The Ritual of New Creation (35 page)

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation

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Page 116

the hovering helicopters is in part determined by one's
Weltanschauung,
by one's vision of the world."
⁵¹Thus, in midrashic fashion, the text casts its problem back upon the reader; it calls for the very dialogue (or dispute) which it has in fact provoked. While Hitler's triumph, his final perversion of justice, must be considered a possibilityand an apocalyptic sensibility might accept, might even welcome such a horrorthis is only one of an endless number of conclusions, given the indeterminacy of the text and the open range of reader responses.

Tishbi yetzaretz kushyot ve'abayot:
the messiah will answer questions and problems. In the Talmud, the phrase denotes the contradiction or inconclusiveness of an argument which cannot be resolved. The answer is infinitely deferred, and with it the satisfaction that comes of intellectual or formal closure. It appears as an acronym:
teku,
a word which in modern Hebrew means a tie score.
⁵²It is, of course, the name Steiner gives to the Indian who is chosen as the witness in A. H.'s trial, who despite the fact that he cannot understand Hitler's words is about to cry out "Proved" just before the helicopters break up the proceedings. His name, charged with an aura of ancient learning, bears within its small span the radical doubt and radical faith that we have come to associate with George Steiner's entire career.

Page 117

Chapter 7
Walter Benjamin, Messianism, and Marxism: A Midrash

The process of the soul's connection with the bodycalled the "descent of the soul into matter"is, from a certain perspective, the soul's profound tragedy. But the soul undertakes this terrible risk as a part of the need to descend in order to make the desired ascent to hitherto unknown heights. It is a risk and a danger, because the soul's connection with the body and its contact with the material world where it is the only factor that is freeunbounded by the determinism of physical law and able to choose and move freelymake it possible for the soul to fall and, in falling, to destroy the world. Indeed, Creation itself, and the creation of man, is precisely such a risk, a descent for the sake of ascension.
¹

It has often been observed that since the onset of Romanticism, the fragment, self-contained but fraught with absence, has been granted a privileged status in literature and, to some extent, in philosophy. Even Marx, endlessly fascinated by Hegel's system-building, produces that most Nietzschean set of aphorisms, the
Theses on Feuerbach
. Modernism, perhaps a more formal and self-conscious movement, misreads the ubiquitous presence of the Romantic fragment and transforms it into a definite cultural project. We think of
Ulysses
and
The Waste Land,
of Kafka and Brecht, of Schoenberg and
Minima

Page 118

Moralia
. Walter Benjamin, student of monads, theorist of dialectic at a standstill, naturally belongs in this great company. In his essay on Surrealism, moving with concerted effort away from his early theological orientation toward a profane critical stance, he calls for the possession of the image sphere "in which political materialism and physical nature share the inner man, the psyche, the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw to them, with dialectical justice, so that no limb remains unrent."
²Here, as much as in Brecht's epic theater, we see the aggressive assertion of a left-wing modernist program with studious fragmentation placed strategically at its heart.

That Jewish messianism and all its mystical baggage should be a crucial component in this program remains as potentially scandalous today as when Benjamin debated with Scholem, Adorno, and Brecht. Perhaps this is because the contradictions inherent in Benjamin's work remain as vexing as they ever were. On the other hand, it can also be said of Benjamin that theological thought, as it infects historical materialismand vice versais quite compatible with the form as well as the content of the body of its intellectual host. Surely the
Theses on the Philosophy of History,
a gnomic masterpiece of modernist technique, can also be read as a midrash, turning and turning the messianic idea under the black light of history. The resulting constellation, sealing Benjamin's canon as it permanently problematizes his materialist version of redemptive criticism, also opens itself provocatively to the continuum of commentary that is the sine qua non of the Jewish textual tradition. What Scholem calls the "religious dignity" of commentary is transferred to the profane ground of materialist speculation: what is produced is an uncanny form as ridden by doubt and hope as any of Kafka's parables.

Because we have learned to distrust totality and the affirmation of presence, knowledge of this sort can only apprehend itself through the midrashic and kabbalistic techniques so strangely rediscovered by modernism. The peculiar constellation made up of messianism, Marxism, and secular literature can only be addressed through fragmentary theses and the radical juxtaposition of discrete texts. Thus Benjamin becomes an exemplary figure not only for critical theory but for modern Jewish culture as well.

In Benjamin's first thesis, historical materialism is a bold automaton, theology a wizened dwarf inhabiting its interior and controlling its

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movement. Rolf Tiedemann, commenting on this allegory of the chess player, frames the dilemma in a most orderly fashion:

A paradoxical situation is produced in Benjamin's thesis regarding the relationship between historical materialism and theology. In order to be able to catch up with real history again, historical materialism must return
beyond
philosophy to
theology
. Granted, it is still historical materialism that "is to win," but to be
able
to win, it is to require the services of the most spiritual of all disciplines. The question remains, whether Benjamin's attempt was successful; whether the alliance of historical materialism and theology is actually able to produce a new unity of theory and practice.
³

But perhaps the question is not one of
success
but of definitionsand of priorities. Neither scholarship nor speculation has provided a clear view of our critical goals: we do not understand what it is we seek to understand. The fragments are compiled, the theories concocted, but the "new unity" remains as problematic as ever. In what would such unity consist? Did Benjamin, who knowingly took the risk of becoming a messianic Marxist, ever desire it? Do we?

III

For the critic, one of the most important questions arising from the dubious alliance of theology and historical materialism may be posed rather bluntly: what does it mean to "redeem" the text? From a Marxist perspective, shouldn't the text remain in a permanently infected, that is, secularized and contradictory condition? On the other hand, when the text is trapped in the realm of
Das Immergleiche,
of "homogeneous, empty time" which Benjamin invokes throughout the
Theses,
do we have any choice but to "rescue'' it? In regard to "saving the text," Marxism and messianism are structurally analogous, except that in the end the analogy always breaks down: the secular desire for human liberation reasserts itself as theology continues to peer upward in its attempt to pierce the veil of the heavens. After all, it is the Marxist puppet that is to win the worldly chess game all the timethough some have rightly come to question the nature of its victory.

In his absorbing study of Benjamin's "aesthetic of redemption," Richard Wolin observes that:

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In the end, Benjamin's redemptive criticism had become thoroughly profane. It ceased to concern itself with presenting an image of otherworldly truth. Instead, its task became one of emancipating cultural products from the debilitating grip of ideological falsification and thereby rendering their truths serviceable for the impending revolutionary transformation of society. ⁴

Perhaps. But even when redemptive criticism becomes thoroughly profane, dealing exclusively with material phenomena, it still remains redemptive and hence always concerned with presenting if not otherworldly truth than at least a metaphysical representation. Marxism is
always already
theological. The critic must remain perpetually vigilant: ideological falsification is a constant threat of extraordinary subtlety, and even claims about culture made in the name of an impending revolution are by no means immune to such reification. As Benjamin himself says, "The concept of progress should be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things 'just keep on going'
is
the catastrophe. Not something that is impending at any particular time ahead, but something that is always given."
⁵

This radical anti-historicism, leading, of course, to the vision of the angel in the ninth thesis, stands as a warning against any complacent deconstruction leading to a self-assured rescue. Each fissure discovered in the text simultaneously mends it. And just as there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, there is no rescue of the text from the march of "progress" which is not at the same time a reinsertion of the text into that same procession.

In
The Messianic Idea in Judaism,
Gershom Scholem writes:

There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value. Thus in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a
life lived in deferment,
in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.
⁶

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