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

his objects as pieces of property; better to say that he is possessed by them: ―He appears
inspired by them and seems to look through them into their distance, like an auger‖ (207).
The task, surely, that lies before an ethical use of poetic language that would give vent to
the absconded world of natural historical language would be one where the goal is to
prevent the apocalypse from occurring through reminding ourselves of the transitory
names of things before they become secreted away by the assumed purity of a legal
judgment. Naming ourselves, is, seemingly, the only opportunity we get. How can man
name himself, such that he avoids the apocalyptic end that all things tend toward? A
proper name is not a sign (a common noun). If a taboo is something that is invoked to
describe what is being repressed, then surely that taboo begins to be broken once it is
given a name? Questions like these can motivate a reading of Benjamin‘s theory of
language that reveals, through its eccentric inclusions, a consistent explanation of an
aesthetic that attempts to undermine the taboo which entitlement creates and why self-
control, in the sense of living-up to one‘s name, was deemed by Benjamin, in his
prescription that one must attack taboo from the position of de-personalized authority, to
be antithetical to avoiding apocalyptic ends.
In fact, the attributes that Benjamin gives to man‘s language – that as transmission
it moves from its genetic coordinates into the dissipation of its estuary, as information it
mimics God‘s power to inform things with meaning, as law it induces fate – produce a
plethora of disturbing qualifications that complicate the relatively stable two-word
division with which he begins and from which he forms the implicate order of the OGT.
Here are a few examples of those utterances about the two-word theory that have just
such a problematic quality. These quotations are found in ―Trauerspiel and Tragedy‖,
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