To Destroy History's Catastrophe: Refractions on Walter Benjamin’s Mourning

"The only philosophy which would still be accountable in the face of despair, would be the attempt to consider all things, as they would be portrayed from the standpoint of redemption."

                    - Theodor Adorno

Walter Benjamin’s death grows within me like only a stranger's death can. My absence of knowledge (intimacy?) creates a screen for my daydreams to project their phantasmagorias. On August 2, 1940, on the border between France and Spain, in an effort to avoid being handed over to Nazi authorities, one of the most nuanced minds- and I’m convinced that the man who declared “everything is thought” would have wanted to be identified as a mind- was terminated, petrifying inside a constellation of essays and the fragments of The Arcades Project, that Ur-text still to be born that somehow birthed many of his mature works.

To indulge in a clichéd essayistic move: Benjamin’s death gives his work an unfulfilled promise. It’s a promise that seductively haunts because it keeps us in perpetual waiting, suspended before a dark that cannot be seen with our eyes, profanely reverent, intoxicated with the phantasmagoria of him inscribing more illuminations on that dark, telling us the stories written on the inside of our skin. But it’s an unfulfilled promise that promises to never be fulfilled. Maybe it is supposed to be this way: his work and his epoch simultaneously destructing, becoming testaments to the very condition of modernity.

Benjamin's work is an alarm. Louder now than ever. In his legendary final essay (posthumously published by Adorno), “On the Concept of History,” his words practically shout: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.” Benjamin’s “real state of emergency” sounds like an emergence from the dangers constantly plaguing people. In order to do this, we must dismantle all we traditionally atrribute as “human." Like the Surrealists, we must "exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.” In each second, in each moment, the alarm rings yet again, constantly renewing the same cry, rediscovering the “state of emergency.”

Eduardo Cadava ruminates for some time on this constant emergency we're trapped within: “the decline of which he [Benjamin] writes is not a decline that occurs in and with time. ‘There are no periods of decline,’ he explains elsewhere. If there are no periods of decline, it is because there is no period without decline.” Dour diagnoses indeed. Mourning keeps appearing in Benjamin's words. A funeral party that never gets to leave the graveyard. Why is that? Is it because, in the words of Lisa Loeb, we’ve “been dying since the day they were born?” Wrong. We’ve been dying since the day before we were born, before our very conception even. In a way, we were never meant to exist. Out of millions of sperm, one particular sperm fertilized one particular egg. While that does seem to be a sort of secular miracle, it also means that nature stacked the odds against our particular self, offering that egg millions of possible selves that would have annihilated our unique existence. And isn't our biodegradability nature’s attempt to take back what shouldn’t have occurred in the first place? Maybe existing is a fugitive act. Maybe everything we accomplish is our attempt to leave evidence of our defiance before we inevitably lose.

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For Benjamin, mourning becomes intricately tied in with memory: “In all mourning there is a tendency to silence, and this infinitely more than our inability or reluctance to communicate. The mournful has the feeling that it is known comprehensively by the unknowable. To be named- even if the name-giver is god-like and saintly- perhaps always brings with it an presentiment of mourning.” Do we name others in order to keep them inside us forever, to catalogue the trace of their existence in our minds? Cadava overlays an echo on this statement: “We could even say the lesson of photography for history- what it says about the spectralization of light, about the electric flashes of remote spirits- is that every attempt to bring the other to the light of day, to keep the other alive, silently presumes that it is mortal, that it is always already touched (or retouched) by death.” Memory-making, with or without machines, is pre-emptive mourning, mourning for a past that will be in the future.

Here we reach a strange temporal location. If the construction of memories transforms present phenomena into their past versions even before they're past, do we even experience time the way we normally concieve of it? Cadava poses a scenario that problematizes the straight-line life. According to him, involuntary memory "flashes images of the past into the present and thereby produces an experience that does not belong to itself, that cannot appropriate experience. . .At the same time it is through this darkness that we ‘keep to ourselves,’ that we come to ourselves as the ones who will never know who we are.” We’re unable to experience the Now because when it finally appears in front of us it is already past. Reflection and consciousness are acts that can only focus on the past, only able to look backward, condemned like Benjamin's Angel of History, the one who forever witnesses our perpetual catastrophe, our twilit disappearance. Even when we believe we are looking forward into the future, we can only see components of the past in this future, grafting our remembrance on what it to come, the past’s catastrophe metamorphosizing into the future’s apocalypse.

If the Now will always be furthest from us and the only hope to be reunited with it coming when it’s past, can we ever experience our death? We won’t even get to experience its memory, for we shall become frozen into skeletons wearing eternal albeit biodegradable smiles. Besides, pain paralyzes thought, terminating any chance at experiencing our death. Pain becomes the substitute of our consciousness, the greedy grabber of our attention. Maybe it even moves beyond attention grabbing, maybe it becomes our very essence. When we are in pain, we become pain. Nothing is so intimate yet impersonal as a scream.

 Can we only experience our death in others then? Benjamin sees promise in this act: “From the perspective of spleen, the buried man is the ‘transcendental subject’ of historical consciousness.” The dead become the text of history’s meaning: decay. Mourning is the act of attending to this text. Charles Bernstein riffs off this sort of sentiment in his libretto on Benjamin: “Then mourning is a kind of listening where the dead sing to us/And even the living tell their stories.” If mourning is such an act, then how should we proceed? As I quoted Benjamin earlier, “In all mourning there is a tendency to silence, and this infinitely more than our inability or reluctance to communicate.” During mourning, is our silence a space we use to invite the dead to speak? And do we listen to experience their tales of what we cannot ourselves experience? Can we only experience our death through hearsay?

If we cannot experience the end of our lives, then we cannot experience life as life. Unable to experience beginnings and endings, life cannot be seen as temporally-based. Chronology is nothing but a mental construction. Life then is already after-life and always has been. We’re sleeping inside the eternity of moments, the dream of progress.

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Sleepwalkers shuffling through a capitalist society. This is one of the images that emerges when reading Benjamin's extensive analyses of modernity's conditions in nineteenth-century Paris. Browsing through The Arcades Project and the atmosphere of gas-lit alleys it conjures, one feels Benjamin trying to arrive at a self-realization that isn't just another deception of bourgeois ideology. For him, the key experience of modernity that needed to be understood was that of shock. The urban street is a place where unexpected encounters can burst forth. However, his shock doesn’t necessarily seem to be the shock of the encounter; it seems to be the shock of encounters fading. As he states in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,”“The delight of the urban poet is love- not at first sight but at last sight. It is an eternal farewell, which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment. Thus, the sonnet deploys the figure of shock, indeed of catastrophe.” It’s all disappearing and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Baudelaire’s passerby that Benjamin speaks of is an all too familiar figure. Anonymity is modern life’s great terror. People come and go so quickly that all we’re left with is their trace. We never get to orient ourselves to their presence. But while we quickly lose other people, the trace of their disappearance has never been so well-preserved. Benjamin comments on this developing obsession: “Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The detective story came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito had been accomplished. Since that time, there has been no end to the efforts to capture a man in his speech and actions.” The result: a detailed love affair with absence.

Summoning the potent, erotic power of the Portuguese concept of saudade, the disappearance of a person simultaneously becomes an absence and a presence. It is more the latter because the other’s abrupt departure has caused us to hold onto their absence as if it were the other. Holding on to their disappearance is an attempt to forget the onset of forgetting. I would even say that this type of mourning becomes an active, intimate relationship. To summon Derrida here, the survivor “must carry the world of the other, which I say without the facility of hyperbole. The world after the end of the world.” Mourning bears with it the responsibility of remembrance. The shock of another’s disappearance is indeed an isolating experience; we become isolated in remembrance, existing within the corpse of what was. However, it’s not necessarily a detrimental isolation; it’s an isolation that shuts off consciousness. In his book on the Trauerspiel, Benjamin reverses the traditional idea of the melancholic: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.” Notice that Benjamin says that melancholy betrays the world, not other people. This would mean that in this intense isolation, the melancholic person is not forsaking the living; they are forsaking the structure of existence that is causing their deaths, the ultimate source of this melancholy. Through remembrance, melancholy is seeking to erase itself.

How so? Shocks, the shock of grief among them, with their isolating capabilities, no longer register in consciousness. They are imprinted within the body. Shock’s intimacy with the body is all too familiar with us. Vomit. Pissed pants. Soiled britches. Spasmodic shudders. Seizures. Tears- although if they do come, they seem to always come last. These are some of the body’s responses to shock, the italicized dialogue with the complete invasion of the other, but most of all, their disappearance. As Benjamin says, one needs to be heroic to live modernity. Like his Baudelaire, if we wish to truly participate in history, we must submit our bodies to such shocks, becoming not the cartographers of an age, but the cartography of an age. Our bodies must become the textual template from which involuntary memory can give rise to an awakening that not merely the dream of waking. Such an awakening would surely catch us by surprise, especially if we’re deeply absorbed in the act of mourning. It would be a hiccup in our atonal, melodious, rending lament.   

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For me, the most heartbreaking section in Benjamin’s published correspondence has to the end of his last letter to Theodor Adorno on August 2, 1940:

“                                    All the best

Yours, Walter Benjamin

P.S. Please forgive the painfully complete signature; it is required.”

A German living in France, Benjamin probably was required to sign his full name so he could be identified by the French censors who were probably reading the mail at this time. Through such a formal signature, two intellectual intimates become separated by government forces that are annihilating the significance of their bond. Societies perennially require these formalities and endorse these separations. Engagements between persons are frightening. All they want are engaugements, preferably done with guns, surgical masks, or computer screens. Eternal mourning breaks out of this, bringing constant apprehension and constant appreciation, a euphoric understanding of a person’s intrinsic, unreproducible significance.  

But Benjamin's messiah, the one who saw that the past “was a state of emergency,” the one would unwittingly commences the catastrophe of the catastrophe, what will emerge from his coming? What does Benjamin’s atemporal space, his Jeztzeit, bring us? He promises: “Redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe.” However, how can we be redeemed if we were never in grace to begin with? Maybe the redemption he mentions is not so much a return to a Paradise from which we have been evicted. Maybe it is a union of the living and the dead, brought about by increased communication through mourning, that would fuse the two states into an elusive third without name, not a place where pain would be nonexistent, but where we could come closer to each other’s pain, a self-separation into the other that would make us come closer to arriving at ourselves.  

Then there is the fissure. A fissure, a hairline abyss, evidence of the instability, the fallibility, the questionability of the beliefs we insulate ourselves in. And maybe that’s Benjamin’s ultimate call: that we destroy the very notion of insulation. Mourning’s need for remembrance contains within it a need for engagement. Benjamin tells us “living means leaving traces.” But where are these traces drawn? In the minds of those who are wise enough to mourn. One’s trace only exists as long as it is remembered. It’s a call for acknowledgement, our signature being made by others in the silent dark.

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I have a vision now. It’s the Angel of History in a sort of reverse. Benjamin is walking away from me with his back turned from me. That he’s walking away from me means we must have conversed with each other. However, my memory doesn’t start there, it starts with his walking away with his back turned from me. I have so many questions to ask him, but he keeps walking, his coat soaked in the Paris rain, his image disappearing in fog off the Seine, fading as I’m recognizing it. Here I realize he’s wrong about one thing, fog is not the consolation of solitude; it is the emphatic reminder of it.

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A conclusion is not meant to be here. Soak in the wound.