(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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give their critique a sharpened dialectical edge when they consider how, in
his writing, the female prostitute functions as an agent of deconstruction
in the context of commodity fetishism and reified sex. By allegorizing the
commodity’s total and massive devaluation of “the feminine” or “esoteric
love,” Benjamin’s “prostitute” destroys the commodity’s primary fantasydevice
of conjuring iconic allusions to divine consummation.
With the negative and positive revelatory capabilities of Benjamin’s
sex/gender images in mind, Christine Buci-Glucksmann discovers, in
Benjamin’s Baudelaire studies, a “utopia of the feminine” that is at once
“catastrophic,” “anthropological,” and “transgressive.” She reads the
“catastrophic” dimension of Benjamin’s “prostitute” as “the Trauerspiel
of the prostitute-body.” 6 The prostitute-body compares, Buci-Glucksmann
argues, with the Baroque allegory, in that it incites a crisis of seeing:
where God and salvation once were, humanity now is, in all its
mortal anguish and unsalvageable wreckage. Fragmented imagistically
into sexual parts for sale and consumption, the prostitute-body accentuates
the modern crisis of looking (for valuable exchange) to the point
of critical self-illumination (and possible redemption). In her analysis of
the “anthropological” dimension of the utopia of the feminine, Buci-
Glucksmann excavates historical — Saint-Simonian — sources of feminist
androgyny, along with cabalistic and other mystic sources of “divine
androgyny,” that inspired Benjamin’s rereading of Baudelaire’s “heroic
lesbian.” But she does not invoke images of “esoteric love” or its conjunction
with language in Benjamin’s writing. Conversely, Weigel, who
does stress the esoteric conjunction of Eros and language, rejects the
idea that Benjamin’s images of the feminine amount to a theory of the
feminine, utopian or otherwise. Instead Weigel urges us to read Benjamin’s
images of the feminine and female sexuality as aspects of his textuality,
or for “the way in which he works with these images, transforms
them into dialectical or thought-images.” 7
Some feminist critics approach Benjamin’s images of gender and
sexuality to clarify the extent of his masculinism and/or misogyny. Rey
Chow, for instance, unveils the problematic equation of demasculinization
and feminization in Benjamin’s writing, where feminization signifies
not a specifically feminine enhancement or empowerment but a diminution
of male potency. 8 She also considers Benjamin’s images of the bigcity
(male) subject’s “love” for the prostitute/commodity-thing, who is
decked out in imitation of the fashion mannequin/corpse as an object
of misogynous necrophilia. Benjamin’s feminist readers are especially
annoyed by his exclusively masculine imaging of the flâneur. Janet Wolff
calls for a reinvestigation of urban modernity through the imagined, if
not actually documented, perspective of the flâneuse. Some feminist
critics scrutinize Benjamin’s constellation of the flâneur to refine and
advance feminist theory developed elsewhere. Miriam Hansen, for