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WalterBenjamin'sLoveAffairwith Death
Rey Chow
There is no better way to know death than to link it with some li-
centious image.
- Marquis de Sade
Men say there are two unrepresentable things: death and the femi-
nine sex. That's because they need femininity to be associated
with death; it's the jitters that give them a hard on! for themselves!
- Hdlene Cixous
For some time now, the figure of Walter Benjamin has loomed large
among students of modern culture and cultural theory. If it was once
true that "[t]he fascination of the person and of his work allowed no al-
ternative other than that of magnetic attraction or horrified rejection,"'
critics have increasingly used Benjamin to articulate aspects of post-
modern culture, no doubt because his writings enable readers to fol-
low a trajectory of subversiveness against cultural conformism. Al-
though Benjamin did not use the term "other," his work consistently
turns on the otherness (the "barbarism") of monumental history, posi-
tioning itself in a combat mode that is always ready, not to attack, but
to take off in an unexpected direction. Benjamin's elusiveness makes it
possible for some of his readers to say that his "ground" is "nothing
63
64 Rey Chow
but the silent surface of the texts to be read,"2while others are frankly
eager to see him interpreted in a specifically "correct" way.3 Apart
from the well-known conflicts in Benjamin scholarship between inter-
pretations of his Marxistdialectics and his Jewish mysticism, which are
typified by the political positions adopted by Theodor Adorno and
Gershom Scholem, his works have, in the English-speakingworld at
least, aroused the interests of criticsas diverse as Terry Eagleton, Frank
Kermode, George Steiner, and Susan Sontag. Articles on Benjamin
continue to be published by prestigious academicjournals, and his es-
says, notably "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History," are often required
readings for undergraduate and graduate theory courses in American
universities.4
In an age when the theorizing of marginalized experiences has be-
come an important part of political consciousness, an acquaintance
with Benjamin's texts is extremely instructive. However, as in the case
of many discourses of subversion that are derived from the close read-
ings of literaryculture, Benjamin's writingsremain ambiguous with re-
gard to the social relations of gender. Exactly how is he ambiguous?
5. A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929) 4.
66 Rey Chow
The lower Leskov descends on the scale of created things the more
obviously does his way of viewing things approach the mystical.
Actually, as will be shown, there is much evidence that in this, too,
a characteristicis revealed which is inherent in the nature of the
storyteller.To be sure, only a few have ventured into the depths of
inanimate nature, and in modern narrativeliterature there is not
much in which the voice of the anonymous storyteller,who was
prior to all literature,resounds so clearlyas it does in Leskov'ssto-
ry "The Alexandrite." (I 106-7)
Benjamin comments: "With these words, soul, eye, and hand are
brought into connection. Interacting with one another, they determine a
practice." Yet while to all appearances this practice has to do with life -
with specific parts of the living human body - it is at the same time at
the service of the lifeless. "The Alexandrite" fascinates Benjamin because
it deals, after all, with "a semiprecious stone, the chrysoberyl. ... the
lowest stratum of created things" (I 107). As the storyteller sees in this
chrysoberyl "a natural prophecy of a petrified, lifeless nature concerning
the historical world in which he himself lives" (I 107), so the endowment
of storytelling with "life" is in sensorially specific ways inseparable from
death, or rather, from an apprehension of the world as death. The sen-
sorially specific - "soul, eye, and hand" - take on a significance that is
akin not so much to real life as to the surreal. It is Leskov's venturing into
"the depths of inanimate nature" with his human body that gives to his
storytelling its compelling aura, its life-likeness.
II
The desire for the inanimate in Benjamin's work is not limited to his
nostalgia for storytelling. Before coming back to other problems related
to his conception of narrativity, however, we need to make another de-
tour, this time through Benjamin's descriptions of the "aura." The no-
tion of the "aura" is most frequently associated with the ,"Work of Art"
essay, in which he discusses mechanical processes of reproduction in
terms of the declineof the aura, that is, of art's liberation from its tradi-
tional enslavement to rituals. But as Miriam Hansen puts it, "Benjamin's
attitude towards the decline of the aura is profoundly ambivalent."8 The
aura of a work of art refers to "its presence in time and space, its unique
existence at the place where it happens to be" (I 220). Benjamin also
says: "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of
authenticity. ... The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical -
and, of course, not only technical - reproducibility" (I 220).
8. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the
Land of Technology,"' New GermanCritique, 40 (Winter1987): 187. I share many of the
views in this essay, with the exception of the issue of gender as I will indicate below.
70 Rey Chow
What could this last sentence mean? There are at least two possi-
bilities. First, that what is authentic is outside reproducibility: there is
the "authentic" and there is the "reproduced." Second, that once the
process of reproducibility has begun (and it has always already begun:
"In principle a work of art has always been reproducible." - I 218),
"authenticity" itself is always on the outside:it does not really exist. The
first of these interpretations is idealist; the second is poststructuralist.
What the poststructuralist interpretation allows us to see is the cultural
constructedness of the notion of "authenticity," produced at a chrono-
logical moment when what is "authentic" is already superseded. How-
ever, Benjamin's argument does not only exceed the idealism of the
first interpretation but also the persistent human-centeredness of the
second by its organic imagery: "that which withers in the age of me-
chanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art" (I 221, my em-
phasis; the German original: "was im Zeitalterder technischenReproduzier-
barkeitdes Kunstwerksverkiimmert,das ist seine Aura"). Such excess means
that the relationship between the aura and its destruction through me-
chanical reproduction must be given a more allegorical reading than
the one which would take the form of a linear historical development
by positing a progression from the "enslavement" of art - i.e., to aura
- to its "emancipation," i.e., the decline of the aura.
It would be more accurate to think of the aura as a perceptual rela-
tionship between the beholder and the object beheld:
the aura, then, is not simply a matter of the increasing proximity of the
object itself but also that of the loss of the stable distance between the
eye and the object. Within that stable distance, the eye and the object
used to enjoy a reciprocity of "looks":
III
the first time ... man has to operate with his whole living person, yet for-
going its aura" (I 229). (3) The filmic image as viewed by the audience:
"Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting"
(I 233). In other words, the filmic image derives its compellingly "obvi-
ous" and "self-evident" nature from "the thoroughgoing permeation of
reality with mechanical equipment" (I 234); what is seen is seen only at
the point at which the awareness of the process of making is cut off.
These examples bring us to a familiar scenario: that of the male
fetishist in Freud's "Fetishism" and "Splitting of the Ego in the Defen-
sive Process." Freud's little boy, we recall, detected nothing particular-
ly frightening on first encountering the female genitals. It is when he is
caught in his act of masturbation by his nurse, who threatens to report
it to his father, that the female genitals acquire the meaning of "castra-
tion" in a memory.'0 While it is true that the castration complex is or-
ganized around a sight," the order in which the fear of castration hap-
pens is, I think, of great importance. Since it is during the second, not
the first, time the female genitals are "seen" (in retrospect, in a flash-
back) that they become what they "are," we should emphasize that this
"sight" is a mental image and as such already inscribed in the "be-
latedness" of narrative. The mutual implications between Freud's con-
struction of the female body and Benjamin's construction of the filmic
image are clear: the little boy's retrospective look back to the female
genitals is (already) a kind of camera's eye that makes a particular cut in
its optical path; while the "aura" can be rethought as that part of the
male subject that has been split off and transplanted onto an external,
automatized object (much like Olympia in Hoffmann's "Sandman,"
which Freud uses for his theory of "the uncanny"). If Benjamin's read-
ing of modern culture is fetishistic, then Freud's reading of sexual dif-
ference is allegorist. What remains in both cases is an image that bears
the effect of something missing - the "castrated" female body and the
mechanically-produced illusion of reality. Like "scenes of crime," such
images invite investigation. Something has been done. Whodunit?
and "chaste" ("keusch"). Could we not say that what Vrehave is an inter-
section of two types of discourses - economics and sexuality? Eco-
nomics and sexuality here mark a certain psychic anxiety. To be specif-
ic, I think what we are hearing is a sexuality that is stressed with a cau-
tion against over-spending and exhaustion, which in turn expresses it-
self as a valorization of formal restraint,or formal frugality.This way of
reading Benjamin's language reveals a "classical" theme, namely, the
direct proportional relationship that is often implied between stylized
control and sensual pleasure. As Michel Foucault demonstrates with
regard to the Greek "use of pleasure," this relationship is part and par-
cel of a model of sexuality in which moderation is the sign of virility
and virtue - qualities that are by definition masculine. Accordingly,
excessiveness, or immoderation, is equated with an "effeminate"
yielding to bodily pleasures. Among the Greeks, it is said, the preserva-
tion of erotic energy was often imagined in the form of an encasement
of the semen within the male body.12 In terms of Benjamin's essay, this
imaginary encasement of energy as a resistance to emasculation takes
the form of a theorizing of the story's "compactness" ("Gedrungenheit").
But then, a psychic bifurcation already occurs: while the story is the
seed of energy that is "capable of releasing" its strength indefinitely
and promiscuously (passing from listener to listener), it is at the same
time a representationalform, an externalized object onto which is pro-
jected a chastity.In the light of Freud, the storyfonnrm is already a fetish
that has come to stand in for a certain apprehended loss. Its "compact-
ness," the sign of both male virilityand female chastityin the terms ar-
gued above, is a sexualizedexpression of otherwise nameless energy.
The feeling of nostalgia that is often attributed to the essay now re-
ceives a new light. Not only is storytelling something that is lost, but
also, precisely in the story's "chaste compactness," Benjamin tells of a
world in which the conception of active energy pre-writes but has not
yet "hardened" into Freud's penile model, and to which it is difficult,
if not impossible, to return.
12. See The Use of Pleasure (Volume Two of The History of Sexuality), trans. Robert
Hurley (New York:Vintage Books, 1985), especially PartsII and III. A passage like the
following, which describes dominant Greek attitudes toward sexual discharge, can be
juxtaposed suggestively with Benjamin's formulation of the story: "Whereas women
needed sexual relations so that the discharge necessary to their organism might occur
in a regular manner, men could - in certain cases at least - retain all their semen; far
from causing them harm, strict abstinence on their part would preserve their force in
its entirety, accumulate it, concentrate it, and carry it finally to a higher level" (120).
76 Rey Chow
Following from the arguments above, what we can say is that an explic-
itly "feminized" - passive, relaxed, yielding - attitude informs Benja-
min's understanding of story-listening as an activity. While I will return
to the implications of such "feminizations" later, I will focus first on the
interesting shuttling between conservatism and spendthriftness in
Benjamin's concept of narrative. When Benjamin does not describe the
story as an object, his language is an abandoned, unchaste one: the lis-
tener's way of being involved with the story is by being bored. If
attentiveness is a kind of faithfulness, then it is when the listener is un-
faithful, absent-minded, excessive, that he can re-member the story and
integrate it into his experience most deeply. In a way that is contrasted
with the absorbing concentration required by the bourgeois novel, sto-
ry-listening is a kind of straying.Benjamin's point is that it is when the
listener strays away from the "mainstream" that the experience of re-
ception can be most truthful, because most involuntary.
Critics have written on the politically subversive nature of the types
of activities in Benjamin that are akin to "straying."'3 Be it that of the
chiffonnier who picks up the rags of culture abandoned by a progres-
sive orientation toward the future; the Baudelairean flineur who wan-
ders through the streets of Paris, receiving from its anonymous crowds
the stamp of his existence, his occasional sexual shock, and ultimately
his betrayal; the collector who purchases books simply in order not to
read but to possess them; or the allegorist and physiognomist of cul-
tural ruins/runes who reads by way of a constant leave-taking from
13. See, for instance, Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the
Whore: The Politics of Loitering"; Irving Wohlfarth, "Et Cetera? The Historian as
Chiffonnier." Both in New German Critique, 39 (Fall 1986): 99-140; 142-68.
Benjamin'sLove Affair With Death 77
... the flight into sabotage and anarchism ... later makes it so dif-
ficult for the intellectual to see things clearly. Perhaps the same
sabotage of real social existence is to be found even ... in my
manner, already described, of walking in the city, in the stubborn
refusal under any circumstances to form a united front, be it even
with my own mother.16
the comparison with Freud shows that in Benjamin, we find rather the
sensoryeffects of post-castration,effects which, however "alive," are de-
void of any wish or desire, except when it is in the form of a fascination
with the inanimate.
The profound lack of interest in being "at one" with his mother
gives way to another memory. In the lines that immediately follow
from the above, Benjamin mentions how, in his later years, he was to
find in his relationships with prostitutes the significance of a crossing
of class boundaries:
24. "Central Park,"trans. Lloyd Spencer (with the help of Mark Harrington),New
German Critique, 34 (Winter 1985): 41.
25. "Central Park" 52.
26. "Central Park" 40.
82 Rey Chow
IV
It is tempting to equate emasculation with feminization. In this re-
gard, one could say that the subversive politics of straying, in which
Benjamin's work is thoroughly immersed is a "feminized" politics.27
This, however, would be to confuse the movements and spaces that
can be clarified by the simple working diagram below:
The masculine
I1
Indeterminacy
feminine
2The
The feminine
27. Hansen, for instance, argues for an affinity between Benjamin's notion of"dis-
traction" and a certain kind of female spectatorship. Describing the habits of women
film audiences of the early 20th century, she writes: "In the over-identification with
[such] images, in the failure to maintain a narratively stabilized distance, is there not an
element of Benjamin's 'daydreaming surrender to faraway things' . . .?" (218). For
another argument about how Benjamin's conception of modernity as "utopia" with
multiple ambiguous aspects can be understood through the motif of woman, see
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La Raison baroque:De Baudelaired Benjamin (Paris: Editions
Galilee, 1984). A part of this argument was published in the article "Catastrophic Uto-
pia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern," trans. Katherine Streip, Representations,
no. 14 (Spring 1986): 220-29.
Benjamin'sLove Affair With Death 83
28. Reading in Detail: Aestheticsand the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen,
1987) 97.
84 Rey Chow