(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

264
DIANNE CHISHOLM
of consumer persuasion. Lined up in every store window, they solicit the
gaze of the individual consumer in overwhelming crowds. The woman
who dresses in accord with the mannequins’ seductive instruction is
recruited into an imaginary sorority of greatest desirability; she joins ranks
with the urban masses and embodies their commitment not to revolutionary
politics but to fashion revolution. Fashioning herself in this way,
the woman consumer conceivably enjoys a communion with the masses
not unlike the male client whose communion with the masses is mediated
by the fashionably attired prostitute.
Hermaphroditism, Androgyny, and Transsexualism
Images of ambiguous gender and sex appear more frequently in Benjamin’s
writing than those of straight femininity and masculinity. For example,
the lesbian woman of his Baudelaire studies is, in terms of gender,
a mannish woman. The demon (Socrates) is at once effeminate “castrato”
and phallic “faun.” Images of male impotence signify not just a
diminished masculinity but a transgendering of the masculine into the
feminine — as in the case of Baudelaire, who sees himself in the woman
prostitute and who makes his career on the streets as a boulevard poet
and street-walker. Genius may be the spirit of masculine sexuality in Platonic
love, but in the context of modernity it undergoes a sex change, for
only by changing into feminine sexuality can modern genius perceive the
spiritual nature of the erotic that the sexual exhibition of modern feminine
fashion conceals (or makes seem unnaturally natural). Since it takes
masculine genius to know the spirituality of the unity of the erotic and the
sexual, and since the feminine is the existential embodiment of this unity,
love’s revelation must then be androgynous. This is the case whether the
love that is revealed is Platonic or modern. If modern then masculine
genius must undergo a mental sex change to see the spiritual through the
profane sexuality of feminine fashion, and love’s revelation is ambiguously
en-gendered as transsexual.
In any case, the mix of feminine and masculine attributes in Benjamin’s
images of androgyny and hermaphroditism is itself ambiguously
positive and negative. “Socrates” signifies a negative, demonic
hermaphroditism. Likewise, “Baudelaire” signifies a negative, “satanic”
transsexualism (in his descent into the female prostitute’s body- and
image-space). Yet Klee’s angel in Benjamin’s “Über den Begriff der
Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History,” 1940) 22 signifies the
“divine androgyny” of messianic redemption. Benjamin’s androgynous
angel, like the androgynous, utopian architecture of Saint-Simonianism,
foresees a post-historical unity of the masculine and the feminine, of the
creative and the procreative, in the wake of modernity’s obsession with
catastrophic progress.