In the Language of Walter Benjamin (review)

Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 136 pages.

"Plato says . . . that poets' verses resemble those who are in the bloom of their youth but lack beauty, for neither the one after they have lost their bloom, nor the other after they have been broken up, appear the same as before."¹

In five exceptional readings, each of which deals with a different text or set of texts by Walter Benjamin, Carol Jacobs' new book examines the concept of similarity as it appears in the work of the German philosopher. Despite their indebtedness to Benjamin's philosophy of language, the readings presented by Jacobs constitute something decisively other than an explication of the content of this philosophy of language. Jacobs' readings, which she refers to as "intermittent attempts" dispersed over some twenty five years (1), are linked by a consistent effort to examine Benjamin's unconventionally mimetic use of language, his "refusal of the naturally proper meaning in names" (4). In each of the five essays, Jacobs shows that a philosophical conception of language presents itself rather than is signified as a theoretical object in Benjamin's texts. She does so keeping with Benjamin's concept of presentation [Darstellung] and of the dialectic image, a revelation achieved, however, at the price of the complete loss of that which is revealed. This faithfulness to Benjamin has the result in turn that Jacobs also uses mimetic language in a specific sense to carry out a mimicry of reading. This is true to the extent that sentences, like the following about Benjamin taken from the Introduction, begin to apply to her own writing as well: "Benjamin practices the practices of which he writes, from the very beginning" (5). Her sentences too are to be understood in the double sense of being not only statements about Benjamin but also statements about her own reading practice. Jacobs claims: "It is an error to search Benjamin's work for stability in the terminology. Nothing works devoid of context, performance. These are texts that must always be read anew, less for the referents they do not seem to preserve than for their Darstellung: here lives, works, theories, terms, are saved only like phenomena in ideas, only like stars in a constellation" (7).

In asserting this, Jacobs writes "in mimicry of Benjamin" (92) and uses a language that does not shy away from using Benjamin's own concepts and metaphors to talk about and to offer an interpretation of his texts. It is for her reader to see that, at the same time, she never ceases to talk about her own activity in Benjamin's language--it is her own reading that affirms itself while pretending to speak about another's language. The task she gives to her reader is to descry this reading on the pages that she has carefully arranged to resemble the ones written by Benjamin.

To be more specific, the mimetic use of language that Jacobs' readings so actively attest to in Benjamin's writing has nothing to do with a rhetorically embellished language which privileges a figural sense over a literal one. From a wider historical perspective, one could say that Jacobs' interpretations of Benjamin explore the non-identity inherent in mimesis which had disconcerted Plato--but which the rhetorical tradition inaugurated by Aristotle covered up. It is commonly known that Plato, in the Republic, criticizes imitation because it fails to be identical to itself. Aristotle initiates a long tradition when, in a decisive gesture, he paraphrases Plato's critique to give an example of the rhetorical figure of the simile. Although Aristotle speaks of no fewer than four types of metaphors, it is the fourth type, the analogy, to which he attributes the essential structure of a metaphor.² According to his definition, metaphors and similes [metaphora and eikôn] are equally grounded in a third term that remains fixed.³ Aristotle's famous interpretation of the Homeric simile of Archilles...