howard eiland

This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the m...

There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a system of signification but as the necessarily ambiguous existential condition of intelligibility in which we always already find ourselves situated, the historically evolving collective articulation of things. The ontological theory of language at issue here, with its concern for the problems of meaning and translation in particular and its methodological distance-in-nearness, entails a simultaneously concentrated and expansive allegorical experience of the world. Allegory brings out the word inherent in the thing—the word not as flat marker but as gravitating and radiating body of history. This essay touches on prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources of this modernist theory of language and philosophical philology, thinkers who worked in different ways to open theoretical horizons while promulgating an art of reading. Such historically oriented and textually focused work of opening remains a political-educational imperative.

Drawing on writings of the German Romantic tradition, Werner Hamacher’s aphoristic Minima Philologica develops a philosophy of philology, one operating without the control mechanisms of instrumentalized thought but not without internal rigor. Hamacher conceives philology as an art of (slow) reading bound to the spirit of experiment and linguistic play. Versed in the conventions and operations of literature in order to do it justice, philology nevertheless speaks in another voice, one more ascetic and conjectural. Having broken with the positivism of the Alexandrian tradition of philologia, this other philology plays the trickster in humanistic disciplines. Its task today is twofold: to unmask the industrial manufacture of language, complicit as it is with hostility to the word; and, as remedy for reification, to reawaken the philia in philology by cultivating—with historically informed critical vigilance—the power of affect, the mimetic power, in language and discourse.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger compares language in general to a well-worn streetcar in which everyone rides "without hindrance and above all without danger."' A singularly reactionary complaint, we may say. Do we really need more danger in the world at present? But, then, what might we mean by 'danger'? The question seems impertinent until we realize that in German Gefahr, related to fahren, go, derives from an old substantive vare, which meant not only ambush, peril, fear, but also endeavor, aspiration, a word which, moreover, in its oldest historical form is cognate with Latin periculum, trial, danger, and its verbal offshoot, experiri, to try, test, prove ("placet experiri" being Hans Castorp's initiatory motto in The Magic Mountain). Danger is literally cousin to experience (Erfahrung). The German and Latin terms, together with the Greek peira, trial, experience, and empeiros, experienced (>'empirical'), go back to a reconstructed Indo-European root form per-, meaning specifically to try, undertake, risk. To try is metaphorically to lead over, press forward, and this verbal base belongs to a more general word family, built around the phoneme per, in which we may trace the extension

... of the phantasmagoria appertaining to commodity character, allowing us to reflect on its social and historical significance. ... brings the dialectic of new and old to a state of Stillstand, an instance that is “not the end of a continuous movement but a qualitatively different moment; . . . ...

... of the phantasmagoria appertaining to commodity character, allowing us to reflect on its social and historical significance. ... brings the dialectic of new and old to a state of Stillstand, an instance that is “not the end of a continuous movement but a qualitatively different moment; . . . ...

WHAT DO WE mean when we speak of "presence"? Do we refer to the ostensibly concrete, pragmatic presence of things at hand, of objects lying before us which we may touch and manipulate? Do we include the often nonproximate presence of persons, for example, an author's mediated influence, or the emergent presence of moods, of weathers, of responsibilities — in other words, things which we cannot touch but which nonetheless touch us? Have we pondered this wide-ranging parasensuous sense of "touch"? Have we distinguished between the presence of now and of here or, alternately, grasped the intimate complicity of spatial presence and temporal present, as something that goes beyond mere terminology? For that matter, what about the intangible but weighty presence of words, meaning not just external signs — written or phonetic, not just language as a body of information or a scheme for communication, but language as a universal function transcending the status of instrument or entity, a function neither objective nor subjective, language as the very condition of intelligibility and multidimensional articulation? In what sense is the sense of what is said — whether verbally, in "body language," or in other modes of expression (such as images) — present to one who follows? For the words "sense" and Sinn, as Martin Heidegger explains in his preoccupation with the latent poetry of idiom, originally signify way, course.1 Is presence, as something that elusively concerns and bears upon, homes in, touches, means, perhaps associated with following a way or going through? These questions announce the main themes of my discussion. If presence has to do with "throughness," it is probably no accident that Heidegger's approach to the problem, which claimed his attention practically from start to finish of his long career, comes itself to resemble a series of ever renewed attacks on an ever receding stronghold. Conceived as necessarily experimental and provisional, this project involves, as I shall indicate, the assumption of now one word, now another, in the endeavor to name, invoke, and thus draw into a luminous clearing, the specter of presence. But throughout

... There, it should be noted, the method of montage is opposed to that of distraction. ● ● ● ● Now, in his attitude toward the idea of intoxication—Rausch, of course, is a pivotal term in Nietzsche's later philosophy—Benjamin parts company with Brecht. ...

... Stanley Rosen accuses Heidegger of displacing Plato's political-pedagogic icon onto an on ... of night and day, constitutes an overcoming of Plato, reason's founding father, the im ... Indeed, asHeidegger observes, every dream of overcoming remains something essentially Platonic. ...