Refuge For A Bleeding God: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections
☭ 25 March 2023 🌒 05 Germinal CCXXXI 🪄
A bleeding god looks for abandoned temples and haunted timelines to bandage his worlds and hold court with prophets and therapists, angry bosses and concerned professors, estranged parents and strange children. The place of solace is inevitable stained by the sacraments of divine madness.
Benjamin is not blind to the intricate mode of Kraus’s polemical discourse, in which a radical technique of unmasking the enemy combines with an intense art of self-expression continually sustained by demonic vanity. The critic Kraus behaves like an actor who anxiously waits for applause, and his famous public readings from Shakespeare and the popular Viennese playwright Johanne Nestroy have been but crucial tests of his power of mimicking other voices and personae. Kraus employs these powers when attacking his enemies, literally creeping “into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them.” [CR. the Divided Self’s theory of schizophrenia, Laign] Benjamin does not hesitate to say that “Kraus will pay any price to get himself talked about,” but he also knows that his elemental vanity generates a self-torture that forces him to sacrifice to his initiated reader, in each modest comma and obscure fact, “a piece of his mutilated flesh.” In Kraus’s’ writings, idiosyncrasy has been elevated to the most supreme instrument of criticism, and his obsessives self-concern is put to the most noble use.
Reflections, pg. xxxviii
[Benjamin studding everything as if it were a Text]
…Benjamin moved to the speculative left or tired to formulate what he thought he had learned from Bertolt Brecht; and once we had learned something about his Marxist commitments, we might feel better prepared to deal with those particularly difficult texts in which, to the despair of partisan interpretors, spiritual and materialist ideas appear in cryptic configurations. In these (as for example, the Paris précis) the failure of the systematic thinker constitutes the true triumph of the master of hermeneutics who, in “reading” the things of the world as if [why “as if”?] they were sacred texts, suddenly decodes the overwhelming forces of human history.
Reflections, pg. xvi
to the conservatism of simile, “reading” and “as if,” which imply fealty to the real meaning of these words, representatives of the world as it really is, where each thing has its own name and can only dress up in the costumes of other things contingently, we respond with the radical, language altering, perhaps even language destroying movement of metaphor, which does not merely leave out, (ap…?) the comparative relationsion (as and like) but denies it altogether in place of a relationship of identity: the things are texts, and if your defintion of text cannot handle that except by comparison, then let us run roughshod over your definition and planet down sacred border stones, establish sacred games and sovereign principles to make language something of our own which dares to make things into what they could never have been and which they already are.
parataxis and hypotaxis, Benjamin as a partisan of the later.
The bleeding text, a series of successive lines, cuts, traumas, related to each other more by proximity and drafts (going up and down the arms again and again, filling up space, removing skin fragment by fragment, stroke by stroke, a successive series of becoming statements of pain, self performative and declarative and creative, the word made flesh and the flesh made word so that ink and blood might mean what the say, signifying a kind of unbearability born bloody and collapsing and self memorializing.
See On Hypocrisy.