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

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

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the reality of the dialogic king-hero‟s conflicted responses to a potential state of<br />

emergency, lacking, as he does, the fullness of character endemic to the new era of<br />

unbelief in the divine right of kings that would be the necessary prerequisite to his<br />

positing an arbitrary intervention into emergency. Both martyrs and tyrants must seem to<br />

be acting for the good of their communities. The mechanisms of identification and<br />

transference necessary to catharsis are irrevocably mutilated by the unavoidable<br />

hypocrisy this promotes. Autonomy, it was thought, should show itself in the king‟s<br />

exemplary use of inalienable power. Kings would thereby demonstrate the essential<br />

relationship between violence and natural justice: “At the moment when the ruler<br />

indulges in the most violent display of power, both history and the higher power, which<br />

checks its vicissitudes, are recognized as manifest in him” (70). It was the trauerspiel,<br />

Benjamin argues, that would show this violence in the moment of its being thwarted by<br />

overwhelming, communal, exigent circumstances.<br />

Trauerspiels frame this natural kingly autonomy by narrating its emergence from<br />

within a general economy of kingly insecurity. Kings are displayed in moments of<br />

indecisiveness as they wrestle between the contradictory natural demands that self-<br />

preservation and the communal good (encoded in the mythical definitions of community<br />

and kingship inherited from Classical and Christian myth) place upon them. The<br />

trauerspiel‟s argument would seem to be that this very indecisiveness is at root the cause<br />

of terror and catastrophe. Manuals concerning the martyr-drama did not so much concern<br />

themselves with the king‟s spiritual torment as with the physical suffering that the king<br />

faced under the conflicts between personal and public necessity. Afflicted with the<br />

faithlessness of friends and enemies alike, the martyr-drama demonstrates how kingly<br />

35

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