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 Benjaminâs letters remain from the first years, as those from Adorno were lost in Benjaminâs 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: âthe air is hardly fit to breathe anymore â a condition which of course loses significance as one is being strangled anyway.â1 Three weeks later, Benjamin fled Germany to Ibiza via Paris, only to return to the French capital in October and settle there as exiled ĂŠmigreĚ.
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 â at least until 1938 when he left more permanently for New York â 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 âa photograph of our earthly life from the perspective of a redeemed life [ ... ] no further words seem necessary to demonstrate our agreement ... .â2 But although Adorno celebrates their mutual grasp, and especially Benjaminâs passage on the childhood photograph which successfully polarizes Kafkaâs notion of gesture, there were elements that Benjamin had failed to develop. For instance, Benjamin had written about progress, that âKafka 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.â3 In a mildly critical remark, presupposing shared views about Hegel, Adorno reminds his friend of the need to dialectically negate this idea of epochs.
Benjamin concedes in his response to Adornoâs 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 Benjaminâs ExposĂŠ of 1935, a text of much greater academic importance. This was âa general planâ5 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 ExposĂŠ, 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 ExposĂŠ from Adorno was both expected and crucial, as nobody had expressed more enthusiasm for The Arcades Project than him. Ever since Benjaminâs 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 ExposĂŠ in early June, eventually responded two months later, it was with a detailed, severe, and lengthy critique that must have dented Benjaminâs hopes. It opened with the following remark:
What follows is a thorough examination of composition as well as individual concepts, and Hegel is mentioned on several occasions. Benjamin took notice: âWiesengrund. Dialectical images and dialectics at a standstill in Hegel.â7
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 âtheology.â8 In the ExposĂŠ, the dialectical image âfails to preserve that social movement within the contradiction for the sake of which you yourself have sacrificed theology here.â9 The term âtheologyâ is prone to cause confusion: for Adorno it refers not only to Benjaminâs earlier work on philosophy and critical aesthetics, but even more to Kierkegaardâs 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. Benjaminâs tenet in âOn the Program of the Coming Philosophy,â that âanother relation between thesis and antithesis is possible than synthesisâ10 had been brought to bear in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, and also in the essay âGoetheâs Elective Affinities,â for which Adorno expressed unreserved admiration. A similarly non-synthetic dialectics had been developed in Adornoâs analysis of Kierkegaard â an immanent critique that Benjamin had referred to as âa reading in Kierkegaard.â11 In the course of this analysis, Adorno follows Kierkegaardâs critique of Hegel to the point where it literally confronts Kierkegaardâs ruling over his own thought. This self-rule, Adorno writes, does not synthesize, dialectics rather keeps the spheres apart with a mythical notion:
At this point, Kierkegaardâs dialectical critique of Hegel is judged by Adorno as a preliminary step. Adorno begins from here on to contribute to Kierkegaardâs philosophy by supplementing its mythical self-rule with a dialectical realization of the theological paradox:
When Adorno insists on Benjaminâs theology as what âsustains our thoughts,â 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 âthe secret coded character of our theology.â14 But Benjamin seems less than convinced; in his review of Adornoâs book in Vossischen Zeitung on April 22, 1933, he ironically praises the authorâs disappearance into his own image of Kierkegaardâs remains, like a painter in a Chinese fairytale. âThis 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.â15 Benjaminâs own early writings and literary analyses often refer to âreligionâ along with âGodâ and âthe divine,â but the term âtheologyâ is almost never used. And if one judges from the formal structure of the ExposĂŠ, it is indeed difficult to find traces of Adornoâs methodology.
In order to approach their methodological differences, one may look at how Benjaminâs notion of the divine works in a dialectical course of argument. The essay âCritique of Violenceâ from 1921 offers an illustrative case. Benjamin opens by proposing a general maxim: âall the natural ends of individuals must collide with legal ends if pursued with a greater or lesser degree of violence.â16 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? âWithout doubtâ, Benjamin answers: âthere is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of âunderstanding,â language.â17 Law cannot legislate language, he argues, although a weak, modern law prohibits fraud and perjury âfor fear of the defrauded party.â An unconfident law legislates to preempt violence, and âthis tendency of law has also played a part in the concession of the right to strike, which contradicts the interests of the state.â18 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 â due to the nonviolent law of its means â belongs to the realm of language. This bifurcation of strike reveals a new categorical division pertaining to the nature of violence. What Benjamin calls âmythic violence,â 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 âdivine violence.â Revolutionary strike is the non-violent means to Godâs 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, âneither the divine judgment nor the grounds for this judgment can be known in advance.â19 The divine language of pure nomos is what Benjamin a few years later terms âthe language of nonintentional truthâ â the language of philosophy.20
There exist today a plethora of analyses of Benjaminâs concept of divine violence.21 These allow us to contend that in comparison to Adornoâs conception of theology, Benjaminâs 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. âOnly in its multiplicity does the concept of knowledge stand up.â22 This notion of multiplicity is crucial. It is coextensive with Benjaminâs discovery of intensity as the decisive element of dialectical determination. As we shall see, Adorno mistook this multiplicity in the ExposĂŠ for a collection of naĂŻve, undetermined postulates. But what Benjaminâs 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 ExposĂŠ, the phrase âEach epoch dreams the one to followâ subtitles the first chapterâs methodological section. Here, Benjamin explains that to every new mode of production corresponds â and this term shall prove decisive â 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 âfashionâ. 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: