Benjamin’s Passages: Dreaming, Awakening by Alexander Gelley (review)

“Jede philosophische Rezension sollte zugleich Philosophie der Rezensionen sein.”¹

Moving through Walter Benjamin’s vertiginous oeuvre, Alexander Gelley’s Benjamin’s Passages offers a certain cohesion through aesthetics and politics, modernity with its cities, leading from these major themes into more concrete Benjaminian concerns with weak messianism and dreaming/awakening. This highlights the major constellation of Benjamin’s thought, which offers up a matrix where art and language, revolution and dreams, history and theology are interconnected in concrete yet dynamic ways. This is not a simple mesh to enter or weave through and Gelley does an admirable job of not only navigating but also making sense of the highly complex and frequently methodologically paradoxical material. Making sense is, of course, to be expected and is demanded from academics required to deliver comprehensibility and offer insight purportedly new. A review of a commentary inherits this difficulty, reviewing a commentary whose very object confronts such a sense-making abyss.

Benjamin’s Passages presents an interpretation leading from Benjamin’s early writing on language, particularly the 1916 essay “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” into the Passagenarbeit. The concern with language forms one of the main threads of Gelley’s reading. Tracing the interrelation of language and images to messianism and awakening from early work into Benjamin’s final uncompleted manuscript seems to seek a certain continuity, also attributing a desire for continuity of tradition to Benjamin (165). Simultaneously, Gelley evokes Benjamin’s postulation for the necessity to explode the continuum of history.² The distinction between the continuum of history and continuity of tradition exposes a thought-provoking juxtaposition that may be said to characterize Gelley’s mode of close reading that leads him to a distinct interpretation.

The argument of the book is at least two-fold: first, it approaches Benjamin’s work in terms of a “qualified performativity” that can be situated in relation to a complex tradition after J. L. Austin; second, Gelley proposes to read Benjamin’s conception of history through a notion of “retrograde temporality” (xii). I will begin with the latter, which bears on rethinking historiography and the relation to history, crucial to Benjamin’s work of the 1930’s, the final decade before his demise. The explosion of the continuum of history necessitated in order to revolutionize collectivity, evokes a non-linear relation to history, which is not past. Gelley reads this movement in terms of multi-directionality: “the possibility of moving the present back into the past and bringing the past forward into the present” (39). Further: “The idea of history as somehow incomplete, capable at any present time of bringing forth a hitherto latent force, is the central tenet of Benjamin’s historiography” (Ibid). The political motivation for this rethinking of temporality and what Gelley calls “counter-history” is replete with implications for the “barbaric” process of cultural transmission (Ibid). This non-linear approach to history and temporality, which subverts dichotomies, should enable us to revolutionize knowledge by making insight buried among the robberies of cultural treasures accessible at the right moment. In order to approach this “us” it may be helpful to recall a tradition that remains just beyond the margins of the book.

While Gelley focuses on Benjamin and secondary scholarship, “qualified performativity” evokes a recent tradition that has been elaborated in particularly influential ways by feminist queer scholars in the last few decades. Whereas Austin himself proposed performatives in their provocative immediacy: words that enact what they pronounce—e.g. “I do,” in marriage or “I bet” in a wager—scholars of queer performativity such as Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have addressed less immediate or successful performatives in hate speech and other political contexts, taking off from Derrida’s famous analysis of literary performatives.³ Understanding Gelley’s insistence on the “qualified” nature of Benjamin’s performativity can be read in this context as underscoring its deferred, non-immediate character, which in turn constitutes a “weakness” broken out of opposition to...