(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PRESENCE OF THE BAROQUE
49
Still, one can be tempted to describe Benjamin’s diction as a kind of
post-metaphysical mysticism (Bertolt Brecht), 7 a term that can be especially
applied to the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede (Epistemo-Critical Prologue)
and its cabalistic movements of thought. Nevertheless it is obvious
that the Trauerspiel book (as opposed, for example, to the essays “Der
Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows” [“The Storyteller:
Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” 1936] and “Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” [“The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 1939]) has not yet
been exhausted by interpretation. As is manifest throughout the reception
of the book in the broad field of cultural studies, it can always be newly
discovered despite, but probably even more because, of the fact that “it is
excessively difficult to read.”
The Epistemo-Critical Prologue:
A Negative Theology of Perception
The epistemo-critical prologue introduces the reader to the Trauerspiel
book and presents in the form of a philosophical-theological tractatus
Benjamin’s way of thinking, a thinking that progresses more in fractions
and diversions than in classical dialectical deductions. The text is not an
introduction to the Baroque. It sees its goal rather in inserting the reader
into the context of Benjamin’s epistemological assumptions. With it Benjamin
refers back deliberately to notions like the Platonic “idea” or the
Leibnizian “monad.” Both carry a heavy philosophical heritage, associated
with an occidental understanding of philosophy as a Lehre vom Sein
(doctrine of being). In a way Benjamin does not care much about this
philosophical burden. He takes these notions with an almost naive carelessness
and transforms them into cornerstones of his tractatus. The epistemo-critical
prologue stands as a continuation of Benjamin’s reflections
of his philosophy of language, which he had worked on before, particularly
in the twenties. In the first years after his dissertation Der Begriff
der Kunst kritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Criticism in
German Romanticism, 1920) Benjamin wanted to write his postdoctoral
thesis in the field of the philosophy of language. In a letter to Gershom
Scholem he wrote that he hoped, with regard to this field of investigation,
to find inspiring literature in the area of scholastic writings or in the period
of scholasticism (Briefe, 230). Benjamin was affected by mystical traditions
of language and hoped to find in them an opportunity to articulate
experiences “die man synthetisch noch nicht darzustellen wüßte” (Briefe,
259; that could not yet be represented in synthetic ways). So the recourse
to mystical traditions in the field of the philosophy of language can be
understood as an experiment in developing a counter-discourse that
directs itself against what Benjamin calls contemptuously the “philistine