Dialectics of secularization, profanation, philosophical Marranism.
Walter Benjamin’s tarrying with the theological
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Luis Ignacio García UNC | CONICET
Abstract. The relationship of Walter Benjamin’s thought with theology and Judaism has always
been controversial. In a canonical way, this controversy has posed the dichotomy between
materialism and theology as the “Janus face” that would define his philosophy. But the
singularity of this philosophy lies, rather, in the dissolution of all dichotomy, starting with that
which opposes the theological to the profane. Therefore, it is superfluous to investigate the
respective proportions of materialism and theology that would take place in his thought. Instead,
it is necessary to examine the logic of the movement in which the relationship between the
theological and the secular takes place. Three possible names for this logic are proposed here:
dialectic of secularization, profanation and philosophical Marranism. Each with its peculiarities
–that must be analyzed and demarcated– appoints the antinomian movement that turns, each
time, dichotomies into extremes of an arc of tensions in which none of the poles remains
immune or unchanged. This mediality is the appropriate territory to enquire the place of
secularization and enlightenment in Benjamin’s thought.
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In this talk we’ll try to think Benjamin’s relationship with theology (and Judaism) beyond misunderstandings and controversies surrounding the dichotomy “theology/ materialism” and we’ll try to assume a renewed set of questions: no longer the question about the proportions of “materialism” and “theology” that we could find at a certain stage of his thought, but about the logic of this scriptural machine in which both
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contenders are the poles of the same arc of “theological-political” tensions; no longer the question about the determining hierarchical principle (either the theological over the profane or the Marxian over the Jewish) of a mildly eclectic thinking, but about the subversive and horizontal, profaning structure that breaks the hierarchy between terms and “instances” designed by the modernity as opposites and hierarchical; no longer the question about the lack of mediation (of “dialectics”) between elements or traditions that come into play in his thinking, but about the experience of an immediate mediation alien to the traditional forms of mediation; no longer the question about the consistency or inconsistency between the languages of Marxism and Jewish mysticism, but about the design of a third language (a pure language) in which the unexpected encounter between them can be enunciated.
Hence, the enigma of the relationship between philosophy and theology in Benjamin’s thought lies not in certain theological motifs we can surely find in his writing, but rather in the singularity of the way in which the Berliner thought and, above all, practiced this relationship in the very weave of his writing. His own notion and practice of writing can be considered as the axis that provides the backbone of the double face of his thought, his “Janus-faced” philosophy, but no longer seen (as did Scholem, the designer of the image) from any of the faces in particular but from the rotation axis that allows to recognize them as faces of the same antinomian god of
writing. Writing as the experience of co-belonging of the sacred and the profane in an
Enlightenment to come. For our hypothesis is that the theological in Benjamin refers not primarily, or not only, to any of the faces involved in the famous image of Scholem, but to the oscillation movement itself (the messianic reversal) between the theological and the secular, to the own interpenetration of the Jewish and the modern that his writing weaves.
detour (Umweg, as he says in the Trauerspielbuch), the inversion or reversal (Umkehr, as in the “Kafka”), the salto mortale, are secret paradigms of a messianic movement of redemption of the Modern that places Benjamin’s thought as one of the most disturbing and actual philosophies of “secularization”.
Which is, then, the logic of that torsion? Some important studies, all of them outside the dichotomizing reading, have already been made, and we are indebted to them (there has been talk about a “science of thresholds”, a “dialectics of secularization”, “profanation” of “philosophical Marranism”, in all cases trying to name the beyond the old duality materialism/theology). On our part, we should begin establishing the most obvious fact: whenever Judaism or theology appears in Benjamin’s writing, it does so with the reluctant gesture (the Marrano gesture) of concealment and dissimulation. Or rather, self-concealment and self-dissimulation, because there is not a more powerful spiritual force that hides the presence of the Jewish, but the Jewish itself is what avoids the modality of presence, and prefers rather to officiate as the guardian (the smuggler) of a truth that can’t be said openly. There are many expressions of this reluctant gesture, soberly elusive. One of the clearest is the following, taken from a letter to Scholem, of 1928:
What affected me most happily in your letter is the notion that, for the time being, I
should not deprive the Jewish world in my thought of its protection –if and to whatever
extent it should leave its latency–, and that I should attract around it, like a fence, that
doctrinaire occupation –or whatever you may want to call it– with French and German.
whom? Do German and literary studies protect the Jewish, as its esoteric core, avoiding its exposure? Or is the latency of the Jewish world within them which gives life to literary criticism, protecting it from degradation, from Geschwätz? And simultaneously, is not this dialectics of protection, in turn, a reciprocal dialectics of endangerment? Danger of disappearing of Jewishness in its own shelter, paradoxical shelter of European culture as a new desert to be crosses, Europe as a new Egypt, literary criticism as an experience of exile; while the danger of collapse of criticism in his foreign nucleus, in his ardent Messianic heart? Exile critique, a paradigm of a dialectics of foreignness whose model is very suggestive to place in Jewish own experience. For Jewishness is proposed here as the silent center from which emerge Benjamin’s exercise of criticism, without being yet clear whether to the benefit of Jewishness (which would thus be preserved from its profanation) or French and German studies (which thus recover the spiritual sense lost in modern criticism), both in exile on each other. The salvation of the theological seems to reflect the salvation of the profane, through the image of the constellation of tensions around a silent or empty center.
This is the characteristic movement of Benjamin’s thought, the paradoxical displacement that poses a dialectics between the esoteric and the exoteric in which both are mutually claiming each other, an oscillation in which an open language protects a secret message and from which none of the two remains untouched, neither the “Jewish world” nor European studies. The structure of this movement bears a striking affinity with the Marrano phenomenon, not only because of the similar strategy of dissimulation or self-concealment of Jewishness as “cunning” to preserve it in an unfavorable context, but also because of the syncretistic gesture unafraid to melt the Jewish motifs with others outside its world (scandal to Scholem), altering both in a mirroring foreignness interplay that seeks to emancipate the different worlds here involved from their respective inertias. If Marranism was a survival strategy of the Jews in the adverse context of early modernity, the Marrano curve traced by Benjamin’s thought is a still valid paradigm of survival (always distorted survival) of the theological in the context of late modernity.
modern city, that is, as “an exiled in his own country”. For this inhabitant of an “encrypted exile” (“Krypto-Emigration” says Benjamin), the maxim of his action reads: “Erase the traces!” This maxim is taken by Benjamin –in a firm antinomical logic– from a cycle of poems by Bertolt Brecht –the intimate enemy of Scholem– on the experience of the great city –precise inversion of mystical experience–, and yet it keeps a thorough structural affinity with the most remembered image of the self-concealment of theology in Benjamin: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting-paper is to ink. It becomes saturated with it. But if it was just up to the blotting-paper, nothing would remain of what was written”. Benjamin’s theology is a “theology on the run” (Theologie auf der
Flucht), it erases its tracks as an illegal in the modern city, as the Jewish ink fades in the
blotter of Benjamin’s thought. It’s all there, though under the inverse or spectral form of its not being, of the Marrano torsion, of the Latenz.
The locus classicus of this paradoxical logic is, of course, the so called “Theological-political Fragment”, of 1921. This short text condenses in its writing a theory of secularization that is at the same time a critique of the very notion of secularization. Again, this theory of (modern) theological-secular interface is formulated in an image, as if the “theological-political” space in-between (entrelugar /
Zwischenraum) that Benjamin is trying to delimit were not susceptible of concepts, and
claim rather an indiscernible secular-theological writing that, beyond communication, put into action the self-manifestation of language as a medium of an autotelic
experience, as an officiant of a “rite of passage” that only in act can be referred (that is
to say, cannot be referred at all). The image is the Now of language, its very unintentional being given. In this sense, the encounter between the “theological” and the “profane” is not given in language, but somehow, is the proper being given of language as such: image. That now, the image, is the small door through which we access to the clash of the opposing forces (counter-striving jointure [gegenstrebige Fügung]) of tradition and modernity.
The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this
order to the Messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history. It is
the precondition of a mystical conception of history, encompassing a problem that can
be represented through an image [Bild]. If one arrow points to the goal toward which
the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then
certainly the quest to free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic
direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can promote
[befördern] another force on the opposite path, so the profane order of the profane
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, though not
itself a category of the Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach.
We are faced to a theological-secular detour, a “gegenstrebige Fügung” that seems appropriate to be named as a “dialectics of secularization”. Both terms, dialectics and secularization, were used by Benjamin, and together appear to adequately express this game of opposites in which the profane promotes the messianic not through its re-enchantment, but alone through its own profane being. However, some features of this expression lead us to prefer other ways of naming this crucial movement of Benjamin’s thought. The “dialectic” (motive of his main differences with Adorno) could still allude to some notion of mediation that seems completely absent here (and all throughout Benjamin’s idiosyncratic use of the word “dialectics”), and instead is suggested an
immediacy (of a clash of forces) and a “correspondence” (between opposing
movements). “Secularization”, meanwhile, refers to a dynamic of replacement, relief and removal of religion that is totally absent here. And eventually, the addition of “dialectics” to that removal could induce the terrible mistake of thinking a sort of compromise in which some theological elements would mix with some secular ones. There’s nothing like that here. Rather, we’re faced to a logic of co-belonging (“correspondence” says Benjamin) which seeks, in any case, the messianic in the reverse of the profane.
Secularization is a form of removal that leaves intact the forces, merely moving them
from one place to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts [...]
does nothing but to translate the celestial monarchy in earthly monarchy, but leaves
intact the power. The profanation implies, however, a neutralization of what it profanes.
Once profaned, what was unavailable and separated loses its aura and is returned to use.
Again the problem of the place and the taking place (of language, as always: does the encounter of the theological and the secular happens in the place of language, or is that encounter the proper having place of language?). In his study on Benjamin’s fragment, for his part, Hamacher suggests something only apparently opposite:
The strictly profane life is the life that is profaned in the experience of its finitude, in the
process of its disappearance, in the loss even of its creature character. Profanation is not
a modified use of sacred or divine instances, profanation is the passage to the unusable.
Agamben’s “place” is Hamacher “instance”. Curiously, both derive from the same outline apparently contrary consequences: in one case the use, in the other the unusable. However, they are just two opposing forces promoting each other reciprocally, extremes that meet, because the Messianic heart is the same: to neutralize the “places” (of the “theological” and the “profane”), disable “instances” to give room to a game of forces that is indeed a “use”, but a ludic or playful use, that is, autotelic, useless use –again, the movement from the place to the taking place.
Should we call “profanation” to what we have suggested to think as Marrano
detour? As Hamacher writes: “Messianic is profanation, and nothing out of it”. And in
fact, his reading refers this movement of opposites to notorious places in the Western
philosophical (profane) tradition. Plato, Aristotle, and especially Kant, would offer
profane/theological relationship in Benjamin: closer to Hamman and the Kabbalah in his philosophy of language, closer to F. Schlegel and Jewish messianism in his philosophy of history. It’s not the “teleology of nature” which will enable the relationship between the profane and the theological, but the immediate mediation of
linguistic experience as the medium of that “experience” in emphatic sense (Erfahrung)
that Benjamin missed, precisely, in his famous critic of Kant: “A concept of knowledge gained in reflection upon the linguistic essence of knowledge certainly will create a corresponding concept of experience including fields that Kant failed to integrate into the system, being the highest of those fields that of religion.”
The issue is here clearly not secularization, nor even its “dialectics” (for instance, the dichotomy of “disenchantment” of the world and the various efforts of positive “re-enchantment”). The notion of “profanation” certainly seems more appropriate insofar as it deactivates the dichotomy between sacred and secular, affecting the very places of the dichotomy. However, since the profane is itself one of the terms of the dichotomy is problematic to pretend to dissolve the dichotomy under the protection of one of its terms (assuming, besides, that this solution could result in the traditional framework of profane western “philosophy” –rather than in a
crypto-theological anti-philosophy). The neutralization of the “places” and “instances” of the
