(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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WOLFGANG BOCK
is left to be analyzed chemically, but nonetheless keeps its great power
of healing. Also, in Benjamin’s idea of similarities there is no longer an
obvious reference to an original; rather, the independence of the new
reference is emphasized, without, however, its being completely severed
from the original.
In Benjamin’s second theory of language, as in his first, a surface and
a hidden tendency are available side by side. Especially asymmetrical or
nonsensuous similarity has much in common with the concept of mimesis
developed by Aristotle in his Poetics. 12 Aristotle was the first to develop a
philosophy in which aesthetics tends to gain an autonomous position and
is no longer dependent on references to a prior original depicted in representations.
According to this theory, mimesis in the arts does not mean
a simple imitation; rather, in the representation something new arises. It
is no longer a relationship of model and copy; instead, the representation
has its own autonomous meaning.
If one transfers these complex connections to Benjamin’s construction
of the development of language in his second theory, one sees a
change in the role of spoken and written language from imitation and
representation of the original to a self-representation in the medium itself.
Thus linguistic representation attains a logic of its own, independent of
the faithfulness to an original. What linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure
call an arbitrary relation of word and meaning, signifier and signified, is
for Benjamin just a hidden relation that still is active but gives the signifier
a particular kind of freedom. 13 This new independence also implies a
distance from both magic and theology and a move toward the secularization
of culture. In this regard Benjamin’s second theory of language
posits the reverse case of the first: in the first, the spreading of language
appears as a dilution of the true language of the original, while with the
secularization of magic in the second theory a more autonomous perspective
on aesthetics is won. This important shift from the first to the second
theory was difficult for Scholem to understand; maybe because it includes
also a criticism of religion’s transformation into art.
However, in both cases an enigmatic element is present in the relation
of word and thing. This adherence to a hidden opposite element remains
characteristic of Benjamin’s thinking: in the first theory there remains a
sense that there was still something standard about language, even as it
was being “spun apart” as if by centrifugal force in the same way that in
the second one the hidden relationship between the mundane forms and
their magic references is still kept. In other words, even a nonsensuous
similarity is a similarity and a reference.
In this way Benjamin uses the image of an ellipse — a geometric figure
or curve that is defined by the distance of its points from two fixed
foci — to capture the relation between the two elements — tradition and
innovation; imitation and creation — that does not neatly distinguish