalist) values—a critique or protest that bears upon aspects which are felt to be unbearable and degrading: the quantification and mechanization of life, the reification of social relations, the dissolution of the community and the disenchantment of the world. Its nostalgia for the past does not mean it is necessarily retrograde: the Romantic view of the world may assume both reactionary and revolutionary forms. For revolutionary Romanticism the aim is not a return to the past but a detour through the past on the way to a utopian future.

Here we could discuss nostalgia for pre-capitalist values as (admittedly ahistorical) resistance to modernity, but on this question we will again be met with your inability to mistake our interest for adherence. We have no ‘allegiance to Camatte’ to be spoken of (and we explicitly critique his understanding of capital in our engagement with him), though we might naturally feel inclined to take his side for the moment when he is accused of unfaithfulness to the proper conception of domination and history. Here we might reemphasize that it is a person’s tendency to deviate that draws us, as deviants, to them. Not so we can form a new deviant position to adhere to or deviate from, but to hold a palaver, discoursing in a manner not only idle but aimless.

This is, of course, a matter of taste.

We play with Camatte, and more importantly Perlman, for the same reason we play with Benjamin: for their endeavors in heresy.

3. Yes, of course. Did you read it?

4. Here is an interesting question, however uninteresting your method of approach, and without acceding to speak for nihilism, we will offer an interpretation of the line. While there are several ways to approach nihilism, for now we could say that nihilism means an orientation toward reducing what exists to rubble rather than toward a way through it. For us, this approach corresponds to a strategic interpretation of the situation, a provisional understanding that, firstly, what we are faced with is not yet rubble but structures (and so why concern oneself with navigating a path that has not been opened), and secondly that all attempts, however marginal, at radicalizing and even destroying these structures may result in their improvement. Were you to excavate your cherished History, you’d likely see that every such attempt has lead directly to a labor camp.

Elsewhere we’ve discussed an ethics which seeks to find escape routes from the structures which constrain us. Your reading of ‘a way through’ seems to betray a desire to recompose such rubble into some new dialectical arrangement of capture. Without shying away from the delight we take in the rubble, we must also imagine that a ‘way through’ would mean a way out.

We could counter with Benjamin’s call “to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” Here he has infinitely more in common with a conception of history as decomposition and tragedy than with any ideology which believes that redemption might be built into these monuments. Toward any such ideology, we have more than contempt.

In summation, we can only insist, against a reading of the “Theses” that would make it our moral obligation to save the dead, that instead our task, and our desire, is to experience those moments that break the continuity of history and, insofar as it is possible, to inhabit them. In doing so, we are not called to the past by any group with its martyrs and its morality of death. We are motivated only, by a sense of recognition, to “blast open the continuum of history.” You accuse us of ahistoricism. What we intend is far worse.

Most sincerely,