Professional Documents
Culture Documents
supremely pertinent. Over and above the logical loop evident in the melan-
cholic conversion of privation into acquisition is the spectre of acquiescence
which would – this is Hegel’s beautiful soul – embrace the present in the
gratification of its own despair. There is nothing neutral about the drift to
compensatory gratification. The sublime abstraction which finds power in
disempowerment threatens to evaporate the object into an aesthetic phantas-
magoria which would adapt the subject to the requirements of the present.
The effacement of negativity would still the repetition which is the essential
legacy of trauma – the signature of its inherent historicity – but which is
equally, by that very token, its most generative power. The occlusion of the
traumatic past cuts off any relation to a radically (perhaps catastrophically)
different future.
The structure of melancholia in this way begins to bleed into that of
fetishism – the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in response
to a traumatic loss (‘castration’) which structurally can be neither fully
acknowledged nor denied.5 Perversion not only names the simultaneity
of recognition and disavowal: it hints at the deeper paradox that the very
recognition is the disavowal. There is no acknowledgement of trauma which
in its claim to adequacy (a claim implicit in the very protestation of inad-
equacy) does not efface the loss it would concede. Despite appearances, the
celebrated ‘Je sais bien . . . mais quand même’ structure outlined by Octave
Mannoni in no way neutralizes by partitioning the contradiction it would
announce.6 The fetishistic split which maintains the contradiction between
knowledge and belief – traumatic loss, on the one hand, redemptive totality,
on the other – provides no protective containment of its antitheses, but
rather implicates both within a contaminating porosity and oscillation of
one term into the other.
Could such a perverse simultaneity of acknowledgement and disavowal
be the condition of historicity? Far from indicating a simple deviation from
some norm of repression (together with its counterpart of enlightenment),
fetishism might rather indicate the subject’s irreducible split between two
contradictory imperatives – an antinomy which itself marks the ambivalent
legacy of every trauma. If every relation to history is always at some level a
non-relation to another history – a missed encounter with the other’s lack
and as such a traumatic relation to the other’s trauma – history itself would
be defined by the recursive or reflexive pressure of a loss recognizable only in
its own effacement. Could perversion be the mark of the subject’s impossible
relationship to a loss which is ultimately not its own to acknowledge in the
first place – but so too, equally, the index of a certain promise?
The issue is all the more pressing at a time when the very proliferation
of memorials, the manic drive to museify, threatens to spell the erasure of
memory. It is less a question here of disavowing such disavowal (in the name,
for example, of a demystified or disenchanted mourning) than to consider
what might be at stake in such a contradiction. How to respond to the claim
The Sickness of Tradition 91
of the dead when every response (starting with the piety of the response
which invokes ‘the dead’ as if they were some kind of self-evident corporate
subject) threatens to escalate the amnesia against which the anamnestic
project is directed?
not the immediate, banal contrast between the determined misery of the
former and the voluptuous determination of the latter decisive? A grain of
Nietzschean suspicion might go some way here: the defiant exhibitionism
of the melancholic reveals a streak of luxurious enjoyment matched only
by the severity of the fetishist’s commitment to a jouissance which in its
workmanlike assiduity displays a discipline and focus verging on the
ascetic. Both loss and jouissance present themselves here as symmetrically
and reciprocally traumatic. If castration names the trauma of our symbolic
mediation, the encounter with the Real brings the equally devastating
trauma of an unmediated proximity – the ‘hard kernel’ which marks at
once the limit and the possibility of experience. The fantasy of loss can
itself function as a defence against the trauma of enjoyment, just as jouis-
sance itself can be reinflected as a defence against the trauma of castration.
Just as obsessional rituals can defend against the ‘real’ death threatening
to engulf the subject on the battlefield of enjoyment, so too even ‘little
deaths’ can be reconstructed as so many miniaturized defences against the
symbolic mortifications on the plane of language. The operative antithesis
in this case would be thus not between symbolic castration and ‘real’
enjoyment per se, but rather between the imaginary overlay each inevitably
acquires in the face of the other: according to this ‘Borromean’ logic, even
‘trauma’ can be mobilized as a fantasmatic defence against trauma. The
manifest opposition between the experiences of lack and excess is thus
ultimately less decisive than the structures of fantasy which pre-emptively
sustain them.
One might then proceed to schematize the various parallels. Both
melancholia and fetishism involve a doubling or ‘splitting’ of the self in the
face of a loss, the intractability of which structurally prohibits the recog-
nition it thereby, as prohibition, demands. In the terms of ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ the topological ‘cleavage between the critical faculty of the ego
and the ego as altered by identification’ (SE 14: 249) reflects the ambiguity
of a loss which is simultaneously accepted (by way of metabolizing identi-
fication) and disavowed (by way of literalizing incorporation) – a permanent
‘open wound’ which ambiguously commemorates the original instance
of traumatic wounding in so far as it at once drains away every interior
plenitude of the subject and (the catch) reifies the resultant void of sub-
jectivity as a last, stubborn surd of positivity, thereby reconfirming or
sustaining narcissism in the very injury which would deface it. A lack
congeals, which in its hypertrophy pre-empts the very possibility of the
substitution which it at the same time renders necessary. This brings
melancholia virtually to coincide with fetishism, where the epistemic split
between the affirmation and the denial of lack inevitably reproduces the
very antithesis it seeks to neutralize: the split both retraces and effaces the
castration which it is designed to regulate, in that it functions simultaneously
both as catastrophic fissure and as stabilizing partition.11 The Ichspaltung in
94 Walter Benjamin and History
this way not only creates the very possibility of forming fetishist attachments
but in itself functions as the ultimate fetish.
Various other parallels flow directly from this. The paradoxical relation
to loss in each case leads directly to an intensified attachment to things
whose prosthetic role is neither countenanced nor entirely denied. Thus the
apparent literalism of fetishist desire, the refusal of symbolic mediation,
the irreplaceable ‘thisness’ or singularity of the fetish object, and thus
similarly the peculiar tenacity of melancholia. The ‘cathectic loyalty’12
to the lost object in this latter instance not only does not preclude but
requires the secret construction of a substitute – the remnant of the object
incorporated within the empty interior of the subject – which functions
as a screen memory the very opacity of which remains both refractory
and infinitely tantalizing. (It is ultimately memory itself which gets deter-
mined as the ultimate fetish-object: the veil.) Thus the familiar paradoxes
of recuperation: mourning itself becomes a fetishistic proxy for an object
whose loss is overshadowed by the clamorous grief it occasions, and in
this way furtively stages substitution precisely by insisting on the latter’s
impossibility.
Substitution in each case structurally requires the construction of a part-
object whose fragmentation both prolongs and occludes the traumatic wound
it commemorates. The fetishistic passion for the inanimate – to objects, to
body-parts, and even to the whole body itself now refashioned as its own
synecdoche of itself (the erect body posing as substitute for its own absent
member)13 – displays a chiasmic exchange between unity and fragmentation
whereby the subject finds vitality in the mortification which most shatters it
and thereby retrieves a weird, excessive organicity in dismemberment as such.
The supplement thus both denies and reveals the irreparability of the lack to
which it is consecrated – the part-object functions as the whole object and
as such blocks the syntagmatic completion which it simultaneously incites
and enables – and in this way erodes the opposition between unity and frag-
mentation, an opposition which is in turn elaborated as the opposition
between jouissance (oriented toward the viscosity of life-substance) and
the dead letter of the law. In enunciating the law of enjoyment as his very
own private law – posited without the detour of symbolic mediation – the
pervert effectively elides the structural gap which is the essential condition
of the law as such, and in this way, and through the various literalisms of
his practice, flaunts the law precisely in usurping as exclusive occupant the
site of the law’s own enunciation.
Melancholia displays a similar logic. The incorporation of the object
requires the latter’s abbreviation as a frozen attribute and thereby inflicts
upon it a kind of second death – miniaturization reproduces the death
which it simultaneously reduces – a violence which will in turn reverberate
within the sadomasochistic theatre of grief wherein, famously, it is the lost
object itself which is being whipped by the subject’s most intimate self-
The Sickness of Tradition 95
flagellations. The refusal to admit the object’s lack involves the concession
of that very lack and exacerbation of the latter’s mortifying dismemberment.
Reduced to a part-object within the hollow crypt of subjectivity, the object
persists as living corpse, at once congealed remains and extruding surplus,
whose death accretes like so much cellular efflorescence.
screaming, the serpent’s venom not quite completely penetrated, the agony
not quite yet at its climax: the gaze fixes on the penultimate moment so as
to block the revelation of the monstrous void. Penultimacy – incompletion
as such – becomes a defence against a mortifying conclusion.
Melancholia and fetishism would thus seem to collude to produce the
illusion of an intact present – solitary, sufficient, immune from past or
future threat. Indeed they come to coincide: postponement of a death
forever pending consummates itself in the pre-emptive fantasy of a death
always already accomplished. Thus, in Proust, the blink of an eye from
chronic prematurity to chronic, irreversal senescence, from the phantasm of
the blank page to the phantasm of the bal de morts, from perpetual virginity
to premature, perpetual mummification – and into the no less reassuring
fantasy that ‘having already died, I have nothing left to fear from death’.16
What would it mean to ‘traverse the fantasy’ so as to release the present
from a reassuring stasis? To negotiate the switching station between the too
early and the too late, between fetishistic ‘before’ and melancholic ‘after’,
so as to change the terms of both postponement and its obverse? Here
Benjamin’s reflections on history may prove compelling.
BENJAMIN’S LOSSES
. . . This is so true, that the eternal is more the frill on a dress than any idea.
N3, 2
metaphysical problematic of part and whole unfurls into the more poignant
‘Benjaminian’ problematic – loss and redemption, death and resurrection
– the political, historical and indeed theological stakes begin to emerge.
The issue here is not just the familiar paradox of capitalist recuperation
– the endless reintegration of every dissonance within the syncopated
continuum of the history of the victors. Nor is it simply a question of
Benjamin’s seemingly limitless capacity to blur antitheses – the exquisite
oscillation of virtually every item on the menu between subversion and
subvention. Does the scavenging operation of, for example, Baudelaire’s
chiffonier disrupt or merely reproduce the consumerist compulsion of
capitalist modernity?21 Does the lingering hesitancy of the flâneur obstruct
the traffic flow (as the transit authorities feared) or, by fostering the illusion
of surplus leisure, secretly reinforce it?22 Does the ‘enigmatic satisfaction’
of the allegorist – the lingering lasciviousness toward the thing-world
– challenge the aesthetic plenitude of the symbolic or supply a brand of
private consolation? Do the obsessional arrangements of the collector defy
the functionality of capital or furnish it with the alibi of aesthetic disinter-
estedness?23 Is the melancholic fidelity to the dead decisively distinguished
from the luxurious despondencies – empathic acedia, ‘left-wing melancholy’
– of the vainglorious victors?24 Such fretful questions (the list continues)
have from the beginning plagued the reception of Benjamin. The symmet-
rical chorus of reproaches – too happy, too sad – circles around, but perhaps
itself shies away from the most intractable aporia.
Does the revolutionary standstill – blasting, freezing, exploding time,
shooting the clocks, pulling the emergency brake, etc. – disrupt the triumphal
procession of the victors or merely invert it (thereby buttressing it, etc.) by
reproducing the crystalline abstraction of alienated labour? The question
is not entirely well-posed, but does have the merit of focusing attention for
a moment on the profound congruity between, for example, the essays on
mass culture and the various reflections on history.25 Photography presents
each time the privileged metaphor and model of temporal contraction: ‘to
seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (GS 1.2: 695
SW 4:391) is to experience a synchronization of past and present which can
be understood in the strictest sense as traumatic: the posthumous shock
inflicted on the past under the pressure of a present danger – which is to
say that history is experienced only as and at an irreversible delay. ‘Where
thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions it gives
that constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad’ (GS 1.3:
703 SW 4:396). Benjamin does more here than extend Freud’s or Proust’s
celebrated analogy between the deferred action of the photograph and
the structural belatedness of experience. In pointing to the coincidence of
trauma with its own abreaction – the lightning flash retroactively inflicts the
shock it shockingly discharges – he also points to an irreducible contami-
nation between the messianic rupture and the oppressive viscosity in which
100 Walter Benjamin and History
it intervenes. The revolutionaries who shot all the clocks had, in the first
place, to synchronize their watches, had to affirm the historicist continuum
in the moment of negating it, just as, in another register, the moment of
‘awakening’ is negotiated only from within the claustral confines of the
dream: the dream or phantasm not only gropes numbly towards the next
enthralling episode but in so doing (Adorno ignores this part) turns with
stealth and cunning towards its own overcoming (cf. AP, p. 13)
Fetishism informs not only the content of the Passagen-Werk, and not just
the form of its peculiar windowshop appearance. One might set aside the
(by now) tiresome speculations regarding the mimicry at work here: is the
Passagen-Werk itself a kind of literary arcade, a collection, a site of flânerie,
a department store, a museum, a cluttered interieur, a sad inventory; is
Benjamin a shopper, a ragpicker, a brooder, a thief? A deeper and more
intractable ambiguity informs the project: is it a ruin, a heap, a sketch, a
scaffold, a constructivist construction? Is its posthumous, unfinished quality
provisional, accidental, structural: what is the measure of its incompletion?
Is its unfinishedness that of the collection (forever structurally just one item
short – completion both its presupposition and its logical undoing), and if
so what sustains this logic of perpetual penultimacy? Is the fragmentation
pre-emptive, the serial production of a lack generated so as to maintain the
fiction of totality, and as such a kind of fetishism in reverse?
Liminal experiences pervade the Arcades Project and define its most familiar
landmarks – from Metro entrances to railway stations to the twilight zone of
the arcades themselves – and Benjamin repeatedly invokes the ‘magic of the
threshold’ as paradigmatic both of nineteenth-century urban experience and
of the work that commemorates it; the various spatial and optical ambigu-
ities generated architecturally by glass and iron – inside and outside, near
and distant, past and future – correlate with the deep existential ambiguities
between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, living and dead.
The very porosity of these distinctions in the dream-world of Baudelaire’s
Paris speaks to the unease and fascination generated by the ambiguous time-
space of capitalist modernity itself – the birth-pangs of commodity culture as
it pervades the interstices of the big city – and acquires layered political and
historical resonance in the aftermath of repeated revolutionary defeat. In the
architectural phantasmagorias of post-1848 Paris, ruin and sketch converge
– monuments to missed opportunities, ciphers of futures foreclosed.
Writing in 1935, and remarking on the preliminary nature of Baudelaire’s
modernity (that is to say, his modernity tout court), Benjamin insists on
the provisional or penultimate status of the various nineteenth-century
innovations: ‘all these products are on the point of entering the market as
commodities. But they hover on the threshold [Alle diese Produkte sind im
Begriff, sich als Ware auf den Markt begeben. Aber sie zoegern auf der Schwelle]’
(AP, p. 13/GS 5.1: 59). There is a sense in which Benjamin himself, on the
The Sickness of Tradition 101
48 Ibid., p. 42.
49 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
50 Ibid., pp. 21–2.
51 Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 62.
52 Ibid., p. 62.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., p. 63.
55 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 154.
56 Ibid., p. 174.
57 Ibid., p. 31.
CHAPTER 5
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 18: 253.
Henceforth references to this edition are abbreviated as SE.
2 See for some of these vacillations, the various histories provided by Giorgio Agamben,
Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and, Giulia Schiesari, The Gendering of
Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), together with the inaugural work by
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New
York: Basic Books, 1964).
3 See Agamben, Stanzas.
4 Cf. Jean Starobinski, La Mélancolie au miroir (Paris: Julliard, 1989).
5 See Freud, ‘Fetishism’, SE 21: 155 f. and ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defence’, SE 23: 271–8.
6 Cf. Octave Mannoni, ‘ “Je sais bien . . . mais quand même”: la croyance’, in Clefs pour
l’ imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
7 Cf. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age’, in
Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 249–60.
8 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1989).
9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927), section 27.
10 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de memoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
11 The oscillation is reflected in the contrast between the description in the Abrib, where
the ego structurally assumes the unstable condition of fragmentation and supplementary
accretion it perceives in the object, and the New Introductory Lectures, in which splitting,
now generalized to the point of a universal topographical structure, is ‘dissected’ in terms
of a crystalline division – temporary and recuperable – along stable, pre-established lines.
Thus, on the one hand, ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’, SE 23: 204:
Disavowals of this kind occur very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever
we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete
attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an
acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result
in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends
on which of the two can seize hold of the greater intensity.
Compare, on the other hand, New Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXIII, SE 22:
58 f.:
240 Walter Benjamin and History
So the ego can be split; it splits itself during a number of its functions – tem-
porarily at least. Its parts can come together afterwards. That is not exactly a
novelty, though it may be putting an unusual emphasis on what is generally
known. On the other hand, we are familiar with the notion that pathology, by
making things larger and coarser, can draw attention to normal conditions which
would otherwise have escaped us. Where it points to a breach or a rent, there may
normally be an articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but
not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleave into fragments
whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s
structure.
12 Cf. Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, SE 23: 241.
13 Cf. Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, SE 18: 273.
14 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 136:
He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was
able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship.
In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl
dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference; he will throw himself down
again, his eyes will fill with tears again, he will repeat the poet’s words again.
What a curious dialectic! He longs for the girl, he has to do violence to himself
to keep from hanging around her all day long, and yet in the very first moment
he became an old man in regard to the entire relationship . . . Recollection has the
great advantage in that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is
that it has nothing to lose.
Nietzsche’s analysis of the ‘it was’ – the fantasy of the spectator before the
pageant of ever-completed history – is rigorously parallel. Nietzsche, ‘On the
Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’, Untimely Meditations and
Beyond Good and Evil §277: ‘The everlasting pitiful “too late!” – The melancholy
of everything finished! . . .’
15 Again, Nietzsche demonstrates the profound complicity between the ‘too early’ and
the ‘too late’ – at the level of fantasy:
The problem of those who wait – It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a
higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act
– ‘break out’ one might say – at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and
in every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what
extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the
awakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act, comes but too
late – when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up
in sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he ‘rose up’
that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! ‘It is too late’
– he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth forever useless.
(Beyond Good and Evil §274)
16 Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu.
17 Cf. Freud, ‘Fetishism’, p. 154.
18 For a fuller reading of the Adorno–Benjamin entanglement in terms of the theological
Bilderstreit or ‘iconoclastic controversy’ see Rebecca Comay, ‘Materialist Mutations
of the Bilderverbot’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art (London:
Continuum, 2004), pp. 32–59.
19 ‘Motifs are assembled without being developed’ (C, p. 580). Note how the charge more
or less resumes Lukács’ own earlier opposition between narration and description in
‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978),
pp. 110–48.
Notes 241
20 See Irving Wohlfarth’s suggestive essay ‘Et Cetera? L’historien comme chiffonier’, in
Heinz Wismann (ed.), Walter Benjamin et Paris (Paris: Cerf, 1986), pp. 559–610.
21 Cf. Wohlfarth, ‘Et Cetera?’
22 Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics
of Loitering’, New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–141.
23 Cf. Max Pensky, ‘Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of
the Passagenwerk’, in Michael P. Steinberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 164–89.
24 Cf. Benjamin’s citation of Flaubert in the Theses on History (GS 1.2: 696): ‘Peu de gens
devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage . . .’
25 See in particular Eduardo Cadava’s exemplary remarks on the conjunction of these two
texts – and on the essentially photographic nature of historical memory (and vice versa)
– in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
CHAPTER 6
1 Thus the editors of a German collection of essays on Kierkegaard lament the fact
that Benjamin, with the exception of his review of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard
had nothing to say about Kierkegaard: ‘Leider hat er sich über Kierkegaard ander-
norts [except in the review of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard] nicht geäubert. Dab
er ihn gleichwohl verarbeitet, läbt zumal seine Geschichtsphilosophie vermuten. In
ihr scheint er geradezu darauf aus zu sein, Kierkegaards theologische Intention aus
ihren idealistischen Fesseln zu lösen’. Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve (eds),
Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979),
p. 80.
2 I am referring mainly to the first version of 1931: ‘Was ist das epische Theater?’ (GS
2.2: 519–31). Translations, if not otherwise indicated, are my own.
3 ‘Worum es heute im Theater geht, läbt sich genauer mit Beziehung auf die Bühne
als auf das Drama bestimmen. Es geht um die Verschüttung der Orchestra. Der
Abgrund, der die Spieler vom Publikum wie die Toten von den Lebendigen scheidet,
der Abgrund, dessen Schweigen im Schauspiel die Erhabenheit, dessen Klingen in
der Oper den Rausch steigert, dieser Abgrund, der unter allen Elementen der Bühne
die Spuren ihres sakralen Ursprungs am unverwischbarsten trägt, ist funktionslos
geworden’.
4 ‘Wenn Du nämlich von meinem “zweiten Entwurf ” schreibst “darin würde man nie
die Hand WB’s erkennen”, so nenne ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt und Du
gehst dabei bestimmt über die Grenze hinaus, an der Du – gewib meiner Freundschaft
nicht – aber meiner Zustimmung sicher bist. [. . .] Der WB hat – und das ist bei einem
Schriftsteller nicht selbstverständlich – darin aber sieht er seine Aufgabe und sein
bestes Recht – zwei Hände. Ich hatte es mir mit vierzehn Jahren eines Tages in den
Kopf gesetzt, ich müsse links schreiben lernen. Und ich sehe mich heut noch Stunden
und Stunden an meinem Schulpult in Haubinda sitzen und üben. Heute steht mein
Pult in der Bibliothèque Nationale – den Lehrgang so zu schreiben habe ich da auf
einer höhern Stufe – auf Zeit! – wieder aufgenommen.’ (Letter to Gretel Karplus, 1
September 1935, GB 5: 151).
5 ‘Das saturnische Tempo der Sache hatte seinen tiefsten Grund in dem Prozeß einer
vollkommenen Umwälzung, den eine aus der weit zurückliegenden Zeit meines
unmittelbar metaphysischen, ja theologischen Denkens stammende Gedanken- und
Bildermasse durchmachen mubte, um mit ihrer ganzen Kraft meine gegenwärtige
Verfassung zu nähren. Dieser Prozeb ging im stillen vor sich; ich selber habe so wenig