Benjamin's Passages by Gelley Alexander;

Author:Gelley, Alexander; [Gelley, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2014-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4. Reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. (Photo by Candida Höfer. © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

We may better grasp now the surprising collocation of historical method and philology that Benjamin expressed in this notation regarding the Passagen-Werk: “The historical method is a philological one that lies at the basis of the book of life. ‘To read what was never written,’ we find in Hofmannstahl. The reader of whom one thinks here is the true historian” (GS 1: 1238). “Philology” here may be taken in the sense that Daniel Heller-Roazen, in an essay on the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, termed “the restorative function.” This signifies, he continues, “that one . . . may speak of its subject matter only once it has registered its very loss, and it can give itself its object only on condition of having destroyed it first.”25 This dynamic element of the project is well characterized by Susan Buck-Morss:

Benjamin described the “pedagogic” side of his work: “‘to educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade’” (GS 5: 571). Now a stereoscope, that instrument which creates a three-dimensional image, works from not one image, but two. On their own, the historical facts of the Passagen-Werk are flat . . . It is because they are, and were meant to be, only half the text. The reader of Benjamin’s generation was to provide the other half from the fleeting images that appeared, isolated from history, in his or her lived experience.26

Benjamin’s project manifests the stereoscopic principle in a highly reflexive manner, and it invites a reading that is attuned to its status as relic and fragment—a reading that is philological and historical, but also, coordinately, divinatory because the Passagen-Werk, though not a book but an integral “Werk,” was a project awaiting its “actualization.”

Notes

1. Siegfried Kracauer’s Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (1937), Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1938). Benjamin was well aware of their work in the preceding years.

2. Cf. Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe,” 89–104.

3. The title of the English translation, The Arcades Project, has the virtue of avoiding the sense of a work or book implicit in Das Passagen-Werk. But, as I discuss in this chapter, something is also lost in translating Passagen as “arcades.”

4. T. J. Clark, “Reservations of the Marvellous,” The London Review of Books (June 22, 2000). I can support this conclusion though not its implicit judgment.

5. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, “Ce que taisent les manuscrits: les fiches de Walter Benjamin et le mythe des ‘Passages,’” in Penser, classer, écrire: De Pascal à Pérec, ed. Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Vincennes: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), 110, 112.

6. Cf. GS 6: 172.

7. Their conclusions are particularly directed against Adorno’s influential conception of the work: “The Benjamin papers say nothing about the Passagen-Werk as it exists for the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In particular, it is impossible to explain how

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