BENJAMIN, SURREALISM AND THE "SECCRET"
Michael Cowan
“Sich in einer Stadt nicht
zurechtfinden heißt nicht viel,” wrote Walter Benjamin in one of the most
oft-cited passages of his late work Berliner Kindheit. “In einer
Stadt sich aber zu verirren, wie man in einem Walde sich verirrt, braucht
Schulung.”
Exploiting the
ambiguity of the term “irren,” its middle position between “wandering” and
“making a mistake,” Benjamin here describes a paradoxical sort of
“schooling.” For the acquisition of this art of erring – Benjamin goes
onto describe it as a Kunst – is characterized not so much by a
process of learning as by one of unlearning: one must rid oneself
of a certain habitual and instrumental relationship to one’s environment.
The emphasis on such a
non-instrumental relationship lends to Benjamin’s account of his childhood
flânerie through Berlin decidedly surrealist connotations. In André
Breton’s novel Nadja (1928), the narrator continually underlines
the aleatory nature of his meanderings through the streets of Paris –
“sans but aucun” – with the novel’s eponymous heroine. Precisely in its
erratic structure however, their movement embodies a paradoxical
calculation: that of inviting the incalculable or unforeseeable to give a
sign of itself in the midst of a modern world dominated by a utilitarian
and instrumental economy.
Similarly, in his preface to Le paysan de Paris (1926),
Louis Aragon described the aesthetic project behind the book as an
effort to unlearn the instrumental relation to things.
“Il me faut un effort douloureux pour
m’arracher à cette coutume mentale.”
In her study Erinnerung an die Zukunft, Anna Stüssi was surely
correct to underline Benjamin’s debt to surrealist flâneur literature –
and particularly Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris – in Berliner
Kindheit.
In particular, Benjamin’s notion of a schooling in the art of erring
recalls Aragon’s discussion of l’erreur further on in the preface
to Le paysan de Paris:
Or il est un
royaume noir, et que les yeux de l’homme évitent, parce que ce paysage ne
les flatte point. Cette ombre, de laquelle il prétend se passer pour
décrire la lumière, c’est l’erreur avec ses caractères inconnus, l’erreur
qui, seule, pourrait témoigner à celui qui l’aurait envisagée pour
elle-même, de la fugitive réalité. Mais qui ne saisit que le visage de
l’erreur et celui de la vérité ne sauraient avoir des traits différents?
L’erreur s’accompagne de
certitude. L’erreur s’impose par l’évidence.
For Aragon, the act of erring/error
(erreur) is connected to the search for a certain “reality” (réalité)
and even “truth” (vérité). But despite his insistence, in
quasi-Cartesian language, on the “certainty” (certitude)
that accompanies acts of erring into the dark, the reality connected to
erring still appears to flee the gaze of the one who errs, remaining
forever “fugitive.” Erring functions not to reveal that reality to the
light of day, but rather to “bear witness,” in Aragon’s
formulation, to its existence as something hidden (l’erreur qui, seule,
pourrait témoigner […] de la fugitive réalité).
For Maurice Blanchot, this
paradoxical effort to point to the unknown as unknown represented
surrealism’s most enduring ethical legacy. Looking back from the vantage
point of 1969, Blanchot explained in L’entretien infini:
L’expérience
surréaliste vise (il me semble) le point de divergence à partir duquel
toute connaisssance, comme toute affirmation limitée de vie, échappe à
elle-même pour s’exposer à la force neutre du désarrangement. […] Le
jeu, l’aléa, la rencontre. Ces mots désignent, sans le définir, le
nouvel espace […] à partir duquel […] l’inconnu s’annonce et entre,
hors jeu, dans le jeu. Espace qui n’est jamais que l’approche d’un autre
espace, le voisinage du lointain, l’au-delà, mais sans transcendance comme
sans immanence.
Surrealism, Blanchot suggests,
intends the overcoming of intention itself. Surrealist knowledge
“aims” (vise) not at a grasping, but rather at its own “exposure”
to what cannot be aimed at. For Blanchot, such a paradox contains an
ethical moment to the extent that the relation to the other thus
established would avoid any attempt at epistemological mastery or
possession of an object. The important thing – and a precept Blanchot sees
surrealism as not always having lived up to – is to find a way to relate
to the unknown as unknown, as a secret the essential quality of
which is precisely to remain secret. This means never grasping it,
but only approaching the secret’s threshold (l’approche d’un
autre espace, le voisinage du lointain). This relation
without (intentional) relation is something Blanchot finds throughout
the poetry of René Char. For Char, writes Blanchot in another section of
L’entretien infini,
La recherche – la
poésie, la pensée – se rapporte à l’inconnu comme inconnu. Ce rapport
découvre l’inconnu, mais d’une découverte qui le laisse à couvert; par ce
rapport, il y a « présence » de l’inconnu; l’inconnu, en cette
« présence », est rendu présent, mais toujours comme inconnu. Ce rapport
doit laisser intact – non touché – ce qu’il porte et non dévoilé ce qu’il
découvre. Ce ne sera pas un rapport de dévoilement. L’inconnu ne sera pas
révélé, mais indiqué.
An indication rather than a
showing, a suggestion rather than a putting on display: here the other is
not summoned forth into the service of the seeing, knowing subject – not,
that is, transformed into an object of knowledge.
The ethical project
described here by Blanchot – the effort to establish a non-instrumental
relation to the other through the maintenance of secrecy – can help to
articulate one of the central points of convergence between surrealist flânerie
and the “art of erring” Benjamin undertook to articulate in Berliner
Kindheit. The child at the center of Benjamin’s text is
everywhere confronted by secrets. Often, the narrator of Berliner
Kindheit does not describe the sort of ethical relation
Blanchot attempts to formulate. In a chapter entitled “Der Strumpf,” for
example, he recounts one of his favorite childhood games, in which he
delved ever “deeper” into a wardrobe until, in the back corner, he found a
pile of rolled-up stockings, the mysterious form of which never ceased to
fascinate him. In highly eroticized language, the narrator describes his
efforts to find out what lies in the middle, to seize and “unveil” the
“soft” secret residing deep within the stocking:
Es war ‘das
Mitgebrachte,’ das ich immer im eingerollten Innern in der Hand hielt, was
mich in ihre Tiefe zog. Wenn ich es mit der Faust umspannt und mich nach
Kräften in dem Besitz der weichen, wollenen Masse bestätigt hatte, begann
der zweite Teil des Spieles, der die Enthüllung brachte. Denn nun machte
ich mich daran, ‘Das Mitgebrachte’ aus seiner wollenen Tasche
auszuwickeln.(BK, 58)
This passage
clearly expresses the urge for a kind of violation; its language is one of
sexual seduction (was mich in ihre Tiefe zog) and a desire for
possession (Wenn ich es mit der Faust umspannt und mich nach Kräften in
dem Besitz der weichen, wollenen Masse bestätigt hatte).
The child’s gesture embodies, moreover, the project
of an instrumental modernity as Benjamin understood it. The gesture
recalls, in particular, the movement of “penetration” (Eindringen)
that Benjamin saw as the central project of the cameraman and the surgeon
– and which directly opposed them to the painter and the magician – in his
essay on the work of art:
Mit einem Wort: zum
Unterschied vom Magier [...] verzichtet der Chirurg im entscheidenden
Augenblick darauf, seinem Kranken von Mensch zu Mensch sich gegenüber zu
stellen; er dringt vielmehr in ihn ein. – Magier und Chirurg verhalten
sich wie Maler und Kameramann. Der Maler beobachtet in seiner Arbeit eine
natürliche Distanz zum Gegebenen, der Kameramann dagegen dringt tief ins
Gewebe der Gegebenheit ein.
Like the cameraman rendering visible
the body’s inner secrets or penetrating behind the surface appearances of
perception – and Benjamin wrote these lines in an age fascinated by the
cinema’s ability to visualize otherwise invisible aspects of the objective
world through the use of techniques such as slow-motion and x-ray
cinematography
– the child before the rolled up stocking wants to make visible the
secret underneath, to bring back a sort of visual trophy (das
Mitgebrachte) which might offer some proof if his conquest.
Nonetheless, at the moment the child
attempts to force the revelation of the secret, the certainty of
possession he thinks he has assured himself of (und mich nach Kräften
in dem Besitz der […] Masse bestätigt hatte) gives way to a feeling of
dismay:
Ich zog es
immer näher an mich heran, bis das Bestürzende sich ereignete: ich hatte
“Das Mitgebrachte” herausgeholt, aber “Die Tasche”, in der es gelegen
hatte, war nicht mehr da. Nicht oft genug konnte ich die Probe auf diesen
Vorgang machen. Er lehrte mich, dass Form und Inhalt, Hülle und Verhülltes
dasselbe sind. Er leitete mich an, die Wahrheit so behutsam aus der
Dichtung hervorzuziehen, wie die Kinderhand den Strumpf aus “Der Tasche”
holte. (BK 58)
Das Bestürzende:
Benjamin’s choice of terms here implies that the child’s discovery
occasioned a certain loss of self-control.
With the realization that the desire for possession can never quite get
hold of what it wished to possess, the child’s self-assured confidence is
shaken to its core – an experience which does not, however, keep him from
attempting again and again to gain mastery over the hidden secret.
Nicht oft genug konnte ich die Probe auf diesen Vorgang machen:
Benjamin’s child seems to be involved here in a pleasure-pain struggle for
power – albeit one he destined to lose – precisely the opposite sort of
relation to that Blanchot describes above.
Nonetheless,
Benjamin does say that there was a lesson in all of this: Er lehrte
mich, die Wahrheit so behutsam aus der Dichtung hervorzuziehen, wie die
Kinderhand den Strumpf aus “der Tasche” holte.
Despite Benjamin’s formulation of carefully “extracting”
the truth, however, the import of the child’s failed attempt to extract
the stocking’s secret seems to lie elsewhere; this can be seen in a
passage from a text Benjamin is surely hinting at here, as Anna Stüssi
recognized, with the words Wahrheit and
Dichtung.
In his essay on Geothe’s novel Wahlverwandschaften, Benjamin speaks
of the beauty of poetry as something that only exists, as it were, in
secret. Recalling the platonic model of an ideal and essential Beauty
lying beyond the realm of appearances (Schein), Benjamin asserts
that beauty itself can never be seen directly, without its covering under
the realm of appearances – which means also that it can never be named.
Das Schöne,
Benjamin contends, must remain
ausdruckslos:
Zum Schein nämlich steht das Ausdruckslose, wiewohl im
Gegensatz, doch in derart notwendigem Verhältnis, dass eben das Schöne, ob
auch selber nicht Schein, aufhört ein wesentlich Schönes zu sein, wenn der
Schein von ihm schwindet. Denn dieser gehört ihm zu als die Hülle und als
das Wesensgesetz der Schönheit zeigt sich somit, dass sie als solche nur
im Verhüllten erscheint. [...] Mag daher Schein sonst überall Trug sein –
der schöne Schein ist die Hülle vor dem notwendig Verhülltesten. Denn
weder die Hülle noch der verhüllte Gegenstand ist das Schöne, sondern dies
ist der Gegenstand in seiner Hülle. [...] Hier gründet die uralte
Anschauung, dass in der Enthüllung das Verhüllte sich verwandelt, dass es
“sich selbst gleich” nur unter der Verhüllung bleiben wird. Also wird
allem Schönen gegenüber die Idee der Enthüllung zu der der
Unenthüllbarkeit. Die Kunstkritik hat nicht die Hülle zu heben, vielmehr
durch deren genaueste Erkenntnis als Hülle erst zur wahren Anschauung des
Schönen sich zu erheben. Zu der Anschauung, die der sogenannten Einfühlung
niemals und nur unvollkommen einer reineren Betrachtung des Naiven sich
eröffnen wird: zur Anschauung des Schönen als Geheimnis. Niemals noch
wurde ein wahres Kunstwerk erfasst, denn wo es
unausweichlich als Geheimnis sich darstellte.
In its attempt to articulate
the “essential law of beauty” (das Wesengesetz der Schönheit) or
the criteria for defining something “essentially beautiful” (ein
wesentlich Schönes), Benjamin’s definition of beauty here follows no
less an essentialist logic than its platonic antecedent. And yet, for
Benjamin, the essence of beauty resides not in any self-identical quality
(Benjamin himself places quotations around the words “sich selbst gleich”),
but rather precisely in its secrecy. This quality of secrecy, the
presence of the veil, is essential to beauty as such. Indeed, one
might say that it is the cover, the realm of “appearances,” that first
makes beauty into what it “is,” even as it makes the latter unknowable.
And this covering, which is so often –and first of all by Plato himself –
seen as a negative obstacle to be overcome or a deception (Trug) to
be corrected, is, in Benjamin’s account, precisely what the critic should
be focusing on. The object of aesthetics would lie not in an act of
uncovering or piercing the veil (Die Kunstkritik hat nicht die Hülle zu
heben), but rather in indicating beauty as a secret (zur
Anschauung des Schönen als Geheimnis)
– and more precisely in indicating the essential secrecy of beauty.
In other words, aesthetics
seeks not to define an object so much as a relation, and precisely
a relation of secrecy (Denn weder die Hülle noch
der verhüllte Gegenstand ist das Schöne, sonder dies ist der Gegenstand in
seiner Hülle).
It is the impossibility of removing
the veil without losing the very thing “inside” (dass in der Enthüllung
das Verhüllte sich verwandelt) that provoked the child’s dismay before
the stocking in Berliner Kindheit. If we follow Benjamin’s reading
of Goethe and Plato, the “lesson” of the stocking episode would consist
not in an extraction of the secret, however “careful,” but rather an
insight into its unextractability [Also wird allem Schönen
gegenüber die Idee der Enthüllung zu der der Unenthüllbarkeit] – the
insight, more importantly, that attention to this secret requires a
different sort of relation than the sado-masochistic game of possession or
the visual demand for identity. The “truth” (Wahrheit) in
“poetry” (Dichtung) is not an object in the sense of
something that a reader could “extract” through a hermeneutic act. Rather,
the “truth” of poetry, like beauty, would reside, essentially, in this
relation of secrecy itself.
Such a lesson in aesthetic
contemplation is not unlike the schooling in erring, for it demands
an overcoming of the intentional, instrumental relation to its “object.”
In its most ethical moments, Benjamin’s account of a childhood in Berlin
encourages, on the part of readers, not a demand to reveal what lies
behind the covering, but rather an attention to the relation of
secrecy itself. Berliner Kindheit is riddled with secrets, not
simply those hidden in the figure of the child for the narrator, but also
the secrets with which the world confronts the child himself.
Sometimes, as in the stocking game, Benjamin shows us a child all to eager
to violate the relation of secrecy. In the chapter Pfaueninsel, the
narrator describes his search, during an afternoon outing to Berlin’s
“Peacock Island,” for a peacock feather, a “booty” (Beute) that
would, in his words, give him “ownership” of island.
“Funde sind Kindern, was Erwachsenen
Siege,” Benjamin writes,
Ich hatte
etwas gesucht, was mir die Insel ganz zu eigen gegeben, sie
ausschliesslich mir eröffnet hätte. Mit einer einzigen Feder hätte ich sie
in Besitz genommen – nicht nur die Insel, auch den Nachmittag, die
Überfahrt von Sakrow mit der Fähre, all dieses wäre erst mit meiner Feder
mir ganz und unbestreitbar zugefallen.
(BK, 46)
The entire language of this
passage is one of power: the impatient child is interested only in
a find (Fund) and not in the search itself; he
desires a possession that, as a monument to his own victory (Sieg),
would reaffirm him in his own egotistical subjectivity. But like the
stocking, the island refuses to hand the secret over.
Not having found a feather, the child is
left inconsolable: “Die Insel war verloren und mit ihr ein zweites
Vaterland: die Pfauenerde. Und nun erst las ich in den blanken Fenstern
des Schlosshofs vorm Nachhausegegen die Schilder, welche der Glast der
Sonne in sie schob: ich sollte heute nicht ins Innere treten” (BK,
47).
The secret of the island refuses to let the child into its sanctuary.
Paradoxically, his Nachhausegehen is anything but a
“homecoming” in any triumphal sense, for he leaves the island with a
devastating feeling of exile and loss.
At other times,
the child of Berliner Kindheit seems to learn to take on a more
ethical relation to the secret. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than
in the chapter Fischotter, where Benjamin describes the child’s
waiting for the appearance of an otter at the zoo, his favorite of all the
animals precisely because it proves the most mysterious. Although the
zookeepers have constructed a sort of grotto for the otter on the ground
beside its basin, the animal obstinately remains out of sight.
The grotto, we read,
war als
Wohnung für das Tier gedacht; doch habe ich es niemals darin angetroffen.
Und so blieb ich häufig, endlos wartend, vor dieser unergründlichen und
schwarzen Tiefe, um irgendwo den Otter zu entdecken. Gelang es endlich,
war es sicher nur für einen Nu, denn augenblicklich war der gleissende
Insasse der Zisterne wieder von neuem in der nassen Nacht verschwunden.
(BK, 44)
This nasse Nacht serves as
the otter’s Hülle – its cover and its real shelter as opposed to
the grotto meant to put the animal on display – which first defines the
secret as a secret. That the child’s “sighting” of the otter covers an
amount of time too small to measure (im Nu) is precisely what
guards its mystery and lends the creature a quasi-mythical quality: “Es
war das heilige Tier des Regenwassers” (ibid).
One is reminded here, in the image
of the captivated child awaiting a sign of the otter, of all of the
fleeting creatures with which René Char populated his poetry. In Le
martinet, for example, the central activity of the bird seems to
reside precisely in its resistance to sighting: “Il n’y a pas d’yeux pour
le tenir. Il crie, c’est toute sa présence.”
Similarly, when the narrator of La fauvette des roseaux
searches for the warbler of the title, he can find only the traces
indicating the animal’s hidden presence: “La perche de saule happée est à
l’instant cédée par l’ongle de la fugitive.”
Indeed, for Char as well, this beauty was ultimately ungraspable,
for he found no more appropriate name for the secret so desired in these
creatures than that of permanent invisible, a poem whose opening
lines read like a gloss on Benjamin’s otter chapter:
Permanent invisible
aux chasses convoités,
Proche, proche
invisible et si proche à mes doigts,
Ô mon distant
gibier…
In Char’s poetry, one finds a
sort of parallel to Benjamin’s paradoxical notion of a schooling in
erring: the motif of the hunt. Char laments the traditional
sort of hunt, carried out by a desire all too eager to appropriate its
“object.” “Un mince fusil va
l’abattre,” he writes of the martinet. Or in Pour renouer:
“Nous nous sommes soudain trop approchés de quelque chose dont on nous
tenait à une distance mystérieusement favorable et mesurée.”
To this movement of appropriation, however, Char opposes another
sort of hunt, one every bit as paradoxical as the schooling in erring. For
the ethical hunt does not aim to kill or collect a trophy, but rather to
maintain that relation of distance (Ô mon distant gibier) to
the other which defines it as other – so that what is hunted is not
the object of the hunter but rather an overcoming of objectifying
intention itself, an overcoming that first allows the traces of the
unknown to become visible. Char’s term distant gibier refers not
simply to a “game” that happens to be at a distance, but rather to that
distance itself. In Benjamin, as in Char, establishing a relation to
the unknown as unknown requires the maintenance of this distance, a desire
not to desire to cross the threshold into the
interior (ins Innere treten).
If the ethical relation
requires respect for an essential spatial distance, it also requires the
maintenance of a temporal distance in the form of patience –
precisely the sort of patience lacked by the boy on the peacock island. In
the citation from the otter chapter above, Benjamin describes the child’s
waiting for the glimpse of the secretive animal as endless (endloss
wartend). In the same chapter, the narrator goes on to describe the
rain on the child’s window, which has a similar effect on the child as the
water in the otter’s basin. “Und auch darin bewies
[das
Tier]
seine heimliche Verwandschaft mit dem Regen. Denn niemals war der liebe,
lange Tag mir lieber, niemals länger, als wenn Regen mit seinen feinen
oder groben Zähnen ihm langsam Stunden und Minuten strähnte.”
Although this veil of rain might appear to harbor a secret, it does not
call forth the child’s impatience to get behind it. Quite the contrary,
far from “killing time,” the rain seem to slow the passing of time down,
separating out the day’s hours and minutes the way a comb separates the
hairs on a head.
Here, it is precisely this increasing of the distance, this slowing down
of time’s passing, that the child values (Denn niemals war der liebe,
lange Tag mir lieber, niemals länger…). The rain provokes the same
attitude of waiting in the child as the otter’s watery darkness: “Und
unersättlich sah ich ihm [dem Regen] dann zu.
Ich wartete. Nicht bis es nachliess. Sondern dass es mehr
und immer üppiger herunterraschte” (BK, 45).
This watery Hülle
arouses the child’s desire, not for a break, not for its lifting to reveal
the sun, but rather for more rain.
In this sense, the desire of
Benjamin’s child in the otter chapter resembles not so much a desire for
appropriation as the ethical desire described by Emmanuel Levinas – what
Levinas termed “metaphysical desire” to distinguish it from a desire
understood according to the model of physical need:
Les désirs que l’on
peut satisfaire, ne ressemblent au désir métaphysique que dans les
déceptions de la satisfaction ou dans l’exaspération de la
non-satisfaction et du désir, qui constitue la volupté même. Le désir
métaphysique a une autre intention – il désire l’au-delà de tout ce qui
peut simplement le compléter. Il est comme la bonté – le Désiré ne le
comble pas, mais le creuse.
The exasperation of
non-satisfaction: Levinas’s term captures
precisely the sense of frustration felt by the boy engaged in the stocking
game or the hunt on the peacock island. If metaphysical desire has
another intention, this is precisely that paradoxical intention to
overcome intention (the latter understood as desire in that
traditional sense of need). “Désir
sans satisfaction,” writes Levinas, “qui, précisément, entend
l’éloignement, l’altérité et l’extériorité de l’Autre.”
Levinas attempts here to articulate a paradoxical sort of desire, one
whose ethical posture resides precisely in its refusal to reduce the
alterity of the other. This is what Levinas means by bonté, a
generosity toward the otherness of the other:
Générosité nourrie
par le Désiré et, dans ce sens relation qui n’est pas disparition de la
distance, qui n’est pas rapprochement, ou, pour serrer de plus près
l’essence de la générosité et de la bonté, rapport dont la positivité
vient de l’éloignement, de la séparation, car elle se nourrit, pourrait-on
dire, de sa faim. Eloignement qui n’est radical que si le désir n’est pas
la possibilité d’anticiper le désirable, s’il ne le pense pas au
préalable, s’il va vers lui à l’aventure, c’est-à-dire comme vers une
altérité absolue, inanticipable, comme on va à la mort. Le désir est
absolu, si l’être désirant est mortel et le Désiré, invisible.
L’invisibilité n’indique pas une absence de rapport; elle implique des
rapports avec ce qui n’est pas donné, dont il n’y a pas idée.
That Levinas
again speaks in terms reminiscent of the the motif of erring (Eloignement
qui n’est radical que si le désir n’est pas la possibilité d’anticiper le
désirable,[…] s’il va vers lui à l’aventure) is not by chance.
In Levinas’ formulation of generous desire,
there is no place for the movement of Eindringen. While the
desiring subject does keep up a relation with what it desires, this
what is not the object of any intentional grasping or any
epistemological appropriation, but rather a continual “désarrangement,” as
Blanchot had put it, of “connaissance.” Of this invisble something,
writes Levinas, one can have
no idea.
In the more generous relation to the
other, desire does not overcome distance and the time of waiting is not
abolished. Both, on the contrary, are increased. Separation is seen not as
an obstacle to be reduced, but as essential to the relation itself: “Le
Même et l’Autre se tiennent par un rapport et s’absolvent de ce
rapport, demeurant absolument séparés.”
Paradoxically, in moments like those spent before the otter’s basin, the
child desires not possession of an object, not the secret’s visibility,
but its covering over; to borrow Levinas’ formulation, the child’s desire
seems to feed on its own hunger: Und unersättlich sah ich [dem Regen]
dann zu. Ich wartete. Nicht bis es nachlies. Sondern dass
es mehr und immer üppiger herunterraschte.
Benjamin says something similar about the child’s relation to the otter:
“Aber ich hätte liebe, lange Tage die Stirne an sein Gatter legen
können, ohne mich dabei an
[dem
Tier]
sattzusehen” (BK, 44). Here as well, Benjamin stresses the
drawing out of the time of waiting (liebe, lange Tage). The paradox
of this statement lies in the fact that the child is not, in fact,
seeing the otter at all, but only the watery darkness that covers
it over. Benjamin’s term sattsehen might function in this sentence,
then, not as an anticipation of satisfaction (satt meaning
“satiated” as in the term sich satt essen, on which the expression
sich satt sehen forms an analogy), but rather as an indication of
precisely the opposite of perspective: ohne mich sattzusehen – a
seeing (Sehen) that does not seek to be satiated (satt).
Or rather, one might say that it fills itself only on its own
seeing, a seeing which, far from representing some sort of scopic drive,
appears more as a sort of groping in the dark.
If such a groping in the darkness
before the otter’s basin recalls Aragon’s notion of erreur with
which I began (Or, il est un royaume noir…),
this is hardly a coincidence. Where Baudelaire’s heroic flâneur
provided Benjamin with a paradigmatic figure for
comprehending the disintegration of experience in the modern world, the
surrealist “art of erring” encapsulated a different, ethical
project. Like the narrator of Aragon’s Paysan, the narrator of
Berlinder Kindheit, through his numerous accounts of unfathomable
secrets, attempts to articulate a paradoxical, non-instrumental
form of knowledge: a knowledge that seeks not the lifting of the secret’s
veil, but rather the essential secrecy of the secret itself.
© 2005 Michael Cowan
Michael Cowan
earned his Ph.D. in German Studies, as well as an M.A. in French, at the
University of California at Berkeley. He is currently working on a book
project dealing with the discourse on the “will” in early 20th-century
German culture and will begin teaching German and Film at the University
of Virginia in the fall. His interests include modernism, history of the
body and early cinema. Publications: Leibhaftige Moderne. Körper in
Kunst und Massenmedien 1918-1933, co-edited with Kai Marcel Sicks
(Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2005);
“‘Gymnastics of the Will’: Abulia and Will Therapy in Modern German
Culture” (forthcoming in Kulturpoetik, Fall 2005);
“Nichts
ist so sehr Zeitgemäß als Willensschwäche: Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Psychology of the Will” (forthcoming in Nietzsche-Studien 32/2005);
“Spectacle de masse et modernité hystérique dans Mario et le magicien
de Thomas Mann” (Etudes Germaniques
59/2004:
87-107); “Theater and Cinema in the ‘Age
of Nervousness’: Der Andere by Paul Lindau (1893) and Max Mack
(1913)” (Cinema & Cie 5/Fall 2004).
