(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

262
DIANNE CHISHOLM
heroic image of Baudelaire’s singularly sexual lesbian with social, political,
and economic depth, he offers no systematic analysis of how utopian
socialist feminism or revolutionary lesbian-feminism may have changed
the “feminine habitus.”
Homosexuality
Images of male homosexuality appear occasionally in Benjamin’s writing,
but he does not develop them significantly, and they do not amount
to a major theme. Benjamin’s most elaborate image of homosexuality
appears in “Socrates.” Here the love of the female for the female is the
ideal emblem of Platonic love, whereas Socratic love is monstrous and
daemonic. “Same und Frucht, Zeugung und Geburt nennt seine sympotische
Rede in dämonischer Ununterschiedenheit, und stellt im Redner
selbst die fürchterliche Mischung vor: Kastrat und Faun” (GS II.1:131;
“Socrates’ talk in the Symposium refers to seed and fruit, procreation and
birth, in daemonic indistinguishability and presents in the speaker himself
the terrible mixture of castrato and faun,” SW 1:54). Accordingly,
“Sokrates preist . . . die Liebe zwischen Männern und Jünglingen und
rühmt sie als das Medium des schöpferischen Geistes” (GS II.1:131;
“Socrates praises the love between men and youths and lauds it as the
medium of the creative spirit,” SW 1:53) and yet, his pedagogical method
is coercive: “Durch Haß und Begierde verfolgt er das Eidos und sucht es
objektiv zu machen” (GS II.1:131; “through hatred and desire, Socrates
pursues the eidos and attempts to make it objective,” SW 1:53–54). Benjamin
concludes: “In Wahrheit ein Nicht-Menschlicher ist Sokrates, und
unmenschlich . . . geht seine Rede über den Eros” (GS II.1:131; “In
truth, Socrates is a nonhuman, and his discussion of eros is inhumane,”
SW 1:54). Socratic love registers lowest “in der Stufenfolge der Erotik”
(GS II.1:131; “in the hierarchy of the erotic,” SW 1:54).
Sigrid Weigel observes that “it is striking that Benjamin did not,
after the caricature of ‘Socrates,’ devote any systematic attention to male
homosexuality.” 20 She discovers only two further, marginal, mentions:
“in the Proust essay, or, for example, in a short note written in Siena that
might be assigned to the motif of the “Eros of distance”: 21 “Der Ritus
lehrt: die Kirche hat sich nicht durch Überwindung der mann-weiblichen
Liebe sondern der homosexuellen aufgebaut. Daß der Priester nicht
mit dem Chorknaben schläft — das ist das Wunder der Messe. Dom von
Siena 28 Juli 1929” (GS VI:204; “The rite teaches us: the Church did
not develop on the basis of overcoming male-female love but homosexual
love. That the priest does not sleep with the choirboy: that is the miracle
of the Mass [Siena Cathedral 28 July 1929]”). Benjamin does, in fact,
make another and more extensive mention of homosexuality in a passage
of his “Paris Diary” (1930). In this passage he describes his visit to a gay