Abstract
Walter Benjamin’s writings are often read in terms of their emphasis on undecidability. This article focuses on Benjamin’s view of decision as a philosophic capacity to suspend recognizable myth. Myth is recognizable as closure. Myth becomes recognizable as myth when exceptions and extremes arise in relation to it. Without necessarily following the specific exception or extreme (which may itself be mythic), philosophy is a politics that is attuned to the capacity of an exception or extreme to perform the limit of a specific mythic form. In elaborating philosophically impelled decision as a capacity to take exception to myth, the article compares Benjamin’s works with writings by Agamben, Schmitt, Hiller, Sorel, Derrida and others. At various points in the article, and especially towards the end, the discussion of the notion of philosophic decision includes consideration of ways in which aspects of Benjamin’s enmity to myth might themselves become mythic, unphilosophic.
‘Truth lies in the extreme’, he [Eduard Fuchs] occasionally remarks [‘Die Wahrheit liegt im Extrem’, formuliert er gelegentlich]. (W 3, 271/ II:2, 483)
1
For what is limited has an extreme [τò γἀρ πεπρασμένoν ἄκρoν ἔχει]. (Epicurus, ‘Letter to Herodotus’)
I Introduction
On the basis of exception, it is uniquely possible to decide concerning the normal situation. This claim is made by Søren Kierkegaard. The genuine exception, he suggests, is the best possible basis for studying the general, for such an exception is somehow constituted by the general to which it is opposed. If the exception can think, it is compelled to think passionately about the general, which is usually only considered superficially. 2 Kierkegaard’s statement has influenced theorists of exception as different as Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. 3 His statement is not cited in Walter Benjamin’s brief commentaries on, or his adaptations of, Kierkegaard’s work. In certain respects, however, Kierkegaard’s statement could be considered pertinent to much of Benjamin’s work, and not only to his work on exception or extreme. Decades ago, Hermann Schweppenhäuser referred to Benjamin as the ‘Kierkegaard among the speculative materialists’, who ‘insists … on breaks and distinctions’. 4 Irrespective of whether the characterization ‘speculative’ seems fitting, Benjamin does indeed have a priority of breaking with, distinguishing from, what he regards as oppressive or repressive senses of reality. He emphasizes that our material or physical selves, the selves bound to a not entirely controllable nature, produce exceptions or extremes in relation to closed – mythic – orders in which we otherwise live. The following article will not address the question of how much or how little his correlative priority of breaks and distinctions is influenced by Kierkegaard. 5 It will be an attempt, however, to elaborate ways in which exception is a priority for what will be presented not only as philosophy, but also as politics, in Benjamin’s works.
This priority manifests itself in a specific sort of discontent with cultural parameters. Such discontent is especially dramatized in Benjamin’s statement – made in his essay on Eduard Fuchs (1937) and in his ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) – that every document of culture is simultaneously a document of barbarism (W 3, 267/ II:2, 477 and W 4, 392/ KG 19, 73; see too KG 19, 34, 63–4, 86, 97). Barbarism – he says in the Passagen-Werk – ‘lurks in the very concept of culture’ (AP, 467/ V:1, 584). The term ‘barbarism’ might seem to imply a cultural snobbism. Much more at stake, however, is a refusal of – a taking exception to – cultural self-satisfaction. In 1933, Benjamin even commends ‘new barbarians’ who mock ‘culture’ (W 2, 731–6/ II:1, 213–19).
A less than Kierkegaardian element in Benjamin’s rejection of cultural complacency, and indeed of any mythic – any closed – conception, is the extent to which philosophy is the proposed antidote. Philosophy will be discussed in the following article as a politics of taking exception to, becoming extreme in relation to, myth. Such decision to take exception to mythic closure will be elaborated as a politics of changing our relationship with closure, with myth. Kierkegaard has been mentioned above and will be mentioned once again below in order to help clarify Benjamin’s views. As implied already, however, this is no article on Kierkegaard. Of concern will be rather some ways in which Benjamin could be taken to advocate – implicitly and explicitly – philosophic decision, decision to take exception to myth. This philosophic aspect of Benjamin’s works, and indeed the role of decision in them, are often denied or overlooked, even by careful readers of Benjamin’s writings. In order to cast a different light on this topic, the following article will elicit from Benjamin’s writings a notion of decision that is a philosophic capacity to cut away from, to suspend, recognizable myth.
Such myth is recognizable as a closure, although there are undoubtedly many closures that go unnoticed or remain utterly unconscious. Adapting Benjamin’s views, it will be contended that myth can, for instance, become evident as myth when exceptions and extremes arise in relation to it. Philosophy will be elaborated as involving a politics of attentiveness to such defections from myth. In this way, the article will explore implications – primarily in Benjamin’s writings – of the view articulated by Agamben that ‘politics … has no name other than its Greek pseudonym … philosophy’. 6 Without necessarily following the specific exception or extreme (which may itself be mythic, may itself be closure), philosophy is exceptional and extreme in its attention to the capacity of an exception or extreme to perform that a specific myth is not true, that it is limited. With such a politics of attention to exception or extreme, philosophically impelled decision affirms its own constitutive function of taking exception to myth.
If philosophy is thus conceived as a politics of decision to take exception to myth, this is obviously a very different conception of philosophy than that criticized in Jacques Rancière’s portrayal of philosophy and politics in a ‘mésentente’ [disagreement] with respect to one another. Philosophy finds a scandal, Rancière claims, in the ‘mésentente’ persistently created in our lives by politics. 7 Rancière is critical of the ‘initial project of philosophy’ to suppress politics and to suppress the interruption and the interval created by politics. 8 The following article will, in contrast, concern those elements of philosophy that are antithetical to such suppression. Largely from Benjamin’s writings, the following article will develop a conception of philosophy as decision to be attentive to extremes and exceptions. Such attention will be elaborated in terms of its capacity to regard extremes and exceptions as indicators of the limited character of that in relation to which they are extremes and exceptions.
Part II (Philosophy as renegade) will outline Benjamin’s conception of philosophy as a taking-exception to myth – a taking-exception to closure. Philosophy will be discussed as eluding what would otherwise be resignation to a fate of rule by myth, rule by closure concerning life or experience.
Part III (Decision to take exception to myth) will stress, in slight divergence from some claims by Agamben concerning similarities of Benjamin and Schmitt, that Schmitt’s notion of decision distinguishes itself from Benjamin’s in attempting to resurrect the authority of myth in politics. Also in partial disagreement with Agamben, it will be suggested that Benjamin does cite a potential effectiveness of the non-mythic in decision to take exception to myth. Critics of Benjamin rightly note his occasional tendency to envision, or claim the existence of, purely non-mythic decision. This tendency may indeed distinguish Benjamin’s ‘critique’ from deconstruction. It will be suggested, however, that his notion of decision to take exception to myth does not only involve a pretence to decision uncontaminated by the contingent. Emphasis will accordingly be placed on an opposing tendency in his work: the rejection of claims to pure decision (including in Kierkegaard). The latter tendency will be developed to propose that the wrongness of myth, its closure against philosophic exception to it, is the sole assured basis for critique.
Part IV (Untragic decision) will further elaborate this notion that philosophic decision performs myth as untrue. Although it will be conceded again to Derrida and others that Benjamin sometimes claims the possibility of pure decision, greater consideration will be given to his aforementioned counter-tendency: philosophic decision as taking exception to myth. This philosophic decision will be examined as a politics of performing the ruination that ultimately prevails over myth and thus suspends the demands of myth. In contrast with tragic decision, therefore, philosophic decision involves no demand of sacrifice. If there is philosophic sacrifice, it is that of cutting from the demands of myth. Whereas Samuel Weber has argued that Benjamin’s rejection of tragic decision is a rejection of decision per se, an attempt will be made to draw from Benjamin’s writings a project of decision against tragic decision, against identification of destiny with any specific moral-legal order. Philosophic decision to take exception to tragic myth will be formulated through examination of a work that is largely ignored in discussions of Benjamin’s conception of decision: Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This work by Benjamin will be considered for its portrayal of decision as registering the revolt of nature to mythic (including tragic) construals.
Part V (Myth as enemy) will be an endeavour to provide nuance concerning the enmity of Benjamin’s philosophic politics to myth. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, it will be stressed that Benjamin is no pacifist. It will even be conceded to some critics that he may himself succumb to mythic notions of violence. Yet it will also be indicated that his outlook remains in significant respects distinct from Georges Sorel’s recruitment of myth for revolution and for the general strike. Even some of Benjamin’s most controversial endorsements – such as his approbation of hate-filled revenge on behalf of previous or current generations’ suffering – will be shown to involve anti-mythic – that is, philosophic – provisos.
On this basis, and on the basis of previous parts of the article, the Epilogue (Philosophic Politics) will register disagreement with the continually advanced view that philosophy is irrelevant to Benjamin’s outlook.
II Philosophy as renegade
Philosophy opposes the mythic, which includes the aforementioned ‘general’ that is mythic insofar as it is would-be containment of exceptions. Conversely, the mythic is opposed to philosophy; myth is opposed to the permanent possibility for taking exception to it. In ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), Benjamin accordingly refers to ‘our task’ of ‘bringing-about the real state of exception’ [Herbeiführung des wirklichen Ausnahmezustands] (W 4, 392/ KG 19, 74; see too KG 19, 35, 35, 87, 97). Such real extreme, he indicates in other texts, opens against what would otherwise be resignation to an ostensible fate (W 1, 451/ IV:1, 95; C, 378/ GB 4, 26). Such resignation is myth. As is suggested by Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946), some of whose work Benjamin greatly admired, philosophy – indeed any creativity – includes the risk of becoming renegade, for it is always prepared to differentiate itself from anything that is presented as established. 9
Apparently promoting this sense of philosophic inquiry, Benjamin’s Kafka essay of 1934 (W 2, 797/ II:2, 412) and his 1921 essay ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ (W 1, 249/ II:1, 199) include adaptations of a passage from Hermann Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens [Ethics of the Pure Will]. The passage by Cohen (from which Benjamin only partly quotes) concerns the tendency of myth to regard an assumed ‘good’ as natural, and to regard ‘evil’ as a breakdown of, or ‘invasion [Einbruch] into’, certain orders, certain ‘constructions and social formations [Fügungen und Gesellungen]’. Concerning this so-called ‘evil’ as ‘invasion’, Cohen claims it ‘not only’ is ‘a breaking away from these orders [ein Heraustreten aus diesen Ordnungen]’ but also entails that ‘these orders themselves’ ‘seem to occasion and bring about this breaking-away, this defection [dieses Heraustreten, diesen Abfall zu veranlassen und herbeiführen scheinen]’. 10 In Benjamin’s own terms, it could be said that not only are orders often complicit in the defection from them (they contribute to the defections from them); the orders might also become discernible as myth with the emergence of such defection. Philosophy is an exercise of taking defections into a performance of the limited – the mythic – make-up of the constructions from which they defect.
Philosophy is, therefore, itself a defection, an exception, an extreme, that especially enables myth to be presented as myth, as undue closure concerning life or experience. This conception of philosophy and the correlative practice of philosophy are particularly clear in Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch (1925/28), where extreme and exception are discussed as manifestations of the necessity that breaks through mythic containment. Such breakthrough does not require philosophy to identify itself with all extremes and exceptions that might emerge. If, however, the mythic cannot be somehow eluded, if we do not somehow feel dissociated from myth, there would be no need for, and indeed no possibility of, philosophy. A tendency towards the extreme thus provides the ‘norm’ of ‘concept-formation’ in philosophic examination (O, 57/ I:1, 238). This point might seem to invoke a pathos of the extraordinary. 11 Very early, however, Benjamin objects to any ‘Romanticism’ that attempts to see ‘the extraordinary’ in ‘everything infinitely particular’, everything isolated from setting (II:1, 44). In the Trauerspielbuch, it is stressed that the ‘unique-extreme’ [Einmalig-Extreme] is unique solely by virtue of its defection, its breaking-away. The unique-extreme can thus facilitate a breakdown of meaning, a breakdown that is necessary if words are to be considered philosophically – beyond their usage for simply fixing meaning (O, 35–6/ I:1, 215–16). 12
Such a philosophic undermining of sovereign containment is concretely illustrated in the baroque mourning play when the ruler is presented as mere creature (O, 85–6/ I:1, 263–5) and the courtier is presented as personification of fallen or creaturely sensibility (ibid.: 95–8/ 273–7). This presentation of creaturely or fallen sovereignty contrasts with what is fostered in Carl Schmitt’s works, which – as will be noted below – advocate a mythically secured sovereignty.
Benjamin’s philosophic impetus requires continual departure – defection – from myth, whether myth is an attempted exclusion of exception, an attempted elimination of exception, or any other stagnant relation with exception.
III Decision to take exception to myth
As mythically secured, Schmitt’s sovereign has something in common with an outlook that Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch does indeed depict as lingering in the baroque; this baroque outlook is one for which, as Benjamin puts it, ‘the most important function of the prince’ is ‘to exclude’ [auszuschlieβen] – that is, to control – ‘the exceptional condition’ [Ausnahmezustand] in order to secure rulership (65–6/ 245–6). For Benjamin, such exclusion or control of exception is unphilosophic; it is mythic. 13 The baroque attempt to exclude exception shares something with the Schmittian ruler who wants to eliminate exception: both the wish to exclude exception, and the wish to eliminate it, are mythic, unphilosophic. This contrasts with the constitutively philosophic decision: to take exception to myth.
Schmitt’s ideal sovereign, like the baroque sovereign as depicted by Benjamin, is impelled by mythic aspirations of control. 14 Proposing a similarity of Benjamin and Schmitt, however, Agamben addresses the aforementioned baroque exclusion or attempted control of exception as distinct from Schmitt’s notion of decision because Schmitt recognizes that the decision cannot be based on clarity about whether and in what way there is an ‘emergency’ [Notfall]. 15 Yet Schmitt does stress the need for a constitutional provision that specifies ‘who may act in such a case’. The provision entails, moreover, that – as long as there are no hindering legal constraints – this ‘sovereign’ may emerge as the one who ‘decides … whether there is an extreme emergency … [and] what should happen in order to eliminate [beiseitigen] it’. 16 Although Schmitt and Benjamin both consider authority uncircumscribable, and certainly not circumscribable by rules and laws, Schmitt – unlike Benjamin – attempts to resurrect ‘pre-modern’ normativity in political sovereignty. 17 Schmitt accordingly contends that the power to act politically, indeed to achieve any great historical activity, is a capacity for myth. 18 This capacity for myth is supposed to eliminate – that is, ultimately somehow control – exception. It is, therefore, the antithesis of the philosophic politics that Benjamin tends to propose.
In this respect, there is an affinity between Benjamin and Erich Unger, who claims that myth is a ‘process [Ablauf] whose stigma is success [Gelingen]’. 19 History removed from recognizable criteria of success is a philosophically conceived history. Philosophic politics counters the disregard that is mythic eagerness to claim success (including success at declaring someone or something a failure). Philosophic politics is, after all, decision to take exception to myth. Benjamin’s usage of the term ‘myth’, by which – as suggested already – he most often means closure, is almost always pejorative. He considers myth, moreover, to be all-pervasive: ‘As long as there is a single beggar, there will still be myth’, he says in the early 1930s (W 2, 688/ VI, 208). He repeats this statement in the Arcades study (AP, 400/ V:1, 505). A point of this statement may be that myth – closure – has always been integral to human existence and societal form. Myth is something in which – even through which – we continually live. As will be clarified below, however, Benjamin contrasts such authority of myth with unhaltable destruction or ruination. This rejection of the authority of myth amounts not only to a basic difference with Schmitt; it also distinguishes Benjamin from many conservative desires for sovereign authority, desires that are sometimes ascribed to him. 20
Given his (albeit antipathetic) emphasis on all-pervasive myth, the question could arise of how Benjamin thinks the non-mythic can be registered at all, let alone as decision to take exception to myth. In its philosophic opposition to myth, Benjamin’s ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ relegates to God the non-mythic (here called ‘pure’ or ‘divine’ violence) (W 1, 249–50/ II:1, 199–200). In State of Exception, Agamben considers Benjamin to have thereby rejected any notion that human decision can credibly bring exception into association with the divine or pure, the non-mythic. 21 On the grounds that Benjamin is critical of the limits of ‘“decision”’ within legal parameters (W 1, 243/ II:1, 189), there has been an objection to Agamben’s identification of this term ‘decision’ (in the relevant part of Benjamin’s essay) as a Schmittian one. 22 It is, however, precisely a critique of Schmittian decision that is elicited by Agamben. 23 Questionable may be, nonetheless, Agamben’s aforementioned contention – his contention that Benjamin’s critical view of such decision rejects any claim of decision to bring exception into association with the non-mythic. In a work that appeared earlier than State of Exception, Agamben does remark that Benjamin conceives of philosophy as partly ‘a decision’ concerning the conflict of codified law with messianic time, which takes exception to such law. As Agamben clarifies in that earlier work, however, a difficulty is that the real state of exception – as messianic – will be realized only in the end of history; if we have not reached this end, our experience of its reality is simply in or as its tension with historical time. 24 Benjamin does indeed acknowledge that ‘decision’ [Entscheidung] concerning ‘when pure violence really was [war] in a particular case’ may be neither ‘possible’ nor ‘urgent’ for ‘humans’. After all, pure – that is, divine – violence as such remains unrecognizable to humans. Benjamin’s usage above of the past tense (‘war’) might seem to suggest that decision now concerning pure violence is even more unlikely. Benjamin does add, nevertheless, that ‘mythic’ violence, the opposite of divine or pure violence, ‘can be recognized as such with certainty’, unless the effects are ‘incomparable’ (W 1, 252/ II:1, 202–3). In suggesting that even myth could have incomparable effects, Benjamin seems to be acknowledging that myth can affect each of us in unique ways and that its effects presumably often remain inaccessible to our resources of comparison. Perhaps he is also trying to convey that comparable effects are mythic effects; they can occasion exceptions to the applied comparison. Recognition of exception to the mythic is, in any case, already a potential unsettling of the dominance of myth over the unique-extreme. This recognition can emerge as decision of, and for, exception to myth, even if that decision is recurrently confronted with hitherto unnoticed or unaddressed mythic embroilments. To return to the debate outlined at the outset of this paragraph: decision can thus entail an effectiveness of the non-mythic, albeit an effectiveness that is not fulfilled, complete, or entirely sure of itself (amid mythic, or possibly mythic, embroilments).
The non-mythic basis for this decision remains pure violence or, as Benjamin elsewhere puts it, now-time [Jetztzeit]. Now-time is all that myth (as a closure) is not and could never be. ‘On the Concept of History’ thus contains the remark that ‘[h]istory is the object of a construction’ whose ‘place’ [Ort] is formed not by the prevailing ‘homogeneous empty time’ but rather by ‘the time filled by now-time’. Any attempted opening to now-time involves a clash with prevailing time (W 4, 395/ KG 19, 78; see too KG 19, 24, 40, 102). Benjamin’s notion of now-time has perhaps an echo in Hannah Arendt’s adaptation of various scientific theories – including Einstein’s theory of relativity – to distinguish humanly conceived time from universal or absolute time that we experience only as ultimately beyond the comprehension of human beings. 25 In ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Benjamin similarly proposes that the critique of violence be critique of the closure of history from the force of ‘decay’ [Verfall]; Benjamin proposes this, moreover, on behalf of ‘a critical, cutting and deciding [kritische, scheidende und entscheidende] attitude [Einstellung] towards’ the ‘temporal data’. The temporal data are mythically closed data; they are data isolated from the time – the decay – prevailing over them. The critical, cutting and deciding attitude towards such data is the ‘“philosophy”’ that Benjamin proposes can be exerted against the history of mythic violence. Divine violence is unrecognizable as such, but can be recognizably effective as critique of mythic closure, mythic violence (W 1, 251–2/ II:1, 202–3; also see ‘Die Bedeutung der Zeit in der moralischen Welt’ [‘The Significance of Time in the Moral World’] (a note of 1921)], W 1, 286–7/ VI, 97–8) even though there is no way this critique can be exercised independently of mythic – including unconsciously mythic – influences. Although divine violence – pure violence, now-time – is the permanent basis for critique, critique is facilitated by the discernible wrongness of, closure by, myth.
This aspect of Benjamin’s outlook might be overlooked in the claim that Benjamin attempts ‘to isolate, in all purity, a thing such as pure nonmediate violence’ and that the ‘critique of violence must be thoroughly distinguished from deconstruction’, for ‘[a]s a critique, it is based on the security and confidence of mastering the threat of contamination’. 26 As will be elaborated in the following parts of this article, there are indeed respects in which Benjamin’s view of critique seems distinct from Derrida’s support for ‘decision’ that interrupts ‘determination by engaging … in the perhaps’. 27 Yet there remains in Benjamin’s outlook a great deal compatible with the viewpoint for which, as Derrida puts it, ‘a decision is unconscious – … involves the unconscious’ and is, in this sense, ‘passive’ 28 and bound to a heterogeneous ‘instant’ that is the ‘condition’ of decision. 29 Jean-Luc Nancy formulates a somewhat similar conception of decision as ‘not open to, or decided by anything other than, the world of existence itself to which the existent is thrown, given up, and exposed’. 30 In a text from the 1980s, François Laruelle even takes the transcendentally independent ‘real’ as a basis for delimiting (or delineating the self-limitation of) philosophic decision; philosophic decision, he contends, has a tendency towards closure against the real that a priori precedes and constitutes decision. 31 In the relevant aspects of Benjamin’s outlook, however, the decision or cutting-away simply recalls all that myth cannot tolerate; it is in this intolerance or closure that myth presents itself. What myth cannot incorporate is the time referred to in Benjamin’s Hölderlin essay (1915) as ‘the temporal identity dwelling in every spatial relation [aller räumlichen Beziehung einwohnende zeitliche Identität]’ (W 1, 28–9/ II:1, 117). This time has a rhythm of dissonance. It is the time of the caesura that is strange to the rhythm of succession and yet strangely familiar as the only permanent carrier of this rhythm (ibid.: 28, 31–2, 35/ 116, 121, 125). ‘The time of destiny [Schicksal]’, Benjamin remarks elsewhere, ‘is the time that can be made simultaneous [gleichzeitig] (not present [gegenwärtig])’ (VI, 91). 32 In a note of 1920–1, he similarly refers to the now of recognition that is ‘logical’ in requiring admission of the catastrophic relationship of truth with recognition (W 1, 276/ VI, 46). The now requires the entry, the invasion (to adapt Cohen’s previously discussed term), of destiny, of truth, which is recognizable only as unrecognizable. This entry or invasion happens as exception that is taken to, or against, the disregard or denial of unrecognizable truth.
When Benjamin in his essay of 1931 on Karl Kraus says there is ‘no idealistic but only a materialistic deliverance from myth’, he simply recalls that the force of purification does not purify; rather, it performs impurity as impurity, and does so against ahistorical attempts to claim purity (W 2, 454–5/ II:1, 363–5). There is no escape from obliquely determinant historical conditioning or contamination. 33 Indeed, insofar as Kierkegaard’s ‘“decision”’ presumes an independence of spiritual or religious inwardness, Benjamin regards it as ultimately ineffective against the societal ‘myth’ to which it is opposed (W 2, 703–5/ III, 380–3). 34 It is ineffective in the sense that it is illusory – that is, it is itself mythic in its claim to purity. Against myth, however, there may be decision not to claim or imply purity. This is what philosophy can do. It can perform myth as myth, and can thereby unsettle claims of purity that would otherwise be made on behalf of myth.
IV Untragic decision
Politics of decay
Benjamin does not always adopt this decision to perform impurity as impurity. In ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, for instance, he seems sometimes to claim the possibility of decision that is itself pure: although he advances the proletarian strike as a strike against the general legal-political order, he may succumb to a myth of the general insofar as he conceives of the proletarian general strike as a strike against all attachments in the legal-political order (W 1, 245/ II:1, 193). Such decontamination or detachment, he contends, is also possible in other dimensions of experience. For instance, he proposes that personal relations can involve not only suspension of legal order but also the usage of this suspension for the possibility it provides of ‘agreement’ [Übereinkunft], ‘reconciliation’ [Ausgleich], or – in Benjamin’s usage of a more encompassing term – ‘“understanding”’ [‘Verständigung’]. He puts the term ‘“understanding”’ in quotation marks, which may indicate his acknowledgement that much of what is called ‘understanding’ is mythic, closed. The agreement, reconciliation, understanding that Benjamin considers non-violent is, of course, also regarded by him as distinct from such mythic understanding; he considers it unburdened by myth (ibid.: 244–5/ 191–2). In state diplomacy too, he alleges, such conflict resolution outside of contracts is possible; he suggests this conflict resolution is based on an ‘analogy’ with the aforementioned ‘agreement [Übereinkunft] between private persons’ (ibid.: 245, 247/ 193, 195). In the presumption to a possibility of non-mythic, non-violent, pure understanding between people, it does seem – as Derrida contends – that Benjamin’s claims on behalf of such private and public relations involve a naïve or forced assumption about the possibility of decontamination, about the alleged purity of the relevant experiences. 35
All this does not entirely discredit, however, Benjamin’s notion – intimated so far in this article – that critique of violence can simply be critique of any presumed closure from the force of decay. Implicitly or explicitly against the tragic identification of history with a specific moral-legal order, various writings by Benjamin advance a bond of critical decision with decay.
The relevant passage of Benjamin’s ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ includes the claim that this critique oriented by ‘decay’ will also tend towards the ‘removal’ or ‘suspension’ [Entsetzung] of ‘state power’ [Staatsgewalt]. The claim expressly associates such critique with pure violence (W 1, 251–2/ II:1, 202–3). This might seem an instance of the aforementioned presumption to decontamination, but a point might also be that pure violence prevails over all other kinds of violence. As Judith Butler notes, opening to the relevant force of decay or destruction must, in some sense, be an opening to the force that will indeed destroy – and survive – any state power. 36 For the pertinent sense of critique, ruination – decay, destruction, passing away – is the force that enables closures to be recognized as such, to be recognized as myth precisely in their attempted denial of preponderant ruination. The goal of suspending or abolishing state power (which is always mythic power) simply ensures the continuation of critique – a continuation to which philosophic politics is committed. As long as the state exists, critique cannot desist. In what has come to be called his ‘Theological-Political Fragment’, Benjamin thus presents ‘the task of world politics, whose method is to be called nihilism’, as a striving for the ‘eternal and total passing away [Vergängnis]’ that is messianic nature (W 3, 306/ II:1, 204). 37
Undemanded sacrifice: Cutting for exception
In distinguishing itself from myth, the force of ruination, the force of eternal and total passing away, accepts but does not demand sacrifice. It thus distinguishes messianic sacrifice from the tragic sacrifice that explicitly identifies itself with a specific moral-legal order. 38 In ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Benjamin cites aspects of religious tradition and of educational power [Gewalt] that inspire recognition of, and action on behalf of, the ruination that prevails over myth, especially law (W 1, 249–50/ II:1, 199–200). He thereby reiterates his view that pure divine violence is outside of law (ibid.: 252/ 202). He is not, however, commending any kind of violence that might seem to happen outside law. The latter view has been ascribed to him – with the claim that Benjamin’s notion of divine violence could be used to legitimize corporal punishment of children by educators and parents. 39 As will be acknowledged towards the close of this article, Benjamin succumbs to mythification of certain other kinds of violence. His aforementioned critical, cutting and deciding attitude cannot, however, demand victims (W 1, 250, 251/ II:1, 200, 202). To do so would be mythic. This refusal to demand victims may be formulated as a decision to take exception to any tragic identification with myth.
The critical, cutting approach – described above as untragic decision – is elaborated by a study, which is (chronologically as well as thematically) a companion piece to ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ and yet is rarely discussed in relation to it. 40 Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’ (written in 1921–2) contains Benjamin’s most extensive discussion of decision. 41
In his Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’, Benjamin discusses decision as philosophic opposition to myth (W 1, 314, 326/ I:1, 147, 162). He focuses especially on a novella (‘The Strange Neighbouring Children’) that appears within Goethe’s novel (Elective Affinities). He refers to a brilliant or bright light reigning in the novella; this brilliant or bright light makes everything ‘sharply contoured’ and, from the outset, somehow pushing towards ‘the day of decision’, the day that ‘shines into the dusk-like Hades of the novel’ (ibid.: 331/ 169). This day of decision [Tag der Entscheidung], which does happen in the novella, is a cutting – Scheidung – from or away from – Ent – the conformist conciliation that hazily prevails in the novel. The decision is ‘beyond’ all later happening and comparison, and is thus experienced as ‘essentially singular … and unique [einmalig … und einzig]’ (ibid.: 347/ 190). 42 Decision is singular and unique insofar as it is based on the inability of action – that is, of ‘experience’ [Erfahrung] – to be absorbed by humans’ presumptions to contain it. Experience constantly takes exception to whatever is regarded or identified as ‘lived experience’ [Erlebnis]. According to this early formulation of Benjamin’s later more developed contrast of Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the relevant ‘experience’ [Erfahrung] sustains what could be called philosophic decision. Such decision takes exception to mythification of experience (ibid.: 347, 354/ 190, 199).
This emphasis on decision to take exception to myth might seem a reversal of Samuel Weber’s ‘Taking Exception to Decision’, although that study, and the book in which it appears, regrettably do not consider the theory of decision that is developed in Benjamin’s Elective Affinities essay. Weber’s emphasis on undecidability in Benjamin’s portrayal – in the Trauerspielbuch – of the baroque prince concerns the indecisiveness of this tyrant in a state of exception (O, 70–1/ I:1, 250). 43 Perhaps it may be said, however, that the Trauerspielbuch does allow for decision to take exception to attempts to disregard the permanence of exception. The decision to take exception in this way is no tragic decision; it is no decision on behalf of an identification of fate with a specific moral-legal order. It is rather very compatible with the contrast made by Benjamin between tragic decision and the open-ended ‘appeal’ of the Trauerspiel (O, 137/ I:1, 315). 44 The pertinent passage of the Trauerspielbuch does contrast decision and appeal; the appeal is characterized as of the sort that is formulated by ‘the martyr’ (O, 137/ I:1, 315). The martyr-like appeal in the Trauerspiel amounts, however, to a decision not to respect any tragic decision that identifies destiny with the alleged necessity of a specific moral-legal order. The martyr-like appeal takes exception to any identification of destiny with a specific moral-legal order. There can be such decision to appeal for exception to tragic decision. In a passage of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship that is quoted by Weber on behalf of ‘undecidability’, Derrida refers (I use Weber’s translation) to ‘a decision that tears apart as the decision of the other. Of the absolute other in me, of the other as the absolute that decides in me of me. Absolutely singular in principle, according to its most traditional concept, the decision is not only always exceptional, it takes exception to me.’ 45 Such decision could be an appeal to take exception to mythic construals or identifications of oneself. This formulation and others by Derrida seem compatible with Benjamin’s advocacy in the Elective Affinities essay of decision as a cut from myth and as a cut on behalf of the Einmalig-Extreme (unique-extreme). Such decision, Benjamin proposes, is decision to remain open to experience of the freedom that does not comply with any lived shape (W 1, 302/ I:1, 131). Any lived shape is mythically imbued, and yet myth is not omnipotent; there is exception to specific myth. As an endeavour to remain open to such exception, decision can at least cut from utter surrender – utter sacrifice – to recognized myth, recognized closure.
This freedom erupts in the novella within Goethe’s novel as a young woman’s dramatic (seemingly suicidal) leap into a river awakens a young man’s hitherto slumbering feeling for her. He then joins her in a decision against previously established, quite stultifying, bonds and for more powerfully felt, mysterious ones (W 1, 331/ I:1, 169). The young couple’s ‘decision’ is read by Benjamin as indication of a ‘readiness for reconciliation’ [Versöhnungsbereitschaft], a readiness that enables the two people to become ‘reconciled’ [ausgesöhnt], for it ensues from their openness to God’s constantly destructive unity of sensory and supersensory (ibid.: 332, 343/ 170–1, 184). The latter destruction is stressed by one of his notes of 1919–20 that says divine violence ‘breathes destruction’ in ‘the earthly world’ (W 1, 226/ VI, 99). Divine violence destroys mythic attempts to contain it. If the novella within Goethe’s novel had continued, the particular relationship of the young couple would have become mythic in some way – at least as mythic as relationships must become in order to ‘survive’ and ‘advance’ in moral-legal contexts. This mythic stabilization does not annul, however, these persons’ earlier willingness to enter a decision to break from the myth that was their compliance with a moral-legal context experienced by them as an imposition. They could, after all, do such deciding again, and indeed must do so if they are ever again to decide in Benjamin’s sense of decision (W 1, 345, 353/ I:1, 187, 198).
Such decision cannot consider itself self-contained. It cannot claim to integrate experience and is, therefore, always subject to reconsideration. As intimated already, the aforementioned critique of ‘Erlebnis’ is accordingly further developed in the 1930s by Benjamin into a critique of Bergson’s conception of durée. Bergson conceives of duration as that whereby ‘the thinking being’ experiences ‘the free act’ as ‘a synthesis’ associated with a sense of ‘reasonable evolution’. 46 This conception is treated by Benjamin, adapting Max Horkheimer, as estranged from history, as suppressing death. With the ‘bad infinity of an ornament’, Erlebnis struts as though it is Erfahrung, whereas the latter has precisely what the former lacks: no suppression of death (W 4, 336/ I:2, 643). 47 This may be noteworthy for the distinction to be developed below between the outlooks of Benjamin and Georges Sorel, who considers himself a follower of Bergson, perhaps not least of the latter’s notion of ‘integral experience’ [expérience intégrale]. 48 For Benjamin, Erfahrung – unlike Erlebnis – is experience that does not indulge any pretence to integrate it. 49
As opening to preponderant destruction in nature, the deciding, cutting, critical attitude cannot have decision as last judgement, or even as a utopian completeness or perfection that might seem to be portrayed in Goethe’s aforementioned novella, which Benjamin’s Elective Affinities essay interprets as a literary-philosophic break from myth. In the latter break, as suggested already, the novella simply points to the potential of humans to defect from specific myths (W 1, 342–3/ I:1, 183–5). Cutting critical decisiveness can often reject discernible judgements perpetrated by a mythic context; it can take exception to that.
Beyond elective affinities
To this extent, the human is a possibility of decision recalling the revolt of nature (W 1, 307–8, 326–7, 335, 346–7/ I:1, 138–9, 163, 174, 189). The decision will never be certain of its motivations or impulses but will at least raise a priority that might otherwise be neglected. Whereas elective affinities arise in natural adaptation, there can be decision concerned with nature that destroys. There has been a tendency in readings of the Elective Affinities essay to note only Benjamin’s characterization of nature in its affirmation of myth and to overlook Benjamin’s emphasis on nature that revolts against myth. 50
If there is to be responsiveness to it, the latter – destructive – nature requires decision that recalls the revolt of action to construals of action. Even the ancient Greek tragic figure, Benjamin remarks in the Elective Affinities essay, momentarily introduces the ‘word’ that broaches the ‘edge of decision’ where mythic guilt and innocence are wrenched into a confusing abyss (W 1, 337/ I:1, 176–7). Much more than is possible in ancient Greek tragedy, the ‘sense’ of the ‘action [Handelns]’ in ‘the seconds of decision’ by the figures in the novella within Elective Affinities is ‘courageous resolution’ that breaks an ostensible ‘fate [Schicksal]’ (ibid.: 332/ 170–1). With the title Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities], Goethe refers – half-unconsciously perhaps – to the dilemma in the novel that ‘choice’ [Wahl] is unable to reach ‘the greatness of decision’. Choice belongs to natural ‘elements’ in their sequences of adaptation (ibid.: 346/ 188–9). 51 In the main text of the novel (apart from the novella within it), Goethe’s figures under the ‘spell of elective affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften]’ (W 1, 304/ I:1, 134) do not rise to more than ‘choice’ [Wahl], which does not strengthen the development of ‘affinity’ [Verwandtschaft]; nor does it provide any basis for ‘the spiritual’ [das Geistige] in affinity. Benjamin uses the word ‘spiritual’ in various ways, but its usage here – as on some other occasions – evidently concerns a potential for thinking beyond adaptive nature. Such potential is presented by Benjamin as involving decision rather choice (ibid.: 346/ 189). 52
Against sheer adaptation to myth, against elective affinities, Benjamin advances decision that takes exception to myth – decision that treats no moral-legal order as tragic fate. As the critical, cutting and decisive attitude, the decision is no guarantor of ‘redemption’ but is a guarantor of ‘hope’ (W 1, 355/ II:1, 201 and I:3, 835–7) that resurrects mystery against mythic solution or dissolution (W 1, 355/ I:1, 201). Notes from 1922–3 thus object to a Roman Catholic refusal to recognize ‘the situation of decision’. Focusing on the ‘practical … Catholic authority’ (the practical ‘administration of justice in church-discipline and confessional judgement’), Benjamin refers to the ‘Catholic, bad, deferment [Verschiebung] of the last judgement’. He contrasts this deferment, which amounts to an institutional denial of deferment, with the ‘Jewish, good, postponement [Aufschub] of the last judgement (namely, of the decision)’ (ibid.: VI, 60–3 especially 60, 63). The latter postponement, the postponement of the last judgement or of conclusive decision, has been discussed above as Benjamin’s advocacy of decision that endeavours to recall non-mythic nature. In the words of another note from around 1922–3, the body [Körper] within, yet also independent of, the body as lived ‘Leib’ is the possibility of ‘decision’ with regard to the ‘resurrection’ [Auferstehung] of ‘körperliche’ nature (ibid.: 395/ VI, 80). The latter nature is to be resurrected only as destructive mystery, but precisely this is guarantor of hope against the tragedy of myth, which cannot tolerate such mystery.
V Myth as enemy
Benjamin is very emphatic in his opposition to myth. Against the non-mythic nature, ‘On the Concept of History’ may be taken to say, humans have created an ‘enemy’, which is the conformism that has never ceased to dominate tradition (W 4, 391/ KG 19, 72; see too KG 19, 18, 33, 62, 85, 96). This conformism, however unwittingly, exhibits the enemy that is myth. Benjamin is obviously less hesitant than Derrida to refer to an enemy. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida explores Nietzsche’s cat’apostrophe ‘“Enemies, there is no enemy”’ [Feinde, es gibt keinen Feind], and suggests this cat’apostrophe recalls that ‘[t]he enemy is not given’. 53 Enmity is a construction. Benjamin regards myth as a human projection, but he considers this construction ‘enemy’. Carl Schmitt’s notion of myth is similar to Benjamin’s in many respects, and Schmitt regards the friend/enemy distinction as constitutive of politics, 54 but Schmitt deems politics to be mythic. 55 In terms developed so far in this article, it could be said that, for Benjamin, myth can be recognized as the enemy of philosophically impelled decision. This enemy presents itself, for instance, in principles by which we are organized as societal beings, myths by which we are organized societally. 56 In their ultimate disregard of their own arbitrariness and brutality, such myths are the enemy of philosophy.
It could be, however, that the enmity involved in Benjamin’s decision to take exception to myth sometimes becomes mythic, not least in its defence of certain kinds of violence. To some extent, this has been mentioned above. A more focused attempt will be made here to explore relevant nuances and possible drawbacks of Benjamin’s approach.
Mythic pacifism and mythic violence
In accordance with his philosophic unfriendliness to myth, Benjamin does not want mere existence to be so valued that opposition to myth would be unduly compromised. In ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, he is thus critical of Kurt Hiller’s pacifism insofar as Hiller (a prominent socialist writer) equates the human with the human’s mere existence, ‘mere life’ [das bloße Leben], and regards that existence as something sacred (W 1, 250–1/ II:1, 201–2). 57 This critique of Hiller’s pacifism has not been sufficiently stressed in accounts that concentrate on ways in which Benjamin‘s essay, ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, says so much on behalf of non-violence. It has been contended, for instance, that ‘“the proletarian general strike”’, according to Benjamin’s essay, ‘categorically rejects the use of violence’. 58 This strike is, however, a revolutionary general strike, which is distinct from a ‘political general strike’ that attempts to secure rights within an existing state-apparatus (W 1, 245–7/ II:1, 193–5). The proletarian general strike, as ‘a politics of pure means’, is against what has hitherto generally prevailed legally and morally. Benjamin accordingly realizes that the state will recognize as its enemy any general strike that becomes a revolutionary general strike (ibid.: 239–40/ 184–5). The revolution could consequently include counter-violence to state violence. Such a possibility figures in Benjamin’s objections to Hiller.
Hiller says: ‘We recognize that even higher than happiness and justice is an existence … existence in itself [eines Daseins … Dasein an sich].’ 59 Hiller makes this remark at least partly in opposition to the Spartacus League (around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) that had recourse to notions of violent proletarian self-defence and class warfare. 60 Hiller cites favourably passages from Human All Too Human in which Nietzsche commends making oneself defenceless, especially when one could mount defences. 61 Such usage by Hiller of Nietzsche might seem similar to aspects of Derrida’s aforementioned Politics of Friendship, but Derrida elsewhere supports Nelson Mandela’s refusal to renounce armed struggle as a means of opposing apartheid. 62 Somewhat in this vein, Benjamin’s ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ pronounces a wariness of celebrating at all costs mere life, mere existence (W 1, 250–1/ II:1, 201–2). 63
In ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Benjamin is thus critical of those who would always – perhaps on the basis of the commandment not to kill or on the basis of some other view that all human life is sacred – disallow ‘the dreadful [ungeheuren] cases’ in which, despite a guideline to the contrary, there may emerge the ‘responsibility’ of killing or there may emerge ‘the extreme case’ of ‘the revolutionary killing of the oppressor’ (W 1, 250–1/ II:1, 201). 64
There remains, however, the question of whether Benjamin’s critique of mythic pacifism involves something mythic. 65 Such a question could arise not only with regard to his aforementioned remarks about killing, but also with regard to his claim that there is a ‘divine violence’, which, in contrast with ‘mythic violence’, can be recognized in ‘a true war’ or in the ‘crowd’s divine judgement on a criminal’ (W 1, 252/ II:1, 203).
Perhaps war, or judgement against a criminal, or the aforementioned killing, could seem non-mythic by virtue of unsettling the prevalence of a specific, very egregious, mythic rule. Some of the most sceptical might be swayed by the idea that certain killings or wars are required in view of the mythic force opposed (for instance, aspects of the war against Nazi Germany) and that the judgement against a criminal may – in some not uncompelling sense – be justified (for instance, judgements against certain war criminals).
Yet philosophy and, therefore, opposition to myth – precisely as Benjamin often conceives them – could all too readily be annulled by killing, war, or the pretence to divinity in judgement of a criminal. Even in ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, which seems to show that Benjamin underestimates complications – mythic traits – of killing, war and judging a criminal, there continues – in a kind of self-contradiction perhaps – Benjamin’s insistence that there can be no certain recognition of divine violence. As noted already, philosophic – anti-mythic – politics becomes possible solely as recognition of the wrongness (the closed condition) of the myth opposed (W 1, 252/ II:1, 203). The latter kind of proviso is an antidote to Benjamin’s occasional conclusiveness on behalf of certain kinds of war, killing, or judgement.
His anti-mythic provisos seem incompatible, for instance, with his view that certain punitive judgements made by a ‘crowd’ [Menge] might be divine (W 1, 252/ II:1, 203) and his seemingly correlative views of ultimately, or conclusively, benign proletarian revolution. Perhaps there could conceivably be a protesting crowd that does not want any myth of itself, and Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ proposes that this potential exists in the Spartacist notion of proletarian revolution (W 4, 394/ KG 19, 77; see too KG 19, 38, 65, 101). Maurice Blanchot also seems to recognize such anti-mythic potential of some crowds. 66 In its views of proletarian revolution, however, even Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ has been taken to have implicit recourse to Georges Sorel’s ‘conception of myth’. 67 Sorel’s conception of myth will be clarified shortly, but it may be noted here that Benjamin’s text does indeed seem to indulge implicitly a myth of the proletariat as the ‘last enslaved class’ (W 4, 394/ KG 19, 77; see too KG 19, 38, 65, 101). Against such myth, there could be juxtaposed his text’s emphasis on the weak Messianic force of the past (ibid.: 390/ 17, 31, 60, 70, 83, 94), whereby the unredeemed past precludes closure now. 68 Such objection to closure could be extended to Benjamin’s oversimplification of war, revolutionary killing and the crowd’s allegedly divine judgement against a criminal. Notwithstanding his anti-mythic critique of Hiller’s pacifist conception of existence as sacred, Benjamin has recourse to what – in his own terms – could be considered myths of certain kinds of violence.
Hate and revenge (against myth)
Among the further points of concern for those wary of Benjamin’s possible mythification of violence is Benjamin’s approbation – in ‘On the Concept of History’ – of hate-filled sacrifice-preparedness [Opferwillen] and revenge on behalf of previous and current generations’ suffering (W 4, 394/ KG 19, 77; see too KG 19, 38, 66, 101). 69 His relevant remarks have a Sorelian – and thus potentially mythic – ring, as will be elaborated shortly. Yet there may still be reasons to distinguish his remarks somewhat from mythic identification.
Benjamin is addressing feelings of hate-filled sacrifice-preparedness and revenge that could arise against myth per se. They could then be said to accept the sacrifice that is not expressly demanded of them: the sacrifice on behalf of the destructive nature that myth cannot tolerate as it propagates sacrifice on its behalf. The suffering entailed by living conditions, and the correlative sense of necessity that demands respect or submission, are mythic. ‘The basic conception of myth is the world as punishment’ (W 4, 394/ KG 19, 139). Myth often treats living conditions as though they are deserved. To such mythic living conditions, whether past or current, the hate and the revenge conceived by Benjamin can always take exception.
This exception is real. It is the only real basis for hate and revenge against myth. The ‘tradition of the oppressed teaches us’ that the Ausnahmezustand ‘in which we [Benjamin apparently means those living as he wrote in 1940] live is the rule’ (W 4, 392/ KG 19, 19, 35, 74, 87, 97). 70 As noted at the outset of this article, Benjamin correlatively proposes a ‘concept of history’ that ‘corresponds with’ this ‘real state of emergency’ [Ausnahmezustand] or, to translate a little differently, this ‘real condition of exception’ (W 4, 392/ KG 19, 19, 35, 74, 87, 97). 71 The real condition of exception is the experience that permanently takes exception to myth insofar as myth is recognizable denial of precisely that experience, which will – in its permanence – always be more real than the myth denying or disregarding it. 72 Hate towards, and revenge on, myth are real insofar as they remain critical of myth. This seems to be the aforementioned critical ‘attitude’ that is presented in ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ as the impossible and (precisely thereby) inextinguishable demand of philosophic politics (W 1, 251–2/ II:1, 202–3).
Sorel and Benjamin
This critical attitude towards myth differs from Sorel’s outlook. In ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Benjamin does indeed explicitly adapt Sorel’s differentiation (in Réflexions sur la violence [Reflections on Violence]) of the proletarian general strike (which Benjamin – like Sorel – regards as revolutionary) from the political strike (which Sorel and Benjamin depict as simply statist in its priorities) (W 1, 245–7/ II:1, 193–5). Sorel and Benjamin also do not define myth very differently. Sorel endorses, however, a myth of the proletarian general strike. Benjamin does not.
Sorel claims, for instance, that he employed the term ‘myth’ in order to ‘put myself in a position of refusing all discussion with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility’. Sorel’s Reflexions [Reflections] first appeared in a series of articles in 1906; as early as 1907, he acknowledges that there may have been regrettable problems with this concept of myth. 73 He still contends, nonetheless, that the resistance to disputation is part of what gives myth, in the context of class conflict, its moral value, its great inspiration of loyalty, and its power within a group. 74
This closure against dispute seems to distinguish Sorelian revolution from at least some aspects of Benjaminian revolution. As intimated already, there may be something Benjaminian avant la lettre in Sorel’s advocacy of the myth of the general strike as a way of preventing compromise with other classes, 75 and in Sorel’s advocacy of proletarian violence for its strength of arousing painful memories of the defeats and swindles perpetrated on this class and its historical ancestors by political compromise. 76 Especially the latter aspect of Sorel’s view is quite conceivably adapted in Benjamin’s aforementioned notion (in ‘On the Concept of History’) of hate-filled sacrifice-preparedness and revenge on behalf of current suffering and ancestors’ suffering. Like Benjamin after him, Sorel conceives of the general strike as the cleavage drawn between those feeling that they belong – with a modicum of self-respect – to capitalist order or at least feeling that they want to belong to it, and those with feelings considerably independent of, and antithetical to, such order. Sorel beckons to those with the latter feelings, and considers this gesture a way of having the idea of the general strike keep socialism ‘ever young’. 77 Benjamin could be taken, however, to have de-mythified this notion at least somewhat as he refrains from expressly adopting Sorel’s notion of a myth of general strike or proletarian revolution. Even while adapting aspects of Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalism, Benjamin’s ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ treats myth as distinct from proletarian general strike (W 1, 245–6/ II:1, 193–4). 78 Myth is associated with power in the sense of ‘Macht’, and contrasted with ‘divine violence’ [göttliche Gewalt] – ‘divine end-making’ – that is associated with ‘justice’ [Gerechtigkeit] (W 1, 248–9/ II:1, 198–9). 79 ‘Justice [Gerechtigkeit]’, Benjamin says in some notes of 1916, is ‘the ethical category of the existent’; it is ‘condition of the world’ or ‘condition of God’ and not in the ‘possession’ [Besitz] of individuals or of society. 80 With regard to unappropriated existence, ‘On the Concept of History’ correlatively proposes: rather than simply either dominating or conforming, there is the possibility of thinking ‘tensions’ in a way that will give a ‘shock’ to a ‘constellation’ (W 4, 396/ KG 19, 80; KG 19, 27, 41, 67, 92, 104). 81 Myth is a suppression of such tensions (ibid.: KG 19, 139). Justice is not. Including in his advocacy of hate and revenge, the extent of Benjamin’s opposition to suppression of tensions is perhaps what most fundamentally distinguishes his outlook from Sorel’s approach.
Benjamin opposes myth in its suppression of exceptions to myth. In his Elective Affinities essay, he comments that there is ‘no truth’ in myth and myth accordingly cannot admit error (W 1, 326 / I:1, 162). This inability of myth to admit error seems noteworthy, for – as stressed above – admission of error is precisely what is not possible in the Sorelian myth. At issue here is not simply what might be considered empirical error. In the terms of Benjamin’s Elective Affinities essay, myth lacks the unequivocalness or clarity [Eindeutigkeit] and indeed simplicity with which ‘character’ recognizes any lived guilt-context as inherently erroneous (ibid.: 326, 335/ 162, 174). As Benjamin proposes in ‘Destiny and Character’ (1919), a lived guilt-context is recognizable as closure beyond which is the unrecognizable that is no lived guilt-context (ibid.: 201–6/ II:1, 171–9). In the acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of error (in himself and others), Karl Kraus accordingly becomes exemplary for Benjamin’s essay of 1931 on him. Through his complicity with communication, Kraus becomes friends with the audience. In his obligation to the word (as distinct from concept), however, Kraus can at best induce the audience, his ‘false friends’, to join him in renouncing, recognizing as ‘the enemy’, the communication that he nonetheless employs (W 2, 450/ II:1, 359). 82 Communication is myth, for it is always imbued with societal guilt-contexts, but any recognizable guilt-context may be performed critically as myth. As suggested above, Benjamin conceives of this performance as philosophy; philosophy emerges as taking exception to mythic guilt-contexts.
VI Epilogue: Philosophic politics
Philosophic politics distinguishes itself by such performance of exception to myth. In taking exception to myth, it performs the elusive ruination that prevails over any myth. In the mid-1920s, Benjamin’s One-Way Street emphasizes ‘decline’ [Untergang] as the sole ‘ratio’ of the current situation; only such an emphasis, he contends, ‘can advance beyond the tiresome amazement [Staunen] at what is repeating itself daily [das alltäglich sich Wiederholende]’ (W 1, 451/ IV:1, 95). Those succumbing thoroughly to myth are incapable of the experience that Benjamin cites – in ‘On the Concept of History’ – as a unique potential of the oppressed: the experience for which there is nothing amazing about the suffering that is entailed by so-called progress (W 4, 392/ KG 19, 74; see too KG 19: 19, 35, 87, 97). There has been a claim that philosophy, and not the amazement, is dismissed in this passage of ‘On the Concept of History’. 83 Indicating the contrary, however, is not only the previously cited statement from One-Way Street that criticizes a certain tiresome amazement. In the relevant passage of ‘On the Concept of History’, Benjamin says: ‘The amazement [Das Staunen] that the things we experience are “still” possible in the twentieth century is no philosophical amazement [kein philosophisches].’ This sentence follows one in which Benjamin criticizes those whose opposition to fascism is ‘in the name of progress as a historical norm’. Benjamin rejects such a myth of human progress, and does so at least partly for the reason that amazement at departures from such a progressivist norm ‘is not at the beginning of a knowledge [Erkenntnis], unless it is the beginning of a knowledge that the view of history from which it arises is untenable’ (W 4, 392/ KG 19, 74; KG 19: 19, 35, 87, 97–8). If there is not questioning of one’s own capacity for amazement or astonishment at the consequences or aspects of so-called progress that do not match the standards of this alleged progress, then there remains simply the untenable conception of history as progress. Such a conception of history is unphilosophic, mythic. 84 It refuses the philosophic capacity to recognize the preponderance of ruination, and thus transformation, over myth, including myths of progress.
Philosophic would, in contrast, be the admission that one’s own deeds and acts of communication are imbued with mythic imperatives, and thus participate in the mythic stultifying of action and communication. This spirit of philosophy may be effective even in the simple observation that today’s exploited are also exploiters. 85 Entanglement with mythic imperatives does not discredit the notion of philosophic decision. Decision to cut away from myth, to perform as erroneous the societal form that – in some respect or other – is otherwise advanced or performed as unquestionable, is the philosophic alertness or attention that can always take exception to discernible myth.
As Benjamin suggests with his aforementioned notion of the oppressed, there may be exceptions or extremes that especially invite this philosophical alertness or attention. These could be the so-called underside of a societal myth. In this regard and explicitly following Benjamin’s inspiration, Derrida refers to car-burnings, roadside outcasts, drug traffickers, terrorists, state criminals, and other phenomena. 86 Benjamin offers no simple pathos of grief about such developments. Philosophic politics involves, rather, perpetual decision to cut away from, to suspend, myth that recognizably disregards exceptions to it or persists in regarding extremes as adequately containable within or by myth. Such decision has been discussed in this article not only as a philosophical politics of decision, but also as the politics of philosophy tout court.