Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption - Monoskop

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91. Cf. Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," GS 1(1):19496, where Benjamin develops the concept of das
Ausdrucklose.
92. Ibid., p. 126. See also, Anson Rabinbach's informed discussion of this motif in Benjamin's thought, "Critique and
Commentary/Alchemy and Chemistry," New German Critique (Spring 1979) 17:314.
93. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 176.
94. Ibid., p. 166; Benjamin, GS 1(1):343. Cf. the very important preliminary outline of the difference between
historical and tragic time in the 1916 "Trauerspiel und Tragödie," GS, 2(1):13337: "The time of history is infinite in
every direction and unfulfilled in every moment. That means there is no empirical event conceivable that would have
a necessary relation to the determinate juncture at which it occurs. For the empirical occurrence, time is only a form;
however, what is more important, an unfulfilled form. The occurrence does not fulfill the formal nature of the time in
which it lies. For to be sure, one must not think that time is nothing but the standard with which the duration of a
mechanical change is measured. This time is indeed a relatively empty form; to conceive of its fulfillment is
meaningless. The time of fulfilled history is something different from that of mechanics . . . . This idea of fulfilled
time appears in the Bible as its dominant historical idea: Messianic time. In each case the idea of fulfilled historical
time is not however to be thought of as the idea of an individual time. It is this definition, which naturally entirely
changes the meaning of fulfillment, which differentiates tragic time from Messianic time. Tragic time relates to the
latter as individually fulfilled time relates to divinely fulfilled time." Consequently, tragic time appears as an
intermediary between historically unfulfilled time (the time of Trauerspiel) and "divinely fulfilled time" (Messianic
time). Tragedy represents fulfillment, yet only symbolically, limited to an individual momentin terms of the
philosophy of history, the moment of man's coming to self-consciousness in face of his urhistorical bondage to the
domination of myth. Whereas the allegorical structure of Trauerspiel knows only the infinite heaping of ruins upon
ruins proper to the state of interminable decline that distinguishes history as natural history.
95. Cf. Ernst Bloch's very significant remarks concerning the utopian content of the symbol and the relation between
art and utopia in general, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung, pp. 199203 and 92982.
96. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 167.
97. Ibid., p. 175.
98. For an excellent discussion of the significance of allegory in Benjamin's Trauerspiel study, see Hans Heinz Holz,
"Prismatisches Denken," in T. W. Adorno et al., Über Walter Benjamin, pp. 62110. For a general discussion of the
relationship of allegory and symbol as modes of aesthetic representation, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and
Method, pp. 6373.
99. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 184.
100. Ibid., p. 18384.
101. Ibid., p. 178.
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