Passages with Benjamin: Reading The Arcades Project

For Lewis Freedman

ABYSS

Is it … the temptation to place the hypothesis at the outset that creates the abyss for all philosophizing?

—Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and Human Language"

Understanding is bound to come late to the reader of The Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk], if it comes at all. Found unfinished in the same library where it was composed (but only after its author's death), sent to New York in 1947, and published in Germany some thirty-five years later, Walter Benjamin's work of passages might be said to exhibit the main feature of what Maurice Blanchot calls "the dread of reading": "it is that every text, no matter how important and how interesting it may be, is empty—it does not exist at bottom; it is necessary to clear an abyss, and if you don't jump, you don't understand" (Blanchot qtd in Warminski 267). It is only post factum, after one has made the leap, that one comes to understand, comes closest to seeing, as it were, the emptiness there from the beginning. In itself the text is nothing—or nothing but a promise, a cipher of the presence of things hoped for, mere evidence of meanings still concealed. For as long as exegesis remains incapable of adducing regulative norms for its procedures, it may well have to resign itself to intermittent leaping. Without a bridge to connect the text with its commentary, there is no way to get from here to there, no passage from nothing to something. There is neither an axiomatic method to distinguish successful from unsuccessful expatiation nor a reliable mechanism to narrow the gap between textual causes and interpretative effects. The issue at stake in The Arcades Project is more than the lag or Nachträglichkeit that assigns to what has been understood a provisional status. The "abyss" itself and the question of how to clear it are given to thought.

CROSSROADS

He sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring.

—Benjamin, "The Destructive Character"

There is perhaps no place better suited to a leap than the one marked by a challenge that is inextricable from the Project. Coming into being in 1936 with Adorno's famous verdict on Benjamin's exposé, this challenge draws a boundary. The boundary will be contested repeatedly, not only as the origin of a fraught legacy but in every act of interpretation: "the work is located at the crossroads [Kreuzweg] between magic and positivism. This place is bewitched. Only theory can break the spell: your fearless, good speculative theory" (SW 4, 102 trans. mod.).

Part of the problem is that the crossroads marks the place where the Project fails, where it conspicuously reveals its "lack of mediation." Nothing but fragments and snatchings from other works, it shirks the demand for resolution or totality.¹ For the rest, it is the site where theory will hope to succeed. To resolve the individual fragment, the discrete moment, into a relation is theory's essential task. Theory shows that nothing can exist by itself, whether fragments or otherwise, since a fragment, once isolated for inspection, is apt to refute itself: a fragment is what it is only because it relates to something else. The "good, speculative" theorist, in the sense intended by Adorno, assumes that even the most insignificant thing can, under certain circumstances, reveal something about the nature of the total sum of relations—the system that at once produces and sustains the mystification of its own essential structure.² The Project, however, will fashion that relation as an unaccomplished task, aspiring "to detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, discrete moment" (AP 575). The "total event" is not to be found beyond the variegated citations but is scattered among them, between the discrete moments that conspire to excite the reader's desire "to detect the crystal" beneath the surface and then to find the means to extricate it. Held to conventional aesthetic notions, such as unity or internal harmony, Benjamin...