The Waiting, the Coming, the Thinking, the Writing, the Reading, the Seeing, the Drowning, the Saving, the Now . . . Secular Illuminations in Walter Benjamin

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"Benjamin's rhetorical figures??”oxymoron, chiasmus, ellipsis, and a certain use of the gerund??”prefigure the universal language likewise foreshadowed in Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant (1871). The latter's “illuminations” are largely inspired by the Paris Commune; the former's “Messianic prose” by the initial promise of the USSR. Both refuse dominant dialectics??”reason versus ecstasy, materialism versus theology??”in the name of a classless society. But Rimbaud also foresees “the time of the assassins”; and Benjamin that of mass extermination. Kafka's clairvoyance in this respect, Benjamin claims in 1938, is a result of the reciprocal disenchantment produced by a ruined mystical tradition interacting with a ruinous Enlightenment, each force being ineffectual, indeed shameful, without the other. An earlier piece, On the Mimetic Faculty, sees analogous disenchantment??”the liquidation of ancient powers of clairvoyance??”at work in the genesis of human language. Is the latter, then, the example for human history to follow? What the Angel of History sees is, however, the nameless catastrophe we call “progress” (and latterly “globalization”) dragging down everything, above all language, in its fall. How, then, resist uninhibited Capital? Lament ( Klage), mourning ( Trauer), strike ( Stillstellung), reversal ( Umkehr), detour ( Umweg), deviation ( Abweichung), dismantling ( Abbau)??”these affects and moves are for Benjamin among the only truly human responses to the unending shame of the human."