(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S GENDER, SEX, AND EROS
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aura the somnolent streets of modernity are illuminated with awakening
insights that cut through the urban consciousness of male genius with
catastrophic revelation.
Benjamin’s last rethinking and reimaging of esoteric love appears in
the dialectical image of “love at last sight,” as part of his investigations
of “Baudelaire’s erotology.” 16 “Love at last sight” is how esoteric love
appears and functions in commodity space decades before that space is
interpenetrated by the body- and image-space of revolutionary surrealism.
Here the beloved is not the uniquely charismatic Nadja/Asja. “She”
is a stranger and a street-walker, or, in any case, an anonymous female
passerby who the crowd presents to the lonely man as he drifts around the
city and is everywhere beckoned by commodity spectacles. She seduces
his attention with her fashionable attire and grace, though she sees him
no more than does a fashion model or a storefront mannequin. She has
eyes only for fashion, or, like the mannequin/mass-object she imitates,
her eyes are like mirrors that do not return but merely reflect his gaze, in
a shocking eidetic reduction of hoped-for erotic communion to profane
sexual desire. In “love at last sight” we see the total negation of the Sapphic
conversation and its silent communion of Eros and language. Instead
of bodies and minds caressing one another, disembodied mannequin mirror-eyes
turn Eros into stone. “Love at last sight” is an allegory of the
decay of esoteric love; it functions only critically, not to invoke ideal love,
but to disenchant.
Technological Eros
The last thought-image of Einbahnstraße, “Zum Planetarium,” presents
a constellation of images that evokes what Irving Wohlfarth suggests we
regard as a “technological Eros.” 17 In this constellation, the spectacle
of the First World War is negatively illumined against a radiant antiquity
when nature-wooing mankind entertained an ecstatic communal rapport
with the cosmos. At the same time, the spectacle of the First World War
is negatively illumined against a utopian future when the proletariat will
have remastered technology so as to afford humanity a new (pro)creative
intercourse with nature (SW 1:486–87). This new (pro)creative intercourse
with nature foresees not just technological mastery of nature as
the imperialists would have it but, above all, political mastery of the relation
between nature and man. “Zum Planetarium” advances the idea of
a technology that is attuned to the cosmos both more closely and more
distantly (with the perfect esoteric balance of closeness to and distance
from the Beloved/Other) than previous attempts to commune with or
control nature. By cultivating a new “technological eros,” humankind
replaces imperialism’s technological “Taumel der Vernichtung” (“frenzy
of destruction”), like that of the First World War, which turned “das