| I offer here a reading of two texts by Walter Benjamin. The first is a letter, written by Benjamin to his friend Gretel Adorno while he was at Camp des Travailleurs Volontaires, in Clos Saint-Joseph Nevers, in 1939. In the letter, Benjamin narrates a dream. I conclude that many of the elements of the dream reflect motifs in Benjamin's written corpus including notions concerning translation, the language of angels, thresholds, and Jewish mysticism. I have used widely divergent theorists in an attempt to come to terms with this dream as both a distress signal and a death wish. Some of these theorists Benjamin studied and wrote about, such as Novalis, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and others he did not, such as Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida. Regardless of their classifications, all of these theorists asked fundamental questions. How is the human subject constituted? Why does the subject dream? What happens to the dreaming subject when it is faced with trauma: a distressing event which is outside of the range of usual human experience?;The constitution of the subject is essential to the question of reading Benjamin's dream because it was a dream he recorded in the face of a traumatic event which attacked his subject position. Benjamin was reaching the point of death, and this dream is a record of his inner world in the sway of trauma.;The second text is "Theses on the Philosophy of History," completed shortly before his suicide one year later, on September 26, 1940. I interpret this piece using Benjamin's theory of reading: one should read in order to bring together seemingly unconnected things, as would a detective. One should place things side by side that normally would seem far removed. One should create a montage, freeing objects from their associates, shocking. As a reader, Benjamin's unusual gaze, always to the side, always watching for the centrality of things that are peripheral, could be understood as a wish to recover memory, to see what survives outside of homogeneous, empty time (Bloch 340). Benjamin wished to allow fragments, shattered pieces plucked out of context, an escape route.;Really, what is the work of a Jewish mystic but to read as Benjamin would have us read? Gershom Scholem, a close friend of Benjamin, explained that Benjamin had strong ties to the mystical tradition, and that he knew that mystical experience is many layered. Mystical and Marxist insights penetrate each other or appear side by side in Benjamin's writings. "Basically, he would have accepted his appointment as Church father, or as some now like to put it, Marxist rabbi, quite graciously, though with dialectical reservation" (Scholem 52). |
