The Ritual of New Creation (36 page)

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Perhaps it is at this point that Scholem's work and that of his friend Walter Benjamin come into the closest proximity. Certainly the function of Jewish messianism in Benjamin's thought finds a precise articulation here. Messianism allows him to move through, or better, to displace the double bind of rescue and reification, of dialectical image and cultural monument, in which he would otherwise be caught. Work done (life lived) in deferment means that the text upon which the critic operates is always being placed at a distance; as Benjamin says of the Arcades Project, "In order for a part of the past to be touched by the present, there must be no continuity between them." The provisional quality of even Benjamin's most authoritative criticism (such as the late essays on Leskov, Kafka, and Baudelaire) arises from just this fortunate discontinuity, which obtains for contemporary phenomena as surely as for those of the past. The critic encounters the text at a messianic distance, aware of the unreality or incompleteness of an endeavor in which every second of time might be "the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter." Critical discourse is thus cast in the conditional; it seeks to "de-territorialize" its assertions at every turn. Likewise, it is anti-hagiographic: though Benjamin and his subjects are now canonized, within his own writing he resists canonization as strenuously as he can. Deferment too is a kind of redemption.

This is not to say that Benjamin fulfills himself despite his endeavors' obvious incompleteness. Rather, when historical materialism is cast in messianic colors, fulfillment must be redefined. It becomes a function of the negative, to be found, as it were, in the gap between rescue and reification. Marx speaks of the moment when the theories of the philosophers become the intellectual weapons of the masses. For Benjamin, it is a moment of both dread and exaltation (for Scholem, the student of Shabbetai Zevi, it is simply a disaster). And in this double bind there can be no displacement.

At this point we must take note of some troubling circumstances. Jacob Neusner takes issue with Scholem on the subject of Jewish messianism, asserting that "the Messianic Idea in Judaism" is in itself a most misleading formulation. In his exhaustive study of the foundations of Judaism, Neusner declares:


Scholem provide[s] portraits of a composite that, in fact, never existed in any one book, time, or place, or in the imagination

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of any one social group, except an imagined "Israel" or a made-up "Judaism."


Once we distinguish one type or system of Judaism or one group of Israelites from another, recognizing commonalities and underscoring points of difference, we no longer find it possible to describe and analyze the messianic idea at all. Indeed, in the present context, we can no longer even comprehend the parallel categories, theidea, and in Judaism . ⁷

Neusner's disagreement with Scholem is part of a larger dispute between a normative view of Judaism and one infused with a sense of anarchic "counterhistory." As such, the claims of both sides must be scrupulously judged by all who heed the call to remembrance and are
observant of history
. Permit me, then, a radical argument: the historical validity of Scholem's messianic idea is irrelevant to our present purposes. The care with which Benjamin produces his dialectical images, his valiant research that brushes history against the grain, that moment of danger when the true picture of the past flits byin short, all the
poetry
of his theoretical formulationsmutely gesture to the critical fiction under construction upon a messianic foundation. It is the nature of this construction we examine herein, with hopes of retracing its blueprints.

"The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last." Even if Benjamin did not get to read that particular aphorism of Kafka, he was implicitly aware of it and took it to heart. The messianic idea inspires the critical project of the historical materialist but also stands outside of it. Nor should one try to imagine that very last day, when the messianic underpinnings are no longer necessary, when the dwarf slips away and the automaton keeps winning his games: it is forbidden.

Because we cannot dispense with the messianic foundation of Marxist criticism, but still seek a more refined understanding of the relationship, we turn inevitably from theology and epistemology to the sociology of knowledge. In his study of secular Jewish intellectuals, John Cuddihy observes that Marx transforms Jewry's "ordeal of civility" as European Jews anxiously attempt to assimilate into gentile culture into the universal dialectic of recognizable material self-interest

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and the deceptively false consciousness of ideology. Cuddihy also notes that "With Jewish secularization-modernizationJudasim is psychologized into Jewishness, and the personal Messiah is depersonalized."
⁸Among assimilated Jewish thinkers, the persistent need to maintain intellectual and emotional ties to messianic belief results, in the case of Marx, with the privileged status of the proletariat and the indescribable realm of freedom which will proceed from the withering of the state. Thus Jurgen Habermas, in his essay celebrating Gershom Scholem, traces a movement from kabbalistic messianism to "a messianic activism that ultimately takes on the more profane meaning of a political liberation from exile. From the early Marx on down to Bloch and the late Benjamin, it takes the form of 'no resurrection of nature without a revolutionizing of society.'"
⁹

But the dissolution of the personal messiah, only partially reconstituted in the profane struggle for political liberation, remains a palpable influence on those cultural critics who trace their descent back to Marx. We know the effect of the Hitler-Stalin pact on Benjamin's thought during the last months of his life. Perhaps this is only the most extreme example of a pervasive response to the frustration of political aspirations of left-wing European intellectuals in the early to mid part of the century: a response which remains the inheritance of leftist thinkers in developed Western countries today. As transformed messianic hopes are thwarted or crushed in the political sphere, the cultural sphere takes on greater importance both symbolically and in terms of praxis. The redeemed text revealed in the critic's discourse stands in for the revolutionized society which failed to appear in the course of history. Indeed, in the ongoing present, when nought but immediacy prevails, criticism's redemption of the text allows for an appearance of messianic plenitude that can be experienced personally, subjectively, inwardly. "We begin empty" says Ernst Bloch as he starts
The Principle of Hope,
and we are progressively filled in the course of that great work; our individual capacity gradually achieved as interpretation renders utopian the content of culture. Benjamin, in more straitened circumstances, anticipates a redeemed humankind receiving the fullness of its past, but is himself granted only "chips of messianic time."

VII

Those who continue to be caught up in the trajectory I have been describing also continue to run much the same risks. Commenting

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on the debate between Benjamin and Adorno, Richard Wolin makes the following contrast:


For Benjamin theory possesses an inalienable constructive or redemptive function; for Adorno its task is to aid in the ideology-critical unveiling of socially engendered false consciousnessif it should attempt to do anything more than this, it runs the risk of providing illusory consolation for real historical suffering. ¹⁰

But if the redemption of the text runs the risk of providing illusory consolation for real historical suffering, it may also provide access to a kind of knowledge which cannot be achieved through any other critical procedure. Such knowledge is prefigurative and essentially poetic, keeping in mind Hannah Arendt's insight that Benjamin
thought poetically
. The image-worlds of poetry derive their authority from their totally synthetic nature: poetry draws upon prevailing historical and linguistic circumstances as they operate within an individual psyche, producing a text that is simultaneously contingent and autonomous. Poetry (like Marx's universal class) is a subject-object; it appropriates and transforms the constituent elements of its world in order to produce itself, but at the same time it acts upon itself, knowing that it is the chief element in its production. Redemptive criticism, which for Benjamin is always marked by the production of dialectical images, offers its knowledge in precisely the same manner.

In his study of Benjamin, Terry Eagleton observes the striking similarity between Adorno's critical methods and those of deconstruction in their shared "rage against positivity, the suspicion of determinate meaning
as such,
the fear that to propose is to be complicit."
¹¹Benjamin, it would appear, remains less taken with matters of negativity and difference. Instead, texts

figure for him less as expressive media than as material ceremonies, scriptive fields of force to be negotiated, dense dispositions of signs less to be 'read' than meditatively engaged, incanted, and ritually re-made. As non-intentional constellations, texts may be deciphered only by the equally 'sacred' pursuits of critique and commentary, in which a language similarly unleashed from intention into its material fullness may catch in its net of mutual resonances something of the 'idea', the pattern of diverse significations, of the text it studies.
¹²

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