TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

emind us too hastily only of Benjamin‘s mystical Adamite essentialisms (e.g. identities
of words and things), which excuses, too early, the effort to interpret his cultural thought
as anything other than his own eisegetical wish to instantiate a hermeneutic process of
profane illumination, a hermeneutic that mixes mysticism with an attention to the
oddness of inherited cultural artifacts. This avenue of thought about Benjamin‘s putative
subjectivism overlooks the substrate of his linguistic theory that actually makes the
hermeneutic procedure of his linguistic theory possible. That is, conjugating theories of
historical materialism against the scope and perspective that a thing‘s aura imparts upon
an event obviates the way the conjugation of thing and aura depends upon this underlying
theory of language. Benjamin‘s characterizations of culture in terms of monads,
dialectical images, the now-time, are governed by the question of how to ethically
remember the past, understanding that this, this ethically redeemed past, is historic only
in the sense that it does not belong within any conventional narrative of cause and effect,
within any aesthetic object that requires decoding, within any language that takes its own
arbitrariness for granted. Benjamin‘s struggle to redeem history by recovering what it is
that has been discarded, or forgotten, highlights understanding the tension produced
between stories about rational progress and Messianic eschatology grounded in
adversarial dispositions towards the use and purpose of language writ large. That is, for
Benjamin, there will be no second coming of Christ to separate the elect from those
embroiled by sin in those end days forecast by religions-of-the-book. Benjamin
announces in his infamous thesis about the angel of history, as it is represented in Klee‘s
painting ―Angelus Novus,‖ that language makes both history and nature manifest. What
we forget is what awaits us. 4
4