(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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ERIC JAROSINSKI
and rhetorical figures into a literary space typically defined by narratives
of development and completion, it becomes the scene of dispersal and
fragmentation as much as, if not more than, construction. Such acts of
interpolation are integral to a critical maneuver that characterizes much of
his work, as Benjamin’s writing here and elsewhere takes hold of its object
as much as its means of representation, leaving its imprint on both. As
his childhood friend Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem recalls: “Er packte jede
Sache von einem gänzlich originellen und unerwarteten Ge sichtspunkt
aus an und tastete sich an die Dinge heran” (He approached all things
from an entirely original and unexpected point of view and felt his way
toward things). 4 While indebted to previous studies of language, vision,
and the body, whose main strands will also be traced here, the reading I
propose will focus on this very tactile element in introducing Benjamin’s
autobiographical texts.
Taking the writing of his life into his own hands, Benjamin confronts
many of the complex theoretical issues he formulates elsewhere about the
nature of experience in modernity and its implications for the subject.
Specifically, he is concerned with the ability to read the present as a complex
text that has much in common with its root, the Latin textum, which
as Benjamin reminds us, means “web.” A multi-layered network characterized
by connections as well as ruptures, it is spun by memory, which, as
he writes in “Zum Bilde Prousts” (“On the Image of Proust”), “hier die
strenge Webevorschrift gibt. Einheit des Textes nämlich ist allein der actus
purus des Erinnerns selber. Nicht die Person des Autors, geschweige die
Handlung” (GS II.1:312; “issues strict regulations for weaving. Only the
actus purus of remembrance itself, not the author or the plot, constitutes
the unity of the text,” SW 2:238). While waiting in a Parisian café, Benjamin
once quickly sketched a diagram of his life, which he was greatly
distressed at later losing; when he interrogated his past, “die Antworten
zeichneten sich wie von selber,” yielding the image of “einer Reihe von
Stammbäumen” or a labyrinth (GS VI:491; “the answers were inscribed,
as if of their own accord,” “a series of family trees,” SW 2:614). We can
as little reproduce the diagram here as Benjamin could retrieve it, yet its
structure does illuminate the challenge Benjamin poses to any simple conception
of a unified subject or self-assured position of the “I.” Benjamin’s
“little rule” reflects this, yet not simply in the name of writing “better
German,” of course. Much more, it seeks to lend expression, if possible,
to a modernity in which, as he notes in the essay “Erfahrung und Armut”
(“Experience and Poverty”), “die Erfahrung ist im Kurse gefallen” (GS
II.1:214; “experience has fallen in value,” SW 2:731) and “Festhalten
ist heut Sache der wenigen Mächtigen geworden, die weiß Gott nicht
menschlicher sind als die vielen” (GS II.1:219; “holding on to things has
become the monopoly of a few powerful people, who, God knows, are
no more human than the many,” SW 2:735). Like so much in Benjamin’s