Knowing About Benjamin

Hi. I'm Adam Kotsko, proprietor and triumvir of The Weblog.

I have recently started a project, or perhaps an experiment, and you are going to be periodically subjected to some of the results. The story of this project--and what it might mean for you and your life--is laid out below the fold, together with some preliminary findings. Before going below the fold, however, I shall pique your interest: it's about Walter Benjamin.

The impetus of this project or experiment is the fact that I am anticipating a rough semester. While pondering the roughness thereof (indeed, while writing the very post that I just linked), I thought to myself: "What a shame it would be if I were to lose the meager knowledge of German I have so laboriously won in recent months. Yet I have no time for a concentrated program of study. What shall I do?" Then I realized: I had in my possession a copy of a German anthology of Benjamin's writings, including the Theses on Philosophy of History. All of those sections are relatively short, which is a blessing in light of the fact that I am quite literally as slow as fuck at reading German. Since Agamben seems to think that Benjamin and St. Paul are similar in some respects (i.e., in the fundamental structure of their thought), and since Agamben is right about everything, I decided to deploy a new running joke: by reading the Theses every day (or close to it) for about a half hour or so, I am "doing devotions." Normally, for the joke to work, I would say the part about devotions first, then reveal that it was actually Benjamin instead of the Bible. Hilarity ensues, mildly.

In any case, Matt approached me, not knowing I was so pious lately. In the interests of helping to prop up my feeble blog during my Semester of the Damned, he offered to contribute a certain amount of content if I would post on Long Sunday. And I thought to myself, "This might work -- but what could I write at Long Sunday? I know: my devotions!" Therefore, every couple weeks or so, usually on the weekends, you will get to hear about the results of my stumbling through Benjamin in German. I plan to cycle through the whole thing (including the Theological-Political Fragment, even though Agamben doesn't think it's very Pauline) a couple times, in the hopes of building confidence. This is another way of saying that this post will be the worst of the series, thus necessitating the long build-up.

Now keep in mind that my German isn't particularly good. I passed a translation exam, so I suppose it's "good enough," but due to the slowness of my reading, I have been unable to be exposed to a wide range of German styles. Basically all I've read outside of student readers has been Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, together with half of the (ten-page) Theses on the Philosophy of History. So if I seem to come up with a translation that's different from the published translation, there's a good chance I'm wrong. (That's where the comment thread comes in -- and since I have been critical of translations offered here before, I expect nothing but the roughest treatment of my efforts here, which are sure to be far below the level of what I presumed to critique.) I also disclaim originality and scholarly rigor. Insofar as I have a goal, it is to maintain my German skills until such time as I can pursue them in a more concentrated way and also to gain a closer acquaintance with Benjamin's text.

And so.

I was reading the second section of the Theses the other day, the one in which he talks about redemption and about the fact that our image of happiness is based on the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. In the same way that our thought of individual redemption is based on the missed opportunities in our own lives, so the historical materialist is responsible for redeeming those missed opportunities in the past. I quote the published translation:

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

So far, so good. Naturally the translation I came up with in my head was different on some points, but nothing that seemed significant. The last sentence of this section, however, tripped me up: "Der historische Materialist weiß darum." The published translation has: "Historical materialists are aware of that." (A more "literal" translation that tends in the same direction might be "The historical materialist knows about that.")

My crappy German, however, led me to be tripped up by the "darum." I had forgotten what the preposition "um" meant, or at least forgot that it can mean something like "about." I was also incidentally misremembering the translation as "The historical materialist knows this," so I wasn't going to be satisfied until I could come up with a reason that that was the translation given (even though, in point of fact, it was not the translation given). Since I have the Biggest German Dictionary Ever, I decided to look up "darum" directly rather than trying for "um," and I found that among the definitions were indeed "about that," etc., but then also "thereby," "for that reason," "because of that." That didn't make any fucking sense--I was stuck. (In what I am going to say, then, keep in mind this tragic story of ignorance and misdirection, in which a five-word sentence took me as long to translate mentally as did the whole rest of the passage.)

So let's look at the grammar of this sentence. "Weiß" is an intransitive verb here. Although it can be used as a transitive verb, in this particular case it is grammatically intransitive. "Darum" would be adverbial here--even if it is a conventional way of writing something like "um das," about this, about the thing we were just discussing, the implied prepositional phrase performs an adverbial function, modifying that verb "knows [weiß]."

One could go in one of two directions with this, then. On the one hand, one could say that the facts related previously in this "thesis" are among the things that the historical materialist knows about, among which might also be included the price of tea at the cafe down the street or the name of the prime minister of Britain. Maybe we could even say that knowing about the weak messianic power is a distinguishing mark of the historical materialist--if one were to tabulate all the facts known by, say, historicists, the demand of this weak messianic power would not be among them. This would be to make "knowing about" effectively into a transitive verb. The verb "knowing about" remains the same in every case, but the object changes--in contrast to historicists, historical materialists are those who cast their knowingness in the the direction of some one particular thing among the collection of things.

On the other hand, one could take the grammar a little more "literally." "Darum" is an adverb. Grammatically it refers to or "contains" the discussion of redemption and weak messianic power, and it modifies the verb "knows [weiß]." It designates the "how" of the knowing. Historicists, say, know in a different way -- the how of historical materialist knowing is "about this,"  about weak messianic power. "The historical materialist knows about this." That is how the historical materialist knows.

To go in a more adverbial direction, and also to go further down the list of possible definitions in the dictionary: "The historical materialist knows thereby." Only the secret pact with the past generations enables the historical materialst qua historical materialist to know. It is not one thing that the historical materialist happens to know "about" or to know "around," but that by which he knows. And perhaps even the word "enables" is going too far: perhaps it is not a question of ability or capacity, some preexisting faculty of knowing that provides the ground for all concrete instances of knowing (for instance, "about" the secret pact) -- rather, the call or the demand of the secret pact with past generations, which will not be settled lightly, is that in which the historical materialist recognizes herself, quite aside from questions of capacity or ability. The demand is issued, and the historical materialist knows thereby, finds herself knowing, even despite herself.