【德国浪漫主义诗学传统中的宇宙灵魂——保罗·克利与本
雅明的1940年】
两个⼈都死于1940年，克利死于6⽉29⽇，本雅明死于9⽉27⽇。
克利是⼆⼗世纪变化最多、最难以理解和才华横溢的杰出艺术家之⼀。⼀个既浪漫⼜神秘的⼈。他把绘画或者创作活动，看作是不可思议的体验。
本雅明的⾝份也是丰富⽽多样，正如理查德.卡尼所⾔：“他既是诗⼈神学家，⼜是历史唯物主义者，既是形⽽上学的语⾔学家，⼜是献⾝政治的游荡者，.....在纳粹德国，他是⼀个犹太⼈；在莫斯科，他是⼀个神秘主义者；在欢乐的巴黎，他是⼀个冷静的德国⼈。他永远没有家园，没有祖国，甚⾄没有职业－－作为⼀个⽂⼈，学术界不承认他是他们中的⼀员。他所写的⼀切最终成为⼀种独特的东西。”
两个⼈都是⾯向未来的不确定。
在他们死后许多年中，你永远会从他们的作品中，获得到某种别具⼀格、⽿⽬⼀新的感受。
名称：《死与⽕》
作者：保罗·克利
创作时间：1940 年
尺⼨：46 × 44cm
类别：布⾯油画
收藏：瑞⼠，伯尔尼，克⾥基⾦会
《死与⽕》是画家在⽣命的最后岁⽉，⾝患重病的情况下创作的，画⾯上弥漫着⼀种浓厚的凄凉和哀愁的氛围，充满艺术的感染⼒。画中粗重的⿊⾊线条隐藏着⼀种不堪负荷的沉重。中间由符号语⾔组成的苍⽩的⼈物形象，就像⼀个骷髅头⼀样，让⼈感受到⼀种死亡的预⽰。
这幅《死与⽕》创作于画家⽣命的最后年头，当时画家患了重病，⽣命垂危。画⾯上弥漫着⼀种浓厚的凄凉和哀愁的氛围，这不是⼀种主观臆断的猜测，⽽是画⾯上的艺术感染⼒使然。画中粗重的⿊⾊线条隐藏着⼀种不堪负荷的沉重。中间有符号语⾔组成的苍⽩的⼈物形象，就像⼀个骷髅头⼀样，让⼈感受到⼀种死亡的预⽰。并且仔细观察会发现这个形象的眼睛和嘴巴是由“T”、“O”、“D”三个字母组成，⽽这三个字母组成的“tod”⼀词，在德语中正是死亡的意思。克利对这个形象处理得极为特别，⼀⽅⾯采⽤了图画和⽂字组合的⽅式，看上去新颖、有趣；另⼀⽅⾯，这个形象从轮廓上看是个⾯向左的⼈，可在五官的处理上却是⾯向⼤家，这种反常的处理，使画⾯妙趣横⽣，也体现了画家⼀种别致
的幽默，这扭曲的形象仿佛是画家对⽣命或者死亡⼀种⾝不由⼰的⽆奈和反讽。这⼀绝妙的处理也彰显了画家的⽣活情趣、艺术才华、性格特征。画⾯的右⽅有⼀个由粗线条构建成的像我们象形⽂字的⼩⼈，正在刺扎这个⼈头，它是病毒或者疾病的象征。⼈物的左⼿托起了⼀个圆圈，这是太阳的象征，也是时间的象征。它表⽰死亡是任何⼈都⽆法逃避的结局，他只是⼀种过程，画家会轻松⾯对。正如画家在给朋友写的信中写道的那样：“当然，我不是偶然地⾛在通往死亡的路上，我所有的作品都指向⼀点并且宣称，终期将⾄了。”因为有对⼈⽣、对死亡的深刻理解，所以画家从容⾯对，并且不失理智以及对⽣命最后的戏谑和幽默。
画中的⾊彩有⼀种令⼈压抑的恐怖感。⽕红⾊的背景有⼀种死亡的⽓息，苍⽩⾊的⼈物形象仿佛是坐在⾎⾥的病⼈，整个画⾯⾊彩的搭配有⼀种古墓中壁画的陈腐之⽓，各种符号语⾔也有⼀种神秘的⾊彩和⽞学的味道。
克利的作品有⼀种奇幻的⾊彩，不是纯粹的抽象或者写实，⽽是⼀种综合的艺术，⼀种在画家独特个性⽀配下的⾃我的艺术。他的绘画语⾔和风格深刻地影响了许多的后来画家。【/p/915676416】
本雅明书信集⼀则：1940年为霍克海默写的法国⽂学介绍（英⽂新译）
New Left Review 51, May-June 2008
Benjamin's last, unpublished report on the literary situation in France. Critical reflections on the fiction, philosophy, memoirs and art criticism of the time—and on Paris, Surrealism and the logic of Hitlerism—moving constantly from the realm of letters to a world at war.
INTRODUCTION TO BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin's final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Rearch in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as the, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler's troops would take Holland six weeks later—was compod during the same months as 'On the Concept of History'. Benjamin's personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed becau of the cold.
Benjamin's 'apologies' to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages u
nder review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the 'almost Chine' courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin's correspondence, his nsitivity to the Institute's reactions was well grounded. 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility' and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his 'Baudelaire' would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer's request for a further report, he t aside a planned comparison of Rousau's Confessions with Gide's Journals ('a historical account of sincerity'), and his Baudelaire: 'clost to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again'.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno's 1966 collection of Benjamin's Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin's mature work: Paris, now 'fragile' under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe's disposd; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I nt you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past ason has proved most fertile. The noxious ed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any ca to make you a florilegium of it. And since the prentation that I offered you before did not displea, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
I shall start with Paris by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—the last portrait of the city to appear before the War. [1] This is far from being a success. But the reader will find here certain interesting features, in that they reveal the distance that the portraitist takes from his subject: the city. A distance on three counts. Firstly, Ramuz has hitherto concentrated on tales of peasant life (of which Derborence is the
most memorable). In addition he is not French but Vaudois, so not just rural but foreign. Finally, his book was written when the threat of war had begun to loom over the city, eming to lend it a sort of fragility that would prompt a retreat on the part of the portraitist. The book came to prominence through its rialization in the Nouvelle Revue Françai. The author still holds the stage, as he ems to be becoming the nrf's accredited chronicler of the War. The March issue opens with his 'Pages from a Neutral', prented as the start of a long ries of reflections.
Ramuz's language bears traces of the hold that Péguy must have exercid over him. It offers the same cascade of repetitions, the same ries of minimal variations on a given phra. But what in Péguy recalls the movement of a man driving in a nail by successive hammer strokes, rather suggests, with Ramuz, the gait of an individual interminably repeating his steps—like tho neurotics who, when they leave the hou, are obsd by the idea of having left a tap running or forgotten to turn off the gas. A recent critic has rightly emphasized the tenacious anxiety of Ramuz. In other words, one will not be expecting certainty, trenchancy or established conviction from this author. The drawbacks of such an approach are obvious; but it is not without certain advantages. Ramuz is a relatively unbiad spirit. He proved this five years ago with his book What is Man, an interesting attempt to get to the heart of the famous Russian experience, which displays the same hesitations that are so striking in 'Pages from a Neutral' and in Paris: Notes by a Vaudois.
As to the latter: the first chapters, which tell how the 'little Vaudois' established himlf in Paris around the beginning of the century, may be simply signalled in passing. Ramuz describes with great acuity the developing consciousness of the young provincial who Parisian isolation makes him aware of his esntial solitude and difference. Moving on to the theoretical notes in the cond part of the book, a few samplings will suffice to bring out the characteristics noted above. Ramuz writes:
This is in sharp distinction to the denunciations of the great city as a centre of disorder and disruption, sheltering that 'nomadic, floating and overflowing mass . . . corrupting by its idleness in the public arena, blown by the winds of factions, by the voice of whoever shouts loudest.' This was Lamartine, but the same alarm bells ring all through the century—in Haussmann, and later Spengler. It is no less surprising to encounter Ramuz's account of the alleged eclip of the prestige of Paris—the great city par excellence:
You will understand, from this little internal debate, how greatly Ramuz ems designed by vocation for the role of Neutral. At all events, his gifts as obrver and writer bring us some remarkable pages:
The reader can expand on such reflections in painful reverie: this wandering flock that Ramuz evokes has been enlarged by the war that has raged in Guernica, in Vyborg, in Warsaw.
Michel Leiris's book, Manhood, is also bad on the biography of the author. [2] But what a different biography this is! Before going further, I would like to draw out what it has in common with other recent Surrealist publications. Particularly notable is a decline in the power of bluff: a power that was one of the glories of Surrealist actions from the beginning. This drop is accompanied by a weakening of internal structure and an unwonted textual transparency. This is due, in part, to the grip that Freudianism exerts over the authors.
Leiris is in his mid-thirties. He was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, which I wrote to you about at the time of its foundation. In civilian life he is an ethnologist with the Musée de l’Homme, at the Trocadéro. As for the personal impression he makes, you met him yourlf in 1934 or 35, at a soirée at Landsberg’s. [3] It would be no exaggeration to claim that his book would have been the greatest success of the literary ason if the War had not intervened. I think certain pages of his autobiography might interest you and will take the liberty of nding you the volume.
You will not suspect me of an excessive tenderness, either for the milieu from which this production emerges, or for the literary genre (‘true confessions’) to which it belongs. In fact the book rather reminded me of Chaplin’s well-known gag where, playing the part of a pawnshop employee dealing with a customer who wants to pawn an alarm clock, he examines the object with distrust, then, to ma
ke sure, carefully takes the mechanism to pieces, finally putting all the parts in the customer’s hat and explaining that he cannot e his way to granting a loan on such an object. I have been told that, when Polgar saw this film, he exclaimed: ‘That’s psychoanalysis, the spitting image!’ [4] Leiris’s book, which the author explains was written after psychoanalytic treatment, may well trigger the same remark. It ems unlikely that a man who has been brought to list his mental asts so scrupulously can hope to produce future works. Leiris explains this clearly enough: ‘It is as though the fallacious constructions on which my life was bad had been undermined at their foundations, without my being given anything that could replace them. The result is that I certainly act more sagaciously; but the emptiness in which I dwell is all the more acute’ (p. 167).
It is not surprising, after this, that the author should show little gratitude towards psychoanalysis: ‘Though the modern explorers of the unconscious speak of Oedipus, castration, guilt, narcissism, I do not believe this is any great advance in terms of the esntials of the matter (which remains, as I e it, related to the problem of death, the apprehension of nothingness, and is thus a question for metaphysics)’ (p.125). This passage delimits the intellectual horizon of Leiris and his milieu. His judgement of the revolutionary impuls that he experienced at one point is thus only to be expected: ‘I could not completely admit at that time that what triggered my anger . . . was not the condition that the laws of society have placed us in, but simply death’ (p. 553).
The positions, though they situate the book, would not in themlves have led me to bring it to your attention. The reason is rather that, for all our rervations, it must be admitted that the complexes recorded here are described with a remarkable vigour. If you will excu a personal reference, I would say that the two dominant complexes, Lucretia and Judith, forcefully remind me of tho colour plates that are to be found in certain books of the mid-nineteenth century. The were novels for petites gens, shop assistants or rvants, and the illustrations were the work of anonymous artists. Plates with garish colours were covered with a coat of varnish that gave them an ambiguous glow. The illustrations (to which I concrated my collector’s passion for many years) belong to what can be called the folklore of the great cities. In Leiris’s work this same folklore flows from places such as public swimming pools, brothels and racecours. It is inspired by an eroticism that rejects socially acceptable forms and turns resolutely towards exoticism and crime. The author’s depictions of the fortune-telling prostitute (p. 33), of Judith (p. 116), of the muum as a site of debauchery (p. 40) are gripping. I was not surprid to
find, in two interlinked ntences, the same interweaving of purity and corruption that gives this popular imagery I mentioned above its terrifying charm. Leiris actually writes: ‘I have always loved purity, folklore, all that is childish, primitive, innocent.’—And, immediately after: ‘I aspire to evil becau
a certain evil is necessary to entertain me’ (p. 110). Finally, I would like to signal to you two passages of philosophical interest: a theory of orgasm (pp. 65–6), and an erotic theory of suicide (p. 114).
Leiris’s book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any rious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them clor to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. [5] This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, who nine circles, according to Turel, reprent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother’s womb. [6] That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard’s studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established.
Bachelard points to the preponderant role played by animals in Lautréamont’s imagination. He draws up an inventory of the animal forms that proliferate in Maldoror. It is not, however, the bodily shape of
the beasts that obss the poet, but rather their aggressive desire. Here again, Bachelard’s exposition ems unassailable. He explains how disturbed Lautréamont is by various forms of animal aggressivity. He shows how the different manifestations are constantly transforming into each other. They prent the elements of an interminable metamorphosis. This must be emphasized, in Bachelard’s view, while taking into account the primacy of claw and muzzle as symbols of aggression. Among the living creatures of the earth, the ones that Lautréamont particularly identifies with, according to Bachelard, are tho that swim and tho that fly. (In fact the attempt is made to establish a kind of mystic identity between the two.)
It goes without saying that no elucidation of Lautréamont’s poetry can succeed outside of a historical analysis. Bachelard’s accommodation of a metaphysical concept of ‘spirit’ stands in total opposition to this. It is this concept—through which he reunites with Jung—that deprives him of any critical penetration, and which is finally responsible for a terminology both slovenly and pedantic. References to an ‘esntially dynamic phenomenology’ (p. 42), a ‘psychism that is not only kinetic, but truly potential’ (p. 174), sustained by a grandiloquent jargon—‘the animal is a monovalent psychism’ (p. 173), etc.—stud the text. Theorists such as Caillois, or ‘the eager young philosopher Armand Petit-jean’ (pp. 180 and 187) are appealed to as authorities. Nor is Klossowski’s study on Ti
me and Aggression forgotten. The book’s methodological procedure, in other words, is far from promising. But before tackling the heart of his study, I would like to mention what is truly amusing about it—comic, even. And I am far from claiming that this comic aspect was not felt and intended by the author himlf.
For Bachelard, Lautréamont’s death at the age of twenty-four—as well as certain passages in his oeuvre—justifies placing great importance on the experience of the poet as a schoolboy. The pages where he brings out the deep-ated nature of the poet’s cruelty—identified both with the verity of the teachers, and with the tortures inflicted by the older boys on tho new to the class—are very welcome. Nor is Bachelard afraid to write that Lautréamont’s drama is one ‘born in the Rhetoric class’ (p. 99). In a conclusion, he connects Lautréamont’s famous ‘Hymn to Mathematics’ (model for Aragon’s ‘Hymn to Philately’) to the very esnce of this cruelty:
I confess that I find highly ductive the idea that this book, full of outrageous asrtions, emerged from a classroom, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is also backed up by quotations that show what a raging need for revenge his school years aroud in the poet: ‘The classroom is hell, and hell is a classroom’ (p. 101).
The third aspect that Bachelard’s book offers is far and away the most interesting; it is also one that has completely escaped the author himlf. To stay within the circle of psychoanalytic experience, his book might be compared with drawings that certain analysands provide to help explain their dreams. Psychoanalysts treat the drawings as puzzles (Vexierbilder) and manage to find in them images that correspond to the subject’s latent preoccupations. Bachelard’s book likewi has a latent content, of which he allows himlf to be the dreamer, I would say.
Lautréamont’s fundamental impul, as Bachelard describes it—his ‘Platonic violence’ (p. 168)—suggests all-too-familiar features to the contemporary reader. But Bachelard is so unaware of the image the features compo that he is quite prepared to salute this new
‘Platonism’ as a philosophy of the future. His description of Maldoror’s aggression can be summarized in four tropes. ‘It is in the dream of action that the truly human joys of action reside. To act without acting, to leave . . . the heavy continuous time of practice for the shimmering momentary time of projects’ (p. 197)—here is the first distinctive feature of his conception. From this it follows that violence demands a ‘suspended time’, to which Lautréamont ‘knew how to give the temporal esnce of menace, of deferred aggression.’ ‘Whilst animal aggression is expresd without delay, and is candid in its crime . . . Lautréamont integrates the lie into his violence. The lie is the
human sign par excellence’ (p. 90). Here we encounter the third element of this unprecedented Platonism:
Finally, in the same order of ideas, this violence is esntially vindictive. ‘What is striking in . . . Lautréamont’s revenges is that the are almost never struggles against an equal. They attack the weakest or the strongest . . . they smother or they scratch. They smother the weak. They scratch the strong’ (p. 80).
Bringing together the indications—scattered throughout Bachelard’s analysis—the physiognomy of Hitlerite domination emerges with all the sharpness one could wish, like the figure hidden in the puzzle. Thus it should not be too much of an effort for Bachelard to grasp the insanity of his asrtion that ‘It is necessary to graft intellectual values onto Lautréamontism’ (p. 199).
Reading the reflections, you will surely not accu me of forcing the interpretation or eing problems where there are none. And yet, to better explain the cour that my thoughts have followed in such readings, I would like to interject a few words on a subject that has nothing directly to do with the prent survey. I refer to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Without dwelling on the circumstances that led me to consult this book, I simply want to let you know the devastating impression it makes o
n anyone who opens it for the first time in the months. I have had the opportunity to do so, as well as that of finding not the German text but only the French translation, which, by sacrificing its nuances, shows all the more sharply the book’s key ideas. You are familiar with the work; I shall not repeat them here. The most I will say is that I found in Spengler a development of the idea of peace that is a perfect complement to Bachelard’s analysis of violence: ‘Universal peace is always a unilateral decision. The Pax Romana had one and only one meaning for the later military emperors and the German kings: to make a formless population of hundreds of millions into the object of the will to power of a few small bands of warriors’ (p. 266).
I do not flatter mylf with making any new discovery when I say that a number of elements of the Hitlerite doctrine are ready to hand in this book. For example: ‘It is from an entirely metaphysical disharmony of “feeling” that a racial hatred is born which is no less strong between French and Germans than between Germans and Jews’ (p. 235). All this is too well known; the only thing that could perhaps detain us is that, when this cond volume appeared in 1922, any decisive reaction on the part of the German Left ems to have been abnt. The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold.
Apart from all this, there is one element of the book who meaning ems only to have surfaced at
the prent time. This concerns the very procedure of Spengler’s thought, which ems to prefigure that of Hitlerite strategy. Spengler, without any deep knowledge of the subjects on which he prognosticates, refers to the most distant epochs with the sole purpo of integrating them into a performance—Schau—which constitutes, quite precily, a speculative model for the Reich. This Schau is, in fact, expressly defined as a ‘decree of blood’(p. 69). Any historical epoch can form part of its metaphysical ‘living space’, just as any territory can form part of the Reich’s Lebensraum. The démarche in the physical world was thus preceded by a similar metaphysical procedure. Few books give a better n of what is hideous and hateful in the claim of German profundity.
The poverty of the German intellectual milieux mentioned above is not without its counterpart in France. At the moment when the Hitler–Stalin entente has knocked away the whole scaffolding of the Popular Front, a book has appeared that provides evidence of the latter’s intrinsic weakness. To be sure, one does not approach Eugène Dabit’s Intimate Diary in any spirit of verity. [7] The author tells his story without pretensions of any kind—neither literary: ‘I speak here only of certain of my states of mind. And not always very clearly or deeply’ (p. 342)—nor moral: no arch for a position of advantage, or even an interesting attitude. There is, besides, the question of his fate: the author was cut down, not yet forty, by an illness contracted during his journey to Russia. All this mak
es for a rather favourable disposition towards the book he left behind; but this inevitably evaporates in the cour of reading. It is oppressive, and for reasons that, for the most part, necessarily escaped its author.
One cannot discount the fact that Dabit was a champion of the Popular Front, and one in whom the literary hopes of the movement were vested. Yet the first striking fact is the lacklustre colouring of his political memoirs. Interviews with men like Gide or Malraux; descriptions of meetings, such as the French writers’ protest in support of tho percuted in Germany; allusions to the various cultural congress—all lack precision, and above all any vibrant communicative power. As for the European upheavals that took place during the eight years that his Diary covers (1928–36), their repercussion here is almost nonexistent. The advent of Hitler, the Abyssinian war, the beginnings of the civil war in Spain, rve simply as backdrop to the stage occupied by the author’s states of mind.
There is something typical in all this. The latest book by Guéhenno (Diary of a ‘Revolution’) is further proof: a commentary on the Popular Front government, and far more resolutely oriented to political actuality, it is no less vague and adopts no decisive stance. André Thérive, the best-informed of French critics, judiciously wrote (Le Temps, 22 June 1939): ‘M. Guéhenno sustains his confidence by his very
