(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DOMINIK FINKELDE
sorrowful or that captures it in a psychological and emotional way. The
mourning play is characterized by “ostentation” (GS I.1:298; Origin,
119). “Ihre Bilder sind gestellt, um gesehen zu werden” (GS I.1:298;
“[The] images [of the mourning play] are displayed in order to be seen,
arranged in a way they want them to be seen,” Origin, 119). However,
the pictures in the setting, i.e. the stage props, resemble the objects that
are lying scattered around Dürer’s angel in Melencolia I. These are not
placed on the floor to be taken up as utensils for future pursuits. Instead,
Dürer’s angel contemplates them. For Benjamin, this engraving anticipates
the Baroque in various ways (GS I.1:319; Origin 140). The instruments
that are scattered around the angel lie there in an unused state as
objects for contemplation (GS I.1:319; Origin, 140). They are stripped
of practical utility and become allegories of melancholy so that they have
to be encoded now and read while the melancholic viewer loses himself
in gazing at them. In the melancholic gaze the object is devalued and
becomes “rätselhafte Wahrheit” (GS I.1:319; “a symbol of some enigmatic
wisdom,” Origin, 140).
In Dürer’s angel, modern brooding and scholarly investigation are
announced. The scholar transforms the world into the “book of nature”
(GS I.1:320; Origin, 141), in the sense of an enigmatic, riddle-like scripture
that must be unfolded in a never-ending manner: “Die Renaissance
durchforscht den Weltraum, das Barock die Bibliotheken” (GS I.1:319;
“The Renaissance explores the universe; the Baroque explores libraries,”
Origin, 140). One effect is an interrelation of melancholic gaze and the
allegorical written word. 28 Acedia, considered in Christian ethics to be a
mortal sin, is “pathologische . . . Verfassung, in welcher jedes unscheinbarste
Ding . . . als Chiffer einer rätselhaften Weisheit auftritt” (GS
I.1:319; “a pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to
be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom,” Origin, 140). Things no longer
refer to a practical engagement, in the sense of being “ready to hand”
(Heidegger speaks of Zuhandenheit). As emblems they stand for something
else whose absence they designate. Whereas Sigmund Freud defined
melancholy in his text Mourning and Melancholy (1917) as a grieving that
is not ready yet to remove emotions from the dead, and that is characterized
by a problematic relation to the object, for Benjamin melancholy
becomes a paradigm that does not yield a “straightforward compensation”
29 for the dead object. Melancholy describes an attitude of perceiving
the world in a state of permanent self-reflection. This motive is explained
with reference to Hamlet. Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark is not only
an actor onstage for the audience, but in a certain way for himself. He is
a self-reflecting observer or theater spectator of his own action 30 and as
a result dissolves, as it were, the dramatic presence of represented stage
action. 31 In Hamlet the spectacle becomes a “play” in which the audience
is imbued with an attitude of self-reflection. That is why melancholy on