(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S GENDER, SEX, AND EROS
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whose pedagogical method is “a mere means to compel conversation”
(“ein bloßes Mittel zur Erzwingung der Rede”) between himself and his
homosexual initiates into conceiving what is foreknown. For Socrates,
“geht der Wissende mit dem Wissen schwanger” (“the knower is pregnant
with knowledge”). Thus “die sokratische Frage ist nicht zart und so
sehr schöpferisch als empfangend, nicht geniushaft. Sie ist . . . eine Erektion
des Wissens” (“the Socratic question is neither tender nor so much
creative as it is conceptive; it is not genius-like. . . . It is an erection of
knowledge”). Socratic love embodies the “furchtbar[e] Herrschaft sexueller
Anschauungen im Geistigen” (“terrible domination of sexual views
in the spiritual”). Moreover, “Same und Frucht, Zeugung und Geburt
nennt seine sympotische Rede in dämonischer Ununterschiedenheit”
(“Socrates’ talk in the Symposium refers to seed and fruit, procreation
and birth, in daemonic indistinguishability”). In contrast, genius is “der
Zeuge jeder wirklich geistigen Schöpfung” (“the witness to every truly
spiritual creation”) which is “geschlechtslos und doch von überweltlichem
Geschlechte” (“asexual and yet of supramundane sexuality”). If “Sokrates
preist . . . die Liebe zwischen Männern und Jünglingen und rühmt sie
als das Medium des schöpferischen Geistes” (“Socrates praises the love
between men and youths and lauds it as the medium of the creative spirit”),
genius lives through the existence of the feminine, which “verbürgt die
Geschlechtslosigkeit des Geistigen in der Welt” (“guarantees the asexuality
of the spiritual in the world”), for, “wie für das Weib unbefleckte Empfängnis
die überschwengliche Idee von Reinheit ist, so ist Empfängnis ohne
Schwangerschaft am tiefsten das Geisteszeichen des männlichen Genius”
(“just as immaculate conception is, for the woman, the rapturous notion
of purity, so conception without pregnancy is most profoundly the spiritual
mark of the male genius” (GS II.1:130–31; SW 1:52–54).
“Male genius” is impotent before the feminine (or the Beloved),
who personifies the mystery of the unity of the erotic and the sexual.
Socratic love penetrates metaphysical mysteries with a demon desire
that forces its dialogue with his philosophical male initiates to conceive
uncreatively or to reproduce knowledge foreknown; whereas Platonic
love inspires genius to pose (to the feminine/beloved — the Other
of/with whom knowledge is sought) “die heilige Frage, die auf Antwort
wartet und deren Resonanz erneut in der Antwort wieder auflebt”
(GS II.1:131; “the holy question which awaits an answer and whose
echo sounds in the response,” SW 1:53). Genius engages conversation
without anticipating or arriving at conception (the foreclosure of
knowledge), yet creatively re-conceives the question that is born in the
answer. Genius engages language in creative conversation in the spirit of
pure love, with no preconceptions or foreknowledge in mind. To put it
another way, the genius of Platonic love is fruitfully impotent, just as the
communion of Sapphic love is inconceivably sexual.