§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.