Toward a Genealogy of Gender in Walter Benjamin's Writing Author(s): Eva Geulen Source: The German Quarterly, Vol.

69, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 161-180 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/408339 . Accessed: 25/07/2011 17:07
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EVA GEULEN New York University

Toward a Genealogy of Gender in Walter Benjamin's Writing

Ichkannmirkeinensch6pferischen Geist ohneGeschlechtsmerkmale vorstellen. ---Johann Hamann Georg it possible-and ifso, how-to acknowledge and account for differenceswithout either subsuming differenceunder a commondewhichwouldhypostatize,erase, nominator, subjugate,or negate difference,or sacrificing any notion of a commonground,which would risk the disintegration of feminist politics into an ever-increasingand potentiallly infinite number of feminisms and their respective identity politics? What Fredric Jameson sought and believed to have foundin Adornoas an antidoteto postmodernistrelativismandproliferating particularisms2-namely unity and difference -is certainlycompatiblewith the motivations behind feminist returns to Adorno. And it is in this regard that Benjamin's work, too, might provideinsights for feminism's currentdilemma,for Benjaminalso sought alternatives--even more forcefully than Adornoand sometimes to the latter's dismay-to the idealist dialecticof subjective andobjective, particularanduniversal. But perhapsbecause Benjamin'sphilosophicalprojectis considerablyless clearly defined than Adorno's,feminist criticism and critiqueofBenjamintraditionallyhave focused on the kind of prominent themes whose relevance to feminist concerns seemed beyond question: Christine BuciGlucksmann's work on the feminine as allegory of modernity in the Baudelaire essays and the Passagen-Werk,Miriam Hansen'sworkon the affinitiesbetweenfemale spectatorshipand Benjamins'sanalysis of distracted reception, Susan BuckMorss'sdiscussions of women and nature in Benjamin, and Helga Geyer-Ryan's re-

I When feminists turn or return to the Frankfurt School-as a number recently have done-Walter Benjaminis usually not the first of its figures to cometo mind. Still, his complex relationship to the more canonical figure of Adornosuggests the possibility that Benjamin might also offer alternatives to the notoriously ambivalent status of femininity in Adorno'sthought. Adorno'srelentless critiqueof any genderessentialism which would deny its mediation by the social whole is only one side of his thought on gender. The other, more problematic side becomes evident in his tendency to associate the utopian moment of nameless bliss with the feminine-as-nature. This gesture always threatens to reaffirm a specific mode of aestheticizing femininityvia its hypostazisationas exotic otherness that constitutes one of the dominant gender ideologies of bourgeois culture.1 For this and other reasons many recent feminist turns to Adornoin particular and the Frankfurt School in general have shifted focus,and they have done so within the context of a specificjuncture, or perhaps, at a specificimpasse of contemporary feminisms. To put it in inexcusably crude and abstract terms, the question is this: Is
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cent Fables of Desire are all prominent examples.3 The value of these and other contributions, including feminist responses more decidedly critical of Benjamin by Rey Chow and Janet Wolff, for example,4 is beyond doubt. But another approach- for the conceivable. moment, a desideratum-is This approach would aim at a reconstruction and critical examination of the role of gender as it informs Benjamin's general thought and as it has left its marks on his discourse, whatever the topic. The tendency to seize isolated motifs and themes ought to be supplemented by a systematic rethinking of Benjamin's primary philosophical concerns, his theory of language and his philosophy of history, his concepts of experience and materiality-all according to the dimension of gender. While this cannot possibly be completed in one article, it is possible to provide some prolegomena with regard to the general parameters and the problems such an undertaking necessarily raises. The central question that these preliminary reflections inevitably yield for a feminist account of gender in Benjamin is whether or not Benjamin's undeniably pervasive recourse to gendered categories is to be criticized as a problematic sexualization of discourses that remains caught in, and consequently perpetuates, sexist sterotypes. This question ought not be decided in abstracto according to one's theoretical convictions and preferences, and, moreover, it cannot be so decided, for the terms of the decision are already addressed in and by Benjamin's work. The mode in which the decision is addressed has the effect of rendering the above question principally undecidable. Such undecidability is perhaps discomforting, but it might also prove emancipatory. In this vein, then, the present analysis not only seeks to provide the first steps towards a genealogy of the gender problematic as it can be reconstructed from Benjamin's work, but also tries to demonstrate that Benjamin's thought need not, and perhaps should not, be conceived as a more or less

fortunate object for feminist criticism-and that, indeed, it offers, provokes, and perhaps even necessitates a critique of feminist criticism. Where Benjamin's work poses problems for feminism, it exposes feminism to its own epistemological and theoretical problematic. And that might well turn out to be its most significant contribution to contemporary feminist thought.

II
The legitimacy, indeed the urgency, of a general reconstruction of gender and gendering in Benjamin can be derived from virtually any of his texts, for all of them are saturated with the imagery of gendered eroticism. This determines not only a significant aspect of his prose's seductive beauty but pertains also to the political materialism of his thought that is, after all, concerned with "bodiesthat matter,"to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler.5 At the end ofhis essay on Surrealism, for example, Benjamin explicitly yet enigmatically claims the existence of a "Bildraum"that is also always a "Leibraum"which discharges its sexual tension in an orgasm called revolution.6 Even (and especially) on the level of Benjamin's own image-oriented prose, postulates like this one need to be taken seriously. To write off a priori this dimension as false aestheticist obsession with the literary qualities of Benjamin's style presumes that a pure content could be isolated and a neutral politics could be distilled that would not be thoroughly tainted by the representations that engendered it. In contrast to Adorno's proverbial prudishness, which is but the underside of the exquisite status the feminine holds as the gatekeeper of forbidden utopia, Benjamin is an excessively erotic writer on all fronts. This dimension persists as figure and metaphor, allusion and analogy in all of Benjamin's texts. Particularly prominent in this regard is the sphere of sexual reproduction, encompassing motifs such as pregnancy, procrea-

GEULEN:Benjamin
tion, conception, birth, and, of course, childhood-for the most eroticized figure in Benjamin is neither man nor woman, but the child. Undoubtedly sexual but of indeterminate or as of yet irrelevant gender, childhood in Benjamin might well be the site of the erotic pure and simple. Why this is sowhy childhood, located at the intersections of future and past possibilities, where proleptic anticipation and retroactive recollection coincide, could and perhaps even had to advance to the emblem of erotic desire in Benjamin's oeuvre is of course part of the question of gender in Benjamin. But only a detour-and detours, delays, and digressions are themselves unmistakable coordinates of Benjamin's erotic universecan provide an answer to this question. While the imagery of sexual reproduction has been linked since the eighteenth century to "Mother" nature and an organicism that was metaphorically transferred onto the sphere of aesthetic creativity and artistic genius, its origins reach back into antiquity. Idealism's apotheosis of art as born by creative genius7 is only a historically late, albeit powerful, manifestation of a Western tradition inaugurated by Plato. Privileging the poet's "children" over real children, the platonic hierarchization of mind and body is grounded in a metaphorical gesture that simultaneously elevates birth to a privileged image of (male) aesthetic production and demotes actual (female) reproduction.8 The immortal life of poetry rests on the mortality or even the death of women and children. Feminism has not ceased to chastize this ideology of aesthetic production.9 But Benjamin deviates in several respects from this ideology. First, his sexualized imagery of production and reproduction tends to appear in contexts that are not only far removed from aesthetics but actually opposed to it, such as the altogether anti-aesthetic realms of allegory and technology. In fact, few others have so radically and persistently questioned the opposition of creative and non-creative work and the

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gendered ideology of aesthetics it supports. Benjamin's writings on modern technologies of reproduction during the 1930s focus on film's and photography's potential displacement of the traditional hierarchization and opposition of modes of production. In the "Kunstwerk"essay and in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, Benjamin insists on the subversive effects that modern technologies have on gender-overdetermined distinctions such as production and reception or creative and manual labor.10 As the famous piece on the "Destruktive Character" suggests, even the opposition between destruction and production collapses under the onslaught of a critique that questions the very distinctions that have legitimized and enforced the gendered division of labor and its accompanying stereotypes: creation vs. fabrication, poiesis vs. techne, natura naturans vs. natura naturata.11 Since this aspect of Benjamin's thought is well known, two examples should suffice to underscore the disruptive effects Benjamin's peculiar deployment of the traditional discourse has in the realm of technology. At the end of Einbahnstra/fe, Benjamin argues that World War I was a first attempt at the orgiastic sexual communion of technology with the cosmos: Dies groBeWerbenum den Kosmos vollzog zum ersten Male sich im planetarischen MaBstab, namlich im Geiste der Technik.Weil aber die Profitgierder herrschenden Klasse an ihr ihren Willen zu biiBen gedachte, hat die Technik die Menschheit verraten und das Brautlager in ein Blutmeerverwandelt.12 In the "Kunstwerk"essay the fascist appropriation of modern technology similarly figures as the latter's rape (I: 256). Such examples suggest that Benjamin's disruptions are not restricted to the juxtaposition of traditional image and non-traditional context but also occur on the level of the image itself, thereby accentuating-here in the figure of rape-the deviations from "thenorm."These features of destruction and violation also

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characterize the conclusion of the essay on Surrealism quoted above. For only after and through destruction, "ja gerade nach solch dialektischer Vernichtung wird dieser Raum noch Bildraum und konkreter: Leibraum sein" (II.1: 309). One of the effects of Benjamin's critical invectives against traditional paradigms of production is thus the privilege accorded to the altogether un- or anti-productive. Repeatedly he stresses the deviations from or the failures of the "normal process":delays and digressions, interruptions and violations.13 While these are undoubtedly markers of Benjamin's eroticism-born, as he said of himself, under the sign of Saturn, "dem Planeten der langsamen Umdrehung, dem Gestirn des Z6gerns und Verspaitens"(VI: 521)-they are also easily recognizable as the central gestures of his philosophy of history. The normative logic of production, which under capitalist conditions permeates even the remotest realm, bears responsibility for the nexus between the figures of Benjamin's eroticism and his historico-political thought, which also privileges the figures of arrest and explosion, shock and interruption.14 It is by virtue of this link that a phenomenon such as impotence, for example, can serve as the figure for the labor-strike: "Mannliche Impotenz ... in ihrem Zeichen vollzieht sich der Stillstand der Produktivkrifte-" (1.2: 679). Strike and standstill are conceived here as "Vollzug"or consummation, which returns an unexpected potency to impotence,15 indicating that Benjamin's complex sexual economy travels along rather strange paths. Getting lost and going astray constitute indeed a key motif in this context. Of the many instances of Benjamin's refusal to abide by capitalist directives, perhaps none is more characteristic and revealing than a short passage entitled "Bettler und Huren" from Berliner Kindheit, in which political and sexual awakening originate together at the intersections of Berlin streets.16 Benjamin's account of his first practical exer-

cises in strike and delay, refusal, revolt, and sabotage expose production and productivity as the common denominator of the political and the personal, the public and the private, capitalist commodity production and sexual reproduction. The child's stubborn denial of his own inescapable ties to production in the text's later passages ich hatte namlich die Gewohnheit angenommen,immer um einen halben Schritt Es zuriickzubleiben. war als wollte ich in keinem Falle eine Front, und sei es mit der eigenen Mutter,bilden"(IV.1:287) recalls the literary production of the earlier parts, for it is on occasion of "einer kleinen Niederschrift, vielleicht der ersten, die ich ganz fiir mich selbst verfasste" (287) that critical insight into the principles of (capitalist) production emerges. His first text, Benjamin recounts, dealt with the recognition that poverty has to do with the humiliation "der schlechtbezahlten Arbeit" (287). His story told of a man distributing leaflets and described the "Erniedrigungen, die er durch ein Publikum erfihrt, das fiir die Zettel kein Interesse hat. So kommt es, daB der Armedamit schloi3ich-sich heimlich seines ganzen Packs entledigt" (287). And he adds: "Gewif3 unfruchtbarste Bereinigung der die Aber keine andere Form der Revolte Lage. ging mir damals ein als die der Sabotage" (287). The infertile, infantile, unproductive, and in this sense impotent, solution remains characteristic of Benjamin's repeated exercises in refusal and his investment in refuse, in what has fallen by the wayside of production, "die ganz verworfene Psyche" (287) of the prostitute, for example. In "Bettler und Huren"the adolescent indeed believes he escapes his imprisonment in a neighborhood, a class, and a family by turning to the prostitute. But the sexual desire that finds expression in "dembeispiellosen Anreiz ... auf offener StraBe eine Hure anzusprechen"consists primarily in the delay of the act rather than in its realization. Finally, Benjamin relieves himself in much the same way as the man of his story: "Wennich dann, manches-

GEULEN:Benjamin
mal schon gegen Morgen, in einer Torfahrt innehielt, hatte ich mich in die asphaltenen Bander der Straf3e hoffnungslos verstrickt, und die saubersten Hande waren es nicht, die mich freimachten" (288). Masturbation is conceivably "die unfruchtbarste Bereinigung" (287) of the situation but it does perpetuate the refusal to join ranks with anybody, the refusal of all modes of production and the ultimately solitary solidarity with waste and refuse. But several aspects of this short text complicate its straightforward interpretation as yet another emblematic narrative of the liberating solidarity with the refuse of society as a position of effective resistance to social norms of production. (And this understanding is indeed the preferred mode of interpreting Benjamin, particularly prominent among feminists.) First of all, it should not be overlooked that the sabotage is de facto ineffective, and the proud sensation ofhaving abdicated one's class was "ein truigerisches leider" (288). This is not only a retrospective political commentary,17 for futility and self-deception are already evident elsewhere in the text. The principal affinity between writing and sexuality suggested by the parallel between the man in Benjamin's first story who relieves himself of "Zettel"and the masturbation in which the boy relieves himself of his sexual tension is not anchored in the familiar and familial metaphors of birth and production but grounded in delay, suspension, and ultimately the production of waste. More precisely, it is grounded in wasting the product, which turns wasting into a mode of non- or anti-production. Imagined as masturbation, literary production produces without producing and thus without reproducing the familiar patterns of production, organic or capitalist. Ineffectivity is the obvious and accepted price of this procedure. Finally, it is the very encounter with the prostitute which, on the rare occasions that it actually appears to have taken place, throws into relief the paralysis that holds sway over the peculiar amalgamation of

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production and wasting operative in this dense piece. When the child finally approaches the prostitute his experience is nothing short of ambiguous, for the female object of his desire turns out to oscillate alarmingly between organic and inorganic, human and machine. The sexual experience thus evokes ambivalence's classical paradigm, the uncanny: "Das Grauen, das ich dabei flihlte, war das gleiche, mit dem mich ein Automat erfiillt hatte, den in Betrieb zu setzen, es an einer Frage genug gewesen waire"(288). The ambivalence of the transgressive sexual act--"das Grauen"--corresponds to the ambivalent success of the attempt to escape the world of production and productivity, since both result in the uncanny experience of absolutely reified communication and commodification of consumer and product alike: Like a coin "warf ich denn meine Stimme durch den Schlitz ... und ich war nicht fahig, die Worte, die da vor mir aus dem stark geschminkten Munde fielen, aufzulesen" (288). The association of the doll-like woman with the slot machine not only intensifies the latent, and in modernism all-too-familiar, disfiguration of woman into machine18suggesting that the capitalist productionmachinery ultimately catches up with its saboteur-but it also effects a peculiar gender change. While inserting a coin into a slot preserves the imaginary scenario of male penetration, the resulting ejaculation of the machine-"Worte, die da vor mir aus dem stark geschminkten Munde fielen"effectively turns the woman into a man and leaves the boy an impotent collector and reader of words, "ich war nicht fahig ... aufzulesen" (288). The sex appeal of the inorganic is, of course, a well-known topos of modernity and consequently a central motif in Benjamin's Passagen-Werk, which devotes an entire section to "die Puppe, der Automat" (V.2: 847-51). But the unexpected insight urged by this particular piece, which is after all concerned with the origins of literary production, and in which sexual, textual,

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early text on Socrates, the very figure to whom we owe one of the most famous allegorical uses of hermaphroditism in the Aristophanean legend of "Hilftenliebe":21 "Same und Frucht, Zeugung und Geburt nennt seine sympotische [sic] Rede in damonischer Ungeschiedenheit und stellte im Redner selbst die ffirchterlichste Mischung vor: Kastrat und Faun" (II.1: 131). Socrates is doubly disfigured, according to Benjamin, because he illegitimately fuses, and thereby confuses, the spheres of spirituality and sexuality, thus contaminating their distinct purity and lending influence to "die furchtbare Herrschaft sexueller Anschauungen im Geistigen" (131). But hermaphroditism is not reducible to compromising the distinct spheres of sexuality and spirituality. Another theme, and quite another tone, dominates the essay on Gottfried Keller, in whose prose, III Benjamin claims, "wechselt das Mdnnliche ins Weibliche, das Weibliche ins Mannliche In Benjamin's ceuvre this ambiva- hinuiber."22 Here the allusion to hermaphlence-which forever sabotages clear dis- roditism exhibits some humorous features, tinctions, installs sexuality as ambivalent, and in the disguise of"Aphroditos, die bairand potentially makes any ambivalence tige Aphrodite" (II.1: 293), Keller appears sexual-found its figure, its body, and its as harmless and somewhat "verhutzelt" as (double or ambivalent) gender in the her- the Swiss antiquity of his prose (II.1: 289). maphrodite. While Benjamin scholars have By contrast, Keller's contemporary Adaloccasionally remarked on this figure, bert Stifter is said to possess a problematic particularly on its autobiographical impli- "Doppelnatur"23that is as much devoid of cations,19 its virtual omnipresence in Ben- any redeeming qualities as Stifter's narrajamin has not been sufficiently acknowl- tives are surely devoid of (intentional) huedged. The allusions to hermaphroditism mor. In the fragments on Stifter (and, incithat proliferate in Benjamin's writings are dentally, in the longer essay on Goethe's by no means always unambiguous sites of Wahlverwandtschaften), the hermaphrodiresistance, nor are they, however, unambi- tism of the demonic is stigmatized as "Baguous sites of abjection or perversion. stardisierung" (II.2: 609), as the violent, ilSometimes the Zwitter can appear in a posi- legitimate, and unmistakably sexually tive light as the epitomy of eroticism, as marked mixture of distinct spheres-those seen in the description of Lesskow's "erd- of"sittliche Welt und das Schicksal mit der haft gewaltigen, mutterlichen Manner- Natur" (II.2: 609) in the case of Stifter, and gestalten."20 But hermaphroditic tenden- of "Geist"and "Sexus"in the case of Socracies can also signify a highly problematic tes. Sometimes these polar characstate of demonic confusion. Nowhere, per- terizations of the hermaphrodite can even haps, did Benjamin express his deep dis- coincide in a single figure. In Benjamin's dain for hermaphroditism's demonic am- essay on Kraus, Kraus's demon, described bivalence more aggressively than in an "alsZwitter aus Geist und Sexus,"24is even-

and economic production are as "verstrickt" as the boy is in "die asphaltenen Bander der StraBe,"is that ambivalence emerges as the hallmark of sexual desire per se. Precisely because it is the site of a primal scene in which literary, political, and sexual awakening are inextricably knotted, one is lead to conclude not only that the sexual is ambivalent but, conversely, that all ambivalences are henceforth to be understood as sexual. Each and every ambivalence-and while they are already numerous in this piece, in Benjamin's ceuvre as a whole they are legion-would then be a mark of sexuality. In this reading, ambivalence would be considered the seal of erotic desire in Benjamin, for the precise reason that ambivalence is the form and figure of delay, suspension, and chance.

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tually redeemed in the lyric in which the "Zwitter"is transformed into an androgynous angel: "kein neuer Mensch; ein Unmensch; ein neuer Engel" (11.1:367). As the word "Unmensch" suggests, hermaphroditism is by no means limited to the ambiguity ofhuman genders. Another variant of hermaphroditism in Benjamin leads into Kafka's chimeric world of hybrids. The uncanny oscillation between animate and inanimate of the thing/creature "Odradek" is articulated in terms of doubled or inverted gender. Recalling the child's fascination with its mother's "Nalikasten" Benjamin writes:

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drogyny is experienced negatively as castration and sexual impotence, as in Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example. The positive connotations, as in Lesskow and perhaps even in Kafka, recall the platonic myth of "Hilftenliebe," which like the Judeo-Christian and particularly the mystic tradition since Jacob Bohme, emphasizes the utopian potential in the figure of an androgynous savior.27 Benjamin's varying commitment to these two traditions of imagining androgyny reflects in turn two competing, yet obviously interrelated philosophical concerns. To the extent that the motif of androgyny is part of a philosophical project Und schwerlich hatte ich mich sehr gethat tries to undo the platonic tradition and wundert,wenn bei den Spulen eine redenits idealist variants, Benjamin must feel an de, die Spule Odradek,gelegen hatte, die affinity to such "leibgeistige Philosophie"ich fast vierzig Jahre spater kennen lernfor he is himself searching for an alternate. Zwar nennt der Dichter diese redende tive to the idealist overcoming in dialectical und ratselhafte, welche auf den Treppen "Aufhebung"and absolute spirit at the cost in den Zimmerecken sich herumtreibt, of the particular and the body. But BenDas wird aber "dieSorge des Hausvaters." jamin's peculiarly aristocratic contempt for der Vorstandeinerjener zweideutigenFathe demonic mixture of separate spheres in milien sein, bei denen sich die Gethe Kantian spirit of critique as separation schlechtsverhaltnisseverkehren.25 and "Unterscheidung"equally finds expresAnd the desire it instigates-"soviel spuirte sion in features such as castration or impoich schon damals, daB die Zwirn- und Garn- tence frequently associated with the herrollen mich mit verrufener Lockung pei- maphrodite, even though they also fail to nigten"(IV.1:290)--echoes the ambivalently function as unambiguous value judgments. arousing encounter with the automated This fundamental ambivalence of the Zwitprostitute in "Bettlerund Huren,"which pre- ter's own intrinsic ambivalence, oscillating cedes "DerNihkasten" in Berliner Kindheit. between highest potency and impotence, As a figure of ambivalence, then, her- desexualization and resexualization, must maphroditism is itself ambivalently em- be acknowledged by any reflection on genployed. Sometimes an object of desire, at der in Benjamin. While it is quite easy to other times-and occasionally even at the detect an all-too-familiar gender-dichotsame time--one of abjection or terror, its omy in distinctions such as nature vs. ethos significance is never reducible to the sex- or sexuality vs. spirituality, the polyvalence whenever hermaphroditism is of the hermaphroditic forbids its reduction ual-yet present, an aura of sexuality is, too.26 That to the confusion of the two sexes. And the the ambivalence of the already ambivalent undetermined gender of the motif of impofigure persists throughout its deployment tence obviously also fails to provide secure criteria for distinguishing between negasuggests that Benjamin simultaneously draws on two distinct, even opposed tradi- tive and positive hermaphroditism. As difficulties mount in the effort to detions of the ancient motif. Socrates, Stifter, and Kraus (prior to his redemption as an- termine the ubiquitous hermaphrodite's gel) point back to a tradition in which an- function and meaning in Benjamin's

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prose,28 the most promising interpretive strategy would seek to elevate the hermaphrodite to the status of a distinct metamotif. One could, for example, link the hermaphroditic with allegory and read into or out of the hermaphrodite all the features of Benjamin's concept of allegory, so that the hermaphrodite towers over Benjamin's oeuvre as an allegory of allegory.29Or one could explore the affinities that prevail between dialectical images and the hermaphrodite. Indeed, to the extent that the hermaphroditic in Benjamin can be understood as the privileged image of ambivalence per se, it is also the image of(or for) "dialectical images" which are characterized by nothing other than ambivalence: "Zweideutigkeit ist die bildliche Erscheinung der Dialektik, das Gesetz der Dialektik im Stillstand" (V.1:55), as one of Benjamin's most famous formulas states.30 However, even the determination of the hermaphroditic as the allegory of allegory, or the allegory of dialectical images, or dialectical image of dialectical images is too limited. For if Benjamin's dictum that the image space is also always a body-space is taken seriously, then any image, whether marked as dialectical image in the strict sense or not (and since ambivalence is dialectics' only visible signature, who is to say what is and what is not a dialectical image?) is ambivalent and thus hermaphroditic. This means, furthermore, that all images in Benjamin, including those that are not recognizably sexual or gendered, are implicated in or related to gender and sex. It is not just the case that sexuality and double gender become images for ambivalence, but conversely, all images, to the extent that they are ambivalent, are also always sexually gendered, oscillating hermaphroditically between image and body, language and materiality. There is, then, in Benjamin not a single "innocent"or "immaculate" image, no image that could escape its own ambivalence, its own hermaphroditism, and thus its own sexuality. Even the image of the hermaphrodite itself must re-

main subject to the ambivalence it signifies. And perhaps this is the ultimate ambivalence: it remains undecidable whether the doubly gendered hermaphrodite is the ultimate signifier, the privileged meta-image for a world of ambivalences whose intrinsic heterogeneity is leveled and narrowed down to the ambivalence of gender, or, conversely, whether we must understand Benjamin's hermaphrodite as opening the narrow confines of sexuality and gender definitions by implicating it on all levels of discourse, so that no image, no speech is ever untouched by gender and sexuality. Sexuality would then not be restricted to one or two genders but would have to be understood as multiple, including the gender of objects and words. To put it bluntly: in Benjamin, are we dealing with another instance of the sexualization of discourses as they proliferate throughout the nineteenth century and have been forcefully analyzed by Michel Foucault,31 or is this conversely a moment of discursivization that emerges in the diversification, disruption, and pluralization of sexuality and gender(s)?32

IV
This question needs to be formulated so strongly and unambiguously because it marks the site of Benjamin's challenge to feminism, which has for the most part avoided the true scope of the gender problematic in Benjamin by restricting its investigations to safely identifiable motifs of (presumably) determinate gender, such as the lesbian or the prostitute. This stragegy in turn safeguards feminism's own position as unambiguous. For when ambivalence is diagnosed-as it often is in recent feminist readings of Benjamin-it is Benjamin's (presumably determinate) position which is judged as ambivalent for the purposes of feminist critique. But what renders his thought ambivalent is rather the persistent refusal to occupy a position-and it is this

GEULEN: Benjamin very refusal that the hermaphrodite also embodies. In the multifarious world of Benjamin's demonic and hermaphroditic prose, ambivalence not only permeates his discourse on feminity, as other critics have pointed out, but disturbs and disfigures both gender distinctions and the difference between what is and what is not sexual, resulting in androgynous, bastardized monstrosities of ambivalence. Emphasizing the kind of intimacy and clearly erotically overdetermined relationship that binds sexuality to image and image to sexuality in Benjamin's writing surely catapults the discussion out of the confines of Benjamin scholarship and into the highly contested arena of debates over the relationship of discourses and gender, images and bodies. In this context, insisting on ambivalence, and particularly on the kind of relentlessly elusive ambivalence at work in Benjamin, is a risky strategy open to many objections. In an essay on feminist approaches to British aestheticism Kathy Alexis Psomiades, following Michel Foucault and Nancy Armstrong, has drawn attention to one problem with particular pertinence to the question of Benjamin's hermaphrodites.33 Psomiades focuses on the effects and interpretability of a gender ideology that gives to femininity a double nature,34 leaving no doubt that Benjamin's persistently ambivalent deployment of sexualized imagery needs to be recognized and criticized as a sexualization of discourses, which operates precisely through the figures and pathways of a (distinctly feminine) ambivalence. Extending the familiar split within bourgeois concepts of femininity between good and bad girl, whore and madonna, Psomiades claims that these models enabled and limited the figuration of contradictions in no way related to femininity and women: "Femininity is thus a discursive field admirably suited to the figuration of contradiction, of two sides ofthe same question, even ofideological self-contradiction."35 While feminists such as Susan Gubar or Mary Poovey

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have interpreted this model in such a way "that the difference within feminity is both the locus of patriarchal control and the locus of resistance to that control,"36 Psomiades demonstrates convincingly that this account remains politically problematic insofar as it reenacts the very gender ideology that has paradoxically helped to sustain the social system within which it operates. Of course, Psomiades's critique of the seductive power of gender-as a system of signification that structures the possibilities for knowledge at any given moment37-is also addressed to all those feminisms that postulate or insist on ambivalence. Feminism's double gesture, "that which occupies both sides of a question in order to undermine the status quo polarization... is thus a gesture which reenacts the gender ideology of femininity that made such figurations possible in the first place."38This powerful critique of what one might call deconstructive feminism-"double gesture" is a Derridean term-cannot leave Benjamin's Zwitter unaffected. In light of Psomiades's arguments the double gender of Benjamin's hermaphrodite is but a radical version of the gender ideology that figures feminity as split or double. The hermaphrodite's true gender thus reveals itself-s/he is woman. Such a conclusion seems all the more legitimate in light of the fact that the nineteenth-century tradition of imagining hermaphroditism, from Bachofen's influential Mutterrecht (1861) to Ludwig Klages and others, has persistently privileged the feminine side of the hermaphrodite in accordance with a bourgeois ideology that identifies sexuality with femininity.39 At this point, with the true gender of the hermaphrodite presumably unveiled, Benjamin's dubious ambivalence splits, so to speak, and solidifies into the positions feminists can take vis-a-vis his work. Depending on one's theoretical presuppositions, one can praise the ambivalent or hermaphroditic femininity as a potential site of resistance or, following

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Armstrong and Psomiades, criticize it as a gender ideology that remains in the service of a politically problematic sexualization of discourses. Having reached this impasse, it seems prudent to postpone any decision or sidetaking in favor of retracing one's steps and exploring further the emergence of gender and sexuality in Benjamin's thought. The primal scene of "Bettler und Huren" presents a dense and concise, but chronologically late and belated staging of the intertwined origins of sexual, textual, and political awakening. Decades earlier Benjamin had composed another text on origins to which he would return, as to an origin, throughout his life. For the philosopher it was as much of a breakthrough as the "kleine Niederschrift" was for the writer: "und ich darf sagen, da3 ichjetzt zum ersten Mal zur Einheit dessen was ich denke vordringe" (II.3: 932), Benjamin says of his 1916 essay "Uber Sprache uiberhaupt und iiber die Sprache des Menschen."40 Since Benjamin chose to develop his exposition of language against the backdrop of Biblical Genesis, an original nexus of sexuality, gender, and language is supplied by the paradigm of a particular type of production, namely creation. Not surprisingly then, the very language of the language essay, its idiosyncratic terminology of and "Schaffen,"for example, "Empfaingnis" is deeply saturated by gender. This early text on Genesis thus cannot fail to offer some clues to the genesis of gender in Benjamin's thought and to facilitate an explanation of why sexuality is omnipresent, and why its relationship to gender remains so opaque and difficult.

guage beyond the realm of human language, which will later be distinguished from other languages by virtue of the name and naming. Benjamin justifies this remarkable and methodologically decisive universalization of "anguage" as communicability by underscoring our inability to imagine anything at all, "dasnicht in gewisser Weise an der Sprache teilhaitte (II.1: 140-41)." "[V]olligeAbwesenheit der Sprache" would amount, he claims, to an idea, sich auch im Bereich "aber diese Idee laiJ3t der Ideen, deren Umkreis diejenige Gottes bezeichnet, nicht fruchtbar machen" (II.1: 141, my emphasis). If the absence of language amounts to an idea that defies fertility, then fertility in all its senses of potence and conception, germination and procreation must be considered as intrinsic to and essential for language. And indeed, what Benjamin proceeds to reveal in this essay is nothing less than such an a priori linguistic sexuality. It is a certain kind of reproductive or creative capacity, in short its fertility, that language retained after God had removed himself from his creation, having released his all-creative word. In the mute (but not non-communicable and therefore not nonlinguistic) world of objects and nature, the divine word is residually present as the "Keim"of the cognizant name: "Denn Gott hat die Dinge geschaffen, das schaffende Wort in ihnen ist der Keim des erkennenden Namens ..." (II.1: 151). On the side of human language, the originally undivided power of the divine word has also regressed into a quasi-embryonic stage. The remainder and residue ofhuman language's divine origin in God is the ability to conceive, a conception whose receptive organ, so to speak, is once again the name: "ImNamen V ist das Wort Gottes nicht schaffend geblieben, es ist an einem Teil empfangend, wenn in "Uber Sprache tiberhaupt und auch sprachempfangend, geworden" (II.1: Early uiberdie Sprache des Menschen" Benjamin 150, my emphasis). This conception is in introduces the central notion of "Mitteil- turn directed toward the language of obbarkeit" or communicability (II.1: 141) that jects: "Aufdie Sprache der Dinge selbst, aus allows him to broaden the definition oflan- denen wiederum lautlos und in der stum-

GEULEN: Benjamin men Magie der Natur das Wort Gottes hervorstrahlt, ist diese Empfaingnis gerichtet" (II.1: 150, my emphasis). As name, the creative word had become "an einem Teil empfangend" (II.1: 150, my emphasis) and its other part or other gender is surrendered in the other residue of divine creation: "Dieses Schipferische, seiner g6ttlichen Aktualitat entledigt, wurde Erkenntnis" (II.1: 149). Knowledge, "Erkenntnis," is the name's second gender. Whereas the capacity of conception was itself conceived of as actively directed toward something, here the notion of spontaneity in turn shows passive restraints: "Diese Erkenntnis der Sache ist aber nicht spontane Schopfung" (II.1: 150), because it requires the interaction with "Empfiangnis," the capacity for which is the name's other part, or its other gender. As name and by virtue of the name, word and language are thus intrinsically and hermaphroditically double--"Erkenntnis" or spontaneity (but not creation) and "Empfaingnis"(but not sheer passivity) at the same time. Consequently, Benjamin claims that the simultaneity of"Empfangnis" and "Spontaneitdt" can be found nowhere but in language: in "dieser Einzigartigkeit der Bindung" they exist "nur im sprachlichen Bereich" (II.1: 150). Recognizing that Benjamin's notion of "Spontaneitat" is another word for or translation of"Erkenntnis" exposes the fact that this enigmatic and, as some have claimed, abstruse and mystic essay actually occupies very familiar philosophical territory. For the question of a possible unity of spontaneity and receptivity, of "Spontaneitat der Begriffe" and "Rezeptivitdt der Empfindungen," is verbatim Kant's question in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.41 According to Kant, these two branches of our knowledge might have a common but certainly unknowable root. By locating their common root or "Bindung"in language and language alone, Benjamin has managed nothing less than the deduction of the transcendental character of language; and with it he has deduced a quasi-gendered hermaphroditic

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sexuality of language itself without so much as mentioning men or women.42 However, all this is only a part, "einTeil," the side ofthe matter that precedes the turn for the worse, when the blissful "Bindung" of spontaneity and receptivity falls apart with the Fall. Everything that pertains to language prior to the Fall corresponds to the side of hermaphroditism that is not condemned, when the mixture of spheres is not (yet) the subject of scorn and disdain. But with the Fall everything changes: "Der Stindenfall ist die Geburtsstunde des menschlichen Wortes, in dem der Name nicht mehr unverletzt lebte ..." (II.1: 153). Where the name is tainted, spontaneity and receptivity are no longer bound in immaculate union but result in birth, the "Geburtsstunde." The word and the concept of birth mark the fall of language which has left the realm of the name and entered the realm of production and instrumentalization: "Das Wort soll etwas mitteilen (aulBer sich selbst). Das ist wirklich der Stindenfall des Sprachgeistes" (II.1: 153). In the short text on Socrates written at about the same time, Benjamin further elaborates this aspect. Since Socrates's speech is said to lack the essential communicability, "die Fdhigkeit, sich mitzuteilen" (II.1: 129), the Socratic question reduces language to "ein bloBes Mittel zur Erzwingung der Rede" (II.1: 131). Socrates's discourse is deemed "eine Erektion des Wissens" (II.1: 131), and with utmost disdain Benjamin adds: "Sein Begriff von geistiger Empfaingnis ist: Schwangerschaft" (II.1: 131). The sign of the spiritual, however, "ist-vielleicht nicht der Zeugende-sicherlich aber der ohne (II. schwanger zu werden empfaingt" 1: 131). What happens with the Fall and the entry into the realms of production and instrumentalization is the splitting of sexuality into conception and procreation on the one hand and birth on the other. Thus the split that runs through Benjamin's sexuality and renders the hermaphrodite ambivalent is ultimately a split that marks two sides or two understandings of sexuality.

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But these two sides do not fall along the woman who delivers man from the nature lines of male vs. female gender-unless, of he is tied to by the fact of his having been course, one chooses to reduce women and born by woman: "und wie die Geliebte ihn femininity to the capacity for pregnancy vom Banne der Mutter befreit, so 16st die and birth. Benjamin's texts, however, par- Frau buchstaiblichvon der Mutter Erde ihn, ticularly in their invectives against birth, die Hebamme, welche jene Nabelschnur are one of the most forceful indictments of durchschneidet, die aus Naturgeheimnis the very powerful mother-myth.43 geflochten ist" (IV.1: 141). But is this really the familiar pattern? But what about the other side of herThe birth of the human Strictly speaking, this other, second non- or maphroditism? word cannot be undone, but it can be re- anti-birth-no longer characterized by deemed, purified, and reerected in a certain pregnancy but by scission and separation, sense. Postlapsarian "Geschwatz" or chat- a castration of sorts-is the original sepater "kennt nur eine Reinigung und Er- ration, the "Ur-teil," that gives rise to h6hung, unter die denn auch der geschwat- gender difference in the first place. What zige Mensch, der Stindige gestellt wurde: Benjamin describes here is indeed the bedas Gericht ... Im Stindenfall, da die ewige coming, the birth, of the possibility of genReinheit des Namens angetastet wurde, er- der differences. In short: this is Benjamin's hob sich die strengere Reinheit des richten- genealogy of gender out ofthe spirit ofjudgden Wortes, des Urteils" (II.1: 153). This is ment as original separation. So it is not acthe context responsible for the demoniza- tually the case that Benjamin eventually tion of hermaphroditism, the source ofBen- resorts to the gender difference to legislate jamin's incessant desire to purify by split- the opposition of sexuality and spirituality ting, judging, and separating. Yet, it is along the lines of femininity and masculinprecisely at this moment that a gender di- ity; on the contrary, genders and gender difvision of male vs. female reasserts itself, ferences only come into being with and after unexpectedly and in a different mode. With the Fall, which is a fall into the kind of regard to the realm of the hermaphroditic, differentiations that only judgment makes judgment is called upon to split and sepa- possible and necessary. Despite appearrate what exists in demonic confusion, thus ances, the difference at issue is not simply giving rise to the distinct spheres of sexu- an opposition of sexual vs. non-sexual, but ality and spirituality as distinct in the first rather a sexual difference, i.e., a differentiaplace. The essay on Socrates indicates un- tion within and constitutive of sexuality. mistakably that this distinction rests on, or This is why Benjamin corrects himself and at least coincides with, the difference of adds, in the Socrates essay, that the realm male and female: "Es ist wahr: das Dasein of the spiritual is "geschlechtslos und doch des Weiblichen verbtirgt die Geschlechts- von tiberweltlichem Geschlechte" (II.1: losigkeit des Geistigen in der Welt" (II.1: 130). Like the language of judgment, this 131). Even though it is necessary to caution gender is "tiberhaupt";overhead it hovers, against identifying "das Weibliche" with like God's word which has, according to woman, the basic pattern of this thought is Benjamin, "iiber dem Menschen als richtall too familiar: By taking on the sexual per endes Urteil schwebend sich erhalten" (II.1: se, woman (or femininity) makes room for 157, my emphasis). the non-sexual purity of the spiritual. In What Benjamin's essay performs is the essence, this is the very structure operative translation or transformation oflanguage's in the tradition of gendering aesthetics prelapsarian sexuality into its postlapsince Plato. Its occurrence in Benjamin's sarian version of the language ofjudgment. work is by no means unique-in a later pas- But the distinction between pre- and postsage from Einbahnstra/Je it is once again lapsarian-if it really is a distinction-

GEULEN: Benjamin should not be overemphasized. Within the realm of translation there exist, according to Benjamin's language essay, no oppositions but only metamorphoses: "Kontinua der Verwandlung, nicht abstrakte Gleichheits- oder Ahnlichkeitsbereiche durchmiBt die Obersetzung" (II.1: 151).

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guage essay is the task of this concluding section. For once we have reached the essay on language, once language has absorbed the gender problematic and gender has become a mode of articulation of difference, we have reached a point where the question of gender in Benjamin has become irrevocably undecidable. But even though this essay forces us to suspend critical decisions, it in no way precludes an inquiry into its VI prehistory. In the language essay Benjamin atEverything Benjamin wrote in the years to deduce the transcendental char- prior to World War I while working for the tempted acter of language prior to, and independent journal Der Anfang returns, as if by graviof, the differentiation into form and content, tational force, to the topic of gender and subject and object, and thus prior to predi- sexuality.46 In a letter to his friend Herbert cation and judgment. With the notion of Belmore he characterized his project in the "Mitteilbarkeit" and "Mittelbarkeit"he ap- very terms that were to remain essential: pears to have found this pre-predicative di- "Vergeistigung des Geschlechtlichen" and mension.44 His emphasis on mediality re- "Vergeschlechtlichung des Geistigen."47 sults in the central notion of"Ubersetzung" Much later, in the Berliner Chronik from which is nothing but the articulation of the 1933, Benjamin formulated his devastatcrucial unity ofreceptivity and spontaneity: ing critique of the youth movement with "Fuir Empfangnis und Spontaneitait zu- which he broke irrevocably shortly after the outbreak of the war. That Benjamin should gleich, wie sie sich in dieser Einzigartigkeit der Bindung nur im sprachlichen Bereich select the highly overdetermined word finden, hat aber die Sprache ihr eigenes "damonisch"48to characterize the youthWort und dieses Wort gilt auch von jener movement's influence on him, the very Empfaingnis des Namenlosen im Namen. word that so consistently signals the illeEs ist die Ubersetzung der Sprache der gitimate mixture or fusion of sexuality and Dinge in die des Menschen. Es ist not- spirituality, suggests the failure of the prowendig, den Begriffder Ubersetzung in der ject as he formulated it in his letter to Beltiefsten Schicht der Sprachtheorie zu be- more. To understand both the failure and griinden ..."(II.1: 150-51). But Benjamin had not always located abandonment of these early projects, as such mediality exclusively in the realm of well as the subsequent shift of Benjamin's language.45 Rather, his turn to language in thinking, it is necessary to grasp the philo1916 follows a long exploration of other pos- sophical ambitions of his early thought. sible sites. A genealogy of gender in Ben- While the themes of this phase span a vajamin, however preliminary, would be in- riety of topics, their common focus is alcomplete until it has shown the translation ready what it will be in the language essay, or "Uberftihrung"ofthe gender problematic namely the search for a solution to (Kanin the early writings prior to 1916 into the tian) oppositions and antinomies that mediality of language, where spontaneity avoids the pitfalls of idealist fusion. In the and conception coexist in the sphere of "Dialog uiber die Religiositait der Gegentranslation. Tracing the origins ofgendered wart" Benjamin reviews the standard language in Benjamin, this "Verwandlung" philosophical responses to the loss of unity of his earliest thoughts on gender and their that was effected by Kant's separation of translation into the terminology of the lan- the senses and understanding, of concep-

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tion and spontaneity, and finds them all sharing "die gleiche Unfruchtbarkeit."49 Classicism was indeed able to recreate a kind of unity, but its aesthetic solution remained abstract and singular, an insight of the few: "Grundlage des Lebens kann sie nicht werden" (II.1: 32). Mysticism's straightforward denial of any dualism and its identification of the sensual as spiritual pure and simple also reaps nothing but scorn. Decadence, finally, figures as the most despicable solution because it "begeht die Todstinde den Geist nattirlich zu machen" (II.1: 32). The failure of these neutralizing and therefore infertile mediations suggests that the solution cannot be the result of any mediation at all. What is required instead is a medium in which one side of the opposition becomes translatable into the other: nature into culture, social ethos into personality, and finally also sexuality into spirituality-and vice versa. This medium, which Benjamin will proclaim to have deduced as language and communicability by 1916, bears a different name in these earlier texts: the community ofyouth. By 1916 Benjamin had shifted from youth to language, from community to communicability, from "Gemeinschaft"to "Sprachgemeinschaft" (II.1: 150). The idea of youth first emerges on the occasion of Benjamin's reflections on the antinomical relationship of ethics and pedagogy. With Kant, he argues that the "Sittengesetz" is essentially independent from any empirical content: "Das Sittengesetz ist Norm des Handelns, aber nicht sein Inhalt."50 Since lessons and education are practical, and therefore dependent on means and examples, the very idea of a "Moralunterricht"amounts to a contradictio in adjecto: "dader Vorgang der sittlichen Erziehung prinzipiell jeder Rationalisierung und Schematisierung widerstreitet, so kann er nichts mit irgendeiner Art von Unterricht zu tun haben" (II.1: 49). Having thus arrived at the strict impossibility of a "Moralunterricht,"the notion of community intervenes to rescue the possibility of an

ethics of pedagogy. In the community, Benjamin claims, the abstract norm translates or transforms itself into a lived set of rules: "Wie wir schon sahen, steht das Sittengesetz jedem Empirisch-Sittlichen (als einem Empirischen) beziehungslos fern. Und doch erlebt die sittliche Gemeinschaft es immer wieder, wie die Norm sich umsetzt in eine empirische, legale Ordnung" (II.1: 50, my emphasis). This "Umsetzen"-in the "Leben der Studenten" the students will be called "der groBe Transformator"51-is, according to Benjamin, a religious process that presupposes freedom, for only freedom allows the community to gain a concept of itself as medium or "Transformator" the in first place. The reasons why Benjamin should endow youth with this medial character are not very different from those that led him a few months later to emphasize language's communicability: Youth does not communicate or produce anything other than itself, it denotes sheer potence or possibility prior to any realization and production: "und jung ist ein Mensch, solange er sein Ideal noch nicht in die Tat umgesetzt hat."52Precisely because it has not transformed its ideals into reality or action, youth can function as the medium of transformation. In a formulation that betrays something of the intellectual elitism inherent in the early Benjamin's rigor: "Wir brauchen eine sch6ne und freie Gemeinschaft, damit das Allgemeine auszusprechen sei, ohne gemein zu werden."53 In this context the sphere of the erotic occupies a privileged position precisely because it presents both the greatest obstacle on the way to achieving the ideal community and the secret center of such a community, as Benjamin suggests when he pleads for "eine Offenheit, die wir am schwersten im Erotischen gewinnen werden und die doch von da aus unser taigliches Sein und Gehaben durchdringen soll" (II.1: 46). Undoubtedly the most important piece in these early writings is therefore the pivotal "Das Leben der Studenten." Here, love

GEULEN:Benjamin
emerges as the mode in which the collective can live up to its purpose via "Geste und Haltung der Liebe" (II.1: 79). The student's most important asset is "die Fdihigkeit zu lieben" (II.1: 82), for the true and free community will have to come about "durch Liebe" (II.1: 84). In this text, love is to the community what translation is to language in "Uber die Sprache." If love is to be the mode through which the community achieves and recognizes its own mediality, if love is to overcome antinomies without annihilating or otherwise invalidating the dualities of judgment, then love itself cannot simply transcend the antinomies but must somehow participate in them. This specific antinomy of Eros itself that resides, according to Benjamin, at the core of any conceptualization of community is nothing other than the opposition of the sexes: Es handelt sich um die Frage, die keine Gemeinschaft ungel6st lassen kann und die doch seit den Griechen und fruihen Christen kein Volk mehr in der Idee gemeistert hat; immer lastet sie auf den Schaffenden: sie dem Bilde der wie groB3en Menschheitgeniigen sollten und Gemeinschaft mit Frauen und Kindern erm6glichten, deren Produktivitaitanders gerichtet ist. Die Griechen,wie wir wissen, iibten Gewalt, indem sie den zeugenden Eros dem schaffendennachstellten,so daBl endlich ihr Staat, aus dessen Inbegriff Frauen und Kinderverbannt waren, zerfiel. (II.1:84) This, then, is the common, and indeed communal, origin of Benjamin's lifelong tendency to associate gender with modes of production. The central question is: "Wo die Einheit im Dasein des Schaffenden und des Zeugenden liegt" (II.1: 83). This question is identical with that of the sexes and with the possibility of their community, because women (and children) represent and embody the "zeugenden Eros." Once again, the traditional marker of feminine sexuality, the capacity for pregnancy and birth, is eclipsed altogether.

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As for the answer to this absolute question and the absolute task; this early, and in many ways idealizing text leaves no doubt that the problem remains unsolved. Where the Greeks failed, the German youth movement did not fare much better, for it neutralized and neutered the "zeugenden Eros" twice, so that it appears either as prostitution or in the form of"jene schwtile Heiterkeit" in which "die burschikose Studentin ... als Nachfolgerin der hiJ3lichen alten Lehrerin jubelnd begrfiBt [wird]" (II.1: 84). The "schaffende Eros," on the other hand, has been perverted into the habits of the "Korpsstudententum" (II.1: 84). Therefore the task remains: "aus dem geistigen Leben heraus zur Einheit zu bilden, was ... verzerrt und zerstiickelt als Torso des einen geistigen Eros uns traurig ansieht" (II.1: 84, my emphasis). For better or for worse, there is perhaps no other thinker whose disdain, not for the body or for sexuality per se, but for all that which is not "geistig,"that which we have long been accustomed to associate with "nature," including certainly questionable cliches regarding the "nature of women," is as deeply engrained as Benjamin's. This disdain is, incidentally, the abyss that separates Benjamin from Johann Georg Hamann, whom he quotes in the language essay and with whom he otherwise appears to share so much, not the least an obsession with gender and sexuality. Nothing is more revealing in this context than Benjamin's own answer, late in "Das Leben der Studenten," to the task he set for himself and for the community, an answer that itself is a retreat, reversal, or inversion, and that therefore bears the unmistakable signature of Benjamin's eroticism: delay. For in the end, nothing is what it seemed to be: Youth is not young, love does not love, community is not common: "Dennoch gilt es zu erkennen, daB sie Schaffende, also Einsame und Alternde sein mtissen, dab ein reicheres Geschlecht von Juinglingen und Kindern schon lebt, dem sie sich nur als Lehrende widmen kannen"

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(II.1: 86). To build their lives "aus dem einigen Geistige von Schaffen, Eros, Jugend" (11.1:86) turns out to mean sexual abstinence: "eine keusche und verzichtende Jugend" (II.1: 86). Benjamin's essay ends with a poem by Stefan George, a great creator whose verse is not about youth, community, and heterosexual love but about aging, solitude, and an erotic community of men: "Denn auf des rausches und der regung leiter/ Sind beide wir im sinken: nie mehr werden/ Der Knaben preis undjubel so mir schmeicheln:/ Nie wieder strofen so im ohr dir donnern" (II.1: 86).54 If the idea of a community of the sexes is a community of men, if the idea of youth is aging, the idea of spirituality is conception without birth, then Benjamin's idea of sexuality is sex without sex. He describes this sexless sex as an aging man in the recollection ofthe experience ofthe young child he once might have been, and perhaps there is nothing more erotic then this tale of virginity regained from Berliner Kindheit: Im Spalt des kaum gebffneten Speiseschrankes drangmeine Hand wie ein Liebender durch die Nacht vor ... Wie gab der Honig, gaben Haufen von Korinthen, gab sogar Reis sich schmeichelnd in die Hand. Wie leidenschaftlichdies Begehren beider,die endlichnun dem L6ffelentronnen waren. Dankbar und wild wie eine, die man aus dem Elternhause sich geraubt hat, gab hier die Erdbeermarmelade ohne Semmel und gleichsam unter Gottesfreiem Himmel sich zu schmecken, und selbst die Butter erwidertemit Zartlichkeit die Kiihnheit eines Werbers,der in ihre Magdekammer Die vorstieBl. Hand, derjugendlicheDon Juan war bald in alle Zellen und Gelasse eingedrungen,hinter sich rinnende Schichten und stromende die Mengen: Jungfraiulichkeit, ohne Klagen sich erneuert.(IV.1:114) What the young and youth-moved Benjamin displaced onto old age, the aging Benjamin rediscovers in the lost distance of an imagined childhood: virginity that renews itself

without complaint. If this is another image of the unity of creation and procreation sought by Benjamin, then it is perfectly clear why any effort to found such a unity in the empirical realm was destined to failure. Whoever seeks renewable virginity or conception without birth has good reason to divert the encounter with gender and sexuality into the realm of language, where they can live on as the unity of spontaneity and receptivity-innocent and virginal only in the sense that they have shed all corporeality. But then again, this is only one part, one side ofthe matter. On the other side, and certainly beyond the kind of biographical speculations these conclusions might prompt, are the "unvergleichlichen Wirkungen" (II.1: 203) or "exzentrischen Auswirkungen" (IV.1:144) that this shift has effected in Benthe jamin's production:55 critical destruction of gender-overdetermined ideologies of production and, most importantly, the immense potential of a concept of gender as a dynamic category that is never reducible to the two sexes. Perhaps the most important legacy of Benjamin's gendered thinking is the possibility of thinking gender ... otherwise. This becomes and remains a possibility only so long as the issue of gender in Benjamin is not yet decided. Notes An earlierdraftof this paperwas presented in a specialsession organizedby Women Gerin man on "Feminismand the FrankfurtSchool" held at the 1994 MLAconference. 10n this problematicin Adornocf. Andrew Hewitt, "A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment?Horkheimerand Adornorevisited," New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 143-70. Rita Felski makes a similar argument along moregenerallines in her recent TheGender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UP,

1995) 5ff.
2Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno and the Persistence of the Dialectic (London:

Verso, 1990). 3Christine Buci-Glucksmann,WalterBen-

GEULEN:Benjamin
jamin und die Utopie des Weiblichen (Hamburg: VSA, 1984). Part of her argument was reprinted under the title "Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern,"Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 220-29; Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 179224, here 218ff; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing: WalterBenjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986): 99-140; Helga Geyer-Ryan, Fables of Desire: Studies in the Ethics of Art and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), particularly the chapter entitled "Abjection in the texts of Walter Benjamin" (106-26). 4Rey Chow, "Benjamin's Love Affair with Death," New German Critique (Spring 1989): 63-86; Janet Wolff, 'The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," The Problems of Modernity, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989) 141-56. Although I concur with some aspects of Chow's analysis (see below), I cannot agree with her rather hasty interpolation of Freud, whose thought is superimposed on Benjamin in a way that fails to dojustice to the texts in question. Moreover, her essay lacks any sense of historical differentiation, either with respect to Benjamin's oeuvre or to Benjamin's own historical analyses, both of which are dissolved and neutralized into a rather vague and highly abstract concept ofmodernity as such. However, as an intervention in feminist theory and as a warning vis-a-vis the problems raised by any unequivocal feminist appropriation of Benjamin, this essay remains a central contribution. 5Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge, 1993). 6Walter Benjamin, "Der Siirrealismus," Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991) II.1: 295310, here 310. All quotations from Benjamin's writings refer to this edition and will be given parenthetically by volume and page number. 7Cf. Gerhard Kaiser, "Mutter Nacht-Mutter Natur," Bilder Lesen: Studien zur Literatur und bildender Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1981) 11-51.

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8platon, Symposion, Samtliche Werke, trans. Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Ernesto Grassi (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986) 209d. 9For recent instances of excavating the dead female bodies in and of art, cf. Klaus Theweleit, buch der konige: orpheus (und) euridike. 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1986 and 1994); Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992). 10Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk," Gesammelte Schriften I.1: 421-508; , "Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und Historiker," Gesammelte Schriften 11.2: 465-505. 11Walter Benjamin, "Der destruktive Charakter," Gesammelte Schriften IV.1: 396-98. 12Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrap/e, Gesammelte Schriften IV.1: 83-148, here 147. 130f course one could argue that the violence in the quotation from the "Kunstwerk" essay is Benjamin's way of criticizing the fascist misappropriation and enslavement of modern technologies. However, the same imagery already dominated his discussion of allegory, whose destructive, deviating tendencies he clearly favors. In his book Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin reflected on the sexual sadism of the allegorist (Gesammelte Schriften 1.1: 203-430, here 360), and in the later Passagen-Werk the allegorist is said to know no intimacy with objects: "sie zu beriihren heiSt sie vergewaltigen" (Gesammelte Schriften vol. V.12, here V.1: 423). 14A telling example of this metaphorical overlap is the piece "Waffen und Munition" in Einbahnstrap/e (IV.1: 110). 15Whenever Benjamin speaks of impotence-and he does so surprisingly often--it appears to be unspecific with regard to gender and to be represented not as a failure but rather as an extension or radicalization of refusal, delay, and suspension. For example, Benjamin writes in a passage on Keller: "Die Kellersche 'Dichtersiinde,' 'SiuBe Frauenbilder zu erfinden/wie die bittere Erde sie nicht hegt', ist sicherlich nicht die seine [i.e., Baudelaire's]. Kellers Frauenbilder haben die Sif3igkeit der Chimaren, weil er ihnen die eigene Impotenz eingebildet hat"(I.2: 663). Keller's women, Benjamin suggests, have this hybrid or chimeric quality because Keller's own impotence was imparted to them, became literally part of them. Nothing could be further from a psychologizing

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account of poetic production as compensation for impotence. On the contrary, for Benjamin impotence became (or remained) potent in and as impotence. Translating potence literally, impotence characterizes the impossiblity of these women, "wie die bittere Erde sie nicht hegt." They are not impotent in the sense that they cannot procreate but in the sense that they are as impossible in reality as chimeras. Their sweetness, their indeed quite incomparable erotic allure, stems from nothing other than the chimeric combination of possibility and impossibility. They are impossible as real beings and yet in this impotent possibility more attractive, more erotically real, possible and promising. Keller's poetic production thus presents the oxymoronic phenomenon of a production of impotence (in both senses of the genitive). 16Walter Benjamin, "Bettler und Huren," Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, Gesammelte Schriften IV.1: 287-88. 17Cf. also Bejamin's commentary in Berliner Chronik, where he recalls the "beispiellose Faszination, auf offener Stral3e eine Hure anzusprechen" but adds: "Aberwar es wirklich ein Oberschreiten, ist es nicht vielmehr eher ein Verharren auf der eigensinnig-wolliistiges Schwelle, ein Z6gern, das das triftigste Motiv in dem Umstand hat, daI3 die Schwelle ins Nichts ffihrt?" (VI: 472). 18Cf.Andreas Huyssen, "The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang's Metropolis," After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 65-81. 19Cf. Gershom Scholem's analysis of the famous fragment entitled "Angesilaus Santander"(VI: 520-522) in "Walter Benjamin and His Angel," On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988) 51-89. 20Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzahler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows," Gesammelte Schriften 11.2: 438-65, here 460. 21Walter Benjamin, "Sokrates," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 129-32. 22Walter Benjamin, "Gottfried Keller," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 283-95, here 291. 23Walter Benjamin, "Stifter," Gesammelte Schriften II.2: 608-10, here 609. 24Walter Benjamin, "Karl Kraus," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 334-67, here 360. 25Walter Benjamin, "Der Naihkasten," Ber-

linerKindheit, Gesammelte Schriften IV.1: 28993. 26In fact, "aura"itself, that central and famously ambivalent term from the "Kunstwerk" essay and the Baudelaire studies, a compositum mixtum of past and present, far and near, might well be yet another trace of Benjamin's omnipresent hermaphroditism. 27Cf. Achim Aurnhammer, Androgynie: Studien zu einem Motiv in der europaischen Literatur (Cologne: B6hlau, 1986). 28In his analysis of myth in Benjamin, Winfried Menninghaus discusses the ambivalence of passage or Schwelle in great detail but fails to recognize its hermaphroditic character, in part because he relegates the erotic dimension to the merely coincidental. Benjamin had insisted "Fluten liegen in dem Wort Schwellen und diese Bedeutungen hat die Etymologie nicht zu uibersehen" (V.1: 618). The central meanings, the "Schwellen" of the phallus and the "Schwellen" during pregnancy, are not mentioned by Menninghaus, even though Benjamin himself points to this dimension on occasion (once he speaks of the "Passage" as entrance into the "intra-uterine Welt" [V: 522]. When Menninghaus explicitly mentions "Zwischengestalten"-he even calls Benjamin a "Zwitter"(92)he refuses not only to acknowledge the gender dimension but, for inexplicable reasons, he also neglects any reference to the most famous figure of ambivalence: the angel. Cf. Winfried Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde: Walter Benjamins Passage des Mythos (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). 29There are many passages that would motivate such an interpretation, for example the following from Zentralpark: "Das Motiv der Androgyne, der Lesbischen, der unfruchtbaren Frau ist im Zusammenhang mit der destruktiven Gewalt der allegorischen Intention zu behandeln" (Gesammelte Schriften 1.2: 655-90, here 661). 30Fora recent contribution to the seemingly interminable debate about the ambivalence of the dialectical image, cf. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993), esp. 211-39. 31Michel Foucault, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. 32In her book Androygny and the Denial of

GEULEN:Benjamin
Difference (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1992), which provides a useful survey of feminist discussions of androgny in literature and culture, Kari Weil has attempted to distinguish along these lines between the androgynous on the one hand and the hermaphrodite on the other. Whereas the latter is aligned with an emancipatory gender confusion, the term androgynous remains bound to gender stereotypes by the all-too-familiar gender symmetry. Her readings, inspired by the work of Luce Irigaray, attempt to show how the hermaphroditic haunts the symmetry of the androgynous. It is very doubtful, however, whether such a line of distinction can be drawn so clearly, or at all. In Benjamin it is impossible to separate androgyny from hermaphroditism, for the ambivalence of these two is precisely the issue. 33Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "Beauty's Body: Gender Ideology and British Aestheticism," Victorian Studies 36.1 (Fall 1992): 31-52. 34Psomiades 36. 35Psomiades 40. 36Psomiades 38. 37Psomiades 38. 38Psomiades 38. 39Cf. Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman,"Feminist Issues 1.2 (Winter 1981): 4754. 40Walter Benjamin, "]OberSprache uiberhaupt und uiberdie Sprache des Menschen," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 140-57. 41Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Werkausgabe in 12 Banden (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977) 3: A 15, B29. 42This is, however, only one side of the role of gender in this essay, which also contains a its most enigmatic mopassage-arguably ment-in which woman is named. At the very moment when Benjamin discusses the name as the most intimate contact between divine and human word, woman is suddenly named, and once again, named another, missing part: "Vielleicht ist es ktihn, aber kaum unm6glich, den Vers 2,20 in seinem zweiten Teile [!] in diesem Zusammenhang zu nennen: daB der Mensch alle Wesen benannte, 'aber fur den Menschen ward keine Gehilfin gefunden, die um ihn waire.'Wie denn auch Adam sein Weib, alsobald er es bekommen hat, benennt. (Mannin im zweiten Kapitel, Heva im dritten)" (II.1: 149). Carol Jacobs (University of Buffalo) offers an exquisite reading of this passage in an essay

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entitled "Emergency, Break: Things will Never Be the Same (Again)," unpublished essay. 43This resistance to the ideology of birth and maternity is probably the main reason for the privilege Benjamin frequently, particularly in the Baudelaire studies, accords to the lesbian as heroine of defiant modernity. For a critical analysis of the lesbian as central figure of modernity cf. Thais E. Morgan, "Male Lesbian Bodies: The Construction of Alternative Masculinities in Courbet, Baudelaire, and Swinburne," Genders 15 (1992): 37-57. 44For the phenomenological dimension of Benjamin's essay cf. Peter Fenves (Northwestern University), "The Dawn of Judgement," unpublished essay, 1992. 45Nor did language maintain its early privilege as the exclusive realm ofmediality in later years. A careful analysis could perhaps demonstrate that the unity of spontaneity and receptivity, as well as the notion of communicability through which this unity is made possible, found a new site or a new medium in Benjamin's later works when language was replaced by modern technologies which, at least in the form of photography and even more so film, also embody the unity of production and reception. The conditions of capitalism would then correspond to the conditions after the Fall when technology is enslaved for the purposes of production and its magic demonically perverted, whithering away as the foul star cult. For a reading of this essay, see Eva Geulen, "Zeit zur Darstellung: Walter Benjamin's 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,'" Modern Language Notes (German Issue) (Spring 1992): 580-605. 46For an overview of this still neglected and largely unexamined phase of Benjamin's life, see the chapter "Benjamin and the Idea of Youth," in John McCole, Walter Benjamin and theAntinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 35-70. 47Walter Benjamin, Briefe I und II, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W.Adorno, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993) 1: 67. 48Benjamin, Briefe 1: 140. 49Walter Benjamin, "Dialog uiber die Religiositait der Gegenwart," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 16-35, here 32. 50Walter Benjamin, "Der Moralunterricht," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 48-54, here 48. 51Walter Benjamin, "Das Leben der Stu-

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denten," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 75-87, here 83. 52WalterBenjamin, "Das Dornrischen," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 9-12, here 11. 53Walter Benjamin, "Romantik," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 42-47, here 45. 54It should be clear that any hasty celebration of Benjamin's admiration for homoeroticism (in the later works he focuses on the lesbian in particular) is problematic so long as it does not take into account that this preference for the homoerotic serves a certain kind of spiritual elevation. 55Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 179-203.

Benjamin speaks of these incomparable effects at the end of this essay: "Denn nur die mythische, nicht die g6ttliche [Gewalt] wird sich als solche mit GewifBheit erkennen lassen, es sei denn in unvergleichlichen Wirkungen, weil die entstihnende Kraft der Gewalt ftir den Menschen nicht zutage liegt" (II.1: 203). In Einbahnstra/3e he speaks of excentric effects on the occasion of a reflection on marriage: "So liegt auch bei der Ehe der Wert nicht in der unfruchtbaren 'Harmonie' der Gatten: als exzentrische Auswirkung ihrer KImpfe und Konkurrenzen tritt, wie das Kind, auch die geistige Gewalt der Ehe zutage" (IV.1: 144).