(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

11: Benjamin’s Gender, Sex, and Eros
Dianne Chisholm
P
IVOTAL MOVEMENTS OF BENJAMIN’S THOUGHT are modulated by his critical,
if convoluted, attention to gender, sex, and Eros. Images of esoteric
love, male impotence, mass prostitution, feminine fashion, utopian
lesbianism, and androgyny and hermaphroditism help formulate Benjamin’s
larger philosophical preoccupations with language, history, technology,
metropolitan culture and society, and even with such messianic
matters as awakening and redemption. They appear as recurrent motifs
that evolve over the course of his oeuvre, from the earliest meditations
on Eros and language in “Metaphysik der Jugend” (“The Metaphysics of
Youth,” 1913–14) and on modernity’s unprecedented transformation
of sex in “Über Liebe und Verwandtes: (Ein europäisches Problem)”
(“On Love and Related Matters: [A European Problem],” 1920), to
illuminations on “esoteric love” and “revolutionary discharge” in “Der
Sürrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz”
(“Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,”
1929), and to culminating reflections on the allegorical impotence and
“sexual shock” of “Baudelaire’s erotology” in the essays and notes on
Baudelaire (1935–39).
Scholars have noted the pervasiveness and importance of Benjamin’s
meditative images and motifs of gender, sex, and Eros, but none have
attempted to bring them all together in one constellation. We might speculate
as to why not. First, these images are far from simple: the images
of gender are often ambiguously androgynous, while those of sex (the
sexual, corporeal sexuality) and Eros (esoteric love, the spiritually erotic)
are ambiguously interrelated (in pure union or daemonic mixture). Second,
the character, function, and context of these images change over the
course of Benjamin’s writing. Third, Benjamin often interpolates these
images and motifs into constellations with other, non-gendered, nonsexual,
and non-erotic themes. His critics thus tend to isolate conjunctions
between Eros (and/or gender and/or sex) and some other major
theme of thought. Sigrid Weigel, for example, focuses on “Eros and Language,”
and she offers an instructive “genealogy” of this relation. 1 Chris
Andre considers the evolving conjunction of Eros and historiography in