Dialectics of secularization profanation. pdf
Dialectics of secularization, profanation, philosophical Marranism.
Walter Benjamin’s tarrying with the theological 1
Luis Ignacio García
UNC | CONICET
Abstract. The relationship of Walter Benjamin’s thought with theology and Judaism has always
been controversial. In a canonical way, this controversy has posed the dichotomy between
materialism and theology as the “Janus face” that would define his philosophy. But the
singularity of this philosophy lies, rather, in the dissolution of all dichotomy, starting with that
which opposes the theological to the profane. Therefore, it is superfluous to investigate the
respective proportions of materialism and theology that would take place in his thought. Instead,
it is necessary to examine the logic of the movement in which the relationship between the
theological and the secular takes place. Three possible names for this logic are proposed here:
dialectic of secularization, profanation and philosophical Marranism. Each with its peculiarities
–that must be analyzed and demarcated– appoints the antinomian movement that turns, each
time, dichotomies into extremes of an arc of tensions in which none of the poles remains
immune or unchanged. This mediality is the appropriate territory to enquire the place of
secularization and enlightenment in Benjamin’s thought.
***
In this talk we’ll try to think Benjamin’s relationship with theology (and Judaism)
beyond misunderstandings and controversies surrounding the dichotomy “theology/
materialism” and we’ll try to assume a renewed set of questions: no longer the question
about the proportions of “materialism” and “theology” that we could find at a certain
stage of his thought, but about the logic of this scriptural machine in which both
1
Presentation at the International Symposium “Walter Benjamin: Secularization and Enlightenment”,
Buenos Aires, 2015.
1
contenders are the poles of the same arc of “theological-political” tensions; no longer
the question about the determining hierarchical principle (either the theological over the
profane or the Marxian over the Jewish) of a mildly eclectic thinking, but about the
subversive and horizontal, profaning structure that breaks the hierarchy between terms
and “instances” designed by the modernity as opposites and hierarchical; no longer the
question about the lack of mediation (of “dialectics”) between elements or traditions
that come into play in his thinking, but about the experience of an immediate mediation
alien to the traditional forms of mediation; no longer the question about the consistency
or inconsistency between the languages of Marxism and Jewish mysticism, but about
the design of a third language (a pure language) in which the unexpected encounter
between them can be enunciated.
Hence, the enigma of the relationship between philosophy and theology in
Benjamin’s thought lies not in certain theological motifs we can surely find in his
writing, but rather in the singularity of the way in which the Berliner thought and, above
all, practiced this relationship in the very weave of his writing. His own notion and
practice of writing can be considered as the axis that provides the backbone of the
double face of his thought, his “Janus-faced” philosophy, but no longer seen (as did
Scholem, the designer of the image) from any of the faces in particular but from the
rotation axis that allows to recognize them as faces of the same antinomian god of
writing. Writing as the experience of co-belonging of the sacred and the profane in an
Enlightenment to come. For our hypothesis is that the theological in Benjamin refers not
primarily, or not only, to any of the faces involved in the famous image of Scholem, but
to the oscillation movement itself (the messianic reversal) between the theological and
the secular, to the own interpenetration of the Jewish and the modern that his writing
weaves.
Now, it’s important to remark that this singular movement has its own logic, that
is to say, it is not an expression of a doubtful eclecticism, nor of a contingent
biographical precarious situation, not even of an intellectual despair of his later years.
Instead, we are facing a logic in all its rigor, that also remained firm and persistent
throughout the whole intellectual itinerary of Benjamin, ignoring those “turns” so often
diagnosed in his thinking by his commentators. Or in any case, we could think that
those diagnosed “turns” conceal an involuntary true that sets in abyss and collapses the
interpretation of the “contradiction” and “self-deception” of Benjamin: the turn, the
2
detour (Umweg, as he says in the Trauerspielbuch), the inversion or reversal (Umkehr,
as in the “Kafka”), the salto mortale, are secret paradigms of a messianic movement of
redemption of the Modern that places Benjamin’s thought as one of the most disturbing
and actual philosophies of “secularization”.
Which is, then, the logic of that torsion? Some important studies, all of them
outside the dichotomizing reading, have already been made, and we are indebted to
them (there has been talk about a “science of thresholds”, a “dialectics of
secularization”, “profanation” of “philosophical Marranism”, in all cases trying to name
the beyond the old duality materialism/theology). On our part, we should begin
establishing the most obvious fact: whenever Judaism or theology appears in
Benjamin’s writing, it does so with the reluctant gesture (the Marrano gesture) of
concealment and dissimulation. Or rather, self-concealment and self-dissimulation,
because there is not a more powerful spiritual force that hides the presence of the
Jewish, but the Jewish itself is what avoids the modality of presence, and prefers rather
to officiate as the guardian (the smuggler) of a truth that can’t be said openly. There are
many expressions of this reluctant gesture, soberly elusive. One of the clearest is the
following, taken from a letter to Scholem, of 1928:
What affected me most happily in your letter is the notion that, for the time being, I
should not deprive the Jewish world in my thought of its protection –if and to whatever
extent it should leave its latency–, and that I should attract around it, like a fence, that
doctrinaire occupation –or whatever you may want to call it– with French and German.
The image is transparent and enigmatic at the same time, and from this crucial year,
1928, it illuminates the problem of theology and Jewishness in Benjamin’s previous and
subsequent production. All the tension of the image (and the theological-secular
relationship is always exposed in images) lies in the ambiguity of the “protection” and
in the double efficiency of the “fence” (an authentic double bind): the “Jewish world”
seems to be the core to be protected, and the heart that gives life to his studies on French
and German culture, but as such, as Jewish, is not to be shown but rather stay in its
shelter (in its “Latenz”); in turn, the European world of modern culture seems to be the
only real object of his intellectual concerns, the only visible occupation of his writing,
but as such it seems to be only a smokescreen over what really matters. So who protects
3
whom? Do German and literary studies protect the Jewish, as its esoteric core, avoiding
its exposure? Or is the latency of the Jewish world within them which gives life to
literary criticism, protecting it from degradation, from Geschwätz? And simultaneously,
is not this dialectics of protection, in turn, a reciprocal dialectics of endangerment?
Danger of disappearing of Jewishness in its own shelter, paradoxical shelter of
European culture as a new desert to be crosses, Europe as a new Egypt, literary criticism
as an experience of exile; while the danger of collapse of criticism in his foreign
nucleus, in his ardent Messianic heart? Exile critique, a paradigm of a dialectics of
foreignness whose model is very suggestive to place in Jewish own experience. For
Jewishness is proposed here as the silent center from which emerge Benjamin’s exercise
of criticism, without being yet clear whether to the benefit of Jewishness (which would
thus be preserved from its profanation) or French and German studies (which thus
recover the spiritual sense lost in modern criticism), both in exile on each other. The
salvation of the theological seems to reflect the salvation of the profane, through the
image of the constellation of tensions around a silent or empty center.
This is the characteristic movement of Benjamin’s thought, the paradoxical
displacement that poses a dialectics between the esoteric and the exoteric in which both
are mutually claiming each other, an oscillation in which an open language protects a
secret message and from which none of the two remains untouched, neither the “Jewish
world” nor European studies. The structure of this movement bears a striking affinity
with the Marrano phenomenon, not only because of the similar strategy of dissimulation
or self-concealment of Jewishness as “cunning” to preserve it in an unfavorable context,
but also because of the syncretistic gesture unafraid to melt the Jewish motifs with
others outside its world (scandal to Scholem), altering both in a mirroring foreignness
interplay that seeks to emancipate the different worlds here involved from their
respective inertias. If Marranism was a survival strategy of the Jews in the adverse
context of early modernity, the Marrano curve traced by Benjamin’s thought is a still
valid paradigm of survival (always distorted survival) of the theological in the context
of late modernity.
The “presence” of Jewishness and theology in Benjamin is never given in the
form of the simple presence, but rather under the paradoxical movement of this double
foreignness, under the supplementary logic of the exterior-interior and interior-exterior.
To put it in Benjamin’s terms, Judaism enters in his thought as an illegal in the great
4
modern city, that is, as “an exiled in his own country”. For this inhabitant of an
“encrypted exile” (“Krypto-Emigration” says Benjamin), the maxim of his action reads:
“Erase the traces!” This maxim is taken by Benjamin –in a firm antinomical logic– from
a cycle of poems by Bertolt Brecht –the intimate enemy of Scholem– on the experience
of the great city –precise inversion of mystical experience–, and yet it keeps a thorough
structural affinity with the most remembered image of the self-concealment of theology
in Benjamin: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting-paper is to ink. It becomes
saturated with it. But if it was just up to the blotting-paper, nothing would remain of
what was written”. Benjamin’s theology is a “theology on the run” (Theologie auf der
Flucht), it erases its tracks as an illegal in the modern city, as the Jewish ink fades in the
blotter of Benjamin’s thought. It’s all there, though under the inverse or spectral form of
its not being, of the Marrano torsion, of the Latenz.
The locus classicus of this paradoxical logic is, of course, the so called
“Theological-political Fragment”, of 1921. This short text condenses in its writing a
theory of secularization that is at the same time a critique of the very notion of
secularization. Again, this theory of (modern) theological-secular interface is
formulated in an image, as if the “theological-political” space in-between (entrelugar /
Zwischenraum) that Benjamin is trying to delimit were not susceptible of concepts, and
claim rather an indiscernible secular-theological writing that, beyond communication,
put into action the self-manifestation of language as a medium of an autotelic
experience, as an officiant of a “rite of passage” that only in act can be referred (that is
to say, cannot be referred at all). The image is the Now of language, its very
unintentional being given. In this sense, the encounter between the “theological” and the
“profane” is not given in language, but somehow, is the proper being given of language
as such: image. That now, the image, is the small door through which we access to the
clash of the opposing forces (counter-striving jointure [gegenstrebige Fügung]) of
tradition and modernity.
After denying all teleology of history and stating that “from the historical point
of view, the Kingdom of God is not goal [Ziel], it is the end [Ende]”, i.e., after
establishing the eschatological grounds of his messianism, Benjamin must reformulate
the relationship between the profane and theological outside all kind of teleology or
salvation history. And here –or, better, now– occurs the image:
5
The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this
order to the Messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history. It is
the precondition of a mystical conception of history, encompassing a problem that can
be represented through an image [Bild]. If one arrow points to the goal toward which
the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then
certainly the quest to free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic
direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can promote
[befördern] another force on the opposite path, so the profane order of the profane
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, though not
itself a category of the Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach.
We are faced to a theological-secular detour, a “gegenstrebige Fügung” that seems
appropriate to be named as a “dialectics of secularization”. Both terms, dialectics and
secularization, were used by Benjamin, and together appear to adequately express this
game of opposites in which the profane promotes the messianic not through its reenchantment, but alone through its own profane being. However, some features of this
expression lead us to prefer other ways of naming this crucial movement of Benjamin’s
thought. The “dialectic” (motive of his main differences with Adorno) could still allude
to some notion of mediation that seems completely absent here (and all throughout
Benjamin’s idiosyncratic use of the word “dialectics”), and instead is suggested an
immediacy (of a clash of forces) and a “correspondence” (between opposing
movements). “Secularization”, meanwhile, refers to a dynamic of replacement, relief
and removal of religion that is totally absent here. And eventually, the addition of
“dialectics” to that removal could induce the terrible mistake of thinking a sort of
compromise in which some theological elements would mix with some secular ones.
There’s nothing like that here. Rather, we’re faced to a logic of co-belonging
(“correspondence” says Benjamin) which seeks, in any case, the messianic in the
reverse of the profane.
Therefore, it may seem more appropriate to speak of profanation, as suggested
by Werner Hamacher and Giorgio Agamben (not far from Adorno’s understanding of
the matter). Agamben proposes –in an implicit comment to the fragment– a distinction
between secularization and profanation that may be relevant to our exposition:
6
Secularization is a form of removal that leaves intact the forces, merely moving them
from one place to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts [...]
does nothing but to translate the celestial monarchy in earthly monarchy, but leaves
intact the power. The profanation implies, however, a neutralization of what it profanes.
Once profaned, what was unavailable and separated loses its aura and is returned to use.
Again the problem of the place and the taking place (of language, as always: does the
encounter of the theological and the secular happens in the place of language, or is that
encounter the proper having place of language?). In his study on Benjamin’s fragment,
for his part, Hamacher suggests something only apparently opposite:
The strictly profane life is the life that is profaned in the experience of its finitude, in the
process of its disappearance, in the loss even of its creature character. Profanation is not
a modified use of sacred or divine instances, profanation is the passage to the unusable.
Agamben’s “place” is Hamacher “instance”. Curiously, both derive from the same
outline apparently contrary consequences: in one case the use, in the other the unusable.
However, they are just two opposing forces promoting each other reciprocally, extremes
that meet, because the Messianic heart is the same: to neutralize the “places” (of the
“theological” and the “profane”), disable “instances” to give room to a game of forces
that is indeed a “use”, but a ludic or playful use, that is, autotelic, useless use –again, the
movement from the place to the taking place.
Should we call “profanation” to what we have suggested to think as Marrano
detour? As Hamacher writes: “Messianic is profanation, and nothing out of it”. And in
fact, his reading refers this movement of opposites to notorious places in the Western
philosophical (profane) tradition. Plato, Aristotle, and especially Kant, would offer
models of this paradoxical movement. The relationship between the profane and the
messianic, the irreducible split and the simultaneous “promotion” of a meeting between
both forces are submitted no less than to the relationship between “nature” and
“freedom” in critical philosophy: also in Kant would be an overturn of the natural
(profane) to the noumenal (Messianic) through the natural order itself (the profane order
of the profane). The problem with this suggestive approach to Kant is that it risks losing
sight of the strictly magical and messianic singularity of nature/freedom,
7
profane/theological relationship in Benjamin: closer to Hamman and the Kabbalah in
his philosophy of language, closer to F. Schlegel and Jewish messianism in his
philosophy of history. It’s not the “teleology of nature” which will enable the
relationship between the profane and the theological, but the immediate mediation of
linguistic experience as the medium of that “experience” in emphatic sense (Erfahrung)
that Benjamin missed, precisely, in his famous critic of Kant: “A concept of knowledge
gained in reflection upon the linguistic essence of knowledge certainly will create a
corresponding concept of experience including fields that Kant failed to integrate into
the system, being the highest of those fields that of religion.”
The issue is here clearly not secularization, nor even its “dialectics” (for
instance, the dichotomy of “disenchantment” of the world and the various efforts of
positive “re-enchantment”). The notion of “profanation” certainly seems more
appropriate insofar as it deactivates the dichotomy between sacred and secular, affecting
the very places of the dichotomy. However, since the profane is itself one of the terms
of the dichotomy is problematic to pretend to dissolve the dichotomy under the
protection of one of its terms (assuming, besides, that this solution could result in the
traditional framework of profane western “philosophy” –rather than in a cryptotheological anti-philosophy). The neutralization of the “places” and “instances” of the
dichotomy can only occur as experience of the theological-profane threshold, that is to
say, as a simultaneously secular and theological experience, or as the (linguistically set)
experience of the end of the dichotomy (the experience of the being given of the
language as such, the rumor of pure language). This openness is the third language of
Benjamin’s Marrano gesture. And this is why we prefer (with Agata Bielik-Robson) to
refer to Benjamin’s tarrying with the theological, as a sort of philosophical Marranism.
Because as Marrano gesture the proper movement of profanation in itself can be
understood as a form –the “quietest” form, and therefore the fairest form– of religion.
8
Walter Benjamin’s tarrying with the theological 1
Luis Ignacio García
UNC | CONICET
Abstract. The relationship of Walter Benjamin’s thought with theology and Judaism has always
been controversial. In a canonical way, this controversy has posed the dichotomy between
materialism and theology as the “Janus face” that would define his philosophy. But the
singularity of this philosophy lies, rather, in the dissolution of all dichotomy, starting with that
which opposes the theological to the profane. Therefore, it is superfluous to investigate the
respective proportions of materialism and theology that would take place in his thought. Instead,
it is necessary to examine the logic of the movement in which the relationship between the
theological and the secular takes place. Three possible names for this logic are proposed here:
dialectic of secularization, profanation and philosophical Marranism. Each with its peculiarities
–that must be analyzed and demarcated– appoints the antinomian movement that turns, each
time, dichotomies into extremes of an arc of tensions in which none of the poles remains
immune or unchanged. This mediality is the appropriate territory to enquire the place of
secularization and enlightenment in Benjamin’s thought.
***
In this talk we’ll try to think Benjamin’s relationship with theology (and Judaism)
beyond misunderstandings and controversies surrounding the dichotomy “theology/
materialism” and we’ll try to assume a renewed set of questions: no longer the question
about the proportions of “materialism” and “theology” that we could find at a certain
stage of his thought, but about the logic of this scriptural machine in which both
1
Presentation at the International Symposium “Walter Benjamin: Secularization and Enlightenment”,
Buenos Aires, 2015.
1
contenders are the poles of the same arc of “theological-political” tensions; no longer
the question about the determining hierarchical principle (either the theological over the
profane or the Marxian over the Jewish) of a mildly eclectic thinking, but about the
subversive and horizontal, profaning structure that breaks the hierarchy between terms
and “instances” designed by the modernity as opposites and hierarchical; no longer the
question about the lack of mediation (of “dialectics”) between elements or traditions
that come into play in his thinking, but about the experience of an immediate mediation
alien to the traditional forms of mediation; no longer the question about the consistency
or inconsistency between the languages of Marxism and Jewish mysticism, but about
the design of a third language (a pure language) in which the unexpected encounter
between them can be enunciated.
Hence, the enigma of the relationship between philosophy and theology in
Benjamin’s thought lies not in certain theological motifs we can surely find in his
writing, but rather in the singularity of the way in which the Berliner thought and, above
all, practiced this relationship in the very weave of his writing. His own notion and
practice of writing can be considered as the axis that provides the backbone of the
double face of his thought, his “Janus-faced” philosophy, but no longer seen (as did
Scholem, the designer of the image) from any of the faces in particular but from the
rotation axis that allows to recognize them as faces of the same antinomian god of
writing. Writing as the experience of co-belonging of the sacred and the profane in an
Enlightenment to come. For our hypothesis is that the theological in Benjamin refers not
primarily, or not only, to any of the faces involved in the famous image of Scholem, but
to the oscillation movement itself (the messianic reversal) between the theological and
the secular, to the own interpenetration of the Jewish and the modern that his writing
weaves.
Now, it’s important to remark that this singular movement has its own logic, that
is to say, it is not an expression of a doubtful eclecticism, nor of a contingent
biographical precarious situation, not even of an intellectual despair of his later years.
Instead, we are facing a logic in all its rigor, that also remained firm and persistent
throughout the whole intellectual itinerary of Benjamin, ignoring those “turns” so often
diagnosed in his thinking by his commentators. Or in any case, we could think that
those diagnosed “turns” conceal an involuntary true that sets in abyss and collapses the
interpretation of the “contradiction” and “self-deception” of Benjamin: the turn, the
2
detour (Umweg, as he says in the Trauerspielbuch), the inversion or reversal (Umkehr,
as in the “Kafka”), the salto mortale, are secret paradigms of a messianic movement of
redemption of the Modern that places Benjamin’s thought as one of the most disturbing
and actual philosophies of “secularization”.
Which is, then, the logic of that torsion? Some important studies, all of them
outside the dichotomizing reading, have already been made, and we are indebted to
them (there has been talk about a “science of thresholds”, a “dialectics of
secularization”, “profanation” of “philosophical Marranism”, in all cases trying to name
the beyond the old duality materialism/theology). On our part, we should begin
establishing the most obvious fact: whenever Judaism or theology appears in
Benjamin’s writing, it does so with the reluctant gesture (the Marrano gesture) of
concealment and dissimulation. Or rather, self-concealment and self-dissimulation,
because there is not a more powerful spiritual force that hides the presence of the
Jewish, but the Jewish itself is what avoids the modality of presence, and prefers rather
to officiate as the guardian (the smuggler) of a truth that can’t be said openly. There are
many expressions of this reluctant gesture, soberly elusive. One of the clearest is the
following, taken from a letter to Scholem, of 1928:
What affected me most happily in your letter is the notion that, for the time being, I
should not deprive the Jewish world in my thought of its protection –if and to whatever
extent it should leave its latency–, and that I should attract around it, like a fence, that
doctrinaire occupation –or whatever you may want to call it– with French and German.
The image is transparent and enigmatic at the same time, and from this crucial year,
1928, it illuminates the problem of theology and Jewishness in Benjamin’s previous and
subsequent production. All the tension of the image (and the theological-secular
relationship is always exposed in images) lies in the ambiguity of the “protection” and
in the double efficiency of the “fence” (an authentic double bind): the “Jewish world”
seems to be the core to be protected, and the heart that gives life to his studies on French
and German culture, but as such, as Jewish, is not to be shown but rather stay in its
shelter (in its “Latenz”); in turn, the European world of modern culture seems to be the
only real object of his intellectual concerns, the only visible occupation of his writing,
but as such it seems to be only a smokescreen over what really matters. So who protects
3
whom? Do German and literary studies protect the Jewish, as its esoteric core, avoiding
its exposure? Or is the latency of the Jewish world within them which gives life to
literary criticism, protecting it from degradation, from Geschwätz? And simultaneously,
is not this dialectics of protection, in turn, a reciprocal dialectics of endangerment?
Danger of disappearing of Jewishness in its own shelter, paradoxical shelter of
European culture as a new desert to be crosses, Europe as a new Egypt, literary criticism
as an experience of exile; while the danger of collapse of criticism in his foreign
nucleus, in his ardent Messianic heart? Exile critique, a paradigm of a dialectics of
foreignness whose model is very suggestive to place in Jewish own experience. For
Jewishness is proposed here as the silent center from which emerge Benjamin’s exercise
of criticism, without being yet clear whether to the benefit of Jewishness (which would
thus be preserved from its profanation) or French and German studies (which thus
recover the spiritual sense lost in modern criticism), both in exile on each other. The
salvation of the theological seems to reflect the salvation of the profane, through the
image of the constellation of tensions around a silent or empty center.
This is the characteristic movement of Benjamin’s thought, the paradoxical
displacement that poses a dialectics between the esoteric and the exoteric in which both
are mutually claiming each other, an oscillation in which an open language protects a
secret message and from which none of the two remains untouched, neither the “Jewish
world” nor European studies. The structure of this movement bears a striking affinity
with the Marrano phenomenon, not only because of the similar strategy of dissimulation
or self-concealment of Jewishness as “cunning” to preserve it in an unfavorable context,
but also because of the syncretistic gesture unafraid to melt the Jewish motifs with
others outside its world (scandal to Scholem), altering both in a mirroring foreignness
interplay that seeks to emancipate the different worlds here involved from their
respective inertias. If Marranism was a survival strategy of the Jews in the adverse
context of early modernity, the Marrano curve traced by Benjamin’s thought is a still
valid paradigm of survival (always distorted survival) of the theological in the context
of late modernity.
The “presence” of Jewishness and theology in Benjamin is never given in the
form of the simple presence, but rather under the paradoxical movement of this double
foreignness, under the supplementary logic of the exterior-interior and interior-exterior.
To put it in Benjamin’s terms, Judaism enters in his thought as an illegal in the great
4
modern city, that is, as “an exiled in his own country”. For this inhabitant of an
“encrypted exile” (“Krypto-Emigration” says Benjamin), the maxim of his action reads:
“Erase the traces!” This maxim is taken by Benjamin –in a firm antinomical logic– from
a cycle of poems by Bertolt Brecht –the intimate enemy of Scholem– on the experience
of the great city –precise inversion of mystical experience–, and yet it keeps a thorough
structural affinity with the most remembered image of the self-concealment of theology
in Benjamin: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting-paper is to ink. It becomes
saturated with it. But if it was just up to the blotting-paper, nothing would remain of
what was written”. Benjamin’s theology is a “theology on the run” (Theologie auf der
Flucht), it erases its tracks as an illegal in the modern city, as the Jewish ink fades in the
blotter of Benjamin’s thought. It’s all there, though under the inverse or spectral form of
its not being, of the Marrano torsion, of the Latenz.
The locus classicus of this paradoxical logic is, of course, the so called
“Theological-political Fragment”, of 1921. This short text condenses in its writing a
theory of secularization that is at the same time a critique of the very notion of
secularization. Again, this theory of (modern) theological-secular interface is
formulated in an image, as if the “theological-political” space in-between (entrelugar /
Zwischenraum) that Benjamin is trying to delimit were not susceptible of concepts, and
claim rather an indiscernible secular-theological writing that, beyond communication,
put into action the self-manifestation of language as a medium of an autotelic
experience, as an officiant of a “rite of passage” that only in act can be referred (that is
to say, cannot be referred at all). The image is the Now of language, its very
unintentional being given. In this sense, the encounter between the “theological” and the
“profane” is not given in language, but somehow, is the proper being given of language
as such: image. That now, the image, is the small door through which we access to the
clash of the opposing forces (counter-striving jointure [gegenstrebige Fügung]) of
tradition and modernity.
After denying all teleology of history and stating that “from the historical point
of view, the Kingdom of God is not goal [Ziel], it is the end [Ende]”, i.e., after
establishing the eschatological grounds of his messianism, Benjamin must reformulate
the relationship between the profane and theological outside all kind of teleology or
salvation history. And here –or, better, now– occurs the image:
5
The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this
order to the Messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history. It is
the precondition of a mystical conception of history, encompassing a problem that can
be represented through an image [Bild]. If one arrow points to the goal toward which
the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then
certainly the quest to free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic
direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can promote
[befördern] another force on the opposite path, so the profane order of the profane
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, though not
itself a category of the Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach.
We are faced to a theological-secular detour, a “gegenstrebige Fügung” that seems
appropriate to be named as a “dialectics of secularization”. Both terms, dialectics and
secularization, were used by Benjamin, and together appear to adequately express this
game of opposites in which the profane promotes the messianic not through its reenchantment, but alone through its own profane being. However, some features of this
expression lead us to prefer other ways of naming this crucial movement of Benjamin’s
thought. The “dialectic” (motive of his main differences with Adorno) could still allude
to some notion of mediation that seems completely absent here (and all throughout
Benjamin’s idiosyncratic use of the word “dialectics”), and instead is suggested an
immediacy (of a clash of forces) and a “correspondence” (between opposing
movements). “Secularization”, meanwhile, refers to a dynamic of replacement, relief
and removal of religion that is totally absent here. And eventually, the addition of
“dialectics” to that removal could induce the terrible mistake of thinking a sort of
compromise in which some theological elements would mix with some secular ones.
There’s nothing like that here. Rather, we’re faced to a logic of co-belonging
(“correspondence” says Benjamin) which seeks, in any case, the messianic in the
reverse of the profane.
Therefore, it may seem more appropriate to speak of profanation, as suggested
by Werner Hamacher and Giorgio Agamben (not far from Adorno’s understanding of
the matter). Agamben proposes –in an implicit comment to the fragment– a distinction
between secularization and profanation that may be relevant to our exposition:
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Secularization is a form of removal that leaves intact the forces, merely moving them
from one place to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts [...]
does nothing but to translate the celestial monarchy in earthly monarchy, but leaves
intact the power. The profanation implies, however, a neutralization of what it profanes.
Once profaned, what was unavailable and separated loses its aura and is returned to use.
Again the problem of the place and the taking place (of language, as always: does the
encounter of the theological and the secular happens in the place of language, or is that
encounter the proper having place of language?). In his study on Benjamin’s fragment,
for his part, Hamacher suggests something only apparently opposite:
The strictly profane life is the life that is profaned in the experience of its finitude, in the
process of its disappearance, in the loss even of its creature character. Profanation is not
a modified use of sacred or divine instances, profanation is the passage to the unusable.
Agamben’s “place” is Hamacher “instance”. Curiously, both derive from the same
outline apparently contrary consequences: in one case the use, in the other the unusable.
However, they are just two opposing forces promoting each other reciprocally, extremes
that meet, because the Messianic heart is the same: to neutralize the “places” (of the
“theological” and the “profane”), disable “instances” to give room to a game of forces
that is indeed a “use”, but a ludic or playful use, that is, autotelic, useless use –again, the
movement from the place to the taking place.
Should we call “profanation” to what we have suggested to think as Marrano
detour? As Hamacher writes: “Messianic is profanation, and nothing out of it”. And in
fact, his reading refers this movement of opposites to notorious places in the Western
philosophical (profane) tradition. Plato, Aristotle, and especially Kant, would offer
models of this paradoxical movement. The relationship between the profane and the
messianic, the irreducible split and the simultaneous “promotion” of a meeting between
both forces are submitted no less than to the relationship between “nature” and
“freedom” in critical philosophy: also in Kant would be an overturn of the natural
(profane) to the noumenal (Messianic) through the natural order itself (the profane order
of the profane). The problem with this suggestive approach to Kant is that it risks losing
sight of the strictly magical and messianic singularity of nature/freedom,
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profane/theological relationship in Benjamin: closer to Hamman and the Kabbalah in
his philosophy of language, closer to F. Schlegel and Jewish messianism in his
philosophy of history. It’s not the “teleology of nature” which will enable the
relationship between the profane and the theological, but the immediate mediation of
linguistic experience as the medium of that “experience” in emphatic sense (Erfahrung)
that Benjamin missed, precisely, in his famous critic of Kant: “A concept of knowledge
gained in reflection upon the linguistic essence of knowledge certainly will create a
corresponding concept of experience including fields that Kant failed to integrate into
the system, being the highest of those fields that of religion.”
The issue is here clearly not secularization, nor even its “dialectics” (for
instance, the dichotomy of “disenchantment” of the world and the various efforts of
positive “re-enchantment”). The notion of “profanation” certainly seems more
appropriate insofar as it deactivates the dichotomy between sacred and secular, affecting
the very places of the dichotomy. However, since the profane is itself one of the terms
of the dichotomy is problematic to pretend to dissolve the dichotomy under the
protection of one of its terms (assuming, besides, that this solution could result in the
traditional framework of profane western “philosophy” –rather than in a cryptotheological anti-philosophy). The neutralization of the “places” and “instances” of the
dichotomy can only occur as experience of the theological-profane threshold, that is to
say, as a simultaneously secular and theological experience, or as the (linguistically set)
experience of the end of the dichotomy (the experience of the being given of the
language as such, the rumor of pure language). This openness is the third language of
Benjamin’s Marrano gesture. And this is why we prefer (with Agata Bielik-Robson) to
refer to Benjamin’s tarrying with the theological, as a sort of philosophical Marranism.
Because as Marrano gesture the proper movement of profanation in itself can be
understood as a form –the “quietest” form, and therefore the fairest form– of religion.
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