(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

258
DIANNE CHISHOLM
In “Über Liebe und Verwandtes,” Benjamin speculates on the transformation
of love in modernity and on how contemporary male genius
might recognize love in such confusing times. In this context, what constitutes
male impotence is the loss of “historischen Formen” (“historical
forms,” such as Platonic love, courtly love), with which the creative
man can perceive the supernatural unity of the erotic and the sexual in
“the feminine,” and see through the newly fabricated appearances of
modern woman. Since these forms are long since “abgestorben” (“have
withered and died”), “unfähig wie nur je scheint der europäische Mann
jener Einheit des weiblichen Wesens gegenüberzustehen” (GS VI:72–
73; “European man is as incapable as ever of confronting that unity
in woman,” SW 1:229–30). This historic incapability is compounded
by the fact that “that unity in woman” is now concealed in modern
fashion, which, however ephemeral, has induced revolutionary change
in the eternal nature of love between the sexes. Modern fashion demoniacally
dresses “that unity in woman” to appear “natural” (as though
radiating from the female body itself) only to repel the discerning man
with a sense of the grotesquely “unnatural.” Accenting the contours of
the female body, fashion’s hyperbolic sexuality radiates more powerfully
than the aura of Eros. In the face of such demoniacal concealment of
the spiritual, man is ever more impotent and desiring. To penetrate the
mystery of the unity of the erotic and sexual inspired by the veil of commodity
fetishism, he must become like her; he must undergo a “fast
planmäßige Metamorphose . . . der männlichen Sexualität in die weibliche
durch den Durchgang durch das Medium des Geistes” (GS VI:73;
“almost planned metamorphosis of masculine sexuality into feminine
sexuality through the medium of the mind,” SW 1:231). The impotence
of male genius is, thus, itself transformed in response to revolutionary
fashion’s transformation of the eternal feminine. Male genius transsexualizes.
Only by mentally metamorphosing into the female of urban fashion
does genius recognize the spirit in which the unity of the erotic and
the sexual is fabricated.
Ultimately, it is the image of Baudelaire that assembles the various
motifs of male impotence into a constellation of profane, erotic illumination.
Baudelaire personifies the male genius who spends his creative
impotence on consorting with a prostitute in whom he sees himself, and
who, as her semblable, empathizes with the commodity. As Benjamin sees
her, the prostitute in mass society is twice fallen: first, as a woman who
sells her sex for money, and second, as a soul whose social, moral, and
spiritual value is reduced to an abstract (bloodless and spiritless) rate of
exchange. As a poet, Baudelaire embodies the impossible task of redeeming
her value in verse that sells. His solution is to join her on the streets
and to illumine the world that she traffics. With her eyes, he images the
commodity with a human face, and, with his images, he both enchants