For Benjamin to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to light. As one may read in the preface to the Origin of German Tragedy, Benjamin regarded truth as an exclusively acoustical phenomenon: ‘Not Plato but Adam,’ who gave things their names, was to him the ‘father of philosophy.’ Hence tradition was the form in which these name-giving words were transmitted; it too was an essentially acoustical phenomenon. He felt himself so akin to Kafka precisely because the latter, current misinterpretations notwithstanding, had ‘no far-sightedness or “prophetic vision,”’ but listened to tradition, and ‘he who listens hard does not see’ (‘Max Brod’s Book on Kafka’).

There are good reasons why Benjamin’s philosophical interest from the outset concentrated on the philosophy of language, and why finally naming through quoting became for him the only possible and appropriate way of dealing with the past without the aid of tradition. Any period to which its own past has become as questionable as it has to us must eventually come up against the phenomenon of language, for in it the past is contained ineradicably, thwarting all attempts to get rid of it once and for all. The Greek polis will continue to exist at the bottom of our political existence – that is, at the bottom of the sea – for as long as we use the word ‘politics.’ This is what the semanticists, who with good reason attack language as the one bulwark behind which the past hides – its confusion, as they say – fail to understand. They are absolutely right: in the final analysis all problems are linguistic problems; they simply do not know the implications of what they are saying.

But Benjamin, who could not yet have read Wittgenstein, let alone his successors, knew a great deal about these very things, because from the beginning the problem of truth had presented itself to him as a ‘revelation … which must be heard, that is, which lies in the metaphysically acoustical sphere.’ To him, therefore, language was by no means primarily the gift of speech which distinguishes man from other living beings, but, on the contrary, ‘the world essence … from which speech arises’ (Briefe I, 197), which incidentally comes quite close to Heidegger’s position that ‘man can speak only insofar as he is the sayer.’ Thus there is ‘a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets which all thought is concerned with’ (‘The Task of the Translator’), and this is ‘the true language’ whose existence we assume unthinkingly as soon as we translate from one language into another. That is why Benjamin places at the centre of his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ the astonishing quotation from Mallarmé in which the spoken languages in their multiplicity and diversity suffocate, as it were, by virtue of their Babel-like tumult, the ‘immortelle parole,’ which cannot even be thought, since ‘thinking is writing without implement or whispers, silently,’ and thus prevent the voice of truth from being heard on earth with the force of material, tangible evidence. Whatever theoretical revisions Benjamin may subsequently have made in these theological-metaphysical convictions, his basic approach, decisive for all his literary studies, remained unchanged: not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but to understand them in their crystallized and thus ultimately fragmentary form as intentionless and noncommunicative utterances of a ‘world essence.’ What else does this mean than that he understood language as an essentially poetic phenomenon? And this is precisely what the last sentence of the Mallarmé aphorism, which he does not quote, says in unequivocal clarity: ‘Seulement, sachons n’existerait pas le vers: lui, philosophiquement remunère le défaut des langues, complément supérieur’ – all this were true if poetry did not exist, the poem that philosophically makes good the defect of languages, is their superior complement.30 All of which says no more, though in a slightly more complex way, than what I mentioned before – namely, that we are dealing here with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.

And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.

HANNAH ARENDT

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin, Schriften, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955, 2 vols., and Briefe, Frankfurt a.M., 1966, 2 vols. The following references are to these editions.

2. Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1965, p. 117.

3. Op. cit.

4. The classical description of the flâneur occurs in Baudelaire’s famous essay on Constantin Guys ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ – see Pléiade edition, pp. 877–83. Benjamin frequently refers to it indirectly and quotes from it in the Baudelaire essay.

5. Both have recently reiterated this – Scholem in his Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture of 1965, in which he said, ‘I am inclined to consider Brecht’s influence on Benjamin’s output in the thirties baleful, and in some respects disastrous,’ and Adorno in a statement to his disciple Rolf Tiedemann according to which Benjamin admitted to Adorno that he had written ‘his essay on the Work of Art in order to outdo Brecht, whom he was afraid of, in radicalism’ (quoted in Rolf Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins, Frankfurt, 1965, p. 89). It is improbable that Benjamin should have expressed fear of Brecht, and Adorno seems not to claim that he did. As for the rest of the statement, it is, unfortunately, all too likely that Benjamin made it because he was afraid of Adorno. It is true that Benjamin was very shy in his dealings with people he had not known since his youth, but he was afraid only of people he was dependent upon. Such a dependence on Brecht would have come about only if he had followed Brecht’s suggestion that he move from Paris to Brecht’s vicinity in considerably less expensive Denmark. As it turned out, Benjamin had serious doubts about such an exclusive ‘dependence on one person’ in a strange country with a ‘quite unfamiliar language’ (Briefe II, 596, 599).

6. In the review of the Dreigroschenroman. Cf. Versuche über Brecht, Frankfurt, 1966, p. 90.

7.