The Art of Reconciliation

Photography and the Conception of Dialectics in Benjamin, Hegel, and Derrida

D. Petersson

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137029942
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Art General

Dag Petersson offers a comprehensive critique of the philosophy that has dominated 200 years of modern thought, politics, economy, and culture. The basic question is this: why does dialectical metaphysics fail to keep what it promises? What is it about dialectics, that makes it fall into irreducibly distinct variations of itself, when all it promises is to synthesize, to reconcile and make whole what is fragmented and alien to itself? An undisciplined creativity intrinsic to completing reason comes to light through analyses of how dialectical systems begin. Every dialectical philosophy must account for its own birth, and it is at this point, when it also articulates its promise of universal synthesis, that the book discovers a desire for light-writing, or photography. Only the most immediate element light can mediate the necessary self-determination of thought at its origin. Light must begin to write. A philosophical critique of dialectics is therefore also a point of departure for a new aesthetic ontology of photography.

Part I

1

Introduction to a Reality of Dreams

The friendship between Benjamin and Adorno is an academic legend. Seldom have two dialectical minds disputed each other as resolutely, as amicably, and with less intent to reconcile their differences. It is a dissension that has proven rich enough for decades of interpretation: two architectures of dialectic thought that in different ways seek to evade the maelstrom of Hegelianism. As we shall see, the conflict will direct us toward questions of time: ontological, experiential, historical, and political.

Benjamin and Adorno were introduced in Frankfurt during a summer seminar in 1923. Afterwards they maintained sporadic contact and met occasionally, but their famous letter correspondence did not commence until five years later. Today only Benjamin’s letters remain from the first years, as those from Adorno were lost in Benjamin’s apartment after his hasty escape from Berlin in March 1933. On February 28 that year, the day after the Reichstag fire, Benjamin wrote to their mutual friend, Gershom Scholem, and complained: ‘the air is hardly fit to breathe anymore – a condition which of course loses significance as one is being strangled anyway.’¹ Three weeks later, Benjamin fled Germany to Ibiza via Paris, only to return to the French capital in October and settle there as exiled émigré.

Adorno, on the other hand, remained in Germany in 1933, but left for England and a position at Oxford University during the following year. Whereas Adorno occasionally returned to Germany – at least until 1938 when he left more permanently for New York – Benjamin remained in exile for the rest of his life. As Benjamin in 1925 had been forced to withdraw his doctoral dissertation, his habilitation, the Origin of German Tragic Drama, he had, as opposed to Adorno, no academic status; Adorno had passed his habilitation in 1931, and the dissertation, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, appeared in print on January 30, 1933. Benjamin had assisted Adorno with his manuscript proofs and managed to write a review before leaving Berlin. For the next few years and during the ensuing dispute, the book formed a point of common reference.

After a year in Paris, Benjamin went to visit his ex-wife Dora in Italy. There he received, in December 17, 1934, a letter from Adorno in response to a recently completed article on Kafka. In a tone of scholarly recognition, Adorno draws to mind an interpretative attempt of his own where Kafka came to represent ‘a photograph of our earthly life from the perspective of a redeemed life [ ... ] no further words seem necessary to demonstrate our agreement ... .’² But although Adorno celebrates their mutual grasp, and especially Benjamin’s passage on the childhood photograph which successfully polarizes Kafka’s notion of gesture, there were elements that Benjamin had failed to develop. For instance, Benjamin had written about progress, that ‘Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time. His novels are set in a swamp world.’³ In a mildly critical remark, presupposing shared views about Hegel, Adorno reminds his friend of the need to dialectically negate this idea of epochs.

[T]he concept of the age of the world still remains abstract in the Hegelian sense (incidentally, though you are probably unaware of it, there are some astonishingly close connections between Hegel and this work. I would simply point out that the passage on ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ corresponds very sharply indeed to the opening dialectical movement of the Hegelian concept: being – nothing – becoming, and further that Cohen certainly took over the theme concerning the inversion of mythical law and guilt from Hegel’s philosophy of right, as well as from the Judaic tradition).⁴

Benjamin concedes in his response to Adorno’s remarks and the subject matter is laid to rest. But in early August, Adorno found reason to raise similar objections once again, and this time with invigorated force. It now concerns Benjamin’s Exposé of 1935, a text of much greater academic importance. This was ‘a general plan’⁵ that Benjamin had begun to draft in May to aid the completion of his great piece, The Arcades Project. As soon as Adorno had news about the Exposé, he asked for a copy to help attract financial support from Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock at the Institute for Social Research. For Benjamin, an endorsement of the Exposé from Adorno was both expected and crucial, as nobody had expressed more enthusiasm for The Arcades Project than him. Ever since Benjamin’s first presentation of the project in 1929 had Adorno considered it an opus magna in the making, and he never failed to ask Benjamin for news about its development. But when he, after having received a copy of the Exposé in early June, eventually responded two months later, it was with a detailed, severe, and lengthy critique that must have dented Benjamin’s hopes. It opened with the following remark:

Let me take as my point of departure the motto on p. 3, ‘chaque époque rêve la suivante’ [Every epoch dreams the one to come]. This seems to me to be an important key to the problem in so far as all those motifs in the theory of the dialectical image which provoke my criticism crystallize around precisely this undialectical proposition, the elimination of which might lead to a clarification of the theory itself.⁶

What follows is a thorough examination of composition as well as individual concepts, and Hegel is mentioned on several occasions. Benjamin took notice: ‘Wiesengrund. Dialectical images and dialectics at a standstill in Hegel.’⁷

It is obvious that Adorno does not simply argue for more Hegelian dialectics. Much rather, Adorno wants Benjamin to return to his own former advances in dialectical thinking, i.e. to what Adorno refers to as ‘theology.’⁸ In the Exposé, the dialectical image ‘fails to preserve that social movement within the contradiction for the sake of which you yourself have sacrificed theology here.’⁹ The term ‘theology’ is prone to cause confusion: for Adorno it refers not only to Benjamin’s earlier work on philosophy and critical aesthetics, but even more to Kierkegaard’s dialectics of religious paradox. Adorno is likely to have recognized a correspondence between Kierkegaard and Benjamin as both followed minutely the formal requirements of Hegelian dialectics, yet evaded the absolute. Benjamin’s tenet in ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,’ that ‘another relation between thesis and antithesis is possible than synthesis’¹⁰ had been brought to bear in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, and also in the essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ for which Adorno expressed unreserved admiration. A similarly non-synthetic dialectics had been developed in Adorno’s analysis of Kierkegaard – an immanent critique that Benjamin had referred to as ‘a reading in Kierkegaard.’¹¹ In the course of this analysis, Adorno follows Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel to the point where it literally confronts Kierkegaard’s ruling over his own thought. This self-rule, Adorno writes, does not synthesize, dialectics rather keeps the spheres apart with a mythical notion:

The real difference from Hegel is not so much the ‘leap’ but that the ‘spheres’ [the aesthetic, the ethic and the religious] do not undergo synthesis. [ ... ] Torn apart by Kierkegaard’s dialectic, as though by a natural force, the spheres that it had earlier created as stages become autonomous ‘ideas’ and rule over the existence from which they originated as articulating elements of its unity. This rule is, however, mythical.¹²

At this point, Kierkegaard’s dialectical critique of Hegel is judged by Adorno as a preliminary step. Adorno begins from here on to contribute to Kierkegaard’s philosophy by supplementing its mythical self-rule with a dialectical realization of the theological paradox:

[T]he traditional, theological interpretation of Kierkegaard is more correct than the psychologically informed interpretation when it poses paradoxy as the highest theme and not the immanence of a ‘spiritual life’ [ ... ]. Yet the theological interpretation remains obediently dependent on Kierkegaard to the extent that it unquestioningly concedes paradoxy as the theological answer. The task is rather: to reveal the structure of the paradoxy itself as dialectical and systematic and at the same time to construct its proper content. This content becomes evident not so much in the theological concept of the symbol as in the mythical sacrifice as it is represented in the reversal and ruin of Kierkegaard’s idealism.¹³

When Adorno insists on Benjamin’s theology as what ‘sustains our thoughts,’ he means that it alone is able to sustain a dialectical paradox in the Arcades Project. Theology alone may identify in finite social structures their ancient historical ideals and infinite resolutions; it alone may structure this content without subjecting it to idealist categories. Dialectically construed, paradox can identify monadic entities like the photographs in Kafka, or the sacrifice in Kierkegaard, and it is these prolegomena of truth that for Adorno validate ‘the secret coded character of our theology.’¹⁴ But Benjamin seems less than convinced; in his review of Adorno’s book in Vossischen Zeitung on April 22, 1933, he ironically praises the author’s disappearance into his own image of Kierkegaard’s remains, like a painter in a Chinese fairytale. ‘This absorption into the image is not redemption; it is consolation. The consolation, whose source of imagination as organon is the seamless passage from the Mythical-historical in reconciliation.’¹⁵ Benjamin’s own early writings and literary analyses often refer to ‘religion’ along with ‘God’ and ‘the divine,’ but the term ‘theology’ is almost never used. And if one judges from the formal structure of the Exposé, it is indeed difficult to find traces of Adorno’s methodology.

In order to approach their methodological differences, one may look at how Benjamin’s notion of the divine works in a dialectical course of argument. The essay ‘Critique of Violence’ from 1921 offers an illustrative case. Benjamin opens by proposing a general maxim: ‘all the natural ends of individuals must collide with legal ends if pursued with a greater or lesser degree of violence.’¹⁶ To uphold this general prohibition against violence, the state must make two exceptions that concede rights to use violent means. One is the right to use violence when creating a new law. (Even law-producing contracts in parliament are violent, says Benjamin, since they reserve the right to use violence should the contract be broken.) The second exception is the right to use violence in order to uphold the law. Thus appears from the maxim a dialectical relationship between law-producing and law-protecting violence that sustains the state monopoly of violence.

Benjamin then juxtaposes another dialectics to this one, a dialectics between the intrinsic violence of contracts and non-violent resolutions of conflict. If all contracts are inherently violent, are there any non-violent solutions to conflict? ‘Without doubt’, Benjamin answers: ‘there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of “understanding,” language.’¹⁷ Law cannot legislate language, he argues, although a weak, modern law prohibits fraud and perjury ‘for fear of the defrauded party.’ An unconfident law legislates to preempt violence, and ‘this tendency of law has also played a part in the concession of the right to strike, which contradicts the interests of the state.’¹⁸ When law justifies violence in order to preempt the violence that may be issued in response to nonviolent means, it has already lost confidence in itself as well as in the use of such nonviolent means for appeasement. Only a weakened state may sanction strikes.

Strike emerges as a form of violence that is neither law-producing nor law-protecting but which is nevertheless tolerated by an insecure, weak state. But then there are two kinds of strike: one that bargains for better working conditions and another, revolutionary proletarian strike that is not ready to resume any labor until labor itself has changed. The first kind of strike belongs to the contract, and therefore to the state apparatus, which condones it, whereas the other aims against state power and – due to the nonviolent law of its means – belongs to the realm of language. This bifurcation of strike reveals a new categorical division pertaining to the nature of violence. What Benjamin calls ‘mythic violence,’ which in its naturalistic, immediate form is a manifestation of the existence of gods, turns out, in fact, to be identical with all law-making violence, indeed all legal violence, whereas that which attempts to destroy it, to call all mythic violence to a halt, is ‘divine violence.’ Revolutionary strike is the non-violent means to God’s most violent, expiating, unpredictable, end: the annihilation of state power and law in the name of Justice. A crucial element therefore separates the commandments from human law: no judgment can be derived from the commandments after a deed. They are purely prescriptive. Whereas law judges an act after its execution, ‘neither the divine judgment nor the grounds for this judgment can be known in advance.’¹⁹ The divine language of pure nomos is what Benjamin a few years later terms ‘the language of nonintentional truth’ – the language of philosophy.²⁰

There exist today a plethora of analyses of Benjamin’s concept of divine violence.²¹ These allow us to contend that in comparison to Adorno’s conception of theology, Benjamin’s concept of the divine follows a different path. Rather than sustaining a paradox for its dialectical construction, this path reveals the truth out of tensions between several distinct, co-existing dialectic moments that are each complete but not in entrainment. ‘Only in its multiplicity does the concept of knowledge stand up.’²² This notion of multiplicity is crucial. It is coextensive with Benjamin’s discovery of intensity as the decisive element of dialectical determination. As we shall see, Adorno mistook this multiplicity in the Exposé for a collection of naïve, undetermined postulates. But what Benjamin’s concept of strike had done for the analysis of legal violence, the concept of dream was meant to do for the history of ninteenth century Paris. To identify as dream images a multiplicity of unresolved aspirations, ideals and promises that belong to this modernizing city in post-revolutionary turmoil, and to release these still brewing tensions in a historically interpretative moment of awakening: such would be his method of actualization.

In the Exposé, the phrase ‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow’ subtitles the first chapter’s methodological section. Here, Benjamin explains that to every new mode of production corresponds – and this term shall prove decisive – wish images in the collective consciousness. In these collective images, the oldest permeates the new; through them the collective seeks beyond present social functions and makes every effort to distance itself from all that appears antiquated (especially the recently outmoded things), what Benjamin recognizes as ‘fashion’. In other words, the collective imagination turns toward a primal past (das Urvergangne) to grasp the new. For Benjamin, this collective dreaming represents a concrete dialectic moment; for Adorno it is rather a social myth waiting to be revealed. And for the worse, Benjamin included class struggle in the category of dreams:

In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter [i.e the primal past] appears wedded to elements of primal history [Urgeschichte] – that is,...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half title
• Part I  
• Part II  
• Part III  
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index