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

The replacement of the general category of historicity with the facticity of the
―concrete particular‖ implies the new perspective that would not allow for the sacrificial
logic practiced by Odysseus in his self-domination. At stake is the way in which reason
allows ―the ratio to consume its relation to its object‖ (244). Hullot-Kentor allows us to
see that this logic implies the kind of act of self-possession that Benjamin warns against
in his special definition of taboo.
For Benjamin, as we have noted in the introduction to this study, nature has a real
history that is articulated as the force of fate; fate being neither ―nature‖ nor ―history.‖
History, too, had its own relationship with nature; History causes nature to lament in its
being misunderstood by explanations that pretend to possess it within a systemic totality.
It was the task of modernist aesthetics to demonstrate and express this history and this
nature by confronting the places where fate, the force of nature within history, is
absconded by the mythical thinking which activates itself as the precursor to those
systemic totalities that moot and hide natural history‘s articulation behind the taboo
making functions of those titles that this History, told as if it were Enlightenment‘s
singular progression, wrongly use for its articulation. For Benjamin this did not mean that
ideas were in need of refurbishing such that they could, like Adam, name things in the
fullness of their philosophical import. Rather, the names that man uses were sports;
names were neither titles nor that primordial and pure Adamite word they sought to
emulate. Benjamin‘s sense of natural history needn‘t fall into Adorno‘s psychologism for
it never posits fate‘s subjectivity. For Benjamin, rather, natural history is the object of
that play where the modernist word entices natural history into writing. At the same time,
Adorno‘s path towards subjectivity offers to Benjamin‘s theory a possibility for
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