Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History
344
Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History
344Hardcover
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Overview
In five chapters, Constellation presents the changing figure of Nietzsche as Benjamin encountered him: an inspiration to his student activism, an authority for his skeptical philology, a manifestation of his philosophical nihilism, a companion in his political exile, and ultimately a subversive collaborator in his efforts to think beyond the hopeless temporality—new and always the same—of the present moment in history.
By excavating this neglected relationship philologically and elaborating its philosophical implications in the surviving texts of both men, Constellation produces new and compelling readings of their works and through them triangulates a theoretical limit in the present, a fractured "now-time" suspended between madness and suicide, from which the collective future regains a measure of consequential and transformative vitality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823245369 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/31/2012 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Mortal Youth
The You is older than the I; the You has been sanctified, but not yet the I: thus man pushes himself toward his neighbor.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On Love of One's Neighbor"
A Youthful Facies
Taking, for reasons that will prove to be not wholly arbitrary, 8 August 1914 as a terminus ad quem for the juvenilia in Benjamin's oeuvre, we face a heterogeneous body of material. Some twenty essays, a few primitive verses, the first pages of a novella, ninety-one letters, several travel diaries, scattered fragments on philosophical topics, a book review, a curriculum vitae. Only one piece is an academic assignment: a discussion of Grillparzer's "Sappho" written in connection with Benjamin's Abitur. The two distinctive features that make a task instructional in this academic sense — inconsequence and standardization — are in fact what these texts ceaselessly denounce explicitly and by self- conscious example. The juvenilia resist and exceed, and are but indirectly beholden to the pedagogic context at their origin. Beyond the general vehemence of its extracurricular self-assertion, the assortment of prose and verse surviving from Benjamin's childhood exhibits no unified self-reflective relation to the extant genre categories in the culture: The orations do not render their author a politician, or the literary polemics a critic, or the abstract speculations a philosopher, or the verses a poet. This variety testifies both to remarkable expressive energy and profound formal ambivalence in the young Benjamin. The juvenilia are not the production of a dilettante at home in a plurality of fields but the traces of an unstable site of articulation.
Yet in another sense this instability — reconceived as pure receptivity and renamed "Youth" — is the very ideal these writings advocate. Beyond their formal diversity the texts all participate in one way or another in Benjamin's antebellum Youth Culture Movement activism, and indeed their intrinsic coherence as a discrete phase in Benjamin's oeuvre rests in the strange reflexivity their proximity to this committed social engagement imposes on them. In the name of an exemplary youthfulness, these writings would like to promote juvenilia themselves to the status of an autonomous and equally legitimate cultural expression. The desire is self-defeating. If an assertion betrays by its expressive insecurity its immature origin, it forfeits, with all juvenilia, mature authority. But juvenilia disappear in a different way if they achieve a fully adult poise, for they are then no longer juvenilia but simply a precocious adulthood. In either case, the normative reaction to youthful texts that sorts them into authoritative precocity or preliminary and nonbinding juvenilia itself remains securely situated on the adult side of that reflective divide. But just this situation is the ultimate target of Benjamin's quixotic intervention in the Youth Culture Movement. It is the perspective that produces the condescending term "juvenilia" that young Benjamin aspires to combat; but it is from the very ground that that perspective makes visible that he intends to combat it. He does this precisely by reactively challenging the normative precedence of adult reactions. That a specifically juvenile reactivity discriminates among cultural forces in an equally valid if wholly distinct manner is Benjamin's contention throughout these writings.
It is this paradoxical self-assertion that constitutes what Benjamin's editor Rolf Tiedemann could concede in 1991 was the "still in many respects puzzling physiognomy of the young Benjamin" (GS, 7:536), the obscure facies at the origin of his thought. That obscurity is not just historical but formal: The self-contradictory impulse traversing the juvenilia renders the youthful facies an impossible object. As a bedrock of motifs that will continue throughout Benjamin's career, its contours define a foundational level for his thought; it is the autochthonous premise of his perseverant signature. As an immature physiognomy, its expression fails to transcend its local environment; it is the isolated particularity his entry into mature thought will entirely overcome. Interpretation hence must acknowledge the resulting fragility of these preliminary conceptualizations. But these texts are also the place in Benjamin's oeuvre where explicit references to Nietzsche most densely cluster. In Benjamin's early essay "Sleeping Beauty," for instance, he emphasizes what he takes to be correspondences between his contemporaries and the "youth-life [Jugendleben] of greats individuals: of a Schiller, a Goethe, a Nietzsche" (EW, 26; GS, 2:9). "I believe also that we have already had prophets: Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Strindberg," his avatar asserts in the "Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present" (EW, 79; GS, 2:34). In the "Life of Students," the pantheon includes Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and the Romantics (SW, 1:43; GS, 2:82).
But if, in one sense, these mentions would seem to make the philosopher a visible influence on the young Benjamin, in another and truer sense, they mark specific opacities in the eventual relation between the two writers. By their very nature such invocations of Nietzsche rest on extant investments in his iconic status, and where the name itself is a sufficient talisman, an engagement with the thinker cannot be said to occur. In "Sleeping Beauty," it is the meaning of the pleonastic neologism "youth-life" at issue, not the meaning of Goethe, Schiller, or Nietzsche. To this illustrative purpose authors and the characters they have fashioned can both contribute with equal facility; Schiller and Goethe represent youth because Karl Moor and Tasso represent youth. Nietzsche's name can appear in the mixed company of novelists, philosophers, dramatists, and poets less because his particular writings defy categorization than because these writings do not specifically intrude into the vague prestige he shares with these figures. Where Benjamin makes reference to individual Nietzschean doctrines, it is only in the most general terms: "We who want to be, with Nietzsche, aristocratic, different, true, beautiful" (EW, 104; GS, 2:45); "Our Gymnasium should refer to Nietzsche and his treatise On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History" (EW, 96; GS, 2:40). Because young Benjamin deploys cultural icons in this illustrative manner, where Nietzsche's name appears in these early writings is precisely where a uniquely Benjaminian engagement with the thinker is marshaled and simultaneously obscured.
For in the history beneath these stereotypical appeals, an engagement was taking place, even if the juvenilia are not autonomous enough to express it to us directly. It could hardly have been otherwise. By 1910 Nietzsche's repercussions had been spreading through Wilhelminian culture for more than twenty years, borne by the deliberate promotion of Elisabeth's Nietzsche Archive, by the contentious interpretations of his thought appearing in books, pamphlets, and the press, by the reactions of novelists, musicians, and other artists, and by the irrepressible ferocity of his texts themselves. This explosive response to Nietzsche's writings in the years before 1914 had not yet, however, produced a dominant interpretation of the thinker. Under Elisabeth's direction, the archive was never able to consolidate an authoritative scholarly image of Nietzsche upon a philologically secure textual foundation. Elisabeth subordinated the philological responsibility of the archive not, it must be stated, to a particular political agenda (though her political opinions were nationalist and authoritarian), but to what she took to be its promotional responsibility to disseminate a respectable version of her brother's image as widely as possible. And in this effort, drawing on her experience both of Cosima Wagner's Bayreuth propaganda and her husband Bernd Förster's utopian colonialist recruitment, she had been impressively successful. As Steven Aschheim has clearly described, Nietzsche's challenge was appropriated by figures across the social scene, by anarchists and reactionaries, feminists and anti-Semites, by Zionists, youth groups, avant-garde reformers, and revolutionaries of all persuasions. No significant cultural or artistic movement in the German- speaking world at this time was not to some extent contending with the relevance of Nietzsche's example for its situation, and more often than not quite vehemently, so that to survey Nietzsche's reception in these years is to discern the landscape of Wilhelminian culture itself. Where do young Benjamin's invocations place him in the resulting cacophony of Nietzscheanistic exhortation and pronouncement with which he was confronted?
Closer to home, the fact of Nietzsche's influence on the German youth movement is uncontroversial, but just how determinant he was remains a matter of debate. Thomas Herfurth finds "an affinity between the spirit of the Youth Movement and the doctrine of Zarathustra ... because Nietzsche's philosophy in its essence is a philosophy of youth." Christian Niemeyer's more historical approach leads him to a rather more skeptical conclusion, particularly with regard to the antebellum youth movement in which Benjamin participated. "The claim," Niemeyer writes, "that Nietzsche was the crucial prophet of the Youth Movement will continue to be insufficiently documented in the source material and moreover for logical as well as historical reasons must count as problematic." And Hans-Georg Gadamer also remembers the youth movement and Nietzsche as an awkward pairing. "Access to 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' was not easy in other respects as well," Gadamer recalled in 1984.
There was the stylistic proximity to Wagner's music-drama and the overburdened mannerisms aping the Old and New Testaments, which repelled us from Nietzsche's "Zarathustra." The taste of the young generation I belonged to, not unlike today's taste, was quite distant from that stylistic epoch. It was the Youth Movement that determined our values, this protest against urban culture and bourgeois education, the escape into the woods with a guitar on one's back, long hikes, nighttime campfires — that was the climate of my generation.
The scholarly examinations of Nietzsche's relation to the broader youth movement do demonstrate that many of the particular texts Benjamin mentions, most prominently Zarathustra and the second of the Untimely Observations, were widely cited at the time. (Unsurprisingly: Nietzsche's essay closes with a crescendo invoking "that youth of which I have spoken, ... that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers" [UO, 164; KSA, 1:331].) But even in this localized context the name Friedrich Nietzsche evoked no consistent doctrine.
So there is no surprise but also small explanatory comfort in the fact that Benjamin's mentor at the time, the pedagogic reformer Gustav Wyneken, also laid claim to a philosophical pedigree that included
Kant, inasmuch as he relocated the Idea from the realm of theory into that of decision, Schopenhauer, inasmuch as he taught us the struggle of the intellect against the "will" and showed us our place in this struggle. And Nietzsche's fundamental demand, too, is no other [i.e. than Wyneken's own]: be the meaning of the earth; make its consequence turn out differently from what it would have otherwise.
Even this most intimate influence throws little light into the obscurity of Benjamin's young Nietzscheanism. Wyneken's casual misquotation of Zarathustra (it is the superman, after all, and not the reader who is to be the meaning of the earth: "Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth!" [TSZ, 13; KSA, 4:14]) is typical of Wyneken's blithe hermeneutic superficiality in matters philosophical. Whatever else Benjamin may have learned from him, such misprision he did not.
All of these examples of Nietzsche's prominence in Benjamin's cultural milieu no doubt help explain why the young intellectual was drawn to Nietzsche's writings. But none of them can directly illuminate what it was he found there. To answer that, we must reconstruct Benjamin's own thought-world at the time and observe how Nietzsche's authority and rhetoric participate in and overcome it. For the particular Nietzsche to whom Benjamin relates would never be simply provided to him by the extant culture, which is as much as to say that Benjamin took Nietzsche seriously from the start, read him, and pondered him in the context of his own most profound concerns, and reacted to his writing and his example in these terms. Out of Benjamin's engagement with the Nietzschean precedent emerges an image of the philosopher that can be introduced to the monumental expositions produced contemporaneously by Heidegger and Jaspers that have largely secured Nietzsche's philosophical status in the present. Benjamin illuminates a Nietzsche whose nimbleness, recklessness, and irreducibly political intentions challenge and deepen those contemporaries' existential and ontological appropriations of Nietzsche's explosive movement. The traces of this explosion in the youthful facies are the enduring truth content of Benjamin's early encounters with Nietzsche, which remains subordinated in the juvenilia to their material content, to the perishing historical specificity within which this juvenilia arose and about which in the first instance they speak. Only by reviving that material content in an account of Benjamin's Youth Culture Movement commitments can the truth content, and Nietzsche's role in it, be liberated from that occasion.
The origins of Benjamin's student activism lie in his two- year attendance as a boy of fourteen and fifteen at the rural educational institute Haubinda (Landeserziehungsheim Haubinda), where he first came in contact with the school reformer Gustav Wyneken and the alternative pedagogic practices he championed.The activism itself, however, arises only later, once Benjamin has returned to the more traditional Gymnasium in Berlin. Benjamin's youthful facies appears in an oppositional posture toward its immediate cultural situation, representing not nascent tendencies within his audience but an ideal realized elsewhere — in this case, Wickersdorf, the school Wyneken had founded after leaving Haubinda. The oppositional posture transcended any localized allegiance to particular educational institutions, when, after taking his Abitur in 1912 from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule, Benjamin continued his studies at the Albert-Ludwigs- UniversitÀ¤t in Freiburg. The intellectual atmosphere in Freiburg was dominated by the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and the historian Friedrich Meinecke, and Benjamin attended lectures by both men. But his interests, though intensely intellectual, were situated outside of the lecture hall. He had soon become a prominent participant in the activism of the "Free Student Movement," an uncoordinated network of reform-minded groups poised against the traditional Korporationen or dueling fraternities of the German university system. Among the loose amalgamation of extracurricular reform organizations was a "chapter" established the year before in sympathy with Wyneken and his theories: the "Detachment for School Reform." This was the framework for Benjamin's thinking and writing in Freiburg throughout 1912, and continued to inform his sympathies when he returned to Berlin and enrolled in the Friedrich-Wilhelms-UniversitÀ¤t late in 1913. In the months before the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin moved back and forth between these institutions, while consistently promoting Wyneken's extracurricular Wickersdorf ideal, becoming one of the most prominent student activists of his day.
In later years, Benjamin would disavow the intellectual vacuity of the antebellum youth movement debates, and his later friends and eventual biographers have tended to share that assessment. But a scornful attitude toward the substantive goals of youth movement organizations — toward their shrill commitments to abstinence, coeducation, or Zionism, not to mention the darker nationalistic and anti-Semitic tendencies metastasizing through them — was in fact central to Benjamin's peculiar activism at the time, so his later disavowal is less straightforward than it might at first seem. Benjamin's involvement in the "Detachment for School Reform" throughout his student years was unconditionally emphatic, but his understanding of "Youth," the ideal for which he campaigned, was vested in such a generalized antithetical attitude toward the mature society and its recognized culture that any practical consequences of his efforts were difficult to distinguish from disengagement. Important for Benjamin were not the specific pedagogic recommendations implied by Wyneken's theories, such as the prefect system or an emphasis on music education — recommendations that would in any case have had but little relevance to the university. What compelled the youthful facies was the confrontational attitude that Wyneken himself exemplified toward preexisting pedagogic frameworks. "This constantly vibrating feeling for the abstractness of pure spirit is what I call Youth," Benjamin wrote to his friend Carla Seligson in 1913. "For only then (if we don't want to become mere workers for a movement) when we keep our view clear to perceive spirit wherever it may be, will we become those who realize it. Almost everyone forgets that they themselves are the site where spirit realizes itself" (GB, 1:175). What Benjamin called "Youth" simply was this antithetical posture, logically prior to any objective issue that might occasion it, and so potentially conditioning any issue whatsoever. In lieu of a common object of concern that would define a movement externally, Benjamin's activism aspired to the mutual recognition of those sharing that "youthful" posture as the precondition of an unspecific cultural renewal. The practical result was not a policy or program but a site in which programs and policies could contend and transform: the Sprechsaal, or "discussion forum" he founded in Berlin.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Abbreviations xiii
A Note on Citations xvii
Introduction: Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche 1
The Förster House 1
Affinity 4
Excelsior! 9
1 Mortal Youth 16
A Youthful Fades 16
The Friend 33
Conversation 43
Heinle 49
Abstand 59
2 Presentation 67
Philology 67
Tragedy 74
Hamlet 83
Socrates 89
Silence 93
3 Inscription 103
Pseudomenon 103
Untimeliness 113
Muri 130
"We Philologists" 143
Asyndeton 155
4 Collaboration 167
Shadow 167
Wanderer 174
Correspondence 180
Demon 190
Caesura 198
5 Mad Maturity 208
"Born posthumously" 208
Conspiracy 219
Eternal Return 227
Glück 237
Now-Time 241
Conclusion: Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin 249
Transcendental Medicine 249
The Pawnshop 255
The End of All Things 258
Notes 263
Bibliography 301
Index 311