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

ensnared within post-lapsarian systems of man-made knowledge. Nature‘s lament over its
being misunderstood when appropriated by titles is another way in which to understand
that which Benjamin designates as taboo.
To practice the aesthetics of taboo, then, is to use language that is aimed precisely
at allowing nature its opportunity to express its own history in its own language. It can be
made to achieve this by providing succor for its lament with an aesthetic practice that is
not beholden to transaction, privacy, and legal possession. In that process, especially
evident for Benjamin in the trauerspiel, a thing expresses itself in an understandable way
once its need to lament has been leavened. In the reflection of the two word world, that
lament becomes a word that is rendered against the noisiness of the titles that would
induct it into bourgeois language, a language that behaves as a system of entitlement
towards defining, rather than a playing with, sadness. Benjamin‘s sense of what
modernist expression achieves, as it exists in embryo in the trauerspiel‘s play with
figurative words and invented archaisms, has just this productive aspect. The sense that it
is nature that expresses its history in the trauerspiel – in a kind of hieroglyph – achieves
the end of showing that ―There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature
that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to
communicate its mental contents‖ (―On Language as Such‖ 62). Benjamin appoints to the
appropriative capacity of man‘s titles a negative, aesthetic, ability to render itself in
depersonalized language. There is a double capture involved, as nature‘s lament is at first
thwarted by the bourgeois title that turns it into an object within a system of knowledge,
and then again as nature‘s sadness at being so misunderstood is captured through playing
with titles that give back to nature a falsely unitary and total significance. Playing with
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