A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida and Celan by Michael G. Levine (review)

The times to come that Michael Levine describes in his book, A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan, do not prefigure a messianic arrival, nor do they present any potential future that could be anticipated, dismissed, or conclusively figured out. Instead, the times at issue in this book are those “long-forgotten moments” whose futures already “nest eloquently” within them, as Walter Benjamin, with whom Levine begins his readings (4), would write. At issue are those instants, in other words, of the future anterior that scan the texts Levine brings together in a most brilliant constellation, without ever having belonged properly to them; the times that will have been articulated differently by others, and through others, in the very midst of these texts; those times, which were never present, never spoken properly, and which therefore come between any stable configuration of presents, be it cyclical or linear. At stake, then, is the temporality of belated addresses with most uncertain sources and destinations, missives that were destined to miss, and only then may resonate here and now. With this structure, difficulties necessarily come up when it comes to indicating any such passage or following the “hidden index” (2) that would gesture toward its future. For, Levine points out, the addresses of which he writes are rendered in the intervals that open not only within writing, but also within reading, where another may come to be legible—and which therefore must be, if it were to be at all, elusive to any gestures that would locate or define it. Thus, through his readings Levine draws out the ways in which texts by Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida would have been crossed by other voices, such as those of Georg Büchner and Franz Kafka, as well as those of their most careful readers today, from Shoshana Felman to Werner Hamacher, Carol Jacobs, and Rainer Nägele. And each time, he opens each text to further readings by others to come, rather than offering a single, decisive message. As other texts from his corpus may also suggest, Levine’s work operates along the lines where philology and psychoanalysis intersect—two approaches to language that each, with different accents, demand the most attentive reading—while circumventing any programmatic or reductive remarks that would prevent him or his readers from responding to the singular demands of the texts he approaches—in all their plurality. When he takes up a poem or prose piece by Celan or Benjamin, then, Levine interprets, not with the aim of providing hermeneutic closure, but in the sense of taking up those other words and other voices which might be read between the lines, words, and even syllables and letters.

The times to come are, thus, less times of advent than they are of intervention. But insofar as such times—should they truly be times to come—could not have been presupposed or prescribed before their coming, each critical intervention in a text that would respond to its address may only precariously be said to take place. In his second chapter, Levine illustrates this precariousness—in both the sense of a danger and a call for intercession—in his reading of Paul Celan’s Meridian speech and the dramas of Georg Büchner. There, the fatal repetition of “coming again” (Wiederkommen), would, in its circular closure, preclude the possibility of a future as well as a past. But rather than coming full circle, this rhythm is scanned by an anterior “coming between” (Dazwischenkommen) of what cannot be properly named or located (51 f.), but only read through the slightest displacements in articulation. For instance, the first editor of Büchner’s œuvre, Karl Emil Franzos, misreads the phrase “a comfortable [commode] religion,” as “a coming [kommende] religion” at the close of Leonce and Lena...