(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DOMINIK FINKELDE
and idealistic” 8 academic epistemological activities. The prologue does
not try to revive forms of uncritical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. Instead it
reveals Benjamin’s struggle to enlarge an undialectical and “bourgeois”
notion of reason with metaphysical gestures of speech that reverberate in
the words “monad” and “idea.” One could even be tempted to say that
Benjamin tries intentionally to stress and overburden the vault of intellectual
(occidental) reason with these premodern terms of philosophy, in
order to explore new lines of thought.
In 1924 he writes to Scholem: “Du wirst [in der Vorrede] seit der
Arbeit ‘Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’
zum ersten Male wieder so etwas wie einen erkenntnistheoretischen Versuch
finden” (Briefe, 346–47; You will find [in the prologue] something
like an epistemological essay for the first time again since my work “On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man”). And after having finished
the prologue, Benjamin writes: “Diese Einleitung ist eine maßlose
Chuzpe — nämlich nicht mehr und nicht weniger als Prologomena zur
Erkenntnistheorie” (Briefe, 372; This introduction is an excessive chutzpah
— it is nothing less and nothing more than prologomena to a theory
of cognition.) Of significance is, as mentioned before, the Platonic “idea.”
But in contrast to Plato, Benjamin tries to provide this term (which is traditionally
associated with an abstract entity) with a new facet that takes
into account, as Bernd Witte writes: “history . . . to a relevant degree.” 9
Hence Benjamin converts the “idea” from a metaphysical and abstract
notion into a model of an inductive procedure that starts from “historical
fields of gravitation” (Winfried Menninghaus), 10 comprising constellations,
which are considered more elusive than are static assemblages. In the
elaboration of these never fixed or fixable “constellations” — which touch
all kinds of different notions on which Benjamin will focus his attention:
“melancholy,” “honor,” the “sovereign,” or the “martyr” — it will become
obvious that the visibility of these constellations does not lead the reader
of the Trauerspiel book to clearly defined classifications of them, purified,
so to speak, of historical arbitrariness. Benjamin says of these ideas/constellations
that they are not “Inbegriffe von Regeln” (GS I.1:224; “simply
the sum total of certain sets of rules,” Origin, 44). They might even
not be “einem jeden Drama . . . kommensurabel” (GS I.1:224; “to any
and every drama . . . in a way commensurable,” Origin, 44). 11 They make
no claim “eine Anzahl gegebener Dichtungen auf Grund irgendwelcher
Gemeinsamkeiten ‘unter’ sich zu begreifen” (GS I.1:224; “to embrace a
number of given works of literature on the basis of certain features that
are common to them,” Origin, 44). By contrast, “ideas” become visible
by constellations manifesting themselves through phenomena, but they
cannot — through these same phenomena — be converted into propositional
matter. 12 In a sense the notion of “idea” sends us back, as Menninghaus
shows, to what Benjamin called in his early text “Über Sprache