(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

LOST ORDERS OF THE DAY: BENJAMIN’S EINBAHNSTRASSE
89
it is in the logic of this question that one cannot think either with or without a
systematic approach.
23
In his Passagen-Werk he will come back to this form of production: “Zweideutigkeit
ist die bildliche Erscheinung der Dialektik, das Gesetz der Dialektik im
Stillstand. Dieser Stillstand ist Utopie und das dialektische Bild also Traumbild”
(“Ambiguity is die manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill.
This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image”).
Benjamin, “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts” (GS V.1:55; Paris, the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century; AP, 10).
24
See Lindner, Benjamin-Handbuch, 689.
25
In “Der Autor als Produzent” (The Author as Producer) he writes: “Ein Autor,
der die Schriftsteller nichts lehrt, lehrt niemanden” (GS II.2:696; “An author who
teaches writers nothing teaches no one,” SW 2:777).
26
For Benjamin’s gender politics and language, see the contribution by Dianne
Chisholm in this volume.
27
Cf. Sonja Neef, Abdruck und Spur: Handschrift im Zeitalter ihrer technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit (Berlin: Kadmos, 2008) and Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999).
28
See Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, GS I.1:284–89; Origin
106–10.
29
See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1998), The State of Exception (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005),
and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
30
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Random House, 1995).
31
See David C. Lindberg, “The Science of Optics,” in Science in the Middle Ages
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 338–68, and Katherine H. Tachau, Vision
and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of
Semantics, 1250–1345 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1988); Jonathan Crary, Techniques
of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press 1992).
32
See also Vivian Liska’s contribution in this volume for further references to
Agamben’s actualization of Benjamin.
33
See Peter Bürger, “Marginalia to Benjamin’s One-Way Street,” in Zeitschrift
für kritische Theorie 17 (2003), 147.
34
Michael Opitz and Ertmut Wizisla, eds., Benjamins Begriffe (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2000) and Lindner, Benjamin-Handbuch. One might assume
that, notwithstanding the good quality of most of the articles, a kind of Benjamin
encyclopedia was the last thing the author wanted to see.
35
Cf. “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (GS
II.1:140–57; “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” SW 1:62–75;
see also Benjamins letter to Martin Buber from Munich, 17 Jul. 1916, GB.
1:325–28; CWB, 79–81 and Samuel Weber, “Der Brief an Martin Buber vom