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

Benjamin connects this pursuit of truth with the possibilities reflection holds in its
presentation of a name.
The structure of truth, then, demands a mode of being which in its lack of
intentionality resembles the simple existence of things, but which is superior in its
permanence. Truth is not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality; it is
the power which determines the essence of this empirical reality. The state of
being, beyond all phenomenality, to which alone this power belongs, is that of the
name. This determines the manner in which ideas are given. But they are not so
much given in a primordial language as in a primordial form of perception, in
which words possess their own nobility as names, unimpaired by cognitive
meaning. (36)
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Benjamin‘s sense of ―truth‖ involves his description of a scaffolding that
dispenses with unitary and monological genetic beginnings. For Benjamin a truth is
something that occurs once a multiplicity of perspectives has been adumbrated and
synthesized. Instead of genetic truths, Benjamin argues for a return to origins, but an
origin that is essentially ―inauthentic‖ in its virtuality:
Virtually, because that which is comprehended in the idea of origin still
has history, in the sense of content, but not in the sense of a set of
occurrences which have befallen it. Its history is inward in character and is
not to be understood as something boundless, but as something related to
essential being, and it can therefore be described as the past and
subsequent history of this being. The past and the subsequent history of
such essences is – as a token of their having been redeemed or gathered
into the world of ideas – not pure history, but natural history. The life of
the works and forms which need such a protection in order to unfold
clearly and unclouded by human life is a natural life. Once this redeemed
state of being in the idea is established, then the presence of the
inauthentic – that is to say natural-historical – past and subsequent history
is virtual. (47)
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