(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE LEGACY OF BENJAMIN’S MESSIANISM
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which the Messiah can enter at any moment (GS I.2:704). However, what
this possibility entails for the fate of history differs significantly from Benjamin’s
idea of a redeemed world. In a variation on Benjamin’s dictum
that history in its totality will only become readable to redeemed mankind
(GS, I.3:1239), Agamben, on the last pages of his essay, liberates humankind
from the burden of history, but the result would probably make not
only Arendt but also Benjamin shudder: “When man could appropriate
his historical condition . . . he could exit his paradoxical situation” and
“at the same time gain access to the total knowledge capable of giving life
to a new cosmogony and to turn history into myth” (MA, 114). With this
dream of a transformation of history into myth, Agamben’s early appropriation
of Benjamin indicates the risk of conjuring up an interruption of
time as a messianic end of history. This danger may be precisely what less
radical fellow travelers and followers of Benjamin have tried to avert.
The Idea of Prose
Agamben’s emphasis on a redemptive reversal occurring at an empty spatial
and temporal spot where beginning and end fall together is accompanied
by a critique of different traditions of thought that rest on the
structure of an infinite deferral. This critique becomes most concrete
in his essay entitled “Language and History: Linguistic Categories and
Historical Categories in Benjamin’s Thought.” 17 In this essay Agamben
addresses Benjamin’s messianic concepts of a universal history and the
universal language that corresponds to it. In the course of his argumentation
he rejects various possible interpretations of these concepts, ranging
from Ludwig Zamenhof’s artificially constructed universal language,
Esperanto, to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics and from Scholem’s
interpretation of the Cabala to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. At first
sight these thinkers have little in common, but it becomes clear that it is
their common appeal to an “infinite task” (Kant’s unendliche Aufgabe)
that motivates Agamben to consider them as opponents to Benjamin’s
messianic thinking.
Agamben’s “Language and History” interprets a single passage from
Benjamin’s paralipomena to his “On the Concept of History.” It focuses
on the link Benjamin establishes between “pure language” and “universal
history” and retraces the correspondences that exist for Benjamin
between genres of narration, history, and redemption. These correspondences
arise out of a revision of Hegel’s theory of aesthetics. In the traditional
triadic scheme developed by Hegel, the epic, in which human
experience is grasped in its unity and totality, stands at the beginning.
The epic, the most ancient account of history, told in the form of heroic
song, was later sublated into poetry, which was in turn sublated into disenchanted
and no longer integral prose. In Hegel’s progressive scheme,