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

the word “Title.” I do this out of respect for Benjamin‟s latent Marxist critique of
structuralism‟s transactional bias, and for the presence of the word title within that
quotation he presents in the Arcades Project concerning the nature of taboo. That
quotation delivers most economically the connection in Benjamin‟s thinking between the
manner in which words can be manipulated when they are used as titles to create a taboo
over natural historical expression. Natural history, Benjamin argues, is best expressed in
the form of names rendered under the philosophical contemplation of reality. The
anamnesis of natural history that is brokered by this kind of language must, I argue,
contend with historical spiritual constitutions that become preoccupied with protecting
the unapproachable privacies that are signaled by the belief that names immediately
bequeath title and possession. It is this making of things into subjects of title and
possession that defines taboo for Benjamin, and underwrites the greater intention of his
project – to let truth critique systems that allow man to acquire and possess knowledge. 7
The aesthetic language of modernist expression, as it follows its origins in the trauerspiel,
is the best medium through which to launch the philosophical reflection that evinces
criticism of the taboo making properties of the title.
Indeed, Richard Wolin has made the point that Benjamin‟s theories about culture
defer to the presence of Benjamin‟s philosophical belief in objective truth. This truth
cannot be discursively rendered, but captured only through the hermeneutic work of
recovering the provenance of a discrete citation. A “dialectical image,” one of
Benjamin‟s many translations of his linguistic theory, is first a textual practice before it
becomes a way of performing cultural criticism. Benjamin‟s pursuit of truth in the way
things become separated from their context means that dialectical images are to forego
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