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

come into their meaning through the intentional act of dislocation and re-arrangement of
their position within genetically instigated orders.
Benjamin does mention the existence of divine pre-lapsarian names, certainly.
Wolin correctly construes their tacit presence to have formed the basis of Benjamin‘s
residual desire to find and return to ―a pre-paradisiac condition of purity and community
that had been dissolved amid the ‗fallen‘ continuum of history‖ (212). However,
Benjamin can also be found to argue for the existence of another, more mundane,
linguistic order. Hasty assertions about Benjamin‘s Adamite linguistic theory seriously
overlook those aspects of it that, in fact, foreshadow deconstruction and its dislocation of
the transcendental signified — as, for example, in Benjamin‘s belief that the meanings of
the names that man uses develop within the history of their conventional transactions —
that allows for the exchange of words for things in a bourgeois semantic economy.
Benjamin‘s theory of mundane human language, trafficking between the expressive name
and the possessive title, does not depend upon the overdetermination of something like
différance to inscribe meaning into any systemically rendered form. For Benjamin, a
word‘s meaning forms itself through an almost delirious, ―phantasmagoric,‖ relationship
to the forgotten divine word that it attempts to become but can only render ambiguously
as a kind of catachresis. This transitive system allows for pure and divinely motivated
Signs to exist in tandem with those that are their mundane, unmotivated, and unmoored
shadows. Where God‘s word is imbued with the permanence of ―divine infinity,‖ the
word that man uses to attain knowledge is finite and subject to historic determination.
Benjaminian linguistic theory is far from being a clever latria to a lost pre-lapsarian
wholeness; it is post-Adam and pre-Derrida.
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