Judith Butler. Benjamin and Kafka. 2011

all right let me talk to you a little bit some framing for this the two essays that you find in eliminations one is published in 1934 and another 3/4 one is published in 38 before then you mean who died and you know broadly the circumstances of his death relation was this escaping the Nazi occupation of France got to the French border with Spain and found that sure enough the gate was closed very ironic saving but disparity then committed suicide of course the gate opened again the next day no so so the game in passing through the gate you know has the kind of meaning for the life for the man and and what's interesting to me as you read through his letters in the 1930s even up into the very end he's arguing about Kafka okay so one has to ask this it is cannot cease taking over here of impede the Jews were deported Benjamin's fearing for his life writing somewhat desperate letters to the new school in New York asking for a of these and getting very very slow responses and from dunno barely any at all he's he's arcing about doctor a lot something's at stake there historically and there's even a moment in a correspondence with the door no where did you hear that they deported so-and-so by the way I read your Kafka asked at best day and then paragraphs without the mention of the cheap edition different paragraphs uncuffed okay we can say displacement or maybe a strange kind of lexicon through which to try to fathom the present whatever that present like being and we're already in a crisis of the depressive driver you could see that in from yesterday in the theses on the philosophy of history the point was not to reclaim an idea of progress for the present but actually to establish a revolutionary possibility in the present through remembers no there's I think by the set of debates about benjamine is he part of the fun for school and most people who are teaching the front for school will teach some any mean but because he wrote into several genres and was scholar also archival work visual culture the work of our technology it's it's not clear that he could be easily categorized as a philosopher it could be that some of the work has philosophical significance implications and he brought together several literary religious and philosophical traditions including the Jewish Kabbalah so I'll talk about a little bit Marxist views on history an immersion of Kant's mainly through the work of Edmund powerand and that was the name I was looking for yesterday the representative of the Marburg school who wrote about music reason and religion but also thought that there was a slow and progressive realization of reason in history it was against that view that he wrote timing again even though some of his own content speculations including a very dense introduction to the German German tragic drama book absorbs that content material he also was influenced by neech the tradition of German aesthetics to be sure but also was extremely interested in literary genres and literary eras so the borough was one of his very first books also German Romanticism was his second to - theses that he tried to write anyway you'll be glad to know that his first thesis was rejected it all feels so bad if you have a hard time here it was considered unreadable some of us are really pleased to join him in the club of the unreadable and he has a very difficult time he gave up the idea of actually getting an academic post and have to like independently and get contracts what he's writing in order to sustain himself in any case it seems to me that he was very often interrogating cultural and historical predicaments of his time and he did so through readings of literary and aesthetic works sometimes urban landscapes especially the final books and then also consumer practices fashion is looking at our pastiche his in Berlin childhood any number of things could be a topic for him but if I were to try to generalize or ask myself is there a kind of guiding question regarding Santa the questions that we could find in venues work I try to say oh yeah it's the question of what time do we live in what time is it what time is it what time do we live in and is it possible within the time in which we live for there to be something like completed action or satisfied life and I think we asked this question sometimes from a Marxist slant highly influenced by petrol fresh and when he did that he was looking at the effects of depersonalization that an increasingly organized society exercises on human life and other times it seems to me that he was articulating or 20 to make use of the resources of which broadly called Jewish mysticism but which is in fact a very specific strain of the Kabbalistic tradition to think about ways of breaking with a historical time that seems to be motoring toward destruction and so we might say what we might ask what drew Benjamin to Kafka he meets Kafka not only is a great fiction writer but as a purveyor of power and but also Kafka is one whose literary style is elliptical that's to say it does not explain everything about what it is saying it allows for there to be an enigmatic or cut or abbreviated quality to the language itself and I think yesterday we looked a bit at that abbreviated cut economic quality in the parable form I think you can see some of that my mythic we produced in Benjamin's own writing teacup is the only source for that but Benjamin himself doesn't actually really lay out an argument in a systematic form right he doesn't start with a set of logical principles and then derive his theoretical conclusions from them and he approaches from one angle he approaches from another anymore the object shifts depending on the angle from which he approaches which is one reason I wanted to impress upon you the idea of the constellation as the moment had the kind of congealed entity as as an important phenomenon for he he distrusted and run against forms of rationalism that would seek to make logical and conceptual sense of an otherwise difficult world he thought that the difficulty of that world had to be thought precisely through historical constellations that permit of various kinds of approaches and even the idea of the illumination which is so important to is understood as through the Kabbalistic idea of animation in in Kabbalistic work for instance of isaac luria you have this idea of of a of an original stuff out of which the world emerges it's called things soft as so and there are angels interestingly enough SETI Road excuse might like that angelic illuminations that that that are dispersed from that original unsewn and they are sparks of divinity we might say that's scattered throughout the world this view this Kabbalistic view is very very important leadership role and I contends that you need an intense conversation about it and maybe we took some part of it over the world with other parts and chose own idea for instance of the Messianic changed over time and in some interesting ways that we can talk about some of which other became politically consequence record but for anyone and interestingly enough for Kafka in the only teams the studying of the Kabbalah was extremely interesting and I think benjamina certainly uses this idea of illumination or divine spark or what you saw I think yesterday in the theses on the philosophy history's messianic chips to to articulate the possibilities of revolutionary action what is it but flashes but what is what illumination comes toward us from at our rule and it's it's not exactly something with a reason it's not exactly something we call intuition but it is the apprehension of some kind of divinity or messianic dimension that emerges in the midst of a ruin or a an image or memory or a spatial configuration of history of one kind or another we'd be tempted to try it translated into the idea of possibility and I'm tempted to do that myself but it is it is there as this this idea of light illumination which he transposes into a revolutionary context I should just tell you that the transposition of the Messianic into the revolutionary context drove him mad he also drove Adorno mad for a totally different reason but don't I didn't want that mysticism in the midst of dialectical materialism shaunb didn't want his kabbalah be mixed with with revolutionary action that he understood as naive and excessively rakia like Sherman was actually arguing with Benjamin's breasts rather than pizza door no so much okay a lot to say but but be quick enough to be as quick second in terms of venue means relationships who stay out of it maybe not other friends would think that the Frankfurt School in terms of reason in history think well Waccamaw stalks with a bifurcation of reason you get down and dialectic remaining I'd like to split right like the sort of like one moment in which history sort of split against itself would you pause it then you mean somewhere in between say Showa and the Frankfurt School well let's be careful because have a must you know has in fact distinguished himself from the phone for school and said very definitively that it aired on the side of aesthetics and that it could not furnish the legitimation for the normative conditions of certain critical life so and although he has written on been imitating his main his main focus in separating his quasi transcendental moves from the comforts coolest visitorial and but it is true that the progressive conceived continues in our most right hover mosses main idea is that not as may not get one of this central principles is that the principles that government modernity have not yet been fully realized and that our job politically is to help with the further articulation and further realization of those principles so what Benjamin is actually doing in his critique over progress is actually saying the very universalization of principles that you think you need to further is precisely the means through which the revolutionary past the history of the oppressed and revolutionary actually covered over so it's a much more radical you know yeah it's a much more logical present and it's not recent it's not in for that and for and for Hamas after a very clear post-world War two for him any position that does not ground itself in rationality is irrationalist and therefore potentially complicit with nurses like fascism or anarchism or nationalism right so the both the you know reason it must stand as a bulwark against those and various kinds of forces and unfortunately that who ended up demeaning the entire aesthetic dimension of the front foot school so to go back and recover that have been I think they're easier now in German scholarly work than they were twenty years ago but certainly was a jury wasn't it was a really big fight yes this is the part of that need that I would like maybe a little more explanation instead it seems like this apprehension of the oppressed mess and the form of like a crystallized image of you know time being for example the way you've described it is kind of a situation that overtakes us and we we feel it and it takes place and making imagistic form and some of that we can see in Bekaa means writing at the Tower of degree building up of capacity how else can we access that image I guess is it just always going to be something that's like intuition or that we feel and comes out or is there some way that this image gets conveyed to the rest of societies again it all we've taken up in it over there so let's remember interestingly enough in the arcades project which is a great interview it's really you know I always say I like parables it's like wow what's remembered is this strange illumination which we may have all kinds of doubts about but this strange illumination are flashing up it comes to us through language and through objects and in the arcades it actually comes on the street and through the commodity and tomorrow morning I'm actually try to link for you Kafka benjamine and Adorno on a problem with the commodity fetishism okay because this will show you a kind of a split within Marxism that happens over Kafka and and will be tears of a family man which is the this short piece on Oh Drive dad and will will read a little bit about from the correspondence of Adorno and Benjamin where they're actually arguing about Baudelaire but their era but they are arguing about the same problem which is whether a certain kind of media fide object which has lost its human character which seems to resemble a human character which seems to actually be the epitome of commodity fetishism in the sense that this is a human subject it seems you mean made into object that that there's still something that emerges from that that less than human creature or that more or less objectified entity that that that for benjamine still that kind of revolutionary messianic spark and how does that comfort if that's the question you have to as it's in them but it's not something we bring to it it's not subjectively constituted it's not it doesn't depend on our having a Faculty of intuition it actually very much comes from the object world and and yet there is a certain kind of agency in bending especially of DC's across with history where he talks about that what what the historical materialist does like he blasts opens he fights there's there is a the most of struggle involved in the approach to the to the Messianic wouldn't a response to the messianic but it's not contemplated it's not contemplated it's it's actually in the form of action which makes it interesting when you think about this manner for instance is final word not mine because you know is is he absorbing passively what happens on the street or is he walking the scene walking in motion right you see part of implicated in it so let me just say a couple of things in in the one essay Bettany begins with the story of Potemkin life remember and then moves to a story about a cop his father and what emphasizes is the following that commonplace things have their weight ok commonplace things have their weight the world that Kafka is describing it as is one in which human elements seem to be transformed into industrial elements and it's not possible to tell them apart and he offers about a description that allows this to become clear so for instance when at one point Kafka Benjamin sights clapping hands in Kafka and claims that the clapping hands in one of Kafka's passages are really steam hammers Kafka does not say that the hands are like steam hammers I mean that would be one thing if they have three like steam hammers that would be to produce a simile which maintains the difference between the two terms compared in the Kafka quotation the hands are steam hammers right so it's an ontological transformation of the - steam hammers and this leaves us I think with the very uncanny sense the tone is familiar it's even an everyday Tom the gesture in which the hands are clapping is surely not particularly noteworthy it forms part of the background of everydayness but for the hams past to be really steamed hammers somebody thank you okay yes on many occasions and often for strange reasons Kafka speakers clap their hands once the casual remark is made that these hands are really steam hammers okay there we go so what I wanted to say about this he is that for the hands to be really steamed hammers means that something has happened to those hands so that something has happened to the other day a transformation at the ontological level has happened within the everyday there noise which forms part of the din of applause or another attention-getting device has been detonated they've lost their organic function and status there's a nascent sense that there might be a person somewhere who listens the one for whom hands are really steamed hammers and one for whom the organic human loss has been really transformed through the figure of industrial weight strength and power okay so on the one hand from a kind of Marxist point of view you could say this is the moment remember commodity fetishism in Marx where he says under capitalism objects assuming human potency and power and humans acquire the attributes of objects and that inversion is is the substance of a commodity fetishism which produces a personified object and a reified person so here it seems to me just in a kind moment we have an image in which a large amount of industrial instrument has taken the place of of a human hand and in that that's that's a significant kind of replacement so you know at a superficial level you could say that something living seems to have become lost and yet the hand still tab right so if they have still plow something living lives on in a strangely mechanical way there's a kind of an animal or living force that that happens there that that still is in the middle of that industrial clapping and I think one of the things that Kafka does is get us to see there's strangely anachronistic and persistent anima as it enters into the process of what I've called unification unification of the human now when Benjamin considers this he he considers these he's okay we have to imagine it somehow clapping Kansas Steve pampers it's actually a great figure because one can imagine the kind of Brechtian theater piece in which you know the audience is like but oh the clapping hands are certainly a gesture to bodily gesture it matters that it's they have the hands that are at issue here and on I think here page 121 he said Ben even claims what Kafka see least of all was the guest Asst GE s to us each gesture is an event one might say a drama in itself so what Cocteau could see needs to fall was the guests each gesture is an event unlike say a drama in itself so on the one hand benjamin is claiming that Kafka gives us examples of this gesture on the other hand he seems to be saying that Kafka could not see this very well I wonder why why is it that comforter could not see it very well it may be that Kafka didn't understand what he was articulating and that Benjamin comes along or Benjamin and Adorno further along together in order to articulate it more fully as a concept of the gesture no there is a little essay by Adorno on cough though which you can find in his bottom called prisms but I don't think I signed that to you I'm just fine but it's just something you can put down this as something you might find interesting but they're working with Benjamin's idea of the gesture of doing our legs that just shows our traces of experience covered over by signification gestures are the traces of experiences covered over by significant yes he says yes he does yes he does and so does also Vytas grab that that's correct that's that's right get very early works yes repeat that was one smart gestures okay so for a doorknob it claims that gestures are the traces of experiences covered over by signification okay now if we think about that that there are traces of experience covered over by signification we might think again about how it is that the discourse of progress or the discourse of mankind progressing covers over seeks to cover over the history of the oppressed and produces its tower of debris right but then is also worried that their work forms of signification including the discursive progress progress of humankind that cover over traces of experience and what are our gestures gestures are the reanimation of what is covered over they are those traces in some sense animated okay over and against those modes of signification that recover and in fact gestures for both the door left for venue may become unimportant concepts for interrupting and exposing the smooth functioning of what are doing are called signification and what then you mean more precisely identified as the problem with progress including the progress of reason what does he mean just Legend cover-up by signification covered over covered over by signification so does that mean they sort of fuse in a way or does now it means there's a process of forgetting or lunging into delivery of rendering putting into oblivion or forgetfulness I'm sorry gestures that which is covered over by signification I thought they'd reanimate the traces of that which is covered over by signification it isn't a gesture significant or in itself well gestures aren't quite signification okay okay gestures aren't quite signification there's there's something else and and that's they see really to lose your gesture is to lose even the trace of what has been covered under it so even a more radical foreclosure right like a gesture is still something animated from the past that is in the process of being covered over or was covered over and is breaking out but if you lose your gesture you actually lose the trace look a government is extremely court here and he's and he doesn't have to do everything right to consider what the Kabbalistic and also to think a little bit about the ways in which atonement and remember this motion within the Jewish tradition so I feel like he's he can give you a lot here and he's of course quite quite impressive and how he's worked at this material but let's remember that I think they're the domain of the Kabbalistic and to do some of that the Jewish ritual practices are not fair and I can tell you what implications those have the other person to read here is Samuel Webber beautiful venue means capabilities and he's done some most important work on the concept of the gesture in vanity so if you want to pursue this that's it's a terrific book I believe it's Stanford University Press the Meridian series Benjamin's capabilities so Adorno actually has one idea of gesture which take which he borrows from venue and they that there are some differences between them but let's just say what you need to know right here is that the bodily gesture emerges as a remnant or ruin of truth a remedy or ruin of some truth that's been covered over or is in the process of being covered over and that it's extremely important that the gesture not be the same as language because the gesture does not communicate in a propositional form it doesn't give us actual content it's an enigmatic remain an animated and enigmatic one named which is why it's also true prolongs to the domain of drama and the domain of new event rather than to the domain of language understood as communicative or as signifying it's not a falsification by the gesture it's like something once meant something my Steamhammer hands are clapping this once meant something very different when my steamer hands were human hand so that I was sitting in the Opera in Vienna right but what is left for us now and remember we're Terra dating them now Taron eating what is possible now how his experience structured now but it's what happens now is the dance lift clap not like Steve hammers but they are really steam difference which is not just a perceptual confusion on the part of a gifted novelist but some kind of ontological transformation has taken place such that we can now say that hands are really steam hammers and they are decontextualized from whatever there is no opera house there is no performance this once signified it once signified we were once able to locate it contextualizing understanding signification it's the remnant of the signifying of a signifying act and as the the strangely animated remnant of a signifying act it is a gesture and not signification does this refer like them across this exhibit experience or the micro physics of experience like is this like they didn't want meant something in my life or wants nothing in case there is no mystery oh yeah that's what we're gonna store all problem I got confused because the Vienna clapping very historical practices laughing way back people clap they don't clap they walk out the stand they clapped a lot they holler Bravo right these are deep historical cultural interventions and if it's in if I use the example of the idle claps it's not that this is a kind of a who's about historical or who's not even a grip of conventions right even this I mean where did I get this from this comes from some other country than the one in which I was born it looks like what the Travis was being he knows where this comes from yes well we talked about action in terms of revolutionary action right and gestures can can convey or emanate revolutionary potential for a historical materialist who can act in relation to it but a gesture is neither fully in action nor is it fully a signification it's a frozen action you might say or there are a stalled in still the scale well here's the question there's certain kinds of gestures like if I it seems like I'm going to kill a bug but if you can see me ready and you understand what the potential is and you can see the end but in the kinds of gestures we're talking about this is happening in such a way that it's do we can't see where it comes from and we can't see where it goes it's not as if there's a potential that is going to be realized it's frozen and it's decontextualized and it's without apparent purpose or realization well what I have to say to you is that in this concept of the gesture what the frozen gesture can convey is a lost world or a lost set of meanings for rescue people really he he furthers his his discussion of gesture there and 51 of your text in the quotation of justice right so we think of protection usually is something that happens insists is that quotation is actually something that happens at a at the level of bodily practice so an actor quotes his own gesture on the stage okay and actors in adjust you're making a gesture but it's also the substance quoting that gesture and when that happens when a gesture is quoted we could say if you could imagine any bodily equivalents of a gesture put in quotation marks when that happens the gesture loses its function in everyday life and becomes foregrounded as an isolated act whose signification is uncertain okay so one thing that happens here and this is part of many memes interesting in freshman theatre is that he does not want their gesture to be me normalized or domestic in an existing social context he doesn't want gesture to be explained by verge of existing rituals and practices or life world's language games in the vacant China and says what he wants to do is understand the gestures isolated from its traditional supports or losing its function within everyday life and becoming an explicit and and emphatic event or drama so we have to remember I think that when a gesture is active or spoken it's not quite the same as a as a full action it doesn't have the immediate instrumental value of an action and a gesture that quotes an action it has to be understood as an interruption of of action right a gesture is usually put into play an ordinary life in a particular life world or a particular language game for the purposes of accomplishing a certain kind of action what happens in cough and indeed whatever you need to say what happens in breasts as well to some degree is is that the immediate instrumental value of an action is is suspended we suspend it and what we get instead is a gesture that quotes an action that quotes an action and that functions as an interruption of that very action okay so for breath you'll know he he wants to in some sense stop every day action because everyday actions is more or less complicit with the the operations of power power and exploitation can you saw in been you mean that moment where we calls on the Messianic as a cessation of happening right as a standing still of happening and this is of course also the violence if he talks about what it is to go to you to bring to a halt the machinery of power ok something we find at the end of a pretty good violence but here when he's talking about epic theater and gesture which makes his discussion of Cocteau with bread it seems clear he writes the war we interrupt someone in the act of acting the work gestures resolved the war we interrupt someone in the act of acting the more gestures resolved right so interruption is a condition for the production of gesture what could that possibly mean well what it means is that the more we accept the flow or continuity or everydayness of daily gestures maybe gestures of compliance gestures of subordination gestures of everyday life that obscure the workings of power in one way or another the fewer gestures emerge but the more were able to produce interruptions and break up the continuity of everyday life then actions get distilled in time they get stopped in time to become gestures we could say they're arresting actions and they cease to be functional might be we in some sense block the function or instrumental possibilities of action and that's what gestures do they they take an action they stop it from being deployed in its usual instrumental way and they bring it into deep as event or drama which also implicitly is the critique of instrumentality right so we could ask the question does the gesture act or does it fail to act I think probably we need to understand the gesture gesture as arrested action and as incomplete signification that calls our attention to what actually usually is and therefore allows us to become critical of how it works and interruptive of its of its mechanical or progressive motion now for Ben you mean the the gestures also to some degree shocking it produces a shock a jolt and if you're interested in the problem of shock and jolt independent mean then you have to go read his essays unemployed man because that's where he's really invasive out but you could see that what he's looking for in the theater breath where's the important cockta are shocking interruptions or intervals that work to stop the illusions of everyday life that in substance recall what has histories that have been covered over and that that produced what he calls the critical reaction okay so we could ask that was a critical reaction different from a revolutionary action and gather they're connected in some important way forever but the gesture no longer functions seamlessly within what phenomenologist called a natural attitude or what the Athenians might call a life world for a game of life then the then we cease to take for granted contemporary ways of structuring time my time does not flow ceaselessly actions don't complete themselves in time time itself is interrupted by incomplete actions and by and by the proliferation of gestures and once a gesture is isolated or arrestor the rest it and once it is understood as quoting itself which is very interesting self quotation off but that is to say it's it's not being it's not functioning or instrumentalize it but it's calling attention to what its function and instrumentality has been and also perhaps what it covers over and what is what it's what it's work is in the ordinary reproduction of power then it seems that it can refer to these storable conditions from which it emerges in a different way it doesn't embody them it doesn't ratify them rather it allows a critical distance on them reproduce those conditions rather it sets up a relationship between arrested action or incomplete speech and those historical conditions that allow for a sense of shock or astonishment about how they function and what they do in other words function or in you mental actions are put out of play they're there they're unemployed they become unemployed the gesture is the unemployed action right it's no longer doing its job it's no longer reproducing historical conditions seamlessly it's not working and when it ceases to work it produces a critical which is a critical distance between the historical conditions it's supposed to be ratified and reproducing and those that no longer serve as a support in other words gestures and of showing something they borrow from theatricality to be sure but instead of saying something that we can understand independently or doing something about meeting an action they produce a critical function or a critical distance again the question of how that's related to revolutionary action is still one and this capacity for an arrestee or punctuated form of showing is crucial to what Benjamin has called it's critical function now the only the other thing I want to to say about this is that then you mean tanks from this idea of gesture something really important for his own thinking he he says for instance on page 150 that the discovery of historical conditions takes plea takes place through the interruption of happenings okay so of happiness in other words it becomes possible to discover and understand historical conditions once they're no longer operating seamlessly functionally instrumentally when they're interrupted or arrested so to do the interruption of happenings that this discovery of historical conditions takes place and it also involves an alienation from those historical conditions now you can see here that there's a little tension between the idea of gesture he gets from Kafka and the idea of gesture he's pulling from Brad because with Kafka the there is this this sense that the world that once functioned has fallen away and is no longer available to us so there's a loss and a problem of remembrance that becomes important for ven you mean when he talks about revolutionary action has been bound up with remembrance and they and the demand to lay hold of the history of the oppressed and to save it from oblivion with breasts of course it becomes different there's a tactical effort made to wrench the gesture from its historical conditions its everyday operations and this active separation of the gesture from its historical conditions provides for the critical intervention okay so the breaking idea has a much more active directorial intervention at work with Kaka something else is happening but for Venu me drawing on both he comes up with this very strong claim on 151 interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring the interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring it's a strong claim and it's an enigmatic claim but you can see that it has a certain anarchist potential I think many of you zone affiliations with America's point of view are also there toward the end of the critique of violence they actually refers us physically to panic as early but ever but interruption is one of the fundamental devices are all structure phrases expressions are repeated quoted and though they are derived from the ordinary sense of how things are they've turned the everyday to something astonishing shocking or joltin and it's only through that dislocated sense of astonishment was shocked within the everyday that something critical emerges and this is one way that Kafka insofar as he offers us a theater of gestures within his right hand is most clearly linked to venomous version of critical theory it's also away which the importance of truncated speech or incomplete phrases or incomplete gestures become essential to this critical function in other words if the action would it be completed or if the phrase were to complete itself you know propositional e acceptable way it would become functional it become instrumental Eisenwald and it would reproduce conditions of life when it's an actually critical distance on those ordinary conditions which alone will allow for a kind of revolutionary action and the conception of the new calendar Flint the brave with existing calendars that break with existing historical issues and the inception of a new calendar or new tire okay so the point is not to locate a quotation bodily quotation within a readily recognizable context right but rather to encounter a quotation citation as precisely the interruption of a context which would make quotation into a version of a strike right it's like going on strike against the everyday know kind of to finally works on this issue of one has to do with what's the difference between theatricality and textually what does it mean to say that cop doesn't writing is a Peter of gestures that's that's a strange thing to say there are very important theatrical moments in in Kafka there's a the Oklahoma theatre company in his novel America there are theatrical addresses there's the theatrical performance of Josephine or the mouse so theater is in court for Kafka and his own engagement with the yiddish theater was extremely important especially for his early writings and he drew I think quite easily and happily from that for many for many writings but what I want to suggest to you is that at least in what is epic theater he draws the analogy between a gesture and a text and he writes a wonderful life an actor must be able to space his gestures the way a typesetter produces spaces Titan okay so an actor must be able to space his gestures the way typesetter produces spaced tight but you can see that Benjamin is in both instances in the theatrical and in the textual really interested in the problem of the interval in the space between that allows her a certain kind of interruption of continuity since it's continuous time and it's a continuity of progress and it's homogeneous empty time that relies on the continuity that he's trying to break up in these various forms through descriptions through textual moments both of which could be understood as gestural and again in begginings theses on the philosophy of history we see very clearly that there's an interval between each thesis right there's an interruption if we wanted to make it into a systematic whole or a logical experience that follows causally sequentially narratively we would not be able to do it because it is broken up and it calls for politically textually of breaking up the continuity and understands its critical function to be need to be constituted in that interruption right so the text itself interrupts it's not routine at the same time that is trying to make a kind of argument okay so what I would like to do okay are you doing okay over there yeah yeah it's coming if it's inside but today even the beginning if I go slowly I repeat myself yeah okay yes okay yes tell me what you'd like to talk about there I mean I do have some it's interesting I mean the gesture is the frozen image right if you remember do this then you mean next time it again is to take a temporal problem like history and show how it becomes specialized and even has a discussion of nan Korea in the German tragic drama the childish field where he talks about house hunters a certain certain times from the past are only become available as landscape or a setting for his image so what he's following time and again is how time gets congealed into the majestic form or a panoramic form or as a as a visual landscape of one kind or another and that continues right into the late work where he's talking about urban landscapes at which point the critical question is helping these kinds of frozen histories emerge now the gesture is kind of a frozen history right in a way a gesture comes from somewhere that somewhere is lost or is where the gesture is cut off from that history and then the history reamer jizz in some kind of animated partial trace form within the gesture so we have the idea of image but we also have the idea of some kind of lamination or light coming through the image which is what luminosities is a very important dimension of the visual of the visual field for him now the dialectical image is a separate issue which relates to all of this but even there by insisting that certain kinds of tensions can be discerned in configurations or special configurations he's not looking for a logical way to overcome contradictions even in capitalism he's not interested in a cagillion mediation of opposition or contradiction he's actually interested in coming up with an image that can hold in tension divergent kinds of moments of history so for him that image in some ways takes the place of dialectical resolution and an irrational silly ation it doesn't seek reconciliation it seeks to find an adequate mode of presentation well now you know so I was so then how how can we understand sometimes watching so then you cannot so he's working with literature and cedar and thinking about Kafka Brett he's also good to be talking about photography and to surging steps and this and by the time he gets to the session you know but it actually does continue whether the term gesture continues to be the most important it seems to me the old shop cut citation attitude all of that 15 in the dialectical image continues continues anyway I guess I'd like to try to think a little bit about remembrance and image and see whether we can make a little more sense of these terms and time that's left to us so in theses on the philosophy of history if you saw that benjamine makes reference to this idea of clashing up which seems to involve sudden emergence of breaking forth of another temper ality into into one present one characterized by in progress that whatever flashes up seems to appear something than to disappear he writes for instance that the true picture of the past Flitz by the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up an instance and at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again so it clashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again so it doesn't stay around and later he says to articulate the past historically does not mean and I mentioned this to you yesterday it doesn't mean to recognize it the way it really was it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger Museum Halloween definable outfits okay so on the one hand it flashes up and instant when it can be recognized on account and then here it can be when one has to seize hold of this memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger okay so we can seize hold of it but I'm not sure you can scoop it right and we didn't think about what that season hold actually is or does now something flashes up but something also flashes through an historical continuum understood it as the historical progress of mankind and this historical progress of mankind takes place against the background as we've said several times now of homogeneous and active and sometimes it seems that this flashing up is something like an explosive device as when he remarks that the awareness of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action is such that they are about to make the continuum of history explode right so it seems to be kind of politically insurrectionary explosion but this moment of action which must be related to the seizing hold of the memory as in flashes of this moment of action converts empty time into what he has called full time and this experience used to belong interesting enough to the historian rather than to the activist so one question we have is when they the historical materialist doesn't a story and also has to be a revolutionary actor or is implicitly a revolutionary actor over the news are separate ok interested to know whether that question can be resolved so the understanding of how the past continues texure the present brings one into greater proximity with what he calls the time of the now or yest site and this yet site the time of the now is not just a simple present it's not the punctual now this moment hardly it is a sense of time we might even say configuration of time which he says is shot through with chips of Messianic time in other words it would it would this no time would be one in which another temper ality interrupts this one time and again so it shot through with see anytime know who know it's being shot through with messianic time might also be kind of an explosive activity the chips that are shot through present time are clearly supposed to interrupt its homogeneity so here was simply interrupter function again something outside of homogeneous an empty time is then found lodged within its trajectory in parts and fragments and ships so with even within homogeneous and empty time there are ships of what it seems to foreclose or cast into oblivion and if the chips are messianic and chips your conditioning supposed to be that is traces then we're not going to find the Messianic in the form of some human right the best thing I did not appear in human form it will either be an anthropomorphism nor will it be a discrete of that but it happened in time it happened on that day okay rather the Messianic will be something that's broken off or shooting through or broken off having shot through and now flashing up the cake it's it's got to be understood as these bits and pieces of another time that have a way of flashing up interrupting continuous who ingenious time okay so the Messianic is not a time to come that we can elaborate in beautiful beautiful images nor is it really a person under an individual or an anthropos of any kind it is to be found precisely in those choices tracers that into out or shoots through and in the 17th thesis he tells us that the society will not be understood as a redeemer but rather as an antichrist okay it's a very odd moment she says Tara sighs don't you meet you out there and loser not only as the Redeemer that comes out there uber Vanunu does Antichrist okay I'm sorry so becomes as the overcoming of the Antichrist but we don't quite know what standing for Christ for the Antichrist overcome the Antichrist he does I actually think he's saying the Messiah is not Christ and the Messiah is not nature right it's not the one who comes as the Antichrist and it's not the one who comes as Christ it's it's rather it's no one thank you permit me that indulgence it's no answer close it's no human form okay and remember of course baby Jesus final line of these theses every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter this is very important because remember now every second of time understood as an yet site now time is carries within it the potential for the Messiah to editor might editor then then every second of time is shot through with the DNA then interestingly enough we have an architectural figure the straight gate for the seconds of time right it's not punctuate at the moment it's already a figure the straight gate which brings us back to my destination because you'll remember that that writer that that master who's who's prepared or unprepared to go through the gate doesn't actually been through the gate in the parable we don't know whether he's going to be gaped at terrible enemies with them possibility that he's break through the gate something's going through the gate before the law the man comes to the law waits before the gate see if he might pass through or if something might pass through some light passes through toward him there's problem with that life there but here benjamine offers us I think are very coughing formulation suggesting that the Messianic has to be understood as something of a wager Messiah might enter the Messiah my nectar it's not Aaron if you have to call me will come when it's rather he might enter he might enter and it's not that the Messiah will come your prediction or has come historical fact but rather what we call the Messianic is always on the order of what might enter and here again I think we have a sense of of what might enter a certain establish this temporal horizon it's not quite shooting through a flashing up it's simply entering as one enters a game or interest through door some opening to another time but what might enter through the door the game is not exactly a figure exactly the figure it's a trace it's a chip it's a light it functions as a disruption to temporality or it functions as the as the the interruption of one temporal t by another temper ality and the ending of one calendar in favor of another or the opening up of a different time from the one that has claimed to be time and it matters which of these interpretations we choose because of one reading the messianic puts an end to time and constitutes a cessation of happening right lesson options Jewish daily discussions but on another reading some forgotten set of histories though that which belongs to the history of the oppressed flashes up and makes a sudden claim on revolutionary action in the present which means that past time comes up and interrupts the present time and it matters whether our aim is to stop history as we know it right simply put an end to it or then to go a strike against the current temporal regime refused to act or whether our task is actually remembrance which is different because that involves a reconstitution in present time in which a forgotten or foreclosed history of the oppressed may well enter it through the gate the door and the memory that flashes out may be come the occasion for revolutionary action and its to meet that these are two different image they're two different ways of understanding missed the messianic the cessation of happening as an end in itself mr. strike Aviva the paradigmatic moment for that but then there's another which I think focuses on well it's possible and it would be great to work that out if that's possible and I think the most I can say right now in a tentative way is that what were what we're coming up against is something of the more spiritual dimension of Benjamin Benjamin Benjamin's idea of the messianic which is involved in this problem of remembrance of the flashing of right and then there's another one which is more often than not identified as a as a kind of Marxist even anarchist position which simply calls for the emergency brake to be pulled the machinery of the stage or movie production of power relations right so cessation of happening is these are the figures so I'm not well maybe they fuse maybe they don't feel it's maybe their intention that's one another Adorno says they're incompatible show-up says they're incompatible and they want to say they're incompatible for completely different reasons right so it's it's a wager it's a risk whether Benjamin cannon does put them together in a way that makes sense I think what I would say is that you know one way of reading it is to say oh look the whole point you simply stop history as we know it going strike against the current temporal regime don't act like this is a station of acting it's really important it's a cessation what's happening is really important this is the well it's is the part that a government uses when he talks about the strike okay there's a second reading which involves the reconstitution of present time in which they've gotten more in perrault history of the oppressed may well enter into her through the street straight gate and that memory emerges as exploiting it to the present and offering a practice of remembrance which is also in some sense revolutionary right we have to figure out is that a different kind of revolutionary action than the pulling of the emergency brake and you know I would give you an example of what how I could disperse that guess maybe if you know here's the day of Independence the day of which this thing's Israel is is celebrated in its foundation and during that same time there is the Palestinian commemoration of the Nok bomb or the catastrophe interesting they know which seeks to commemorate the the expulsion of 750,000 or more Palestinians from their homes there's pigs but whether they were expelled or asked for soliciting but did not understand service expulsion and the question is can one actually you have both histories being celebrated or commemorated same day or in one day after another some of the laws have been discussed and implemented they have to memory at the Mokpo on the day that we're celebrating founding of the State of Israel or you can do it but you can't do it with public money or you can do it the day before but it will cease precisely on this other day and it's an interesting moment where like a good filmmaker a really good filmmaker could take the two temporalities and see you know a lot what is this interruption of one 10:45 and another okay well the the question is you know how does that what's what's the possibility of one temporality interrupting or another and not being foreclosed by another like I would even say were possibilities of translation political translation open up there you know side Edward Sayid said look at his beautiful book on the Freud and the non-european he said look the Jews the Palestinians have two very different histories of displacement in the Exile but why couldn't it be that precisely by bringing the histories of displacement in exile together they would find some some way of understanding each other or some motive translation between well maybe so well it is a question isn't it and of course we also know that the story ins of that period our huge political battles right I mean who tossed the story which way whose revisionist who's a newest tourist whose story can be told where's the post and Industry you know all of this but what I wanna they don't actually get into that politics here because I'm in it all the time I want to say simply this that there are moments where the practice of remembrance flashes up and and solicits or demands a reconfiguration of the not time right and what would it downtime be in which the dominant idea of history progress is actually interrupted by the catastrophe that it seeks to foreclose in order to continue to tell its progressive story and this became actually a very important point between beggining and Sholem because surely at least in the early days of his working on the messianic tradition in Judaism thought that the Messianic had to be understood as momentary fragmentary and couldn't become part of a history or narrative of progress but then when certain forms of Zionism said look it's the fulfillment of the Messianic mission to realize a Jewish homeland in Palestine shoulder said no no no the Messianic is not about the realization of an idea in history that can't be what it is and Benjamin was more strongly querying how can that work how can that work at all Sholem later in life did agree to accept a progressive history of the messianic and wanted to ally it with law and reason over and against the right-wing messiness who he thought were more dangerous so he sees you actually changed but Benny we continued to argue with shown using Kafka to suggest that the messianic actually had to always be counter the idea of progress and realization and that it needed to be used more for the purposes of remembrance and I think you can see that if remembrance involves an understanding of the history of the oppressed it would lead to a very different understanding of Palestine and the emergence of the State of Israel Kafka I wanted to tell you who has this great moment you know he throws resigned his meetings and years ago you know to make it the every point he says he feels like meetings but he actually says something he says that there was he says it was because he was worried about it's true it's true and I think I think what's important for us to know is that the Messianic can take progressive form they can take anti progressive form it can take the right way you need to take left wait okay there's nobody monopolizes of the messianic era right and even with his show you know his move was I think quite astonishing it's white I you know I'm so grateful for to comment for making all this available to us but I believe that there's a history of the Messianic that doesn't get kind of fully fully by by his view and I wonder whether the remembrance version doesn't offer us something slightly different so I'm just going to say this which I hope will be interesting for you this idea of illumination I suggested to you has a history of Benjamin there are all kinds of scattered angels and unredeemed histories throughout his work and I just wanted to let you know about a couple of them for those of you who want to working in venneman and and there one one example actually I will talk about tomorrow morning is the figure order a deck from cares of a family man and as you may know odo deck is a wooden spool with the left that sounds like the rustling of leaves he seems to have no fixed abode the set of revenues from another time and he's constantly falling down a set of stairs and what appears to be a family home but is never quite stabilized in that way and in some ways Oh dread deck figures as the recurrent the the constant recurrence of another time within this time so we might understand though the deck is a figure of remembrance and also under deck is said to flick by which is an interesting term pushed pushed for by and that's what the Messianic flash also does the true picture of the past pushed for by blitz by and and what a question if there's there's also a moment in his talking about possessing translation where he talks about what what flesh is up or what lights up from one language into another right so it's not just the and temporality interrupts another temporalities but one language also interrupts another and something of one language flashes up in the second language so is there a messianic moment in in translation no wouldn't we talk about a revolutionary chance of a fight for the oppressed past it's not just that we're trying to document that past or save it from oblivion it's rather than if the oppressed past can be preserved or two flashes oh it breaks apart a certain and malesia axis at a time like it breaks up the Oblivion that belongs to present time not yet society but the present time oh that tries to homogenize all time and a modernization the modernization of time is something that mark says has happens under capitalism like yearly return why labor time become become equivalent exchangeable they become homogenize the value of time it comes to modernize precisely when it becomes exchange value so there is this Marxist moment here we're talking about the modernization of time but it seems to me that many means remembrance does something slightly different it doesn't it doesn't reclaim the past in the name of the present or future it doesn't try to reconstitute the past it's not redemptive remembrance enacts a resistance to to call modernization and if we recognizes or seizes hold of these moments it's what recognizes or seizes hold up this would be called a chance the chance for revolutionary action or a wager a wager ok so there's something about chance or wager which is part of what happens in revolutionary action the revolutionary actor is not expressing the inexorable progress of history the revolutionary actor is not representing the working class the revolutionary actor is not from propelled by historical forces that are understood to be deterministic the historical that revolutionary actor has to be on guard to seize upon or recognize these chance moments in order to have the chance to take the risk of revolutionary action and this idea of chance or risk or wager is very different from a progressive narrative or a deterministic one and we might say that the history of the oppressed might break through the history of the victor and where he says that the history we get is the history of a victor and call into question the claim to progress or even pull the brake on progress but it seems to me that there's also something else that's introduced here which is the time of the wager or the temporalities chance something may enter something might happen and it just it's a strange sort of possibility that's lodged in history right so if there's revolutionary action it's contingent it's contingent it's a risk it's a wager it doesn't follow from causality or from determinism and it's not part of any inexorable progress there seems to be a chance that it can happen and the Messianic if it can be recognized at all seems not to be an event it's not a happening and it's not persons on an individual so neither the men nor anthropos but rather something like chance or the sudden rigidity of a dominant idea of time or a dominant idea the exposure of students for JUnit II in a dominant idea of time progress or an exploding of amnesia that seeks to deny the history of suffering and whose denial is a precondition of the continuation of history I don't know if it's negative because let's remember about the interruption but let me just say this initiative a negative image it's true we can't give it a single positive definition but maybe we could end up on this point that although sometimes it seems that pulling the brake on history or causing the sensation of happening is the point of the messianic which valorizes the strike and perhaps the anarchist strike in particular sometimes it seems that the remembrance of this view to be oppressed because the chance for revolutionary action and what revolutionary action does this is recon still ain't tied itself we could say it starts a new calendar or we could say it produces another historical configuration of the now so that the now is known now time that no longer seeks to repress or foreclose the history of the oppressed but is in fact permeated by it or characterized precisely by the flashing up of that history within its terms and that what that does is produced a reconstitution I don't want to call it exactly in a Gillian magnet right because it's nice if one is overcome for the other but there's no new time that emerges so this is how one can get from Kafka through Benjamin to revolutionary action we're done yes how do we understand it no I guess the example I would give I'm gonna take two things first of all one would be than just the destruction of that for modernizing about time that we understand this part of music but also of ideas of progress but it's also about belonging the remnants of traces of the history of the oppressed to be active or effective within the present emerges in spectral form right so it's a mass spectrum or trace form becomes the chance for revolutionary action but it also becomes the disruption of the dominant idea of just reality and the possibility of to do what more of a now time that is it's not just cognizant of the history of the oppressed but that takes that history of the oppressed as part of its own action right that's able to transform in some way the but the nearly fully lost history of the oppressed to take that as the chance for moment for its own revolutionary action and that strikes me as a little different from the strike it's about reconstituting time and exploding the terms of time sorry

Channel: European Graduate School Video Lectures

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Keywords: Judith, Butler, literature, philosophy, theology, gesture, messianic, time, messiah, Frankfurt, School, Benjamin, Kafka, Adorno, Derrida, Brecht, Weber, Marx, commodity, fetishism, fetish, Christianity, Christ, space, antichrist, trace, remainder, interruption, language, Event, EGS, European, Graduate

Id: iK5oLfBWttA

Length: 107min 55sec (6475 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2012