8—
Justice in the Seer's Eyes:
Benjamin and Heidegger on a Vision Out of Time and Memory
That things remain as they are: it is that which is the catastrophe.
Walter Benjamin[1]
What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is?
Theodor Adorno[2]
The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject [die decidierte Aktion eines Subjekts], but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of being.
Martin Heidegger[3]
[Bourgeois idealism] contains not only the justification of the established form of existence, but also the pain of its establishment: not only quiescence about what is, but also remembrance of what could be.
Herbert Marcuse[4]
That which is not subjected to the process of difference is the present. The present is that from which we believe we are able to think time, effacing the inverse necessity: to think the present from time as difference.
Jacques Derrida[5]
The following abbreviations are used throughout the chapter.
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I—
Problematic
In question and at stake, here, will be the gaze, or the glance, perhaps just a glimpse, of justice: "of justice" in both the subjective and objective senses. In a preliminary and provisional way, we shall be reflecting on the temporality, historicity, and violence of this connection.
In particular, we will undertake an initial reading of Heidegger's portrait of Kalchas the seer in his essay on "The Anaximander Fragment," in the hope of educing the peculiar logic, the dialectical spirit, that is at work in the seer's gaze. Benjamin's allegorical and dialectical modes of looking at
the world will serve not only as a normative point of reference but also as a compelling conceptual force in the unfolding of the narrative, enabling us to think, beyond Heidegger, and otherwise than as being, as reification, the historical intervention, the justice and temporality, of the seer's gaze.
But a semblance of paradox surrounds this gaze. As we shall see, its futural, prophetic "intentionality" depends on a certain
We should not miss the significance of the fact that Heidegger introduces a discussion of the seer into his essay on Anaximander, suggesting, if not implying, that he sees a crucial connection between
According, as Heidegger says, to the generally accepted text, the fragment, in English translation, reads:
Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.[6]
After examining the hermeneutical anxieties and difficulties involved in understanding and translating the fragment, questioning, above all, the equation of justice and the payment of penalty, expiation, or revenge, Heidegger turns to the question of our historical situation:
Are we latecomers [die Spätlinge ] in a history now racing towards its end, an end which in its increasingly sterile order of uniformity brings everything to an end? Or does there lie concealed in the historic and chronological remoteness of the fragment the historical proximity of something unsaid, something that will speak out in times to come? (AX 16, H 300)
The text continues:
Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone, the twilight of that epoch in which earth itself hangs suspended? Do we confront the evening of a night which heralds another dawn? . . . Are we the latecomers we are? But
are we also at the same time precursors of the dawn of an altogether different age, which has already left our historiological representations of history behind? (AX 17, H 300)
And, since historiography manifests the way we have situated ourselves in time and history, he remarks, critically, arguing a point with which Benjamin and Adorno could certainly agree, that
all historiography predicts what is to come [errechnet das Kommende ] from images of the past determined by the present [durch die Gegenwart ]. It systematically destroys the future and our historic relation to the advent of destiny. (AX 17, H 301)
"Can we nevertheless," he asks, "portray and represent the dawn of an age in ways different from those of historiography?" It is in part, for Heidegger, a question of seeing, of envisioning otherwise—and of a way of seeing that would come from the recognition of a need to prepare itself for an appropriate relationship to the "eschatology," the fateful dispensations of being (AX 18, H 301–2). This requires forming our images of the past in such a way that we retrieve, for the sake of a future we are preparing in the present, possibilities for justice concealed in what the past gives the present.
Writing of the "destiny of man" and the epochal dispensations of being, which he understands in terms of an interplay between unconcealment and concealment, the visible and the invisible, Heidegger turns to the rhetoric of light and vision, observing, for example, that "Man's inability to see himself [das Sichversehen des Menschen ] corresponds to the self-concealing of the light of being" (AX 26, H 311). Contending that "little depends on what we represent and portray of the past [as such]," he stresses that "much depends on the way we are mindful [eingedenk : a word that Benjamin also uses] of what is destined" (AX 27, H 312). "Can we ever be mindful," he asks, "without thinking?" If thinking is to occur, however, then we will have to "abandon all claims of shortsighted opinion and open ourselves to the claim of destiny" (ibid.). It is crucial to keep in mind that Heidegger distinguishes between "fate" and "destiny," using "Schicksal" to refer to fate, a predetermined chain of events, and "Geschick" to refer to destiny, a future that can come to pass only if our appropriation of the past prepares for its arrival. So, then, does the "claim of destiny" speak in the early saying of Anaximander? In answering this question, Heidegger says:
We are not sure whether its claim speaks to our essential being. It remains to ask whether in our relation to the truth of being the glance of being [der Blick des Seins ], and this means lightning [der Blitz ] (Heraclitus, fr. 64), strikes; or whether in our knowledge of the past only the faintest glimmers of a storm long flown casts a pale semblance of light. (Ibid.)
It is in the midst of a struggle to understand the archaic words, words that he translates into a discourse on "being," that Heidegger thinks of Homer's Iliad , and refers to the story of Kalchas the seer, whom Achilles asks to interpret the wrath of the god. Homer writes, there, of Kalchas, "who knew all that is, is to be, or once was." And Heidegger comments:
Before he lets Kalchas speak, Homer designates him as the seer [der Seher ]. Whoever belongs in the realm of seers is such a one
. . . "who knew . . . ";is the pluperfect of the perfect"he has seen." Only when a man has seen does he truly see. To see is to have seen. What is seen has arrived and remains for him in sight. A seer has always already [immer schon ] seen. Having seen in advance, he sees into the future. He sees the future tense out of the perfect. . . . What is it that the seer has seen in advance? Obviously, only what becomes present in the lighting that penetrates his sight. What is seen in such a seeing can only be what comes to presence in unconcealment. But what becomes present? (AX 33–34, H 318–19)
According to Heidegger,
what is past and what is to come also become present, namely as outside the expanse of unconcealment. What presents itself as non-present is what is absent. . . . Even what is absent is something present, for as absent from the expanse [of unconcealment], it presents itself in unconcealment. What is past and what is to come are also
[what is present]. (AX 35, H 320)
"The seer," he says,
stands in sight of what is present, in its unconcealment, which has at the same time cast light on the concealment of what is absent as being absent. The seer sees inasmuch as he has [always already] seen everything as present . (Ibid. Italics added.)
In other words: "The seer is the one who has already seen the whole of what is present in its presencing." (AX 36, H 321. Here, and in subsequent quotations from this text, I have substituted the open "whole" for the closed "totality" as the translation for "das Ganze.") Thus, according to Heidegger,
all things present and absent are gathered and preserved in one presencing for the seer. . . . The seer speaks from the preserve [Wahr ] of what is present. He is the sooth-sayer [Wahr-Sager ]. (AX 36, H 321)
Indeed, "the seer, as the one who has seen, is himself one who makes-present and belongs in an exceptional sense to the whole of what is present" (AX 38, H 323).
But what is involved in the seer's gathering and preserving? What does this mean? In particular, does it mean that the seer's vision is bound to the past, or to a metaphysical present, and that it cannot envision a radical break with the past? How does the seer belong to the whole? Does the gathering and preserving serve a metaphysics of presence? Should Heidegger be understood, here, as suggesting a metaphysics of history that would repress contingency, interruption, and difference? It is crucial to bear in mind, here, that, according to Heidegger, "seeing is determined, not by the eye, but by the lighting of being" (AX 36, H 322). Consequently Heidegger's commentary proceeds to a repudiation of "our usual way of representing things," since representation would "exclude from what is present all absence" (AX 37, H 323). This gives us an indication of the way we must answer our questions: Heidegger believes that the seer's vision gathers the absent, the invisible only if it is open to a future of radically new historical possibilities. Indeed, it gathers the absent not in order to reduce it to the order of the same, but precisely in order to see the present put in question by a temporality radically open to new historical possibilities.
In keeping with this approach, Heidegger will not assume in advance that he understands the "fundamental words" of the Anaximander fragment; thus, he translates these words in a way that respects their historical originality and acknowledges our great distance, the extremity of our difficulty in trying to understand them. Working towards a preliminary interpretation, he translates Anaximander's word
The fragment clearly says that what is present is in
i.e., is out of joint [aus der Fuge ]. However, that cannot mean that things no longer come to presence. But neither does it say that what is present is only occasionally, or perhaps only with respect to some of its properties, out of joint. The fragment says: what is present as such, being what it is, is out of joint. . . . What is present is that which lingers awhile. The while occurs essentially as the transitional arrival in departure: the while comes to presence between approach and withdrawal. Between the twofold absence the presencing of all that lingers occurs. In this "between" whatever lingers awhile is joined, from its emergence here to its departure away from here. The presencing of whatever lingers obtrudes into the "here" of its coming, as into the "away" of its going. In both directions, presencing is conjointly disposed toward absence. (AX 41, H 327)
The commentary continues:
Whatever lingers awhile [Das Je-Weilige ] becomes present as it lingers in the jointure [in der Fuge ] which arranges presencing jointly between a twofold absence. Still, as what is present [als das Anwesende ], whatever lingers awhile—and only it—can stay the length of its while. What has arrived may even insist upon its while [auf seine Weile bestehen ] solely to remain more present, in the sense of perduring. That which lingers perseveres in its presencing [beharrt auf seinem Anwesen ]. In this way, it extricates itself from its transitory while. It strikes the willful pose of persistence [den Eigensinn des Beharrens ], no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present [or disposed to become present in some way]. It stiffens—as if this were the way to linger—and aims solely for continuance and subsistence. (AX 42, H 327–28)
So it is in the persistence of a being beyond the ordinance of time, beyond and in defiance of its assignment or allotment of time, that
The disjunction [die Un-Fuge ] consists in the fact that whatever lingers awhile seeks to win for itself a while based solely on the model of continuance. Lingering as persistence, considered with respect to the jointure of the while, is an insurrection [Aufstand ] on behalf of sheer endurance [blobe Andauern ]. . . . In this rebellious whiling [dieses Aufständische der Weile ] whatever lingers awhile insists upon sheer continuance. (AX 43, H 328)
It is, then, a question of domination—the violence and injustice of relations of domination and subordination within the realm of beings:
But in this way everything that lingers awhile strikes a haughty pose [spreizt sich ] toward every other of its kind. None heeds the lingering presence of the others. Whatever lingers awhile is inconsiderate [rücksichtslos ] toward others, each dominated by what is implied in its lingering presence, namely, the craving to persist. (AX 45–46, H 331)
But there is an ontological dimension to this domination in the realm of beings: obliteration of the "ontological difference" between beings and the being of beings, or between what is present and presencing as such (AX 50–51, H 335–36). "Perhaps," Heidegger therefore suggests,
only when we experience historically what has not been thought—the oblivion of being—as what is to be thought, and only when we have for the longest time pondered what we have long experienced in terms of the destiny of being, may the early word speak in our contemporary recollection. (AX 51, H 337)
At the end of the essay, Heidegger returns to reflect on our contemporary situation and makes very clear the connection he sees between this situation and the
Man has already begun to overwhelm the entire earth and its atmosphere, to arrogate to himself in forms of energy the concealed powers of nature, and to submit future history to the planning and ordering of a world government. This same defiant man is utterly at a loss simply to say what is , to say what this is —that a thing is . (AX 57, H 343)
"The totality of beings, "he says," is the singular object of a singular will to conquer" (ibid. Here it is crucial to retain the word "totality"). "What mortal," he wonders, "can fathom the abyss of this confusion [den Abgrund dieser Wirrnis ]?" (ibid.). His reply, reminiscent of Nietzsche, is unequivocal: "He may try to shut his eyes before this abyss. He may entertain one delusion after another. The abyss does not vanish" (ibid.). Thus, it becomes necessary, as a first gesture in recognition of the need for justice and the possibility of restitution and redemption, to think the abyss: necessary, in fact, to recollect the abyss, looking without blinking into the gaping abyss—to see it. Only such a vision could see the destruction of history and make it visible as a foreseeable end.
Could it be that it is precisely by virtue of an "abyssal" vision, a vision that recollects the abyss of being, that the seer is granted uncanny "foresight"? Could it be, paradoxical though it might seem, that it is only in and as a recollection of the being of beings, a recollection of the ordinance and assignment of time, that such "foresight" is first rendered possible? And could it be that it is precisely in and as this recollection that the seer's vision becomes a vision of justice, a vision that sees, with and through the ordinance and assignment of time, the ending of injustice, the ending of history as a history of unspeakable cruelty and suffering, perhaps the possibility of a new beginning? Could it be that, through a certain process of recollection, we might be granted a vision that not only sees this, but also serves what it sees, an organ and instrument of what we might perhaps call, with one eye on Benjamin, divine justice, divine judgment?
Heidegger leaves largely unthought the connection between the seer's peculiar "foresight" and the problematic of justice and restitution spoken of in the fragment. Likewise obscure in his essay is the connection between the seer's "foresight" and the need for a recollection of being, the lighting of the being of beings, an interplay between concealment and unconcealment within which beings come into being, into presence, stay a while, and then perish, even if driven by a disposition to persist. In order to work
through these questions, we shall leave Heidegger for the time being and turn to Benjamin, whose writings are the product of a certain visionary thinking at once very like and very unlike that of Heidegger's seer.
What are the affinities and the differences between Heidegger's "recollection" (a process of hermeneutical Erinnerung and Wiederholung which in late works he also described using the word Andenken )[7] and Benjamin's "remembrance" (Eingedenken ), and how do they figure in relation to the question of the continuation or ending of history? How are their respective textual practices of recollection and reminiscence related to their visions of justice? Reflecting, first, on the allegorical and dialectical modes of seeing that figure in Benjamin's work, we may be able, perhaps, to return to Heidegger and, thinking the two together, formulate some thoughts that carry forward into a very radical political perspective a difficult meditation concerning what I have called the seer's vision of justice.[8]
Benjamin left no doubt that he could see only irreconcilable differences between his thought and that of Heidegger. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, he wrote: "It is there that I shall find Heidegger on my path, and I expect some sparks to fly from the clash [l'entre-choc ] of our two very different ways of viewing history."[9] Nevertheless, I would argue that there are—or anyway seem to be—many similarities and affinities between them. But the correlations are quite intricate and treacherous. From a certain angle, this is what one might see: Both saw a world of suffering and were moved by what they saw to consecrate their thinking to what they regarded an appropriate response. Both saw the historical departure from the origin, the beginning of history, as in some sense a degeneration; and neither thought the continuation of this decline inevitable and irreversible. Both saw in the decline a loss of memory and saw redemptive hope in the overcoming of forgetfulness. Both turned their philosophical gaze in the direction of history and the writing of history as they struggled to think the possibility of a radical transformation, a new beginning. Both thought it necessary to think this possibility as beyond time and history as we have known them, unequivocally rejecting the causal chain of history, the continuum of historical progress, and the conventional experience of the "now," the time of the "present." Both conceived the interruption of historical time in terms of a sudden flash of lightning, the absolutely unexpected gift of illumination, bringing insight, a moment of vision. Both regarded this vision as in some crucial sense "involuntary." Both drew a sharp distinction between such revelation or unconcealment and the evidence or disclosure of truth in an adequation between subject and object.[10] Both
employed the figure of the seer, the visionary, to articulate the revolutionary substance of their thinking. Both believed that the vision and imagination of the seer must be grounded in a work of memory. Both thought of the interruption of historical time as manifesting the anarchy and violence of a world-transcending, or, say, divine dispensation of justice. And finally, therefore, both men turned to an allegorical mode of vision in order to think, in relation to time and history, what they could not avoid seeing as the decay and destructiveness in modern experience, and to wrest from the present a way of reading the signs of another beginning.
But there is, in spite of these apparent points of convergence, at least one striking difference—a difference that cuts very deeply, separating them beyond all possibility of reconciliation. Heidegger's vision of justice is first and foremost ontological: it is the
Even when Heidegger interprets the "persistence of being" about which the fragment speaks, calling it
The formulation of such a standpoint might begin by insisting that no juridical and moral institutions established here on earth can ever claim to represent the perfection of justice. But Heidegger's text also seems to allow the possibility of a very strong critical position with regard, in particular, to one historically powerful conception of justice, when he not only emphasizes (AX 41, H 327) that we must resist interpreting Anaximander's words,
The standpoint that this reading of Heidegger is suggesting, with regard to a different worldly institution of justice, is defined with great lucidity in a text by Adorno. In writing "On the Classicism of Goethe's Iphigenie ," he comments that:
Humanness requires that the law of an eye for an eye, a quid pro quo, be brought to an end; that the infamous exchange of equivalents, in which age-old myth is recapitulated in rational economics, cease. The process, however, has its dialectical crux in the requirement that what
rises above exchange not fall back behind it; that the suspension of exchange not once again cost human beings, as the objects of order, the full fruits of their labor. The abolition of the exchange of equivalents would be its fulfillment; as long as equality reigns as law, the individual is cheated of equality.[12]
Levinas wants to see an ethical relation no longer determined by symmetry, by equivalence, conceding the appropriateness of such measures only in the sphere of justice; Adorno wants to see economies of equivalence abolished even in the sphere of justice. How might we work toward the realization of a justice that, after Levinas, we might describe as always for the other, always giving beyond compare, beyond measure? Our imperative question. But it must be said, here, that the question of justice never was of great urgency for Heidegger: one would search his writings in vain for any satisfying philosophical response to the injustices of his time and any unequivocal recognition of a justice giving beyond what is due—a justice wholly for the other. But he does oppose relations of domination.
As for Benjamin, I would say that in every one of his writings matters of justice are at stake. This is the case even in the early (1924–25) essay on the Trauerspiel , the German mourning-play, where, because these matters are registered in a discourse on German baroque theater and rendered in allegorical forms, represented, as in the Anaximander fragment, in terms of the destructiveness of time and the corruptions of natural history, the bearing of the text on questions of justice has become highly mediated. But, in a text that conjures up images of a stage strewn with corpses and skulls, questions of justice can hardly be kept deeply buried.
That the stage was indeed already set, in that work, for sustained reflection on a certain narrative regarding justice is something that one can readily deduce from the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" that introduces his Trauerspiel study: we can retrieve it not only from his discussion, there, of "natural history," but also from his treatment of "representation," "truth," and "knowledge." Moreover, the intention to engage in a relentless, unremitting questioning of modern liberal and conservative conceptions of right, duty, and justice is already implicitly manifest in the dialogue that Benjamin chose to abstract from the first act of the baroque drama "Ernelinde Oder Die Viermahl Braut," and placed at the very beginning of his first chapter.
Although the nostalgic, melancholy mood of this remark could not be more different from the mood of Heidegger's essay, its sense of "natural history," of a cosmological or ontological justice—the justice that metes out
the destiny of transience to all finite beings—would seem to bring him into the proximity of the thought that Heidegger wants to read into the Anaximander fragment. But the immediacy of Benjamin's concern for political justice is manifestly at the very heart of the "Critique of Violence" (1921), and it is paramount in all his later writings—for example, Konvolut N, reflecting on "The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress" (begun in 1927) and the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).
As we shall see, this difference between Heidegger and Benjamin with regard to the question of justice ultimately alters in some quite intricate ways even the similarities and affinities alluded to earlier. And yet, it must be said that, if Heidegger's critique of modern political institutions seems to offer only an abstract negation, a negation dangerously close, sometimes, to the mythical, and to be severely weakened by its inability to think outside the political alternatives of national socialism, on the one side, and, on the other side, the equally undesirable politics of Russian communism and American capitalism, Benjamin's Critique of Violence likewise seems to be unable to offer more than an abstract mythic negation of the present and to be hopelessly bound to a representation of the alternatives in which we must ultimately choose between fascism and communism. Of course, as we know, Heidegger chose the hope in Hitler's national socialism and Benjamin chose the hope in communism. And both these systems came to an end, exchanging the hope invested in them for the violence of totalitarian rule.
II—
Benjamin's Dialectic of Catastrophe and Redemption
Hope is not memory held fast but the return of what has been forgotten.
Theodor Adorno, "On the Final Scene of Faust"[13]
The historian is a prophet facing backwards.
Friedrich Schlegel,
Athenaeum Fragments[14]
The future-oriented gaze is directed from the present into a past that is connected as prehistory with our present, as by the chain of continual destiny.
Jürgen Habermas,
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity[15]
Many people have spirit or feeling or imagination. But because singly these qualities can only manifest themselves as fleeting, airy shapes, nature has taken care to bond them chemically to some common earthly matter. To discover this bond is the unremitting task of those who have the greatest capacity for sympathy, but it requires a great deal of practice in intellectual chemistry as well. The man who could discover an infallible reagent for every beautiful quality in human nature would reveal to us a new world. As in the vision of the prophet, the endless field of broken and dismembered humanity would suddenly spring into life.
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments[16]
Prophecy is an occurrence in the moral world. What the prophet sees in advance [voraussieht] are the criminal courts of justice [Strafgerichte].
Walter Benjamin, "Rückblick auf Stefan George"[17]
§1
In "Le Prix du Progrès," Adorno wrote: "All reification is a forgetting."[18] It could be argued that Heidegger frequently expressed the same thought, although we would also have to recognize that there are certain major, even fundamental divergences between them with regard to the political implications of this thought.[19] And yet, the similarities are neither minor nor inconsequential. For Heidegger, reification is a consequence of our forgetting the opening of being; for Adorno, reification is a consequence of the forgetting of social conditions. In any case, like Heidegger, like Benjamin,[20] Adorno warns that there is in our culture an increasingly dangerous destruction of "memory, time, and recollection":
The spectre [Schreckbild ] of man without memory . . . is more than an aspect of decline—it is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois society. [ . . . ] Economists and sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber correlated the principle of tradition to feudal, and that of rationality to bourgeois, forms of society. This means no less than that the advancing bourgeois society liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection [Erinnerung, Zeit, Gedächtnis ] as irrational remains of the past.[21]
Loss of memory can be as dangerous as the foreclosing of foresight. Perhaps even more so. For Benjamin, forgetting is reification because, without a memory of the traces of paradise haunting childhood experience and cultural artifacts, there can be no dialectical opposition to the present—and consequently, no way out of its endless repetition. Benjamin's remembrance is therefore not in the conventional sense "conservative." It is very
much a memory in the service of a Nietzschean forgetting, a forgetting that is intended to free us from enslavement to the past, from the weight of tradition—precisely so that we can experience the past as if for the first time, this time in terms of the needs of the present, and "remember" the image of a past the retrieval of which could at last, perhaps, in an explosion of revolutionary energies, break the spell, the grip, of a seemingly endless history of oppression and suffering.
It is fitting that, in writing about Proust, Benjamin describes his thinking as "the Penelope-work of remembrance" (die Penelopearbeit des Eingedenkens ),[22] indicating the dialectical tensions, the antinomies and paradoxes, inherent in the process: although it is as impossible to recover memory-images of paradise as it is to imagine and foresee the end of history and the inception of a Messianic afterlife, the memory-work in question is the making present of a past, an origin, that actually never was present; but it is also a making-present that is meant to unmake the present. Moreover, since there is, in the very struggle to overcome forgetfulness, an intensified consciousness of the futility of the effort and a heightened sense that there is no possibility of retrieving the original experience intact and in its original redemptive immediacy, the work of remembrance suffers incurably from a vigilance of consciousness which continually deconstructs the work the more it struggles to succeed. Thus this work of memory is compelled to resign itself to being an inaugural repetition, a repetition that, in the crucial sense, fails to be the redeeming repetition.
Like Heidegger, Benjamin gives thought to the "soothsayer." Also like Heidegger, he returns the gaze of the soothsayer to the past, asking it to do the work of remembering, without which the promise of the future would be lost. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," he says:
The soothsayer [Wahrsager ] who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance [Eingedenken ]—namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were forbidden to investigate the future. The Torah and the prayers, on the other hand, instruct them in remembrance. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews, the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter. (IL 264, S 506)
Contrary to conventional thinking, the vision of the seer, the soothsayer, is not a gaze of predictive foresight directed straightforwardly into the future;
it is, rather, a vision that derives its revelatory capacity entirely from a work of memory—a work of memory, however, that must also be a forgetting, a deconstruction of the past as a determining force of fate. An image is eventually produced. But the image, he tells us, is "not seen before being remembered."[23] Memory is therefore primary.
What, then, is the role of the seer's imagination? Intensely conscious of the Judaic prohibition against images of God, and thus of the redemption promised only for the end of time and history, Benjamin's political thought nevertheless depends on the revelatory power, the "weak messianic power" (schwache messianische Kraft ),[24] of images—especially the images granted by virtue of the work of memory.[25] Benjamin attempts to draw a very sharp distinction between "prophetic vision" and the vision at work in imagination, the faculty that produces images, but in the final analysis he requires them to work antagonistically, dialectically, together. In a short text on the imagination, he asserts that the vision of imagination is deformative, or, say, deconstructive; whereas the vision of prophecy claims to see the forms of the future—although perhaps it is actually only inventing them. Contrary to the traditional way of understanding imagination, namely, as the faculty that produces or constructs images, Benjamin asserts that
imagination has nothing to do with forms or formations [Gestaltungen ]. . . . It does indeed take its manifestations from them, but the connection between them and the imagination is so far from being inexorable that we might rather describe the manifestations of the imagination as the de-formation [Entstaltung ] of what has been formed.[26]
The argument continues, clarifying his way of thinking about the soothsayer's prophetic vision:
The exact opposite of imagination is prophetic vision. . . . Prophetic vision is the ability to perceive the forms of the future; imagination is the awareness of the de- formations of the future. Prophecy is genius for premonition; imagination is the genius for forgetting. . . . The imagination knows only constantly changing transitions.[27]
"Pure imagination," he adds, "is concerned exclusively with nature. It creates no new nature. Pure imagination, therefore, is not an inventive power."
The text accordingly expresses Benjamin's Judaic suspicion of both forms of vision and insists on maintaining a necessary dialectical tension between a purely deconstructive use of the imagination and its more inventive use in prophetic vision: a tension which will always threaten to undo the images produced by the prophetic mode.
At the heart of Benjamin's thought, however, is the conviction that the vision that matters most is a vision that comes from historical memory. When genuine, such historical memory consists in "messianic contacts" between the present and certain moments of the past. Although there is a sense in which this memory of the past follows the coming of an image, it is hoped that the work of memory will nevertheless eventuate in the coming of memorative images—for example, the "image of enslaved ancestors, rather than that of liberated grandchildren."[28] Images remembering the victims of history are, though not able to redeem their fate, at least able to accord their names some belated honor.[29]
In Benjamin's work, memory—Mnemosyne—divided into two "archaic" forms: Gedächtnis (let us call it recollection) and Eingedenken (let us call it remembrance). And in each of them, as Irving Wohlfarth points out, "Benjamin discovers a messianic potential at the very moment when they are threatened with final extinction—namely, at the beginning of the Second World War."[30] As the two German prefixes suggest, Gedächtnis is a form of memory that gathers and recollects many different events and episodes, weaving them together into a comprehensive narrative; by contrast, Eingedenken is a much more intense, more focused form of memory, concentrating its care on a singular historical constellation. Gedächtnis is also commemoration, a community's remembering together. In "The Storyteller," it is a question primarily of the former; in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," it is primarily a question of the latter. In both texts, however, Benjamin is concerned above all to rescue the two functions of memory from the obliteration that threatens them. In "The Storyteller," Benjamin explains the difference between the two forms of memory:
Memory creates the chain of tradition which hands events down from generation to generation. . . . It . . . encompasses the varieties of the epic. First among these is the one embodied by the storyteller. It ultimately establishes a whole web of interrelated stories. The next one starts where the last left off, as the great storytellers, especially the Oriental ones, always wanted to show. . . . Such is epic memory [Gedächtnis ] and the storyteller's Muse. Against it should be set another principle, the Muse of the novel, which initially . . . lies concealed, not yet differentiated from that of the story. In epics, it can at most be occasionally divined, particularly at such solemn Homeric moments as the initial invocations of the Muse. What these passages announce is the perpetuating [verewigend ] memory of the novelist as opposed to the short-lived [kurzweilig ] reminiscences of the storyteller. The former is dedicated to the one hero, the one odyssey or the one struggle; the latter, to the many scattered [zerstreut ] occurrences. It is, in
other words, remembrance [Eingedenken ] that, as the novelist's Muse, joins memory [Gedächtnis ], the storyteller's, their original unity having come apart with the disintegration of the epic.[31]
Whereas epic memory, recollection, and storytelling retrieve the past and bring with it the unchanging sameness of the chronological time-order, there is a type of memory that would attempt, however vainly, to rescue the past from this very order.
But if the origin is, as it must be, both within and external to the history that it inaugurates; if the philosopher's remembrance is the making-present of a past that has actually never been fully present; and if remembrance therefore cannot really be a retrieval, a repetition, of the origin, but at most, as Levinas would say, a trace of a trace, in what sense is it true memory—or a memory of truth? Here it is necessary to distinguish, as Benjamin does, between truth as "revelation" and truth as "exposure," as the correspondence, or adequatio , between thought and reality: the truth of Eingedenken is revelation, which is perhaps why, inspired by the use of "mémoire involontaire" in Proust's great novel, Benjamin can think of it as a form of memory disconnected from intentionality: an unwillkürliches Eingedenken (UDT 418).
Explaining, in the "Prologue" to his Trauerspiel essay, the distinction he wants to make between the revelation of truth and its totalizing, reifying exposure, Benjamin says:
truth is not a process of exposure [Enthüllung ] which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does it justice [Offenbarung, die ihm gerecht wird ]. (OGT 31, UDT 146. Also see OGT 35–36 and UDT 150–51.)
This distinction is similar to Levinas's distinction between "disclosure" (dévoilement ) and "revelation" (révélation ),[32] and derives from kindred concerns: in drawing the distinction, Levinas intimates that "disclosure" is always injustice, that "the work of justice" requires "revelation."[33] It is also important to recall, here, Heidegger's distinction between "truth," understood according to the tradition as the correspondence between a proposition of thought and a state of reality, and "unconcealment" (Unverborgenheit ), the necessary condition for the very possibility of "truth."[34] Benjamin's distinction would permit us to draw a corresponding distinction between memory as a repetition of that which is endlessly the same and memory as a repetition that, by virtue of its relation to the creative and renewing resources of the origin, makes a radical difference, a new
beginning. Given the transcendence of the inception, neither form of repetition could actually return to the origin and bring it back to the present intact and as it was; and moreover, even if, per impossibile , repetition could go back and retrieve it "just as it was," what would be retrieved could only be a moment that, as origin, never was, and never could have been, totally and fully present to itself. But in any case, the distinction that Benjamin makes remains crucial: whereas the former repetition could produce only a betrayal of the promise, degeneration and destruction of its potential, the latter would let itself be inspired by the revolutionary energies set in motion through its very efforts, however vain, to retrieve the origin. As we shall see, both Benjamin and Heidegger depend on a revelatory memory that attempts the second kind of repetition in relation to the imagined origin of history.
In his early writings, and especially in the Trauerspiel essay, Benjamin's relation to the tradition is more sympathetic, tinged with a certain deep ambivalence: on the one hand, appreciation and longing for the wisdom buried in the tradition; on the other hand, not only the belief that it can be passed on only in a way that inevitably betrays it, but moreover the conviction that no authentic relation to tradition is possible within the order of tradition, and that the only authentic way to relate to tradition, the only way to receive it, is to destroy it and make way for the radically different. Thus, like Heidegger, Benjamin sees the need for a radical break from tradition. In fact, they both are moved to call for its "destruction." It follows that they would both be extremely critical of historicism in historiography, in historical memory, and in historical writing. For Benjamin, modern historiography is a devastating betrayal of the responsibility carried by memory. It ignores "every reverberation of 'lament'" in history and substitutes false consolations, the idols and fetishes of the marketplace. Thus he argues, with words that it would be easy to imagine finding in Being and Time (especially chapter 5 of the second division), that "in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.[35] Remembrance of tradition must be catastrophic in all senses of the word "must":
Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past as it appears unexpectedly to an historical subject at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the continued existence [Bestand ] of the tradition and those who receive it. The danger is the same for both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism about to overpower it. (GS, vol. I, part 2, Konvolut N, p. 695)
"Tradition" is therefore not, as such, the enemy: "Tradition," that is," as the discontinuity of the past as opposed to history as the continuum of events" (GS, vol. I, part 3, p. 1236). To make history, then, is not to record the passage of time, but the ability to "read" the images of the tradition that could interrupt this continuum. According to a note in the Passagenwerk , past and future are (to be) related not in terms of the passage of time, but through the "legibility" of the images that could indicate a radically new order of time and history (GS, vol. V, part 1, pp. 577–78).
But in the Trauerspiel essay, the attempt to appropriate history, to retrieve it through remembrance, could only be catastrophic, completely shattering, fragmenting, whatever meaningfulness lay buried in history: the reception of tradition could only be a process in which the constructions of meaning it bears are left in ruins. Consequently, the site where tradition would be gathered could not be located in a present with its past and future, a present now-time belonging to the same order of time as the tradition itself; it could be located only in a deferred future, a future, moreover, that would not belong to our present order of time and history. The remembrance that could redeem the past must belong to another time, another history. In question is the imaginative power of a remembrance that could awaken a past that never was and see it shatter the petrified solidity of the present "reality."
Historical remembrance is a dialectical experience of the catastrophic in four different senses: (i) it is fated to a certain failure in retrieving the redeeming origin; (ii) it cannot receive the past and hand it down without destroying it; (iii) since the present is a continuation, a repetition of an empty past severed from the origin, the work of remembrance must be for the sake of a violent, catastrophic destruction of the present; and finally, (iv) the past that it sees, with a vision already at odds with conventional optics, is a past that already lies in ruins. Thus, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin uses the figure of the "Angel of History," the Angelus Novus , to comment that
where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe.[36]
Here the dialectics of the seeing sets in motion a very different constellation of the three temporal moments—past, present, and future.
Howard Caygill holds that "for Heidegger, such ruination is potentially, but not necessarily, the issue of tradition, since for him the excessive moment of origin not only destroys but can also gather; it can allow things and events to be revealed."[37] This is only partly correct. I cannot agree that, for Heidegger, the future which memory serves must and should remain a fu-
ture of this present. Nor can I accept the opposition that Caygill implies between gathering and destroying; for the "gathering" that figures in Heidegger's thought is a gathering, through recollection, of the Es gibt , and that means the groundlessness of what is . So a certain deconstruction of "what is" is already at work in the gathering of memory; it is not at all a gathering of memory under the spell of the metaphysics of presence. (The "ontological" in Heidegger is no longer" the essential." For the metaphysical tradition, Heidegger's "Wesen" can only be an Unwesen , an undoing of the traditional essence.) But Caygill continues the drawing of a difference:
For Benjamin, the moment of origin or "handing over" is characterised by confusion and indecision—in the act of "handing over" there is no community or subject to give or receive, for the subject is indeed ruined by tradition. For Heidegger, the moment of origin is potentially a moment of clarity and resolute decision, one which enables a subject, be it a "hero" or a "people," to decide . . . "who they are and who they are not". This moment of origin is one of historical decision, enabling Dasein to choose as a subject its own destiny. For Benjamin such a choice of destiny is characteristic of tragedy, which always ends with a decision, while Trauerspiel ends with indecision and uncathartic catastrophe. Heidegger's moment of origin can be a moment of decision, resoluteness unto death, while Benjamin's origin provokes sadness and mourning for the death it brings about.
What Caygill says about Benjamin is certainly correct, at least with regard to the text in question: his seer is one who is lost in a lament over the ruination of historical meaning. But what he says about Heidegger is not the whole story. Even in Being and Time , the reception of tradition and its meaning is more of a struggle against historicism and against its preservation of tradition than Caygill recognizes. And, in light of Heidegger's critique of the traditional and modern conceptions of the subject, it can hardly be said that tradition is handed down and received by the traditional subject. Nor can it be said that, for him, the handing-down and the reception is a straightforward process without questions and problems. Moreover, the existential "moment of resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit ) that figures in Being and Time is already an attitude in which the intentionality of the will has been to some extent deconstructed, turned inside out, a question, already, of a certain openness and exposure. Already attempting to think beyond the historicity of this intentionality, Heidegger himself is careful to point out that, in using the word Entschlossenheit , he is radically contesting the traditional way of thinking about resoluteness and historical action. And in his later writings, after the so-called Kehre , all investments of the
will to power still holding sway in this attitude undergo further alteration, eventually assuming, in relation to history as the history of being, the radical ontological exposure of "letting be." And coming with this alteration, there is audible, I think, a certain tone of mourning, not entirely unlike Benjamin's, and no less equivocal, a lamentation over loss—the loss handed down in tradition and history as history and tradition—that reverberates through many of his later writings. Finally, one should note the extent to which, as early as Being and Time , Heidegger was already struggling to think the vision of historical recollection outside of the conventional constructions of time and memory.
According to Benjamin (Konvolut N 3, 1), "Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology through the abstraction of 'historicality,' "whereas what "differentiates [dialectical] images from the 'essentiality' of phenomenology is their historical index" (GS, vol. V, part 1, p. 577). But is Benjamin's criticism justified? In the Entschlossenheit (resolute openness) of Being and Time , as in the Vorbereitungen (preparatory steps) of the later writings, we see that the seer's "moment of vision" is not, for Heidegger, as Benjamin claims, a merely abstract negation of history. Nor can it be said that Heidegger's practice of phenomenology perpetuates the traditional concept of "essentiality," which is of course under the spell of the metaphysics of presence. It must also be noted that most of Heidegger's discussions of the history of metaphysics are contextualized very concretely in critical reflections on contemporary life (on technology, environmental pollution, nuclear energy, commodification, the culture of narcissism, a false individualism, the destruction of experience, alienated labor) and in attempts to think the possibility of an end to history as we know it.
Be these matters as they may, I would argue that it is perhaps in the Trauerspiel essay that Benjamin's vision comes closest to the vision of the Anaximander fragment which Heidegger was attempting to understand. Influenced no doubt by the critical categories that Nietzsche deploys in The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life , Benjamin's "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to the Trauerspiel essay asserts that
origin [Ursprung ], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung ]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being [Werden der Entsprungenen ], but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance [Werden und Vergehen des Entspringendes ]. (OGT 45, UDT 161. Italics added.)
What emerges, then, is not a celebration of progress, nor even an untroubled sense that the past can be taken over for future use in a constructive
way, but only, rather, a profound sense of loss, ruin, destruction, catastrophe. What meaning emerges from tradition, what meaning comes to us from the past, is from the time of its very inception already fated to perish, to disappear: as Caygill says, in the Trauerspiel essay, Benjamin certainly thought that "the site of tradition is not a place where past, present and future are gathered together for resolute action, but one where the present is haunted not only by its past but also by its future of becoming past. It is a place of mourning. Here origin and its objects can never attain authenticity, but are always indebted to something which does not disclose itself."[38] But in later writings, it is important to discern provocative indications of a different relation, no longer in the attitude of a virtually inconsolable mourning, to origin, to the handing down and reception of the past, to present and future. There are incontrovertible differences, here, between Benjamin and Heidegger. But here, too, Caygill exaggerates. For Benjamin, too, was concerned with decision and action. Moreoever, having relinquished intentionality, his own approach risks falling into decisionism—the same danger that Heidegger is often accused of approaching.
Nonetheless, it is essential to keep in mind that the mood of sadness into which the soothsayer, the seer, of the Trauerspiel is fallen comes from his being moved by the sight of so much human suffering, whereas in the Anaximander fragment, what the seer sees is the endless passing away of nature, the fate that is immanent in the very nature of all things. In the one case, a Leidensgeschichte , in the other, a Naturgeschichte . But even if the object of Heidegger's seer is a "natural history," it is not solely a question of fate, since what the seer realizes is the Geschick , the destiny hidden in the image of fate, that constitutes a claim on our capacity to interrupt the present course of history.
By the time Benjamin wrote his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," his visionary was moved by a different attitude, at once more defiant and less willful, less intentional. And the perspective or field of vision (Blickfeld ) correspondingly changed its character.[39] Benjamin became increasingly clear that what is needed is not merely a break with history as a chronicle of progress, a break with history as monument to the victors. The writing of history must be dedicated to the stories of the defeated, the victims: it must be a history that belongs to the other. But moreover, the historian must renounce the panoramic vision, the God's-eye perspective that claims to see a universal history. The historian's philosophical gaze must settle into the material of history, keeping eyes open for the ciphers of a "messianic force," however weak.
§2
There is, in Benjamin's writings, what might be called a "typology" of ways of seeing, each way embodied in a different figure. Perhaps the major figures are the collector, the flaneur, the melancholy brooder, the allegorist, and the dialectician of historical materialism and messianic remembrance. In what follows, we shall consider each of these figures in turn. As we shall see, despite their differences, all these figures embody a vision that involves a memorative image.
In the text marked "H," Benjamin suggests a portrait of the collector. The optics or gaze (Blick ) of the collector is of a peculiarly dispassionate nature, a "disinterested observation" (interesselose Betrachtung )[40] not at all creative (kein erschöpfender Blick ),[41] abstracting things from the "functional" order of production and consumption, making them useless, but precisely thereby especially "promising" as sites for the awakening of an "incomparable glimpse"[42] into otherwise invisible meanings, arousing memory-images, adumbrating the possibility of a world redeemed and made whole. Benjamin compares the collector's visual experience (Schauen ) to that of a magician.[43] But the magic is not without struggle and self-sacrifice: struggle against the dissemination of meaning, against the haunting proximity of the invisible; the sacrifice of intentionality, of an excessive subjectivity, for the sake of an order yet to become visible. Benjamin writes:
Perhaps the most hidden motive of the collector can be described thus: he takes up the struggle [Kampf ] against destruction [Zerstreuung ].[44]
Collecting always involves classifying; and classifying always involves recontextualizing. In collecting, the objects gathered are released from all their original functions in order to be recontextualized in the closest possible relation to similar things.[45] The hope is that this imposed classification, ordering things according to an "astonishing," seemingly "incomprehensible" network of relationships, will somehow release a certain Tiefsinn , a deeply concealed meaningfulness that otherwise could not be discerned.[46] The collector collects things, then, in order to collect memories—and collect through the medium of memories: "he vanishes in the world of memory."[47] The collector's effort to remember and see, or see and remember, is a constant "struggle against dispersion,"[48] against the spell of forgetfulness. The collector's vision, deeply absorbed, immersed in its objects, is grounded in the principle, the discipline, of gathering and recollecting. And the virtue of the gaze lies in this discipline. But it is, by its very nature, an extremely limited praxis. And it takes place indoors.
Very different is the gaze of the flaneur, the one who leaves the collector's bourgeois interiors and takes to the city streets, drifting anonymously through the urban crowds, temporarily playing the part of a disinterested spectator, seeking asylum in the crowds but never overcoming the feeling of marginality, remaining a resident alien, a stranger, a man in exile. The flaneur, strolling along the boulevards, meandering through the parks and gardens, making his way through the commodity displays of the arcades, whiling away hours in the sidewalk cafés, visiting the special meeting-places of the night, gives free play to well-disciplined eyes, ready for whatever might appear before them in some striking form, quietly and patiently observant, but sometimes looking about with a special vigilance, a certain Aufmerksamkeit , as if he were a detective on secret assignment. In manuscript "M" of the Passagen-Werk ,[49] the Pariser Passagen[50] and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,"[51] Benjamin conveys a portrait of this figure, emphasizing points of view, ways of looking and seeing, a dialectical optics.
§3
Of great importance for Benjamin were the figures of the brooder (der Grübler ) and the allegorist (der Allegoriker ), to the character of whose distinctive gazes he devoted considerable thought. The principal text for these intimately related, yet quite distinct figures is the Trauerspiel essay. In describing the melancholy mood of the baroque allegorist, Benjamin says:
For it was only rarely that the eye [der Blick ] was able to find satisfaction in the object itself. (OGT 181, UDT 305)
Commenting on what he called "the peculiar imagistic quality of Benjamin's speculation," Adorno suggested that it had "its origin in his melancholy gaze, under which the historical is transformed into nature by the strength of its own fragility, and everything natural is transformed into a fragment of the history of creation."[52] The figure of the melancholy brooder, totally absorbed in the intense contemplation of fragments, remnants, and ruins, haunts Benjamin's work—especially the early work of the 1920s. Perhaps it is with this work in mind that Derrida was moved to write, in "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" that he (Derrida) does "not see ruin as a negative thing." And he confesses that he would like to write on the "love of ruins." "What else," he asks, "is there to love, anyway?" And he explains:
One cannot love a monument, . . . an instrument as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it hasn't always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason I love it
as a mortal, through its birth and its death, through the ghost or silhouette of its ruin, of my own—which it already is or prefigures. How can we love except in this finitude? Where else would the right to love, indeed the love of right, come from?[53]
Although the mood of this passage is different from the mood registered by Heidegger's reading of the Anaximander fragment, there is a certain proximity in the thought—a proximity that includes, in both cases, a connection between justice and the ruination, the passing, of all things finite, according to the ordinance of time. In any case, Derrida undoubtedly captures, here, something of Benjamin's relation to ruins—a relation which also connects the latter, I think, to the fragment of pre-Socratic thought.
In the Trauerspiel essay, Benjamin contends that "in the field of allegorical intuition, the image is a fragment, a rune." But he immediately adds, with the characteristically conflicted emotions of the allegorist, torn between sadness and joy in seeing the destruction of a past that, for all its false promises, nevertheless had for a time such a beautiful appearance (Schein ):
Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disappears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contains shrivels up. The dry rebuses which remain contain an insight, which is still available to the brooder [Grübler ]. (OGT 176, UDT 300)
It may be assumed that, when he wrote this, Benjamin had in mind the fact that Schein , in German, carries three meanings: radiance, appearance, and illusion.
Somewhat later in the text Benjamin takes us into the very "heart" of the allegorical way of seeing, into its negative dialectics:
Whereas in the symbol, destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hyppocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather, in a death's head. And although such a thing lacks all "symbolic" freedom of expression, . . . all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form in which man's subjection to nature is most obvious and it gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also to the question of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline. (OGT 166, UDT, 289)
Here, though, the brooder's mourning and melancholy hardly overcome, through the allegorical way of seeing, the catastrophe that has befallen meaning: history is revived, but only as dead, bereft of any meaning for the living.
There can be no doubt that the Trauerspiel text is, as Benjamin himself says, an invention and demonstration of his "own particular way of looking at things" (his eigenen Betrachtungsart der Dinge ), refracted through the figures of the brooder and the allegorist (OGT 180, UDT 304). As Max Pensky argues with considerable insight, there is a certain distinction between the melancholy brooder and the allegorist; but Benjamin's work suggests that the dialectical logic inherent in the experience of the melancholy brooder is such that it prefigures, and gradually becomes, the experience of the allegorist.[54] Thus, for example, the melancholy vision of the brooder is a vision that is rooted in an experience of extreme alienation from a world that is seen as "a petrified, primordial landscape." It is a vision rooted in a bodily felt sense of suffering, a suffering that "corresponds" to the human condition with sympathy and compassion for all suffering beings; it is a vision rooted in lamentation, a devastating, deeply felt sense of loss, unforgettable yet irretrievable and irredeemable, of loss so great that it exceeds memory and representation.[55] It is a vision rooted at once in hope and despair, hopelessly resigned to a loss it cannot forget, reminded despite everything that even catastrophe must carry a secret promise of meaning. It is a vision hopelessly sunk in what Horkheimer once described as "die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen," a "longing for the radically other."[56]
In writing about Baudelaire, Benjamin gives us an easily recognizable portrait of the brooder. Unfortunately, the translation cannot pretend to preserve his multiple dimensions of meaning:
What fundamentally distinguishes the brooder [den Grübler ] from the thinker is that he does not meditate [nachsinnt ] on something only with his mind, but also with his senses [seinem Sinnen ]. The case [Fall ] of the brooder is that of a man who, having found the solution to a major problem, immediately forgets it. And now he broods, not so much over the matter itself as over the passing of his meditations [Nachsinnen ] on them.[57]
And he adds:
The thinking of the brooder stands therefore under the sign of memory [Erinnerung ]. Brooder and allegorist are made of the one and the same substance [aus einem Holz ].
The memory of the brooder, he says, "presides over the unordered mass of dead knowledge. In it human knowledge has become fragmented [Stückwerk ] in an especially pregnant sense, namely: as the heap of deliberately
cut-up pieces out of which one constructs a puzzle."[58] But, he notes, times are not any longer favorable (abhold ) for brooding. Consequently, in response to the puzzling disjointedness of the times, the crisis of meaning, the peculiar gaze of the allegorist is solicited and aroused, responsive to the need. That the times are out of joint is reflected in the art of the allegorist, who struggles with the pieces of the puzzle in order to turn melancholy experience into narrative and image: since there can be no eschatology "by which all earthly things could be gathered and exalted before being consigned to their end," the allegorist can only immerse himself in expressions of mourning mingled with desperate hope, a hope against hope, if not directly for redemption, then at least for some revelation of existential meaning in "catastrophic violence" (OGT 66, UDT 184): "The authentic experience of allegory, holding fast to fragments, is that of the perpetual past."[59]
But unlike the melancholy brooder, who is resigned to the conditions of fate, the allegorist assumes a more "active" role, at once more destructive and more hopeful. Obsessed by a faint sense that somehow the fragments could be joined together in a meaningful construction, the allegorist surrenders himself to searching for the still missing clue to the arrangement which would suddenly make visible, if only in the form of barely visible ciphers, the redeeming glow of a lost significance. The hope of the allegorist lies in the possibility that there is a dialectical way of seeing that could educe an otherwise invisible Tiefsinn from its engagement with the fragmented cultural material. But as the hope remains unfulfilled, forever deferred, the allegorist's gaze (allegorische Tiefblick ) remains, in the end, in spite of all efforts, a Blick der Melancholie (OGT 176, 183; UDT 300, 308).
There is in this disappointment, moreover, a certain dialectical necessity. Because the allegorist's immersion and absorption in the subjectivity of mourning, his desperate commitment to the meaningfulness inherent in the experience of loss, virtually guarantees disappointment.[60] Unlike the intention involved in the gaze of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the gaze that draws on dialectical materialism and messianic hermeneutics, the melancholy gaze of the allegorist can yield no completely satisfying or redeeming memory-image:
The intention which underlies allegory is . . . opposed to that which is concerned with the discovery of truth. (OGT 229, UDT 354)
The allegorist's treatment, spellbound within the contradictions of allegorical subjectivity, thus inevitably "betrays and devalues" (verrät und entwertet ) the things he takes up at the same time that he "exalts" them by looking for traces of redemption. Thus the allegorical way of looking at
things and handling them, rather than immediately restoring them to meaningful life, initially causes only their "mortification," bringing out the secret, invisible "justice" in ruination, destruction, and death (OGT 182, 177ff; UDT 306, 301ff). But, whereas the brooder loses himself in mourning, the allegorist attempts, by an exercise of will, of intention, to pass beyond this phase through a dialectic of destruction—although he knows with a painfully acute consciousness that revelatory truth ultimately requires of him the very "death" of intention.[61] The objects that the allegorist rescues from invisibility, from oblivion, are saved—but only as images empty of meaning, as illegible fragments of sense: the process of "restoration is haunted by the idea of catastrophe" (OGT 66, UDT 183). And yet, it is precisely such degradation and fragmentation, all the traces of catastrophe, that enable the allegorist to see in the objects that capture his attention the possibility of assigning an allegorical meaning, thereby reconstructing the object outside the illusoriness of the mythic world, within which it had for a passing moment appeared to be a meaningful and beautiful whole (OGT 174–75, UDT 298). The dialectical tension in the destructive phase of the allegorical art of seeing is evident in this passage from Benjamin's "Paris: Capital of the 19th Century":
Dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, it strives toward the moment of waking. . . . In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins, even before they have crumbled.[62]
Here we see an extremely intricate interweaving of hopeful intention (the monuments of the bourgeoisie deserve to be destroyed, reduced to ruins by the catastrophic violence of justice) and visionary perception (the monuments are seen as already in ruins).
Adorno was therefore correct in his description of the allegorical art of seeing, but perhaps still too captivated himself by its hopeless narcissism, when he said, in his very Benjaminian book on Kierkegaard, that,
No truer image of hope can be imagined than that of ciphers, readable as traces, dissolving in history, disappearing in front of overflowing eyes, indeed confirmed in lamentation. In these tears of despair, the ciphers appear as incandescent figures, dialectically, as compassion, comfort, hope.[63]
Although, as Pensky shows, there is a real difference between the melancholy of the brooder and that of the allegorist, the latter is never very far from brooding subjectivity. As Pensky formulates the difference, it consists
in the fact that, while the brooder "is capable of recognizing, however dimly, that the fragments, which in one sense remain meaningless, also begin to radiate meaning,"[64] he is not able to reconstruct this meaning, and risks falling into a state of despair, mourning the loss of meaning. There is a certain affinity, then, as Pensky notes, with what Benjamin calls "the destructive character."[65] The allegorist, however, attempts nevertheless to fit the fragments together, constructing by forceful intention a narrative of memory that might point toward the possibility of a messianic significance. But the melancholy dialectic does not escape the allegorist's extremely sensitive consciousness: aware that the construction is a product of his own arbitrary intentionality, he cannot deny that the hoped-for meaningfulness is ruined in and by the very act of constructing it. All that the allegorist can see, when his work is done and its conditions—its finitude, its mortal touch—are incontrovertible, is a faintly visible glow, a faintly visible trace, of originary meaning, bearing the objective memory of the paradise that seems irretrievably lost—or forever deferred. And yet, the destructive moment ultimately reveals the limits of this phase, showing that it cannot be identified with the end:
As those who lose their footing turn somersaults in their fall, so would the allegorical intention fall from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its bottomless depths, were it not that, even in the most extreme of them, it had so to turn about that all its darkness, vainglory, and godlessness seems to be nothing but self-delusion. For it is to misunderstand the allegorical entirely if we make a distinction between the store of images, in which this about-turn into salvation and redemption takes place, and that grim store which signifies death and damnation. For it is precisely visions of the frenzy of destruction [Visionen des Vernichtungsrausches ], in which all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins, which reveal [enthüllt sich ] the limit set upon allegorical contemplation [allegorischen Versenkung ], rather than its ideal quality. (OGT 232, UDT 357)
Thus, even the faintest glimmer is sufficient to intimate a dialectical reversal:
ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the gaze at bones, but leaps faithlessly to the Resurrection. (OGT 233, UDT, 358)
As a reward for the allegorist's violent, destructive intentionality, the phase of destruction and mourning—the phase from out of which the melancholy brooder cannot escape—thus recurs to a phase where traces of the promise of redemption finally become visible. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the allegorical vision has little to offer to those who see injustice in the realm of the political.
§4
After the Trauerspiel , Benjamin's allegorical gaze underwent a certain transformation, a certain "education." Briefly stated, it became a way of seeing in which he attempted to bring historical materialism and messianic hermeneutics together in the form of explicitly dialectical images. Although the melancholy gaze and the gaze of the allegorist are also, of course, dialectical, we shall hereafter refer to this new way of seeing by calling it a "dialectical" gaze, a "dialectical" vision. And correlatively, we shall hereafter refer to the images that this way of seeing solicits by calling them "dialectical images." In this section, then, we will examine Benjamin's dialectical way of seeing, bringing out what might be termed the "anarchic" logic of its politics.
Adorno's description of the Benjaminian art is once again useful for introducing the change. What struck him in the course of reading Benjamin's later productions was the emergence of what he called "his Medusan glance":
Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason, Benjamin's philosophy is no less a source of terror, than a promise of happiness.[66]
The task for Benjamin was to translate this "glance," this "gaze," into the materiality and concreteness of images that would be useful for a revolutionary historiography and philosophy. In one of his notes for the Passagen-Werk , Benjamin wrote this:
Sketch the history of the Arcades Project as it has developed. Its truly problematic component: to give up claim to nothing, to demonstrate that the materialistic presentation of history is imagistic in a higher sense than traditional historiography.[67]
Struggling to conceive the appropriate method, a synthesis, somehow, of dialectical materialism and messianic hermeneutics, bringing about the formation of concrete dialectical images and translating them into effective discourse, he declared that "history breaks down into images, not into stories" (B 67; GS V, 1, pp. 595–96). And he noted that there is:
a central problem of historical materialism, which ought finally to be seen: must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily come at the cost of graphicness [Anschaulichkeit ]? Or: by what route is it possible to attain a heightened graphicness combined with a realization of the Marxist method. The first stop along this path will be to carry the montage principle over into history. That is, to build up the large constructions out of the smallest, precisely fashioned structural elements. Indeed, to detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the
small, individual moment. To break, then, with the vulgar naturalism of historicism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. *Trash of history* [Abfall der Geschichte ]. (B 48; GS V, 1, p. 575)
Defending Breton's Manifestos on Surrealism, texts with which he felt considerable immediate sympathy, but also, at the same time, with which he had points of serious disagreement, Benjamin said:
The revolutionary energies that appear in the "out of date," in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photographs, the objects that are beginning to die out, grand pianos in the salons, the dresses of five years ago, trendy night spots when the vogue begins to recede from them. How these things relate to the revolution—no-one could have a more exact concept than these authors. Before these seers and sign-readers, no-one perceived how poverty, . . . the poverty of interiors, of enslaved and enslaving things, can transpose itself into revolutionary nihilism.[68]
Searching for texts in which he could perhaps discern some ideas for use in developing the dialectical way of seeing, Benjamin also turned to Grillparzer, whose comment, briefly touching on both prophetic and retrospective vision, gave him an opportunity to formulate an important point in this regard:
To contrast the theory of history with Grillparzer's comment: "To read into the future is difficult, but to see purely into the past is even more so: I say purely , meaning without clouding that retrospective gaze with everything that has happened in the meantime."
After this quotation, Benjamin wrote: "The 'purity' of the gaze [des Blickes ] is not so much difficult as impossible to attain" (B 59; GS V, 1, p. 587).
Of major importance for the conceptualization of what, in Angelus Novus , he calls the "dialectical optic" is the question of intentionality. After discussing this question in his essay on the genre of the mourning play, Benjamin takes it up again (in 1923) in a short text bearing the title "On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy":
Our gaze must strike the object in such a way that it awakens something within it that springs up to meet the intention. Whereas the reporter who adopts the stance of the banal philosopher and specialized scientist indulges himself in lengthy descriptions of the object at which his gaze is directed, the intensive observer finds that something leaps out at him from the object, enters into him, takes possession of him, and something different—namely the non-intentional truth—speaks from out of the philosopher.[69]
He goes on to say that this speech, this discursive gaze, "possesses authority," the authority of an objectivity that "stands in opposition to the conventional concept of objectivity, because its validity, that of the non-intentional truth, is historical—that is to say, anything but timeless; it is bound to a particular historical base and changes with history." According to Benjamin, then, the truth "leaps into existence as the result of an immersion of the object in itself provoked by the external gaze." Thus, while there is a sense in which the truth that becomes visible may be said to be non-intentional and objective, its manifestation is nonetheless dependent on a procedure that does involve intentionality: the solicitous intentionality of the gaze, interacting with the object that has caught its attention in such a way that the object's entire pre-history and post-history as a commodity may quite suddenly be revealed.
Here there is an entire problematic that Benjamin, and all subsequent commentators, have left in the dark. It would seem necessary to draft a distinction between the visionary moment of revelation, sudden and shocking, in which no intentionality is involved, and the deliberate, intentionality-driven procedures that must precede this moment, preparing the conditions that would make such a moment possible. Both the allegorical image and the dialectical image are sudden revelations, utterly unanticipated, beyond intentionality, impossible to correlate with reality in terms of the correspondence theory of truth. In this regard they are quite similar. But there are certain differences in the processes that precede their manifestation: differences that neither Benjamin nor his commentators have sufficiently, I think, elucidated. In the case of the allegorical image, as well as in the case of the image or Tiefsinn that sometimes rewards the collector, the process is a slow, deliberate, painstaking "destruction," a willful, even violent, destruction of the object—very much a question of intentionality. In the case of the dialectical image, there is no such procedure, although even here, it is a question of a certain preparedness, a certain vigilance, a certain openness to experience—the paradoxical curiosity of the flaneur, for example, which is at once intense and restrained, disinterestedly interested, interestedly disinterested, practicing a critical alertness heightened by virtue of its alienation, its self-restraint, its rigorous epokhé . The "seer" who haunts the Paris arcades looks indiscriminately at everything: the hands of shopkeepers, the faces of shoppers, the gestures of pedestrians passing by, the commodities on display in the shopwindows, the mannequins dressed up in the latest fashions, the advertisements on billboards, the ragpickers, and the streetsweepers. Anything ready-to-hand, anything at all, might catch the material interest of his methodically disinterested, concretely "objective" gaze.
The dialectical image that comes in such circumstances manifests an objective, material truth—a truth that cannot be reduced to the intentionality of the gaze. But it cannot be denied that even the gaze of the flaneur, seemingly without purpose, without direction, seemingly free of material conditions, material worries, is informed by a wealth of background knowledge, intensely conscious of the social and cultural significance of the things that catch his eye: not at all an "innocent" gaze.
This "time of truth," when truth is "loaded to the bursting point with time" (B 50; GS V,1, p. 578), is a "profane illumination,"[70] an experience with vision that Benjamin describes as like a flash of lightning:
It is not that the past casts its light on the present, or the present on the past; rather, the image is that in which that which has been [das Gewesene ] enters, like lightning, into a constellation with the Now [das Jetzt ]. (Ibid.)
"The dialectical image," he says, "is a lightning flash," ein aufblitzendes Bild:
The Then [das Gewesene ] must be held fast as it flashes its lightning image in the Now of recognizability [Erkennbarkeit ]. The rescue that is thus—and only thus—effected, can only take place for that which, in the next moment [im nächsten Augenblick ], is irretrievably lost. Cf., the metaphoric passage from the introduction to Jochmann on the prophet's gaze [Sehblick ], which catches fire from the summits of the past. (B 64; GS V, 1, pp. 591–92)
If there is a way in which the images brought forth by the allegorical gaze slowly make their appearance, emerging only at the end of a laborious alchemical process of destruction and construction, the images brought forth by the dialectical gaze are, by contrast, instantaneous epiphanies, shocking eruptions, momentary awakenings from the mythic dream-time—the terrible phantasmagoria and enchantments—of capitalism. Arguing, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," that "the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up [aufblitzt ] at the instant when it can be recognized and never seen again," he tells us that this "instant," the "Jetztzeit," can occur only "at a moment of danger."[71] Because of their historicality, the images that flash up in this way are not at all the timeless "essences" of transcendental phenomenology (B 50; GS V, 1, p. 577). Nor are they the "archaic" images of myth (ibid.). In no sense do they represent a pre-established harmony of meaning underlying the historical order. But the dialectical image does interrupt, does arrest, if only for an instant, the temporal continuum out of which it arose. And, as "the involuntary memory of a redeemed humanity,"[72] as an image "shot through" with "splinters"
(Splitter ) of light from a "messianic time,"[73] it does leap out of this continuum, belonging not to the order of history, but to the "visual space" (Bildraum ) of anarchy,[74] the avenging anarchy of a messianic justice yet to come:
image is dialectics at a standstill [Dialektik im Stillstand ]. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical: not of a temporal, but of an imagistic nature. (Ibid.)
This is the critical function of the dialectical image, a memory-image deployed in keeping with Benjamin's conception of dialectical materialism:
The materialist presentation of history leads the past to place the present in a critical condition. (B 60; GS V, 1, 588)
The alienation-effect that the image achieves demonstrates this critical condition. As such, the image must avoid inducing sentimentality and empathy; it must be compelling entirely on "objective" or "material" grounds:
For the materialist historian, it is important to distinguish the construction of a historical state of affairs very rigorously from what one generally calls its "reconstruction". "Reconstruction" by means of empathy is one-sided. "Construction" presupposes "destruction." (B 60; GS V, 1, p. 587)
The dialectical character of the image to be achieved creates within the discourse of history—a discourse that for too long has been seen as the unfolding of an immanent but invisible teleology of reason—what Benjamin calls a "forcefield" (Kraftfeld ), drawing historical evidence into violent conflict between a "fore-history" and an "after-history" (ibid.). It is, therefore, not correct to read Benjamin, against Heidegger, as disregarding the futural dimension: were he to have done this, he would have been arresting the dialectic in a conflict between the past and a Now-time with no redemptive prospect, however deferred.
The decisive thing is, as he says, "the unique property of dialectical experience to dissipate the appearance of things always being the same" (B 63; GS V, 1, p. 591). This is why Benjamin emphasizes that "the concept of progress should be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things 'just keep on going' is the catastrophe" (B 64; GS V, 1, p. 592). As an aftereffect of the dialectical image, therefore, there is a crucial moment:
the pastness [das Gewesene ] of a particular epoch is always also "things as they have always been" [das "Von-jeher-Gewesene "]. As such, though, at times it comes into view [vor Augen ] only at a very specific epoch: that is, the epoch in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, suddenly
recognizes the dream image as such. It is at that point [In diesem Augenblick ] that the historian takes on the task of dream interpretation. (B 52; GS V, 1, p. 580)
As we shall see, Benjamin's chosen word for this critical, history-stopping moment, Augenblick , is the same word that Heidegger uses for the crucial moment—the so-called moment of vision—in his own critical reworking of our relation to history and historiography. And it would be difficult to deny that the proximity ends with the same word. In any case, Benjamin argues that the method at work in the dialectical image may be compared to the "splitting of the atom," because the sudden arising of the image "releases the enormous energy of history that lies bonded in the 'Once upon a time' of classical historical narrative" (B 51; GS V, 1, p. 578).
For the dialectical gaze, whose destructive moment Benjamin embodied, for a time, in the figure of the "Angel of History,"
Historical materialism has to abandon the epic element in history. It blasts the epoch out of the reified "continuity of history." But it also blasts open the homogeneity of the epoch. (B 65; GS V, 1, pp. 592–93)
But the dialectical gaze sees hope for redemption—"or, put differently, a revolutionary chance for the fight for the oppressed past"—concealed within catastrophe and destruction:
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the Now [Jetztzeit ]. (I 263, 261; Sch 505, 502)
To rescue the past is at the same time to rescue the present, to salvage that in the present which can be an instrument for the undoing of its complicity with death, with the brutalities of injustice. But the present cannot be transformed "until all of the past has been brought into the present in a historic apocatastasis" (B 46; GS V, 1, p. 573). In this way, therefore, the dialectic image is, after all, involved in a process that might be called a "gathering." One reason why this passage is significant for us is that it does not seem to fit very easily into the interpretive framework within which Howard Caygill attempts to demonstrate that one of the principal the differences between Heidegger and Benjamin lies in the fact that for Heidegger, the "moment of vision" is a conservative gathering of historical time into the metaphysical structure of the present, a present, moreover, that is embodied in the temporally structured transcendental unity of the histori-
cal "subject," whereas he thinks that, for Benjamin, the "moment of vision" is radically dissociative and disseminative, and is made possible only by virtue of the most radical self-effacement of the traditional subject, sacrificing its intentionality and even its unity as the site for a gathering-in of the three dimensions of historical time.[75] But Caygill is right when he points to Benjamin's insistence that "for a fragment of the past to be struck by the contemporary, there must be no continuity between them" (B 60; GS V, 1, p. 587). This implies that the process of "gathering" does not necessarily function to preserve and perpetuate the continuum: instead, it may be the surest way to induce a violent clash. This in fact is the way I suggest that we understand the gathering of memory in the context of Heidegger's critique of historiography and his critical phenomenology of historical experience: the recollection of being is a gathering that throws all beings into a groundlessness that robs them of all their metaphysical attributes. Heidegger's "recollection" of the historical forms through which being presences does not gather in obedience to the so-called metaphysics of presence. On the contrary, it gathers into a vision of interruption and dispersion, into the unrealized possibilities of an originary temporality.
Be this as it may, the task of the dialectical gaze—its Augenblick —is, for Benjamin, not just to break off the "progress" of the historical continuum, but also to rescue the tracework of messianic hope that may be concealed within the familiar things of the profane world. If there be an after-history, an afterlife, for things that have been reduced to commodities, to the spellbinding fetishes of late capitalism, then the task of the dialectical gaze must be to retrieve their secrets in the form of images that can be used to construct them anew—in a different image, and with a different after-history:
If the historical object is to be blasted out [herausgesprengt ] of the continuum of the historical process, it is because the monadological structure of the object demands it. This structure only becomes evident once the object has been blasted free. And it becomes evident precisely in the form of the historical argument [Auseinandersetzung ] which makes up the inside . . . of the historical object, and into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale. The historical object, by virtue of its monadological structure, discovers within itself its own fore-history and after-history. (B 66; GS V, 1, p. 594)
Sifting through the "trash of history" (Abfall der Geschichte ), the remnants of things, objects discarded as useless and worthless (B 48; GS V, 1, p. 575), and all the things that capitalism has shrouded in an invisible aura of false value, Benjamin's dialectical materialist is always vigilant, looking
with a deeply penetrating gaze into the contradictory structure of these historical objects:
Thinking involves both thoughts in motion and thoughts at rest. When thinking reaches a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions, the dialectical image appears. . . . In short, it is to be found wherever the tension between dialectical oppositions is greatest. The dialectical image is, accordingly, the very object constructed in the materialist presentation of history [materialistischen Geschichtsdarstellung ]. It is identical with the historical object: it justifies its being blasted out of the continuum of the historical process. (B 67; GS V, 1, p. 595)
§5
In the concluding paragraph of "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," Benjamin alludes to a "dialectical justice," a "dialectical annihilation."[76] This is perhaps the most fitting description of the dialectical gaze, at once a "profane illumination" and a newly messianic hermeneutics, revealing the way to see the world in the light of redemption. But the justice of this gaze is more than an innerworldly justice; it is (to borrow a word from Derrida) "supplemented" by a justice that comes from the messianic dimension: it is an annihilating justice, effecting its judgment with an eye to what, in the "Critique of Violence," is called a "pure violence." And it is an anarchic justice, "anarchic" in a sense that Levinas, possibly inspired by this text of Benjamin's, defines with admirable lucidity in a note to the "Substitution" chapter of Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence:
The notion of anarchy we are introducing here has a meaning prior to the political (or anti-political) meaning currently attributed to it. It would be self-contradictory to set it up as a principle (in the sense that anarchists understand it). Anarchy cannot be sovereign, like the
. [In the context of his "Critique of Violence," Benjamin would say: it cannot be law-positing or law-preserving.] It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation. The State cannot therefore set itself up as a totality [en Tout ].[77]
Anarchy cannot reign: that means, for Levinas, that it "remains in ambiguity, in enigma, and leaves a trace which speech, in the pain of expression, seeks to state. But there is only a trace."[78] The dialectical gaze is the defiant gaze of the philosopher engaged in an approximation to pure resistance, the justice of endless deconstruction; it is the gaze of the justice in anarchy, making visible for all to see the historical truth concealed by all political in-
stitutions: that their authority and legitimacy are groundless; that their origin in history is indebted to the violence of law-making, a violence concealed by myth and justifiable, if at all, only retrospectively, after the State has been founded; that however powerful they may be, their endurance is nevertheless marked by radical contingency; and that, as Anaximander is telling us, they are fated, like all things that come into being, to remain for a while and pass away. Belonging, in the end, to the fate of "natural history," all our political institutions are already in ruins. This is what the dialectical gaze can see. This is what it can make visible for others to see. This is its negative dialectics—an annihilating justice waiting for redemption.
In Konvolut N, Benjamin cites a letter from Max Horkheimer dated March 16, 1937, taking up the question of the incompleteness of history. The part of the letter that he quotes reads as follows:
The assertion of incompleteness is idealistic, if completeness isn't included in it. Past injustice has occurred and is done with. The murdered are really murdered . . . If one takes incompleteness completely seriously, one has to believe in the Last Judgement. . . . Perhaps there's a difference with regard to incompleteness between the positive and the negative, such that only injustice, terror, and the pain of the past are irreparable. Application of justice, joy, works, all relate differently to time, because their positive character is largely negated by transience. This is primarily true of individual existence, in which sadness rather than happiness is sealed by death.
To which Benjamin replies:
The corrective to this line of thought lies in the reflection that history is not just a science but also a form of memoration [eine Form des Eingedenkens ]. What science has "established," memoration can modify. Memoration can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in memoration we discover the experience [Erfahrung ] that forbids us to conceive of history as thoroughly a-theological, even though we barely dare not attempt to write it according to literally theological concepts. (B 61; GS V, 1, pp. 588–89)
As an organ of justice, the dialectical gaze cannot disregard the future as the origin from which the universal light of redemption will come: "For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only a fore-history of the one that really concerns him" (B 65; GS V, 1, p. 593). The materialist historian and philosopher cannot, like the Angel of History, turn his back on the future and look only into the past. In spite of textual passages where Benjamin would seem to suggest or imply this, it cannot
simply be assumed to represent his complete or final position. And we must also take into account somehow the statement that Benjamin makes in concluding his "Critique of Violence," where he says: "A gaze directed [Eingerichteter Blick ] only at what is close at hand can at most perceive [gewahren ] a dialectical rising and falling in the law-making and law-preserving formations of violence."[79] The German phrasing here reminds one that, for Benjamin, the philosopher's gaze is always to be directed by its concern for justice. But this justice is always, in his thinking, as in Kafka's, still to come—to come with the coming of the Messiah, to come as the "pure" catastrophic violence that would inaugurate a new beginning for humanity.
We must return, therefore, to the statement cited at the beginning of our discussion of Benjamin: "What the prophet sees in advance are the criminal courts of justice." There is an unsettled indeterminacy with regard to how the prophetic foresight, the seeing-in-advance, is to be understood—though in any case, it would certainly be contrary to all of Benjamin's thinking to read it as a predictive vision, as "prophetic" in this cheapened sense. And there is also an unsettling ambiguity, no doubt deliberate, certainly reminiscent of Kafka, in this solemn reference to the courts. Are they the courts of the political revolution that must take place here on earth—or are they the infinitely higher courts of the Last Judgment?
Disregarding the Judaic prohibition on images presenting that which pertains to the divine and continuing, despite his critique of the Enlightenment, the rhetoric, the metaphorics of light, Benjamin occasionally allowed himself to turn away from the past and think with the trope of the prophetic gaze, facing the light of the future and a justice still to come:
The light cast by the messianic age would no longer be the lightning flash of an intermittent "dialectical image" but the unending illumination of an "eternal lamp."[80]
Because it is, after all, only from the redemption to come that humanity can receive the fullness of its past—and most of all, the justice for which the righteous have been waiting. But before the coming of this justice that reason demands, the institutions of the present must be reduced to rubble. Sifting through this rubble, it is possible that we will find hints of the dreams that built the very institutions which repressed them. In "The Actuality of Philosophy," Adorno succinctly expresses this thought, echoing his friend Benjamin:
Only in traces and ruins is it [philosophy] prepared to hope that it will come across correct and just reality.[81]
III—
Heidegger's Seer in the Moment of Vision
What is important is only whether the contemporary Dasein , in keeping with its existential possibility, is original enough still to see on its own the world that is always already unveiled with its existence, to bring it to words, and thereby to make it expressly visible for others.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology[82]
No transformation [Wandel ] comes without an anticipatory escort [vorausgleitendes Geleit ]. But how does an escort draw near unless there takes place an opening illumination [wenn nicht das Ereignis sich lichtet ] which, calling, needing, envisions [er-äugnet ] human being, that is, sees [er-blickt ] and in this seeing [Erblicken ], brings mortals to the path of thinking, poetizing building.
Martin Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics"[83]
§1
In his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor explains Hegel's glorious vision, his way of seeing the phenomenology of the Spirit, arguing that,
if we contemplate the succession of finite things where each passes and is succeeded by another, we are eventually forced to shift our central point of reference from the particular, finite, ephemeral things to the continuing process which goes on through their coming to be and passing away. This is the identity in difference. But the locus of this process is not any particular finite thing, but the whole system of limited ephemeral things.[84]
All finite beings are, as Hegel sees them, marked by inherent contradiction: contradiction internal to their very being, contradiction in their external relations to all other beings. As finite embodiments of the infinite, all finite beings must go under, submitting to the perishing that is inscribed from the very beginning as their fate. Moreover, every entity can be only by reference to another which it is not; hence it is related to an other which negates it and tends to suppress it.[85] Hegel's vision is in some ways quite similar to the vision that Heidegger attributes to Anaximander. But there are also some crucial differences between Hegel's vision and the vision that Heidegger constructs for himself in the process of reading and interpreting Anaximander. Because, for Heidegger, the philosopher's gaze must be directed by the question of
question of the continuation or interruption of history. For this question ultimately bears on the philosopher's position with regard to the repetition and reproduction of injustice, the perpetuation of domination and suffering, in the ontic realm of history.
Before we concentrate on Heidegger's reference to the seer in his commentary on the Anaximander fragment, it would be useful, I think, to consider in some detail Heidegger's discussion of the "moment of vision" (Augenblick ) in division II of Being and Time . It is in this second division that he formulates critical questions and reflections with regard to fate and destiny; authentic and inauthentic ways of experiencing the orders of time, history, and tradition; the historical significance of our cultural forgetfulness of being; the need for a culture of memory; the need in our time for a radical break with the past and a repetition of the inception, the possibilities granted us in and as the origin of historical time; and the urgent need for foresight, a radically different understanding and vision of the future. Although at first it might seem that there is no significant connection between the resolute "moment of vision" and the experience that Heidegger attributes to the seer in his commentary on the Anaximander fragment—and that there is even less of a connection between the "moment of vision" and the "vision" that is involved in what Anaximander has to say in the fragment, we will see, by way of a reading of Being and Time , as well as some other texts, that such an interpretation would need to be corrected. There are, in fact, deep and significant connections to be seen.
§2
We will begin, as we did with Benjamin, by taking up, but only briefly, the question of memory in Heidegger's thinking. This we must do, not only because memory—recollection—is at the very heart of his thinking, but because, as I have already suggested and will here be arguing, it is, contrary to what might at first seem most obvious, the work of recollection and not prophetic foresight which constitutes the vision of the seer, both in the Anaximander fragment itself and in Heidegger's discussion of it.
Looking over the history of Western civilization, Heidegger, like Nietzsche before him, saw the ever-increasing manifestations of nihilism: a nihilism that he interpreted to be the signs and symptoms of the oblivion of being. And in particular, as he read deeply in the history of metaphysics, he discovered that the question of being is no sooner posed than the possibility of a thinking truly open to the claim of this question—truly open to being opened by it—is immediately foreclosed by ontically reduced interpretations, and moreover, that the traces of this foreclosure continue to go
unnoticed. Heidegger also sees (writings 1936–46) that this "decline" from the opening moment that takes place in the history of metaphysics corresponds to an increasing "desolation of the earth" (Verwüstung der Erde ).[86] Seeing this, he is moved to ask: "Can the extreme measure of suffering still bring a transformation here?"[87]
How can a philosopher respond to such a question—and to the need of which it speaks? For his part, Heidegger conceived the task of what he called "thinking" to be, first and foremost, the overcoming (Überwindung ) of this "extreme blindness" (aüßerste Verblendung ), this extreme "forgetfulness of being" (Seinsvergessenheit ) within the discourse of metaphysics, by a process of recollection that would accompany the critical reading of the history of this discourse and by a corresponding critical analysis of the prevailing cultural conceptions of time, history, tradition, and historiography. What this work of recollection would demonstrate, with clear and incontrovertible textual evidence, is that every one of the major concepts that figured in the thinking which inaugurated the history of metaphysics underwent what can now, in retrospect, be seen as a process of increasing reduction and reification: it is now possible to see that, and also how, in the process of being handed down from generation to generation, the principal concepts were unknowingly being altered according to a concealed logic of totalization and reification: a process of "de-generation" separating these concepts from the creative power of their originary moment. This degeneration or ruination is made strikingly clear in such texts as "Overcoming Metaphysics," "Recollection in Metaphysics," and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." The argument, in fact, is so strikingly clear that, when one first actually sees this logic of closure, the effect can resemble what Benjamin calls a shock of recognition.
"Our age rages," he said (lecture series 1951–52), "in a mad, steadily growing craving to conceive history in terms of universal history, as an occurrence."[88] For him, world history is rather "the destiny whereby a world lays claim to us."[89] There can be no recollection of being without the overcoming of the prevailing cultural conceptions that would, in effect, appropriate it for their own designs and ends. What is needed is a recollection that returns to think the "origin" which was posited in the history of being: a recollection that would release the hermeneutical significance of the "first inception," the opening "event" of being. In "Recollection in Metaphysics" (1941), Heidegger says:
Recollection [Erinnerung ] in the history of being is a thinking ahead to the inception [Vordenken in den Anfang ], and belongs to being itself. The opening event [Das Ereignis ] grants the time from which history
takes the granting [die Gewähr ] of an epoch. But that time span when being gives itself to openness can never be found in historically calculated time or with its measures. The time span granted shows itself only to a reflection which is already able to glimpse [zu ahnen vermag ] the history of being, even if this succeeds only in the form of an essential need.[90]
Such recollection, such thinking, would be the overcoming of "philosophy" as we have known it; and it would be, perhaps, a preliminary preparation for what might be called "another beginning":"But with the end of philosophy, thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning."[91]
The "first inception" belongs to a past that, while present, was never present to itself—nor, a fortiori, has it ever been present to itself as past. The first inception, the origin, depends on a future time to bring about a certain reflectively constructed presence to itself that it did not have—and could not have had. But just as, for Benjamin, the philosopher as historical materialist who brings the past into the present must struggle against the temptation simply to consign it to the past as nothing but ruination and catastrophe, so for Heidegger, the thinker who undertakes a process of recollection might be strongly tempted to see in the history of metaphysics nothing but an irredeemable decline. Resisting the Spenglerian narrative, however, Heidegger was able to (fore)see in the end of "philosophy" a "gathering into the most extreme possibilities" (Versammlung in die aüßersten Möglichkeiten ).[92] The task of thinking, then, is to "gather" into recollection some of these still unrealized possibilities from their concealment in the original opening, the first inception of Western thinking. For Heidegger, the Anaximander fragment that we are considering in this chapter is an incipient saying of being.[93] And that means not only that we of today should read and think it in its incipience, its continuing originality and generativity, but that we must recognize in the saying the vision of a seer who has in an extremely significant sense already seen what is still to come. Not the ordinary events of the future, of course, but the revelation of something ontologically significant—or say a presently still concealed dimension of the history of being.
To some extent, the seer's "moment of vision," that moment in which the seer lets the work of
ture. Like Kant, neither Benjamin nor Heidegger wanted to encourage a "schwärmerische Vision," a vision with exalted pretensions.[94] The seer's vision can disclose the possible only if it takes responsibility for a recollection of the epochal presencing of being.
The temporality of this recollection (Erinnerung ), however, is radically different from that of ordinary memory, because, whereas ordinary memory is straightforwardly concerned with the past, recollection is concerned with the generative event of an inception that has been, but still presents us with regenerative possibilities for a new beginning. As Heidegger expresses it in his 1941 Grundbegriffe:
The inception is certainly something that has been, but [it is] not something past. What is past is always a no-longer being, but what has been is being that still presences but is concealed in its incipience.[95]
The past, of course, is past, and ordinary memory relates to it accordingly:
Everything past is only something that has passed away. But the passing away of beings occurs in the essential realm of being. This does not, of course, "subsist" somewhere "in itself", but is what is properly historical in the past, the imperishable, and that means it is an incipiently having been and an incipiently presencing again.[96]
Recollection is concerned with an inception which, in one sense, bears the temporality of that which has already been, but which, in another sense, bears the temporality of that which has not yet been, not yet come to pass. Recollection is a return not to the past but to the originary temporality of inception, to gather up that which could still generate the truly new:
According to the historiological reckoning of time, the earliest is indeed the oldest, and, in the estimation of ordinary understanding, also the most antiquated. The earliest, however, can also be the first according to rank and wealth, according to originality and bindingness for our history and impending historical decisions. . . . We name this "earliest" the incipient [das Anfängliche ]. From it comes an exhortation, in relation to which the opining of the individual and the many fails to hear, and misconstrues its essential power, unaware of the unique opportunity: that recollection of the incipience can transport us into the essential.[97]
Thus, for the historian,
everything earlier is something past, by means of which he can illuminate what comes later and what pertains to him according to his needs. Here the earlier has no power of decision because it is no longer experienced as the incipient in history.[98]
But for the thinker, the inception of metaphysics, as the discourse of being, is not consigned to the past:
The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is not the past, but rather, because it has decided in advance everything to come, it is constantly of the future. We must think about inception this way.[99]
Recollection into the first inception of Western thinking is therefore "a fore-thinking": "a forethinking into the more incipient inception."[100] It is a process that requires fore-sight and anticipation, preparations in thought that might indicate the way to another inception. But Heidegger emphasizes that we must understand these preparations appropriately:
The word anticipation should show us the way to consider that what should be brought to knowing here cannot be produced from man by his own choice. Anticipation means grasping something that comes upon us, whose coming has long held sway, except that we overlook it. . . . Thinking in anticipation and for anticipation is essentially more rigorous and exacting than any formal-conceptual cleverness in whatever sector of the calculable.[101]
And he adds, most importantly, that
to attain anticipatory knowing we must practice such knowing. . . . The fundamental condition [for such practice] is readiness to make ourselves free for the essential.
In other words, words that he used earlier, in his 1927 work, Being and Time , we must learn the attitude of Entschlossenheit: a kind of resolute openness or resolute preparedness, a steadfast, firmly committed anticipatory openness for what might still come from the first inception, if we think with care towards its recollection.
In an early text (1915), "The Concept of Time in the Science of History," Heidegger argues for a process of cultural creation (Kulturschaffen ) that is mindful of tradition and "gathers what is past." But in the course of making this argument, he says that philosophical thought should undertake this creative cultural recollection" in order to work it through further, or to combat it."[102] The intriguing word, here, is of course the little word "or." In this phase of his thinking, Heidegger was just beginning to recognize the need for a very radical break with tradition—or perhaps, rather, with the way in which tradition has been received and handed down. Thus he was also beginning to realize that this break cannot be understood as straightforward, because there are, in the tradition, traces of a truth that must be
preserved. But mere continuation of the inception—repetition in this sense—can only be de-generation. By the time he wrote Being and Time , he would take the "combat" a step further, not hesitating to speak of the need for a thinking that is willing to resort to argumentative "violence" (Gewaltsamkeit ),[103] and indeed arguing that
the question of being does not achieve its true concreteness until we have carried through the process of destroying the ontological tradition. (BT 49, SZ 26)
Since, as he says in Being and Time , "in the field of ontology, any 'springing-from' is degeneration," recollection of the inception, the inaugural opening, can only mean the destruction of the prevailing ways of experiencing and conceptualizing time, history, and tradition, ruled as they are by the assumptions of reifying ontology (BT 383, SZ 334). But he was also beginning, there, to articulate this "destruction" as an intricate hermeneutical process, a deconstructive process, destroying tradition precisely in order to rescue from the ruins what he will later refer to as the thought of the "first inception." It is necessary, he says,
[to] destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of being. (BT 44, SZ 22)
The destruction must consequently be carried out with the understanding that it is part of a process of construction—a vision of another inception, seeing unrealized possibilities in a past that never was.
§3
As we shall now see, Heidegger later, in "The Turning" (1941), gives to the formulation of this destruction a surprising concreteness. "The Turning" ("Die Kehre") is a text of singular importance because, as its title indicates, it names what in retrospect can be seen as the most radical development in Heidegger's thinking: nothing less than a bold reversal of the way he had, in Being and Time , been attempting to receive and work with the opening question of metaphysics, the question, namely, of being. He effected this reversal after realizing that the analytic of Dasein, which immediately follows his radical formulation of the phenomenological method in the "Introduction" to Being and Time , is actually a terrible betrayal of this method, perpetuating the traditional foreclosure that already takes place in the very framing of the question of being—the question that is supposed to open and inaugurate the discourse of metaphysics. Radicalizing the
Husserlian formulation, Heidegger defines the phenomenological method as a hermeneutical procedure, a process that takes place in the interplay between concealment and unconcealment, a process of subjective self-restraint or self-effacement yielding to the presencing of what presents itself, letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself.
In "The Turning," Heidegger argues, against the pressures of the metaphysical tradition, that
we locate history in the realm of happening, instead of thinking history in accordance with its essential origin from out of destining.[104]
"Only," he says,
when man, in the disclosing coming-to-pass of the insight [im Ereignis des Einblickes ] by which he himself is beheld [von diesem Erblickte ], renounces human "self-will" [menschlichen Eigensinn ] and projects himself toward that insight [Einblick ], away from himself, does he correspond [entspricht ] in his essence to the claim of that insight [Einblickes ].[105]
We are, he believes, in a time of grave danger; but he refuses hopelessness and turns his gaze into the inception, the opening, in order to foresee the possibility of a different future: "another destining, yet veiled, is waiting," he tells us.[106] But, he asks, ascribing—strangely—a visual presence to being:
Will we, as the ones caught sight of [als die Erblickten ], be so brought home into the essential glance of being [in den Wesensblick des Seins ] that we will no longer elude it? Will insight into that which is bring itself disclosingly to pass? Will we correspond to that insight [Einblick ], through a looking [Blicken ] that looks [blickt ] into the essence of technology . . . ? Will we see the lightning-flash of being in the essence of technology? [Sehen wir den Blitz des Seins im Wesen der Technik ?][107]
This passage shows the strangeness of the text. But it is perhaps only fitting, after all, that a text intended to mark at once the most radical turning point in his own thinking and the possibility of a turning point in the unfolding decline of the history of being should turn to a hermeneutical phenomenology of the uncanny. With the trope of the "lightning-flash," absolutely shattering and bursting open the subject-object structure of traditional metaphysics, a structure within which we have been all too complacently comfortable, Heidegger is attempting to think in the most extreme visionary terms both the catastrophic-redemptive "turning of the danger" and the intense experience of the reversal that shattered and transformed his own thinking. With regard to the first aspect, he says: "The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly." There is a "sudden
self-lighting," a "lightning-flash" (das Blitzen ) in which "the truth of being flashes."[108] With regard to the second: "Insight into that which is [Einblick in das was ist ]—thus do we name the sudden flash of the truth of being into [the realm of] truthless being."[109] "When insight comes disclosingly to pass, then we are the ones who are struck in their essence by the flashing [light] of being. In insight, men are the ones caught sight of. [Die Menschen sind die im Einblick Erblickten ]."[110] Heidegger attempts to explain the experience in question, but without mitigating the uncanniness of its ontic-ontological doubling:
To flash [blitzen ], in terms both of its derivation and of what it designates, is "to glance". [Heidegger's word, here, is blicken , which can also mean "to look" or "to gaze at."] In the flashing glance and as that glance, the essence, the coming to presence, of being enters into its own emitting of light. Moving through the element of its own shining [seines Leuchtens ], the flashing glance [der Blick ] retrieves that which it catches sight of and brings it back into the brightness of its own looking [birgt der Blick sein Erblicktes in das Blicken zurück ]. And yet that glancing, in its very giving of light, simultaneously also keeps safe the concealed darkness of its origin as the unlighted [das Ungelichtete ]. The in-turning that is the lightning-flash of the truth of being [Einkehr des Blitzes der Wahrheit des Seins ] is the entering, flashing glance—insight [Einblick ].[111]
It would seem to be a question, here, of the possibility of a "glance" or "look," a "glance" or "look" of being and coming from being, doubled by the possibility of a corresponding look or glance on the part of appropriately thoughtful human beings. (This strange thought, however, also appears in the 1942–43 lectures on Parmenides, wherein Heidegger undertakes a critical examination of our ordinary and habitual way of looking and seeing, and pursues the logic of this critique in a preparatory meditation on another, radically different way of looking and seeing.[112] Reflecting on the Greek word
There is, of course, a strong temptation to give this text a "merely" metaphorical interpretation. I have repeatedly argued against reading Heidegger this way, if this designation opposes the "metaphoral" to the "literal" in a way that effectively denies the text any meaningful, transformative relation to experience. What such a text calls for is not a blunting of its power to shatter and burst open—its power to transform our
experiencing and thinking, but instead an effort to take it seriously, take it to heart, and work with it in and as an experience of thinking.
Like Benjamin, Heidegger thinks the interruption of the continuum of history as a lightning-flash. It is at least possible—conceivable—that with the unexpected suddenness of a bolt of lightning, another inception could take place. But only, as Heidegger repeatedly insists, if we are in readiness: only if we have undertaken the necessary "preparations." Such "preparations" would not necessarily be followed by a new inception. But without our preparations, there can be no reason for hope.
In "The Turning," this most strange and disturbing text, which scholars have consistently neglected, undoubtedly because they are puzzled by what appears to be the "personifying" of being and cannot see how to give it an interpretation that is other than mythological or metaphorical, Heidegger is attempting to think such anticipatory preparations in terms of our experience as beings who have been given the capacity to see. In keeping with the image of lightning to designate the catastrophic intensity of the turning point, the abruptness and unexpectedness of the interruption in the historical unfolding of being, and the moment when the possibility of another inception first becomes manifest, he spells out what is required of us in preparation, proposing to think our historical task as calling for a response to the "glance of being" that would correspond appropriately to the claim made on our capacity for vision by this phenomenon. The "look of being" is therefore simply a provocative way to formulate the ontological claim on our visionary capacity. If, as he says in this text, we are always "seen," always "beheld" by the "look of being," this is because—or this is to say that—in beholding, we are always beholden, always held, always bound, in a certain ontological beholdenness: what, in Being and Time , Heidegger would call our Schuldig-sein . We are beholden, because the visibility of the world, the gift of the lighting that makes beings visible, makes a claim (Anspruch ) on our capacity to look and see. In "The Turning," it is suggested that this claim calls on us to look and see with a thoughtfulness that would correspond to the manifestation of the possibility of a new inception in signs of hope—signs never more than flashes of light, instantaneous, puzzling, beyond the possibility of expectation. In question is the character of our gaze: whether it will respond to these signs with a looking and seeing that corresponds to the revelatory moment with appropriate thoughtfulness. In his meditations on Heraclitus, Heidegger would use the word
concealment, and [b] the event, the Es gibt , of being, as the disclosure or unconcealment that grants the field of lighting within which our world-disclosures take place. Are we capable of a vision, a looking and seeing, that could be described as "of being"? "Of being": that is to say, it would be a question of a looking and seeing that understand themselves to be involved in the unconcealment of being, a looking and seeing gathered, out of time, into originary temporality.
"The Turning" is very much, then, an allegorical text. The lightning-flash, rending the sky, effecting a decisive scission in the night, renders for all to see a visible reminder that the crisis of nihilism calls for a decisive response: a resolute commitment to the task of anticipatory thinking— thinking into the possibility of another inception. And with the differentiating scission that it articulates in the openness of the sky, it evokes the ontological difference between being and beings, representing it in the realm of the visible as a critical moment of "decision" in the history of being and the history of metaphysics. Thus it represents that opening moment of inception when the difference between being and beings was first brought forth. But the possibility of another inception is to be glimpsed in the space opened up by the rendering of the ontological difference. For it is into the space of this difference, into the immeasurable dimensionality of this difference, that originary presencing, while giving finite beings unconcealment, itself withdraws into concealment and thereby preserves historical possibilities for new forms of presencing from the nihilistic reductions of what might be called a certain ontological historicism. I mean by that the historical reductions of ontological possibilities to the presently prevailing modes of presencing.
Articulating a decisive difference, the lightning-bolt intimates at once the Geschick , the sending or decision of being, the fateful assignations of presencing which inaugurated the unfolding of its epochal history, and the resolute commitment, the decision to give thought to the Geschick , by which we human beings would be enjoined to correspond in appropriate ways to the calling of our time. As a flash of light illuminating the enveloping darkness, the lightning suddenly appears at the darkest, most hopeless moment—a messenger of hope, perhaps, intimating at least the possibility of a saving enlightenment.
§4
In chapters 4 to 6 of division II of Being and Time , the work to which we shall now give thought, Heidegger uses his existential phenomenology to formulate critical arguments against the conceptions of time, history, and
tradition that have figured prominently in the history of Western philosophy and Western cultural life.
However strange it may seem, the fact is that the trope of the philosopher's gaze plays a major role in these chapters, continuing his attention to vision in the preceding division. In chapter 3, division I, Heidegger suggests that "in its projective character, understanding goes to make up existentially what we call Dasein's 'sight ' [Sicht ]" (BT 186, SZ 146). He then names the disclosive forms that such sight can assume: the "circumspection of concern" (Umsicht ); the "considerateness of solicitude" (Rücksicht ); "a sight that is directed upon being as such" (Sicht auf das Sein als solches ), "for the sake of which any Dasein is as it is"; and the sight of "transparency" (Durchsichtigkeit ), of "self-knowledge," the "sight which is related primarily and on the whole to existence" (ibid.). After introducing this nomenclature, Heidegger comments:
We must, to be sure, guard against a misunderstanding of the expression "sight". It corresponds to the "clearedness" [Gelichtetheit ] which we took as characterizing the disclosedness of the "there". "Seeing" does not mean just perceiving with the bodily eyes; but neither does it mean a pure non-sensory awareness of something present-at-hand in its presence-at-hand. In giving an existential signification to "sight," we have merely drawn upon the peculiar feature of seeing, that it lets entities which are accessible to it be encountered unconcealedly in themselves. Of course, every "sense" does this within that domain of discovery which is genuinely its own. But from the beginning onwards, the tradition of philosophy has been oriented primarily towards "seeing" as a way of access to entities and to being . To keep the connection with this tradition, we may formalize "sight" and "seeing" enough to obtain therewith a universal term for characterizing any access to entities or to being, as access in general. (BT 187, SZ 147. See also BT 397, SZ 346.)
Soon after this passage, in regard to which we must forbear the extensive critical commentary its extremely questionable position calls for, Heidegger introduces "fore-sight" (Vorsicht ) as one of the three background dimensions of existential understanding. But as he uses this term, it does not mean a prophetic power, an ability to make shrewd or valid predictions about the future, but refers, rather, to the fact that, as he formulates it,
when something is understood but is still veiled, it becomes unveiled by an act of appropriation, and this is always done under the guidance of a point of view, which determines that with regard to which what is understood is to be interpreted. In every case, interpretation is grounded in something we see in advance —in a fore-sight . . . . Any-
thing understood which is held in our fore-having and towards which we set our sights "fore-sightedly", becomes conceptualizable through the interpretation. (BT 191, SZ 150)
In both the first and second divisions, Heidegger's frequent references to different ways of looking and seeing bear out his claim that "a Dasein can, in existing, develop the different possibilities of sight, of looking around [Sichumsehens ], and of just looking" (BT 385, SZ 336. Also see BT 397, SZ 346). What concerns him in division II is that singular "potentiality-for-seeing" which he calls "der Augenblick": "the moment of vision." It is in terms of an experience with vision—but is it a look, a glance, a glimpse?—that, like Benjamin, he attempts to articulate a radically different relationship to time, history, and tradition.
Holding that there are authentic and inauthentic ways of being in time, being historical, receiving and handing down tradition, Heidegger lays out a phenomenology of these different ways, showing how there is a certain "pathology" in what we consider "ordinary" and "normal." Thus, for example, he shows that there are two very different ways of anticipating and awaiting (BT 386ff, 397–99; SZ 336ff, 346–48). Anticipation and awaiting, he argues, are ordinarily, normally, dominated by "curiosity," an often over-whelming impatience that cannot tolerate waiting and cannot benefit from it, that refuses to wait, or can only wait if it reduces the future to "what is coming next." As ways of inhabiting and structuring time, anticipating and awaiting can be either deeply felt experiences, rich and enriching, or they can be experienced in distraction, totally bent on a reifying making-present. According to Heidegger, we are living in an age, a time, in which there is less and less tolerance for deferral, for the postponement of gratification, less and less acceptance of waiting, less and less appreciation for the secret gifts in the experience of anticipating and awaiting. And this means that the structure and the dimensionality of the "time" in which we live are correspondingly reduced. This bears on the experience of fore-sight; and it explains why the vision of the seer can be understood, today, only in its degenerate form, viz., as the power to see and predict a determinate future.
With correlatively similar phenomenological analyses, Heidegger shows that there are two ways of experiencing the present: an inauthentic way, commonplace and normal, and an authentic way, much more difficult to achieve:
The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of "nows" which passes away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein. (BT 478, SZ 426)
The ordinary way of experiencing time divides it into a series of present-at-hand now-points. Experienced in this way, the now-time (Jetzt-Zeit ) is totally emptied of meaning, rendered homogeneous, repetitive, one-dimensional: it becomes a decayed version of Plato's "image of eternity," a form of endless suffering, dull and meaningless, bereft of radical hope (BT 425–26, 474–79; SZ 373–74, 421–27). Heidegger argues that neither the authentic "will be" nor the authentic "having-been" can be understood in terms of such a series of "now-times." Thus, just as there is a fallen, pathological experience of the future and the present, so too there is a fallen, pathological memory-experience of the past: a way of remembering that is really, when more deeply experienced, a kind of forgetting; a way of relating to what is past which is incapable of receiving it in a way that is open to what it bears—the unrealized "potentialities-for-being," the possible "destinies," that the past always carries forward. Dasein's "has-been" is not a reified past, exhausted and final, but that out of which futures are yet to be made (BT 432–37, SZ 380–85).
According to Heidegger (BT 394, SZ 344), it is in authentic resoluteness (Entschlossenheit ) that the "moment of vision" (der Augenblick ) takes place (BT 387, SZ 338). In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (lecture course, 1929–30), Heidegger credits Kierkegaard for suggesting his conception of the "moment of vision":
What we are calling the Moment was in fact conceived by Kierkegaard for the very first time in philosophy. The conception launches the possibility of a completely new epoch of philosophy ever since antiquity.[113]
This "moment of vision" is to be understood, then, in terms of the way in which an historical Dasein chooses itself in relation to the existential possibilities inherent in its historical temporality. More to the point, it would constitute the most radical restructuring conceivable of the temporality and historicality within which Dasein could dwell. Temporalizing itself in authentic resoluteness, the "moment of vision" would be the "awakening" of "Dasein's capacity for being disclosive" (BT 384, SZ 335). Resoluteness, Heidegger says, is "the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time" (BT 345, SZ 298). In relation to the "having-been" of history, it essentially involves "holding oneself open" (sich freihalten ) for new historical possibilities (BT 355, SZ 307–8).
This is a rigorously hermeneutical process. The resoluteness at stake here cannot be understood, therefore, in terms of the ordinary concepts of
historical decision and action. Nor can it be inserted into the linear timestructure of present-at-hand now-points:
The moment of vision is a phenomenon which in principle can not be clarified in terms of the "now" [dem Jetzt ]. . . . In the "moment of vision" nothing can occur; but as an authentic present or waiting-towards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be "in a time" as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. (BT 387–88, SZ 338)
(We shall need to return to this passage when we resume our consideration of Heidegger's commentary on the Anaximander fragment.) The word Heidegger uses to describe the "moment of vision"—and the way he uses the word—make this visionary disruption of the now-time clear. Entschlossenheit names a decisive commitment to a deep, ontologically responsible openness in relation to history and tradition. (According to Theodor Kisiel, "Entschlossenheit" first appears in Heidegger's writings in October 1922, introduced in relation to the "ability to unlock." And in 1924, it is discussed as a translation of Aristotle's
According to Heidegger, the "moment of vision" that is prepared by resoluteness is not at all an abstraction from historical situatedness. On the contrary: it must be thought as an "event" taking place in, and with regard to, a particular historical situation. But its way of being historically situated is to look for a perspective on the historicity of the present situation that would enable it to be seen and understood in terms of a "more original" (ursprünglich ) temporality—a temporality from within which we might be liberated from the oppressive fatalism of the ordinary, degraded experience of time and history and might catch sight of radically new possibilities for historical life (BT 370–80, SZ 323–31). The moment of vision "brings existence into the situation and discloses the authentic 'there'" (BT 398, SZ 347. Also see BT 376, SZ 328). The "moment of vision" belongs, therefore, not so much to an individual, but rather more to a cultural community. In resoluteness,
the present is not only brought back from distraction . . . , but it gets held in the future and in having-been. That present which is held in authentic temporality and which is thus authentic itself, we call the "moment of vision." (BT 387, SZ 338)
For Dasein to be in the "moment of vision" for its time is for it to see how a cultural community might be able to "take over" its destiny (Geschick ) as the having-been of historical possibilities that it can in the present still work with creatively for the sake of its future (BT 436–37, SZ 384–85). In the resoluteness of the "moment of vision," Dasein can at least glimpse a way to turn what had seemed past, seemed an inevitable fate, into the future of a potential that has already been granted.
As an historical "event," the "moment of vision" cannot be correctly understood apart from Heidegger's critique of historiography (historiology) and the prevailing conception of tradition and history. According to Heidegger,
authentic historiology becomes a way in which the "today" gets deprived of its character as present. . . . [As authentic, historiology] is necessarily a critique of the "present." (BT 449, SZ 397)
The appropriate object of historiography, for Heidegger, should be:
neither that which has happened just once for all nor something universal that floats above it, but the possibility which has been factically existent [die faktisch existent gewesene Möglichkeit ]. . . . Only by a historiology which is factical and authentic can the history of what-has-been-there, as settled fate [entschlossenes Schicksal ], be shown to be otherwise, so that, in repetition, the "force" of the possible gets struck home into one's factical existence. (BT 447, SZ 395)
Struggling, very much like Benjamin, to liberate the cultural experience of historicity, and the historiography to which it gives rise, from their degradation, from a pursuit of the new that is in reality nothing but fate, an endlessly empty repetition of the same, Heidegger argues that
in inauthentic historicality, . . . the way in which fate [des Schicksals ] has been primordially stretched along has been hidden. With the inconstancy of the they-self [als Man-selbst: as anyone-and-everyone], Dasein makes present its "today". In awaiting the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one. The "they" [das Man ] evades choice. Blind for possibilities, it cannot authentically repeat what has been, but only retains and receives the "actual" that is left over, the world-history that has been, the leavings [die Überbleibsel ] and the information about them that is present-at-hand [die vorhandene Kunde ]. Lost in the making-present of the "today," it understands the "past" in terms of the [inauthentic] "present". On the other hand, the temporality of authentic historicality, as the moment of vision of anticipatory repetition [vorlaufend-wiederholender Augenblick ], deprives the "today" of its character as present [eine Entgegenwärtigung des Heute ], and weans one from the conventionalities of the "they". When, however, one's existence is inauthentically historical, it is loaded down with the legacy of a "past" which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern. But when historicality is authentic, it understands history as the "recurrence" [Wiederkehr ] of the possible, and knows that a possibility will recur [wiederkehrt ] only if existence is open for it fatefully, in a moment of vision, in resolute repetition [wenn die Existenz schick-salhaft-augenblicklich für sie in der entschlossenen Wiederholung offen ist ]. (BT 443–44, SZ 391–92)
The resoluteness of the "moment of vision" is not only the taking-up of an historically unseen possibility; it is also "at the same time a disavowal [der Widerruf ] of that which in the 'today', is working itself out [only] as the 'past'" (BT 438, SZ 386). The "moment of vision" is possible, therefore, only when there is a decisive break with the fatalism of the past—with an experience and understanding of history and tradition that consigns the vision of the inception that is still carried within them to a continuum of now-times that are absolutely, irretrievably in the past. As resolute openness, Entschlossenheit , the "moment of vision" is a "disavowal," a "critique of the present" that opens up a space (Spielraum )[115] of difference, a space, in effect, of freedom, in relation to the past, to tradition, to history as we have known it, and to the prevailing, totally illusory enchantments of the latest "new" and the latest "modern." The disavowal is a crucial moment in the dialectical struggle against history and tradition, making possible the hermeneutical moment that Heidegger calls "repetition." This "repetition"
is not at all a reactionary conservatism. It is not a sentimental attempt to revive a perishing tradition. It is not a glorification or celebration of the past as a demonstration of historical progress. As he conceives it, "repetition" is for the sake of the possible:
The repeating of that which is possible does not bring again [wiederbringen ] something that is "past," nor does it bind the "present" back to that which has already been "outstripped." (BT 437, SZ 385–86)
The repetition that takes place in the "moment of vision" is thus not a repetition in anything like the ordinary sense:
[It] does not abandon itself to that which is past; nor does it aim at progress. In the moment of vision, authentic existence is indifferent to both these alternatives. (Ibid.)
"We characterize repetition," he says,
as a mode of resoluteness which hands itself down—the mode by which Dasein exists explicitly as destiny. But if destiny constitutes the primordial historicality of Dasein, then history has its essential importance neither in what is past nor in the "today" and its connection with what is past, but in that authentic historicizing of existence which arises from Dasein's future. (Ibid.)
The "moment of vision" is a hermeneutical repetition, not of the (finished) "past," but of the (still unfinished) "having-been." (This distinction between the "past" and the "having-been" is crucial: without it, Heidegger's position in Being and Time is totally misrepresented.) The "moment of vision" is, like the lightning-flash in Heidegger's essay on "The Turning" and Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the lighting up of inceptive possibilities in an historical "forcefield." It is the "repetition of a possibility of existence that has come down to us" (BT 437, SZ 385), a repetition of the inceptive "energies" of the origin, a way of receiving these "energies" and handing them down—in, as, and for the "destruction" of the past and a radically new beginning. Thus, although Heidegger—carefully avoiding the conceit of the predictive seer who would claim to "know in advance"—does not commit himself to saying what inceptive possibilities he thinks tradition is secretly handing down to us nor what possibilities he thinks we "ought" to be retrieving, he insists on his conviction that authentic repetition must be "rooted in the future" (BT 438–39, SZ 386–87).
However, while the "moment of vision" is described as looking into, or rather towards the future, it is not to be thought miraculously free of the repetition that perpetuates the historical continuum—the empty, homogeneous time-series in which the creatively explosive potential in the incep-
tion remains lost in oblivion, concealed by the injustice of "that which is." In a passage that has been ignored by the scholars, Heidegger writes:
In everydayness, Dasein can undergo dull "suffering", sink away in the dullness of it, and evade it by seeking new ways in which its dispersion in its affairs may be further dispersed. In the moment of vision [Augenblick ], indeed, and often just "for that moment" [Augenblick ], existence can even gain the mastery over the "everyday"; but it can never extinguish it. (BT 422, SZ 371)
The seer's achievement of a "moment of vision" is not, for Heidegger, the absolute end of the history of suffering. Heidegger refuses to celebrate it as the inauguration of another beginning. While thinking of it as a moment of hope, he refuses to make it a false victory over time and tradition. The weight of tradition and the pull of the past can never be totally overcome. And perhaps this is not entirely regrettable.
Is there a decisive and unequivocal difference, then, as Caygill wants to argue, between Benjamin and Heidegger with regard to redemptive fulfillment? It certainly can be argued that "Heidegger keeps open the possibility that historical time may be a suitable vehicle for authenticity, [whereas this is] an option which Benjamin refuses to entertain."[116] But the distinction that he wants to draw, namely, between fulfillment in historical time (Heidegger) and the fulfillment of historical time (Benjamin), is easily thrown in question by the decisive openness of Heidegger's "moment of vision," that lightning-flash of insightful seeing which, by corresponding to the inceptive disclosiveness of the "look of being," suspends historical time as we have known it within the radically different order of primordial temporality, the temporality of the inception. What can be said with some confidence, however, as the last quotation from Being and Time shows, is that Heidegger does not attribute to the "moment of vision" any miraculous powers to break the spellbinding hold on us of a historicity inextricably bound up with the causes of our suffering. But there is a strong suggestion in Heidegger's work that nothing less than a total interruption of the prevailing temporal order, bringing to an end the historical as we have known it an making way for a new inception, would make such redemption possible.
§5
To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend [vernehmen ] what is present [das Anwesenden ], as such.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"[117]
What is "present as such"? And what is involved in the "having (already) seen," which Heidegger emphasizes in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935–36) and again later (1946) in his discussion of the seer in "The Anaximander Fragment"? When Heidegger, retrieving Greek etymology, emphasizes that to see is to have already seen, that (as he says in his commentary on the fragment) a seer is one who "has always already seen," should we understand him to be attributing to the seer a predictive foresight, a "making-present" of the future? Or is it not, rather, a question of the seer's ability to see what is overlooked, though it is already in view? This gets at part of what is involved; but there are other dimensions. "Having already seen" registers the fact that the beholding of the seer is a capacity which comes from his realization that seeing is a gift, a dispensation (Geschick ), and that it must be exercised in a way that acknowledges the debt that is owed—the beholdenness that precedes the seeing, precedes the beholding. "Having already seen" may thus be said to record the seer's recognition of being held in that beholdenness, always already responsible for seeing what he sees.
What, in the "moment of vision," in the seer's having-always-already-seen, is then "present as such"? In what way or sense is the future made present, seen "in advance"? In "The Anaximander Fragment," Heidegger says:
[1] "The seer sees inasmuch as he has seen everything as present [als Anwesendes ]" (AX 35, H 320).
[2] "All things present and absent are gathered and preserved in one presencing for the seer" (AX 36, H 321).
[3] "The seer is the one who has already seen the whole [das All ] of what is present in its presencing" (AX 36, H 321).
[4] The seer is "the one who has seen, is himself one who makes-present [ein Anwesender ist ] and belongs in an exceptional sense to the whole of what is present [in das Ganze des Anwesenden gehört ]. On the other hand, it does not mean that what is present is nothing but an object entirely dependent upon the seer's subjectivity" (AX 38, H 323).
[5] In question is the developing and exercising of our capacity to be "present" (anwesend ) in the world in a way that would be "illuminating, apprehending, and thus gathering," "present" in a way that "lets what is present as such become present in unconcealment [in der Unverborgenheit wesen läßt ]" (AX 38, H 323).
In arguing for a significant difference between Benjamin and Heidegger, Caygill points to the fact that Heidegger emphasizes the seer's "gathering"
and "preserving," the seer's "making-present." He seems to think that this commits Heidegger to a metaphysical fetishization of the past, making it "present" in a present that continues our bondage to history. But what is it that the seer gathers and preserves? Casting her gaze into the world with a keen awareness of its entering the visible as a site of unconcealment that belongs to an interplay between the visible and the invisible, the seer gathers and preserves by letting be not just what is present, but also what is absent. Moreover, the seer makes them "present," gathers and preserves them, not in a now-present (the Jetzt-Zeit of history into which primordial temporality has degenerated), but rather in presencing as such. That is to say, the seer's vision dislodges things from their placement in the conventional time-continuum of history and gathers everything into the "preserve" of primordial temporality , surrendering all things to the deconstructive interplay (the "Spielraum") of concealment and unconcealment. But Caygill's argument depends on failing to recognize Heidegger's crucial distinction between "making present" in the sense of a Gegenwärtigung and "making present" in the sense of das Anwesene . The "gathering" and "preserving" that Heidegger's seer achieves thus actually destroys the spell of the reified timing of history, gathering all beings, beings both present and absent, into the possibility-field, the open "preserve," of a radically other time-order: "The seer speaks from the preserve [die Wahr ] of what is present. He is the Soothsayer [der Wahr-Sager ]" (AX 36, H 321). What is this "preserve"? It is, for Heidegger, an abyssal dimension which exposes the contingency and transience of all historical formations. In a sense, then, the gathering is a gathering into the anarchy of temporal dispersal and dissemination—the radical ekstasis of primordial temporality, wherein the prevailing order of time and history is exposed to the violence, at once creative and destructive, of the inception.
In the abrupt declaration which marks the end of his "Theologico-Political Fragment," Benjamin connects his concept of revolutionary political action with the concept of "Naturgeschichte," suggesting that the destructive act would be a mimesis learned from nature:
For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.[118]
(It may be that politics is always a form of violence, but this attraction to a redeeming violence that would put an end to all the violence of politics runs the risk of corruption and repetition, becoming itself just another sequence
in the violence of that politics. But is Benjamin's nihilism the only politics one can derive from the concept of natural history?)
Gathering everything into the preserve of primordial temporality, into the interplay of concealment and unconcealment, the seer's way of looking and seeing returns everything, as Anaximander's fragment might be read as saying, to their "natural history": the process of coming into being, staying awhile, and perishing. Thus it may be said to return the established institutions and regimes of time and history to the deconstructive work of primordial temporality.
A crucial passage in this regard, one that we have already cited, clarifies both the character of the "moment of vision" and the character of its resoluteness:
The moment of vision is a phenomenon which in principle can not be clarified in terms of the "now". The "now" is a temporal phenomenon which belongs to time as within-time-ness: the "now" in which" something arises, passes away, or is present-at-hand. In "the moment of vision" nothing can occur; but as an authentic present or waiting-towards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be "in a time" as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. (BT 387–88, SZ 338)
"Nothing can occur": this tells against the common interpretation of "resoluteness," which takes it to be decision and action without reasons, beyond justification, and totally arbitrary: Heidegger's fall into the politics of irrationalism. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The "moment of vision" does not belong to a now-present in the prevailing order of time and history; nor, a fortiori, does it gather past, present, and future into the present of such an order. The "moment of vision" belongs, rather, to the "transcendental field" of possibility, the force-field of competing possibilities contained at the "origin" wherein the prevailing order of time and history arises. "Nothing can occur": Benjamin's dialectics in standstill?
The passage from Being and Time that we have just considered should be thought in connection with a passage from "The Origin of the Work of Art": the one, in fact, that was quoted at the very beginning of this chapter, and in which Heidegger comments, some eight or nine years later, on the way he understood "resoluteness" in the earlier work. Heidegger says there, in no uncertain terms, that
the resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject, but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of being.
Critics and scholars have not given sufficient thought to the phrase "not the deliberate action of a subject." I take it that Heidegger is thereby locating "resoluteness" in the ontological, or, say, "transcendental" dimension: as the openness that recollects being, recollects presencing, it is actually a name for what he will later call "Gelassenheit." According to Heidegger, it was only at first that the word Entscheidung , meaning "decision," was used to signify an "act of man": in the course of his thinking, he soon wanted to understand it ontologically, i.e., as the "essence" of human being, whereby "man" is returned to the dimensionality of being as such and the chains of anthropologism are thrown off.[119] As we must learn from Heidegger's discussion of the lightning-flash in "The Turning," the resoluteness of the "moment of vision" is a moment when the way things have been is decisively and radically interrupted. Resoluteness may be called "action," but only in a very special sense. Heidegger says: "As resolute, Dasein is already taking action [Als entschlossenes handelt das Dasein schon ]" (BT 347, SZ 300). The "already" is crucial here. Resoluteness is always already action because it is the transcendental condition for "action" in the standard sense of the term. It is the attitudinal "orientation" necessary for authentic action. If it seems to be arbitrary and irrational, that is due to the fact that it is being interpreted as decision and action in the standard sense, rather than as the transcendental condition, or the ontological orientation, for the very possibility of authentic action. Thus, contrary to the interpretation of his critics, Heidegger is not at all defining authenticity in terms of decisions and actions for which it would be wrong or inappropriate to ask for justifying reasons. (In "On the Essence of Truth," and in many other writings where he discusses freedom, Heidegger explicitly repudiates conceptions of freedom which think of it in egocentric terms, as an arbitrary, capricious, and irrational exercise of the will.)
Radically understood, the "decision" constitutive of Entschlossenheit is an ontologically drafted scission, a decisive break with the temporality of das Man , the causal continuum of history. It is a decisive break with history as a reifying forgetting of being. What is in question, as Heidegger expresses it in "The Anaximander Fragment," is the possibility of a "decisive turn [entscheidende Wende ] in the destiny of being" (AX 57, H 342). The break consists in the decision to alter the ground for historical decision and action—to shift, as it were, to a radically different ground. This alteration takes place by virtue of a resolute openness to the presencing of being, the being of beings. Resolute openness to the presencing of being is the necessary condition for the possibility of authentic historical action. Thus, in Heidegger's later work, this Entschlossenheit becomes a question of the
recollection of being—a deconstructive hermeneutics of memory that must struggle against the overwhelming force of illusory appearance, to make the frightening ruination (Verderb ), the "untimely" work of
The "moment of vision" is the moment of resoluteness because it is that moment when there is a recollection of being and a corresponding openness that gathers all beings into the anarchic temporality and history of being, into the abyssal withdrawal of grounding principles where all the prevailing worldly institutions and regimes of time and history are subjected to what Derrida would call "the justice of deconstruction" and granted other possibilities of generation and construction. It is in this anarchic dimension of justice that resoluteness roots the "moment of vision." And therefore it is ultimately in this anarchic justice alone that authentic action can—and must—be "grounded." (See in this regard "The Anaximander Fragment," where Heidegger refers to what "arises from the abyss of that relation by which being has appropriated the essence of Western man.")[121]
What the seer has always already seen are not specific objects and events belonging to the conventional future: such a "predictive" vision is nothing but a cheap, fetishized simulacrum of the seer's art. When Heidegger says that the seer has "always already seen" (immer schon gesehen ), what he means is that, by virtue of a recollection of being, the seer sees the ontological dimension of time and history, sees the conditions of possibility for historical ruptures and radically new beginnings, sees the decisive "justice" of the ontological difference, through which primordial temporality—Anaximander's "ordinance of time" —metes out the timing of beings (AX 54, H 339). What the seer "foresees" are not the ontic futures of specific objects and events, but rather the ontological, abyssal fate of all beings: the law, the "divine justice" that has always already decided their fate: their coming-into-being, their staying awhile, and the inevitability of their perishing. This fate, as already decided, sentencing all our institutions to the condition of being in ruins, is thus a future that is already past—and yet, of course, not yet. And it is this future, this already past future, that the seer sees. Always already—and yet, not yet. The seer must maintain these two temporal perspectives in a paradoxical moment of vision.
IV—
Justice in the Seer's Eyes
Thinking about Sophocles's Antigone in the course of some lectures that he gave in the years 1936–37, subsequently published under the title Einführung in die Metaphysik , Heidegger briefly touches on the question
of
this tremendous dialogue in its entire structure and movement aims to show that the sustaining ground and determining essence of all political being consists in nothing less than the "theoretical", that is, in essential knowledge of
and. . . . Knowledge ofof the articulating laws [Fügungsgesetzen ] of the being of beings, is philosophy.[126]
If one puts the last two passages together, it is clear that, for Heidegger,
seen, then, would be the "judgment" or "measure" of
It is perhaps most of all, then, in his proximity to Anaximander's saying that Heidegger also comes closest to Benjamin. As I have tried to show, there are concerns that occupy Heidegger in his commentary on Anaximander which are also legible in Benjamin's Trauerspiel essay, his "Critique of Violence," and his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." On Heidegger's reading, the Anaximander fragment would speak of domination and violence in the realm of beings; of the fact that, in their persistence (das Beharren ), all ontic orders are inherently violent, inherently unjust, excluding or annihilating other possible orders. It would speak of the anarchy of radical justice and the justice of radical anarchy, all too well concealed, a frightening dimension of justice that underlies all finite orders and their institutions of so-called justice. And it would speak of "restitution" for injustice. For the vision that speaks in this fragment, all political orders, all regimes of power, and all socially mediated relations in our time involve domination and are therefore inherently violent, inherently unjust.[127]
What Heidegger's reading of the Anaximander fragment suggests is that the seer's vision penetrates the world of appearances to see what the world would deny: making
The seer who speaks through the fragment attributed to Anaximander discerns
the seer's gaze affirms the most radical justice and anarchy—endings and new beginnings—wherever it looks. It foresees and ruins in advance, pronouncing in advance—already—the ruination and end of all finite histories, all finite beginnings. Before the fact, it has already seen the violence (Gewaltsamkeit ) of divine justice at work and in the name of that justice, it repeats the judgment of
We are accustomed to thinking of law as inaugurating the necessary condition of the possibility of justice. But Benjamin suggests that, because of its irremediable violence, law is also the condition that makes of justice an infinite, end-less impossibility. In Heidegger's reading of Anaximander,
To control the "justice" of time, metaphysics reduces the passage of time to presence and restricts historical memory to the reproduction of the casual continuum. Consequently, its vision of justice is in reality an affirmation of the domination of man by man, offering no hope for real change. Anaximander's vision, or the vision that Heidegger educes from the fragment, sees a different justice: not the reification of historical time in presence and domination, but the interruption of the violence in this regime of historical time. The fragment of Anaximander's thought that time has preserved and bequeathed to us is important for Heidegger because, when he reflects on the condition of our present world, what he sees is that we no longer have any sense of our proper limits, our proper place in the cosmological order: we are driven by a will to power that acknowledges no limits, that defies what Anaximander thought of as divine justice. What he sees is a world "out of joint": the tragedy of forgetfulness and the need for a recollection of the radical justice of primordial temporality. For it could only be out of the destructiveness, the abyssal violence of this temporality that another inception, a time of redemptive justice, might reveal its dawning light.
This violence, however, is not the Holocaust in which Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, and the deformed were systematically gathered into death camps, tortured, and exterminated.
Unlike many others, Heidegger failed to see the evil in the Nazi movement, failed to foresee where its violent hatreds would end. To the reality of fascism, plainly visible for all to see, Heidegger shut his eyes. He who thought deeply about the vision of the seer, about epochal endings and new beginnings, somehow could not see—or did not want to see—that the brutal fascism to which, at least for a time, he gave his passionate support could only end in an exterminating conflagration. How shall we understand this philosopher's blindness? What good are philosophical meditations on the justice of time's ordinance, meditations on the ontological anarchy that awaits all political orders, when they do not enable the philosopher to see in the Nazi gatherings the triumph of evil?
V—
Justice without Violence?
I would agree that we have, as Adorno says, undoubtedly thinking of Benjamin's "Theses," an imperative responsibility to "contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption": an obligation to envision—and make visible in a negative dialectic—perspectives" that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light."[128] But will we, can we, know the difference between messianic visions of justice and the false visions against which Benjamin warns us—the visions, namely, of "seers whose visions appear to them over corpses"?[129]
Heidegger refuses to exclude absence from the realm of what is recognized and seen as present (AX 37, H 323). This may be read as an implicit call for justice. But he nevertheless questions the standard way of interpreting and translating Anaximander's word,
we usually translate
by "penalty". This leads us to translateas "to pay". Whatever lingers awhile in presence pays penalty; it expends this as its punishment ().
And then he remarks, assuming first an ironic tone, then a more serious tone:
The court of justice [Der Gerichtshof ] is complete. It lacks nothing, not even injustice—though of course no one rightly knows what might constitute injustice. (AX 45, H 330)
If one juxtaposes Benjamin's sentence about the seer's prophetic vision of the "criminal courts of justice," quoted at the beginning of our reflections on his thought, and these last two se1ntences of Heidegger, where he turns his gaze from
courts of justice in our world, a certain provocative and intriguing entrechoc might be said to occur. Yet, in the end, both want to call into question not only the conventional institutions of justice, problematizing the claims of those who believe that they know very well what justice and injustice are, but also all the utopian visions of justice that have been handed down by the philosophers in useless and dangerous enthusiasms.
Of course, it must be noted that
Speaking of the confusion that has accompanied the oblivion of being, Heidegger asks: "What mortal can fathom the abyss [Abgrund ] of this confusion?" And he follows this question with an apocalyptic warning reminiscent of Nietzsche:
We may try to shut our eyes before this abyss. We may entertain one delusion after another. The abyss does not vanish. (AX 57, H 343)
For Heidegger, then, our institutions of justice must be held in suspense over the abyss—and the greatest danger comes from forgetting the radical anarchy, the more radical justice, that must be allowed to pass sentence on them from out of its reserve. Just as truth as correctness is "grounded" in the deconstructive, totality-defying anarchy of
But it is when our eyes turn back to the immediate injustices of the world, after gazing into the fragments of Western civilization, looking for the revealing traces that might spell a secret of hope for the coming of a redeeming justice; or when our eyes turn back to the world after a "moment of vision" that has already seen the ruin of all political institutions spelled out in the
the world and its history of suffering, that the extreme difference between Heidegger and Benjamin is most pronounced. When it comes to the political meaning of the justice their respective gazes would make visible, there is ultimately no way that I can see to mediate and reconcile their visions. Both philosophers attempted to think, and themselves see with, a vision released from the historical time and memory of a metaphysics complicitous in the repetitions of violence that rage within the social world. And yet, as Caygill has argued with compelling logic, despite the abstractness that sometimes weakens Benjamin's own dialectical perspectives, it would be difficult to deny that his constellations of memory-images are "awakening" and "motivating" in a way that Heidegger's attempts at a visionary recollection which would release us from the spell of our captivity in the present have neither conceived nor desired.
It is Adorno's conviction that "to gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects . . . is alone the task of thought."[130] It may be easy to concur with this suggestion. But will we ever learn to see justice purely, as what Benjamin once wanted to call pure mediacy—without violence?
Even if we hold, with Heidegger, that
One can imagine Benjamin taking up this question by returning to Anaximander's words and finding in them, as Heidegger did, the first moment of an extremely difficult meditation on justice—a moment of thought described with exquisite precision by Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg, when he wrote, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen , that
das Chaos muß in jeder Dichtung durch den regelmäßigen Flor der Ordnung schimmern [in each poetic statement, chaos must shimmer through the veil of regular order].[131]
Doesn't the chaos of an impossible, but absolutely imperative sentence of justice persistently shimmer through the words of Anaximander's saying? But the question that puts us in question returns, returning again and
again, for the justice of fate can never abrogate or efface the justice of our responsibility. At stake is our responsibility, as Heidegger and Benjamin understood, for a justice no longer hostage to the serial orders of time and history that have served relations of domination among beings: a justice which can only belong to messianic time. At stake, then, is the possibility of our return to the paradoxical experience of an originary temporality outside conventional time, other than eschatological time, gathering before the gaze its barely visible indications, its oldest promise, of a justice so long denied—the justice of a past that has never been present, a future that has already happened, a present always still to come. This is what we need somehow to see. Justice for the other in the ruins of domination. Justice for the other in the ruins of revenge. Untimely justice. Right now!
For there is no Enlightenment other than the one [still] to be thought.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship
The Vanity of Compassion
How can one still have ideals when there are so many blind, deaf, and mad people in the world? How can I without remorse enjoy the light another cannot see or the sound another cannot hear? I feel like a thief of light. Have we not stolen light from the blind and sound from the deaf? Isn't our very lucidity responsible for the madman's darkness?
Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair