Walter Benjamin Images The Creaturely And The

Holy Sigrid Weigel download

https://ebookbell.com/product/walter-benjamin-images-the-
creaturely-and-the-holy-sigrid-weigel-51942230

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Walter Benjamins Concept Of The Image Benjamin Walter Ross

https://ebookbell.com/product/walter-benjamins-concept-of-the-image-
benjamin-walter-ross-5288802

Walter Benjamins Archive Images Texts Signs Walter Benjamin Ursula

Marx

https://ebookbell.com/product/walter-benjamins-archive-images-texts-
signs-walter-benjamin-ursula-marx-5316304

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-arcades-project-walter-
benjamin-2435612

Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol 4 19381940 First Edition

Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/walter-benjamin-selected-writings-
vol-4-19381940-first-edition-benjamin-26429476
On Hashish 1st Walter Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/on-hashish-1st-walter-benjamin-5478458

Origin Of The German Trauerspiel 1st Edition Walter Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/origin-of-the-german-trauerspiel-1st-
edition-walter-benjamin-54996836

On Photography Walter Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/on-photography-walter-benjamin-10665374

The Storyteller Essays Walter Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-storyteller-essays-walter-
benjamin-33980836

On Photography Walter Benjamin

https://ebookbell.com/product/on-photography-walter-benjamin-38032620
WALTER BENJAMIN
Cultural Memory

Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

WALTER BENJAMIN

Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy

Sigrid Weigel

Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
English translation © 20!3 by Sigrid Weigel. All rights reserved.
Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy was originally published in
German under the tide Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder © S. Fischer Verlag
GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2008.
This translation has been made possible by the support of the German Federal
Ministry of Education and Research.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weigel, Sigrid, author.
[Walter Benjamin. English]
Walter Benjamin : images, the creaturely, and the holy I Sigrid Weigel ; translated
by Chadwick Truscott Smith.
pages em. -- (Cultural memory in the present)
"Originally published in German under the tide Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die
Bilder."
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-o-8047-8059-9 (cloth : alk. paper) --
ISBN 978-o-8047-8060-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
r. Benjamin, Walter, r892-1940--Criticism and interpretation. I. Tide. II. Series:
Cultural memory in the present.
PT2603.E455Z9425 wn
838' .9I209--dc23
20!2029069
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in Hlr3.5 Adobe Garamond
In Memory ofStephane Moses
(I9JI-2007)
Table of Contents

Illustrations Xl

Explanation ofTranslation and Citation Xlll

Abbreviations of Cited Works XV

Acknowledgments XVll

Foreword XlX

ON THE THRESHOLD BETWEEN CREATION AND LAST JUDGMENT

1 The Creaturely and the Holy:

Benjamin's Engagement with Secularization 3
2 The Sovereign and the Martyr: The Dilemma of
Political Theology in Light ofthe Return ofReligion 30
3 Disregard of the First Commandment in Monstrous Cases:
The "Critique ofViolence" Beyond Legal Theory and
'States ofException' 59

SOMETHING FROM BEYOND THE POET

THAT BREAKS INTO POETIC LANGUAGE

4 The Artwork as a Breach of the Beyond:

On the Dialectic ofDivine and Human Order in
"Goethe's Elective Affinities" 81
5 Biblical Pathos Formulas and Earthly Hell:
Brecht as Antipode to Benjamin's Engagement with
"Holy Scripture" 106
x Contents

6 Jewish Thinking in a World Without God:

Benjamin's Readings ofKafka as a Critique
of Christian and jewish Theologoumena 130

FROM THE MIDST OF HIS IMAGE WORLD

7 Translation as the Provisional Approach to the

Foreignness of Language:
On the Disappearance ofThought-Images
in Translations ofBenjamin's Writings 167
8 The Study of Images in the Spirit of True Philology:
The Odyssey of The Origin of the German Mourning Play
Through the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg 183
9 The Unknown Masterpieces in Benjamin's Picture Gallery:
On the Relevance ofVisual Art for Benjamin's Epistemology 207

10 Detail-Photographic and Cinematographic Images:

On the Significance ofthe History ofMedia in Benjamin's
Theory of Culture 235

Appendix
Documentation ofthe Correspondence on the Odyssey
Taken by Benjamin's Trauerspiel Book in the KBW:
Extracts from the Letters
Illustrations

CHAPTER 8
Illustration I: Wiener Genesis (series 5r) I87
Illustration 2: Ira, detail from Le Virtu e i Vizi, around I305,
Fresco, Padua, Cappella degli Scrovegni I88

CHAPTER 9
Illustration I: Albrecht Durer, Melencolia I (I5I4), engraving 212
Illustration 2: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (I920), oil crayon
printed on watercolor 2I3
Illustration 3: Matthias Grunewald, Isenheimer Altar (I5I5),
first panel 222
Illustration 4: Panel of the Resurrection, high altar 223
Illustration 5: Concert of Angels 224
Illustration 6: Charles Meryon, Les nuits de mai (I87I), engraving 227
Illustration 7: Gustave Courbet, La vague (I87o), oil on canvas 227
Illustration 8: Wiener Genesis, Pol. I4r (illustration 27) 23I
Illustration 9: Wiener Genesis, Pol. I5r (illustration 29) 23I

CHAPTER IO
Illustration I: David Octavius Hill, In Greyfriar Cemetery
in Edinburgh, I843-I848 256
Illustration 2: Felix Nadar, The Paris Sewer, around I86o 257
Illustration 3: August Sander, Catholic Cleric/Clergyman, I927 258
Illustration 4: Eugene Atget, 9I rue de Turenne, I9II 259
Illustration 5: Karl Blossfeldt, Ur-forms ofArt, Tritonia crocosmiflora
und Delphinuim, I928 260

APPENDIX
Title page from Benjamin's The Origin ofthe German Mourning
Play, with Warburg's dedication to Saxl (WIA) 271
Explanation ofTranslation and Citation

The book has been translated by Chadwick Smith (New York).

In some cases his translation is based on a previous lecture version of
the chapter done by other translators: Georgina Paul, Chapters 1, 2, and 4;
and Jeremy Gaines, Chapters 3, 7, and 9·
Since a great number of the citations from Walter Benjamin's writ-
ings have been modified (for reasons that are explained in detail in several
footnotes and at length in Chapter 7), the book would become unread-
able if this were explicitly indicated in every case. The manner of citation is
therefore indicated within the parenthetical references as follows:

• If only the German source is indicated, it is our own translation.

• Where only the standard English translation is indicated, we follow
these translations.
• In cases where both versions are indicated (the German source pre-
ceding the English publication), this formatting indicates translation
modified.
Abbreviations of Cited Works

Citations from the German editions of Benjamin's collected works

(Gesammelte Schriften) and collected letters ( Gesammelte Briefe) are indi-
cated in the text with volume and page numbers alone. In order to differ-
entiate between these editions, volumes of the works are numbered with
roman numerals and volumes of the letters are indicated by arabic numerals.

AB = Gretel Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Briefo;echsel I9JO-I940

(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005).
BA = Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Briefo;echsel I928-I940
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1994).
GB =Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, Christoph Grodde and Henri
Lonitz, eds., in 6 vols (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1995-2000).
GS = Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, RolfTiedemann and
Hermann Schweppenhauser, in 7 vols. with 3 supplementary vols.
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1972-1999).
SelWr = Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Vols. 1-4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996-2003).
OWS = One- way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter (New York: Verso, 1979).
Corr = The Correspondence ojwalter Benjamin, E. M. Jacobson, ed.
Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).
AP =Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 2002).
Origins= walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New
York: Verso, 1998).
BS = Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Briefo;echsel I993-I940
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1980).
xv1 Abbreviations of Cited Works

CBS =Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of

Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, I932-I940 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992).
Acknowledgments

Work on this book, and the efforts to more precisely understand

the significant place religion occupies in Benjamin's thought, started im-
mediately after the publication of my first book on Benjamin's theoretical
writing, Body- and Image-Space. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin (1996, in Ger-
man: Entstellte Ahnlichkeit, 1997). A crucial impetus for this present work
comes from conversations with Stephane Moses, for which I could no lon-
ger offer my thanks after his untimely death in December 2007. This book
is thus dedicated to him, also because his expositions of readings of the
Torah, which he introduced to the Dialectics of Secularization (Dialektik
der Sakularisierung) research group at the Center for Literary and Cul-
tural Research (ZfL) as a frequent visiting scholar, were especially impor-
tant. I thank the scholars and researchers of this project-Ernst Muller,
Martin Treml, and Daniel Weidner-for their shared work on the concept
of secularization, which is present in my re-interpretations of Benjamin's
writings. I thank Georges Didi-Huberman and Monika Wagner for the in-
spiring conversations about art and Benjamin.
Through their curiosity and questions, my students in various courses
at the Technical University in Berlin and Princeton University highlighted
the need for more precise readings and elucidations of many of the more
difficult passages within Benjamin's writings. I have also had the opportu-
nity to further develop my readings and theses on the basis of discussions
at numerous conferences and lectures, for which many thanks are due
to, among others, Russel Berman, Amir Eshel, Rodolphe Gasche, Helga
Geyer-Ryan, Eckart Goebel, Tony Kaes, Albrecht Koschorke, Vivian Liska,
Avital Ronell, Samuel Weber, Peter Weibel, and Bernd Witte.
I especially thank Jutta Muller at the ZfL for the attentive critical
readings of my German manuscript and Chadwick Smith for untiring
work on the translation.
Foreword

The Holy, Life, and the Creaturely

A letter Walter Benjamin sent to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem in

June 1938 contains a remark that allows an essential clarification of his at-
titude toward the Holy. It comes in the form of a rhetorical figure, as if it
were superfluous to devote a word to it: "Is it necessary to state that holi-
ness is an order reserved for life and that artistic creation does not belong
to it under any circumstances? And does it need to be pointed out that the
epithet of holiness is nothing more than a novelist's empty phrase when
used outside a traditionally established religious framework?" (6/w6; CBS
220; ital. S.W.) This distinction, uttered en passant, throws light on a pos-
sibly principal misunderstanding in the engagement with Benjamin, as it
is found throughout the critical reception of his work.
The dimension of the sacred in his theory was for decades discussed
primarily in relation to his handling of writing, literature, and images.
Only recently has the significance that the divine holds for his concept of
life stepped to the center of the debates about Benjamin's work, particu-
larly in connection with the rediscovery of the concept of mere natural life
(bloJSes naturliches Leben) in the essay "The Critique of Violence" (SelWr
1.236). Although this concept, with which Agamben's Homo Sacer begins,
stretches back to Benjamin and indeed plays a central role in his writings
(far beyond the essay on violence), the current debate seems largely to fail
to grasp the very meaning ofBenjaminian concepts. To him, it is precisely
not about the holiness ojlife; on the contrary, he considers the "dogma of
the sacredness of bare life" as the "last mistaken attempt of the weakened
Western tradition." Thus he sees in it a reaction to the loss of the saint and
interprets the proposition that bare life is indeed sacred as being the mythi-
cal replacement for the divine that originates in "cosmological impenetra-
bility'' (II.Ih02; SelWr 1.251). In contrast to this dogma, his assertion that
xx Foreword

holiness is an order reserved for life means that the concept 'life' refers pre-
cisely to that dimension that transcends mere natura/life to the order of the
holy. It is through a reference to the divine order that the concept of life
first accrues a meaning that makes it more than bare life. This super-natu-
ral (uber-naturliche) dimension of the concept of life relies on the biblical
notion that human life is part of divine Creation. It maintains its particu-
lar contours within the idea inherent to this tradition that man was made
in the divine image, even when this 'more-than-natural-life' has then been
transformed into philosophical, ethical, or other principles after the bible
lost its claim to authority and validity (Chapter 3). A world apart, human
activity is fundamentally different from Creation: the fruits or products
of human production are artifacts, or as Benjamin says, formed structures
(Gebilde).
Yet as a part of creation, itself a creature ( Geschiipf), the human has
a share in the world of creaturely 1-so long as humans are situated in the
state of Creation. The concept, understanding, and interpretation of hu-
mans as creaturely are leitmotifs in the ideas, texts, and images from both
the baroque and modernity that are Benjamin's objects of investigation. In
his commentary on the topic, he interprets the concept of the creaturely as
both an expression and an indication (Anzeichen) of a "counter-historical"
stance-not a-historic, but rather an attitude in contradiction to a histori-
cal understanding. It comes from the wish to return to the state of Cre-
ation, and to this end it leads to history's conversion back into a kind of
state of nature. The concept of the creature is, in this way, a symptom of
a confusion of the state of Creation with the state of nature (Chapter I).
His remark that the attribute of holiness is but a belletristic cliche
certainly does not mean that in Benjamin's view the holy is unimport-

r. During the constitution of the German language, when Latin words were translated
by inventing new German words, it often happened that the Latin word got integrated into
the lexicon as well, with the result a semantic differentiation between the foreign word and
its German equivalent. The translation of Latin creatura into 'Schopfung' (Creation) and
'Geschopf' (creation) is part of Luther's German and refers to a biblical context; its con-
notation stems from the expression 'Gottes Geschopf'(God's creation). In distinction to
'Geschopf' the word 'Kreatur' has acquired another connotation that is more linked to the
natural, bodily, or animallike state of living beings, including humans. Since the difference
between the meanings is central for the whole argument of the book, we will use creation
for 'Geschopf,' creature/ creaturely for 'Kreatur,' and Creation for 'Schopfung.'
 Foreword xx1

ant for poetical works (Dichtung). 2 Quite the opposite. Benjamin's cri-
tique is in fact aimed against programs of art that sacralize poetic creation
and thereby attribute a divine mandate, as it were, to the poet. Benjamin,
rather, sees the poet as a descendant of cultic practices that are lost in his-
tory (understood as the distance from Creation) and considers Dichtung
more as a refuge for concerns that have slipped away from theology. The
latter is less due to the poet than it has to do with language, because every
language (at least in European history) to some degree stands in the lineage
of biblical language, which is the medium of revelation, although this is
the case mainly in the mode of loss, translation, and conventionalization,
that is, in the mode of distance and disfigurement (Entstellung). 3 Benjamin
treats the distance from Creation, in which language also partakes in his-
tory, as a structural distinction between it and revelation. If, however, po-
etic engagement with language is reminiscent of the Heiligung des Namem,
because the words are "called by their names," poetic works become the site
of a breach through which meanings that originate in a higher order can
enter. Nevertheless, poetic works never become identical with the higher
order; nor do they become its secular substitute (Chapter 4).
Taking center stage in this book is Benjamin's recognition of the fact
that not the least, but actually the weightiest, concepts and ideas in Euro-
pean thought (such as life, the human, and justice) arise from biblical tra-
dition. Also of primary concern, however, are the consequences that this
recognition has for the formation of his theory and his engagement with
language and history, and with literature and art. Today, Benjamin's rhe-
torical question, quoted above in the letter to Scholem, demands a clear
and decisive answer: it is necessary. Considering the fact that he actually
considered commentary on the holy to be superfluous, it is surprising how
heavily the reception of Benjamin troubles itself with his engagement with
theology, religion, and the divine (Chapter r). In this regard, a structural

2. Benjamin uses both words 'Dichtung' and 'Literatur,' the latter having a more pro-
fane meaning and including all sorts of texts, whereas 'Dichtung' is reserved for art and dis-
cussed in respect of its complex relationship to sacred scriptures.
3· The Freudian term for dreamwork Entstellung will be translated in this book as 'dis-
figurement' instead of 'distortion,' which belongs to the repeatedly criticized translated
terms in Standard Edition of Freud. As regards the other two terms ofdreamwork, this book
follows the Standard Edition in taking 'displacement' for Verschiebung and 'condensation'
for Verdichtung.
xx11 Foreword

configuration can be observed, one that pervades his writings (sometimes

dearly, sometimes concealed), particularly in his engagement with termi-
nology. Its matrix persists in the ineluctable distinction between the world
of Creation (there) and the world of history (here), which forms a funda-
mental epistemic function in Benjamin's writings. It literally represents the
foundation of his thinking: "history comes into being simultaneously with
meaning in human language" (ILIII39). This epistemic figure found one
of its first linguistic expressions in the early essay on language in the image
of the Fall of language-mind (Sundenfoll des Sprachgeistes). From the bibli-
cal scene of man's expulsion from paradise, Benjamin formed the epistemic
distinction fundamental for his writing and thought. Through the simul-
taneous emergence ( Gleichursprunglichkeit) of history and signs, human
acting and speaking always already takes place in the interval between cre-
ation and revelation. Thus the historical subject is situated in a state of ir-
resolvable disfigurement (Entstellung), while at the same time the subject's
concepts always remain based on that from which they were differentiated:
law is based on and springs up from justice, the word on the name, images
on semblance, and art on the cult. In this respect, there is for Benjamin no
thought free from some kind of reference back to ideas that originate in
the tradition of the history of religion.

Neither Theological nor Secular

Thus Benjamin's own stance can in no way be called theological. It is

rather obliged to the questions that were removed from theology, the latter
having lost its privileged claim to meaning. Yet it also cannot be described
as secular, at least not in the terms with which Hans Blumenberg char-
acterized this term in his critique of the paradigms of secularization: as a
"reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corre-
sponding questions could not be eliminated," in whose transmission, how-
ever, a "continuing acceptance of the religious sphere in which language
originates" can be discerned (1988, 65, 104). When Blumenberg justifiably
judges such practice of secularization as the last Theologoumenon, Ben-
jamin's critique is as well directed to such Theologoumena. This becomes
especially dear in his engagement with the interpretations of Kafka avail-
able to him at the time (Chapter 6). Perhaps Benjamin's manner of think-
ing and writing can best be described as postbiblical, since it arises from a
 Foreword xxm

consciousness for biblical language, holy orders, and the idea of salvation
without being tied to it through confession. That the terms of the divine
order have singular meanings that may not be transferred into the secular
order of human action and social communication is a fixed point within
his thought. This acceptance of biblical language absent faith may be de-
scribed as jewish thinking in a world without God, to borrow the wonderful
title of the Festschrift for Stephane Moses (Festschrift 2000). This thinking
is not to be confused with negative theology, in which the Deus abscondicus
itself becomes the center of, and point of reference for, a religious com-
portment. Nor should it be aligned with a variant of negative theology
critical of capitalism that makes the bourgeois world in the image of hell
into the object of a quasi-religious evocation (Chapter 5).
Blumenberg once remarked that the God of philosophers is unfeel-
ing, while that of the bible is hypersensitive: "therefore the theologians
speak in the idiom of philosophy in order to spare their God: could he bear
the language of the Bible?" (Blumenberg 1998, 19, my trans.) With Benja-
min, one must object to this interpretation to the extent that in his view,
theology as speech about God has already been differentiated from bibli-
cal language, since it always implies a speaking in history after the "Fall of
language-mind," at a distance from creation, so that this fact can rather
clarifY the closeness the theological idiom has to the language of philoso-
phy. Contrarily, Benjamin is adamant that there is an afterlife of biblical
language, and indeed in poetic works. Dichtung does not inherit the tradi-
tion in such a way that it can be possessed as a resource at Dichtung's dis-
posal, but rather in the sense that poetic works provide a site for a breach
through which "something beyond the poet interrupts the language of po-
etry" (Chapter 4). In this way, his engagement with the tradition does not
conform to the opposition of theology to philosophy. Benjamin's position
beyond theology and philosophy finds expression mainly in his figures of
speech, thought-images, and dialectic images. The genuinely Benjaminian
use of language systematically disappears in most translations of his writ-
ings into other languages. Because the thought-images are translated either
as metaphors or as concepts, his theory often loses its specific signature in
international reception. Whereas, because of this elision, his reflections
appear to be a great deal more easily compatible with current theoretical
discourses, it is often the case that the dimension of language that recalls
religious quotations is unrecognizable (Chapter 7).
xx1v Foreword

Forgotten Images:
The Significance of Art in Benjamin's Epistemology

On the other hand, the dominance of thought-images in Benjamin's

writing has to date obscured the central and irreplaceable significance that
aesthetic perception and the visual images have for his mode of thinking.
Arrworks, paintings, and prints (that is, images from the history of arr) in
fact occupy an elevated place in his writings, and not only the two icons of
his work, Durer's Melencolia and Klee's Angelus Novus-without reference
to which few books and arricles about Benjamin manage to be published.
Similarly, not only are the photographic and cinematographic images so
imporrant for his cultural theory of moderniry central in his works (Chap-
ter 10), but so are images from arrists of the most diverse provenances,
from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance and from the baroque
to moderniry and expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Although many
works have dealt with Benjamin's concept, critique, and theory of arr, an
investigation into the question as to what epistemological significance cor-
responds to artworks themselves remains until now absent.
In Benjamin, the images are also related (like Dichtung) to the af-
terlife of religion. Yet even though poetic language is significant and
meaningful for the survival of biblical language, with images it concerns
the survival of the cultic, sacred, and magical meanings. If religion relo-
cates its divine kingdom into the clouds, as Benjamin once formulated
(VILI/25), then a preview of the "divine kingdom" becomes perceptible
in the arrists' painted clouds. Benjamin is interested less in motifs from
the history of religion, mostly Christian topics, than he is in the col-
ors and materials of art. In them, the sacred appears practically instan-
taneous and unmediated. In often shorr, extremely dense passages, the
most diverse images from the history of art come to play a central role in
Benjamin's writings. Not uncommonly, it is similar to that lighrninglike
insight followed by the text as the long-rolling thunder described by Ben-
jamin in one of the thought-images from the epistemo-theoretical convo-
lute of the Arcades Project (Chapter 9). The viewing of paintings or arrists'
images often functions like a mode of knowledge in which revelation
continues to have an effect: the lightninglike perception of a simultane-
iry that is not translatable into concepts or terminology. The charge (that
thought learns from the images' own mode of perception) continues in
 Foreword xxv

Benjamin's style of writing and is expressed primarily in his thought-im-

ages. Because of this, Benjamin's epistemology is unthinkable without
the experience of art.
In addition to the afterlife of religion in modernity, Benjamin's phys-
iognomic gaze was also interested in physical movements, pathos formu-
las, and expression of emotions in painting and art history. Yet despite
repeated efforts, he failed to convert his latent affinity with the cultural sci-
ence (Kulturwissenschajt) of the Warburg circle into a real exchange with
its members, as testified to by the odyssey his Origin ofthe German Mourn-
ing Pia/ took through the Kulturwissenschafdichen Bibliothek Warburg
(Chapter 8). The weight of this missed encounter is clear when one con-
siders the fact that he saw the Warburg school as part of a movement that
felt at home in boundary zones ( Grenzgebieten), just as he did in his own
work. This type of being at home thus became existential for him the more
he was in reality excluded-barred first from the institution of the uni-
versity (through the rejection of his Habilitationsschrift), 5 then from the
country (by the start of the Hider-Reich). He also considered the neue
Kunstwissenschaft's treatment of art, one that (like Riegl and Linfert) at-
tributes significance to the insignificant, as a part of his imagined virtual
movement. He valued it and considered this mode of research a study of
images "in the spirit of true philology."
The missed dialogue between Benjamin and the Warburg school
stands in the series of failures that characterize Benjamin's own efforts,
while at the same time they continue in the reception of his work. This in-
cludes not only the failure to take seriously the epistemic importance art
has for his thinking, but also a passage from his "Critique ofViolence" that
is highly significant for the context for his stance toward biblical tradition,
until now largely ignored.

4· Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, often referred to as Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama.
The latter mistakes an important argument: In two early essays, written in 1916 just before his
language theory, Benjamin discussed the contrast between Tragodie (tragic drama) and Trauer-
spiel (mourning play) in respect of totally different concepts of time, language, and emotion.
There, he already emphasized mourning and the relation of history and nature in Trauerspiel,
which later on became leitmotifs of his book on the baroque mourning play.
5· Translator's note: The Habilitationsschrift is the postdoctoral, professional disserta-
tion required by German universities to obtain the rank of professor and then lecture at a
universi ry.
xxv1 Foreword

"In Monstrous Cases":

A Largely Ignored Passage from the "Critique ofViolence"

Considering present-day instances of war and terrorism on the inter-

national scene, a "Critique ofViolence," such as the one Walter Benjamin
undertakes in his essay (published in August 1921 in the Archiv for Sozial-
wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik), is of pressing urgency in that it attends
to the tense relationship between law (Recht) and justice ( Gerechtigkeit).
Firstly, such a critique bears on the violence brought out in the conflict
between international law and the unilateral claims of sovereignty made
by the U.S. empire as part of the Bush administration's policy exercised in
Iraq, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Yet it also touches on the varying forms
of nonstate violence that are legitimized through concepts such as justice
and human rights, reaching up to the register of a terroristic violence that
itself appeals to the principles of 'righteousness' or 'holy war' and thus re-
lies on instances that override national or international law (Chapter 2).
It is precisely for the discussion of these nonstate forms of violence that
Benjamin's essay is particularly relevant. It is devoted to the question of
"whether violence, in a particular case, is a means to a just or unjust end"
(SelWr 1.238, transl. mod.). In addition to phenomena such as the right
to general strike and martial law, Benjamin grapples with the legitimacy
of revolutionary violence in general and brings his argument to a head at
the end when he poses the question of tyrannicide literally exemplified
in the "monstrous case [ ... ] exemplified in the revolutionary killing of
the oppressor" (201, 250ff.).
Yet however much Benjamin's "Critique ofViolence" is again moved
into the center of political theory through the present-day debates, it is
indeed conspicuous that the readings of this certainly dense and difficult
text consistently disregard (when it is not simply avoided) a particular pas-
sage, namely, the nearly two pages on "divine violence" in which Benja-
min speaks of what it means to disregard the commandment "Thou shall
not kill" when "monstrous cases" (2ooff., 250) present themselves. The fact
that this passage plays no essential role in the intense present-day discus-
sion of Benjamin's contribution to a critique of violence is therefore quite
remarkable, as it is the only one in the entire text in which he not only
deals with his contemporaries' arguments about the legitimacy or prin-
cipled rejection of revolutionary murder but also formulates his own re-
 Foreword xxvu

sponse. His response certainly does not take place under the banner of
legitimacy, but rather of the responsibility of acting subjects. Subsequent to
the assertion that "[t]hose who base a condemnation of all violent killing
of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken,"
he writes: "it [the prohibition-S.W] exists not as a criterion of judgment,
but as a guideline for acting of persons or communities who have to en-
gage with it in solitude and, in monstrous cases (in ungeheuren Fallen), to
take on themselves the responsibility to disregard it (von ihm abzusehen)"
(250, transl. mod.; Chapter 3).
The question will not be addressed here as to from which motives
Benjamin's discussion of the aloneness in which one must take the respon-
sibility in disregarding the commandment "Thou shall not kill" is virtually
ignored or bypassed in a systematic way. With reference to his famous dec-
laration "detour is method," however, it can be asserted that circumvention
also is and has a method. In this case, it seems to be a necessary precon-
dition to be able to position Benjamin's reflections on violence in close
proximity to a theory of the state ofexception and thereby to integrate the
"Critique ofViolence" within the paradigms of political theology. At pres-
ent, the author who gives this positioning the greatest weight is Giorgio
Agamben. He claims that though Benjamin "does not name the state of
exception in the essay," he nevertheless proceeds, retrenching his argument
slightly: "though he does use the term Ernstfoll, which appears in Schmitt
as a synonym for Ausnahmezustand." In interpreting the appearance of
Ernstjall as evidence, Agamben adds another indication for the claimed af-
finity to Schmitt: "But another technical term from Schmitt's vocabulary
is present in the text: Entscheidung, 'decision.' Law, Benjamin writes, 'ac-
knowledges in the "decision" determined by place and time a metaphysical
category"' (Agamben, State ofException 53).
The claim that Benjamin uses Schmitt's terms and concepts is an
important cornerstone both for Agamben's reading of an "exoteric debate
between Benjamin and Schmitt" (55) and for his interpretation of the rela-
tionship between the two theories, which amounts to a distinction of two
sides of the law, both on this side and beyond, in dealing with violence in
the state of exception: "While Schmitt attempts every time to re-inscribe
violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by
seeking every time to assure-as pure violence-an existence outside the
law" (Agamben, State ofException 53). Yet in Agamben's summary, not only
XXVlll Foreword

is Benjamin's argumentation misjudged but the gesture and diction of the

entire essay are as well. Benjamin's argument is both far removed from in-
suring (sichern) pure violence beyond law and absolutely distant from es-
tablishing any security for a decision about violence at all. Benjamin is only
sure in his efforts to clarifY the terminology taken from the history of phi-
losophy that is operative in his analysis of violence in its relationship "to
law and justice" (SelWr r.236): "[t]he critique of violence is the philosophy
of its own history" (SelWr !.251).
In this endeavor, language and terminology gain a central signifi-
cance. A close reading of his essay will disallow the assertion that Benjamin
used Schmitt's vocabulary, especially in the case of technical terms, that is,
of nomenclatures or disciplinary jargon. The episterna-theoretical point of
departure for his critique of violence, in which he yet takes the historical
and theoretical preconditions of law making (Rechtsetzung) and law pre-
serving (Rechtserhaltung) into account, consists precisely in the fact that it
takes place beyond the disciplinary boundaries of legal or constitutional
law (and thus also beyond positive law). Regarding the specific terminol-
ogy in Benjamin's essay that Agamben interprets as coming from Schmitt, a
close reading will show that Benjamin indeed speaks of"crisis" (Ernstjall),
yet only in the context of his analysis of martial law. For him, its contradic-
tions obtain precisely in the fact legal subjects sanction violence, "whose
ends [ ... ] can therefore in a crisis come into conflict with their own legal
or natural ends" (240). Ernstjall here thus means the becoming effective of
law of war through the entrance of the event of war-that is, crisis. And if
Benjamin talks about decision, the word "decision" is carefully set within
quotation marks, when Benjamin explains that through this acknowledged
metaphysical category (namely 'Entscheidung) law gives rise to the "claim
to critical evaluation" (243). He thus considers the utilization of the cate-
gory of decision in the law to be worthy of critique.
One likewise fails to recognize the significance of "pure violence,"
an idea central to Benjamin's mode of reflection, when one understands
it (as Agamben does) as terminus technicus (technical term) in Benjamin's
essay (Agamben, State ofException 53). Benjamin rather inscribes the cen-
tral terms in the contemporary debate on revolutionary violence in terms
of their mythic and religious-historical foundations, which remain embed-
ded within them and are thereby used in mediated ways. In particular, the
diction of the passage on the commandment quoted above argues outside
 Foreword xx1x

of any certainty provided by technical language. Instead of a decision made

in the state of exception, the vocabulary is rather one of monstrous cases,
solitude, responsibility, and disregard of the commandment.

On the Problem of Double Translation

The subsumption of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" into a dis-

course about the state of exception and political theology is naturally not
the result of Agamben's interpretation alone but rather is also the effect
of, among other things, problems involved in translation, as it is a debate
conducted mainly in the English-speaking context. In English translation
"ungeheure Hille" becomes "exceptional cases" (SelWr 1.250), a rendering
in which the difference between the Benjaminian formulation "in mon-
strous cases" and the "state of exception" disappears. The phrase "von ihm
absehen" then becomes "ignoring it" in the translation, which really means
taking no note or notice of something. Yet "davon abzusehen," rather than
indicating ignorance, refers to a conscious omission, that is to say a kind of
negative acting that presupposes acknowledgment. If the struggle with the
imperative of the commandment is translated with the phrase "to wrestle
with it in solitude," then this situation of acting (judged by Benjamin to
be one of uncertain responsibility) maintains a tragic element: it becomes
the lonely struggle of a person, which makes the scene suitable for political
theology's concept of sovereignty, which holds that the sovereign is the one
who decides on the state of exception.
For me, it is not a matter of exposing or criticizing "false" transla-
tions, but rather a question of the problem of translatability itself That
even in the best translations Benjamin's argumentation, along with the
specific linguistic style of his analyses, is often lost and sometimes reversed
is an effect of a double assimilation. First, his writing is assimilated into
'understandable' (that is, accepted or conventional) usage through the
translations. The second takes place with the approximation of his very
singular (eigensinnig) use of language to present-day theoretical language,
even though Benjamin's specific mode of writing is incompatible with it
because it often relies on unusual, older locutions and so-called outdated
words. The difference between the language with which we communicate
today and the words favored by Benjamin concerns, if nothing else, the dif-
ference between sacred or biblical language and modern, secular discourse.
xxx Foreword

Benjamin's attitude toward Jewish tradition and biblical language, toward

religion and secularization, is apparent not only in his explicit assertions
about the relation of messianism to history (such as in the "Theological-
Political Fragment" and "On the Concept of History"); in his remarks on
literature and religion (such as in "Goethe's Elective Affinities" and his essay
on Franz Kafka); or in reflections on language and revelation (such as in
the essay on Karl Kraus and "The Task of the Translator"). Above all, it is
operative in his use oflanguage. His postulate "[to call] on the word by its
name" literally means to bend the secular use of language back to the bib-
lical (cultic) origin of language.
The origin and descent (and this also implies the derivation) of secu-
lar terms from biblical concepts is a main topic of the essay "The Critique
ofViolence." For example, when Benjamin amends the contemplation of
"every conceivable solution to human problems" with the insertion of the
clause "not to speak of salvation from the confines (Bannkreis) of all the
world-historical conditions of existence obtaining hitherto," (247) then
the pair of terms solution and salvation (Losung und Erlosung) opens up a
horizon for a critique of violence in which 'solution,' as a notion of human
action, reflects its descent from the biblical idea of redemption: as the
transport of divine terms into the sphere of human politics. Solution com-
ports itself toward redemption just as law does toward justice. Again this
specific wordplay of the pair of terms Losung-Erlosung is largely lost when
English translations take "Erlosung" as "deliverance." For Benjamin, the
critique of violence is inseparable from his stance in dealing with the dia-
lectic of secularization. Its scene is his work on and engagement with con-
cepts and images.

Dialectic of Secularization

An engagement with secularized theological language runs through

Benjamin's writings as a leitmotif. Above all, his criticism is directed
against strategies that counter the dwindling legitimacy of theology after
the death of God with an investiture of or participation in its orphaned
terms. Benjamin mobilizes those theoretical efforts that can be described as
work on constellations of a historical dialectic between Creation and his-
tory in order to counter this. Whereas political theology inherits theologi-
cal concepts, Benjamin's work is committed to phenomena and meanings
 Foreword xxxl

in which vanished religious and cultic practices have an ongoing effect in

modernity. The challenge of reading Benjamin, however, lies in the fact
that a consistent theory of secularization is never formulated in his writ-
ings. Instead, a web of connections among thought-images, figures, and
terminology spans his texts. A trail of his reflections on the concept of life
and the creaturely, for instance, reaches from the short text "Fate and Char-
acter" (1919), through the "Critique ofViolence" (1921), "Goethe's Elective
Affinities" (1924-25), the Origin of the German Mourning Play (1927), and
"Karl Kraus" (1931), up to "Franz Kafka'' (1935).
In this context, Benjamin again and again rebuffs terms that repre-
sent the unreflecting transferal of a divine mandate into secular cultural
contexts-without however pleading for an absolute purity of religious
concepts. Instead, he is concerned (in acknowledgment of the ineluctable
difference between revelation and history) with the illumination of thresh-
old constellations. This is apparent when he situates, for example, Karl
Kraus's figures and tone on the threshold between the world of Creation
and the last judgment, between lament (Klage) and accusation (Anklage).
From his early draft on the theory oflanguage from 1916, in which the "Fall
of language-mind" constitutes the line of demarcation that separates pure
paradisiacal language from language within the history of human commu-
nication; through "The Task of the Translator" (1921), in which translation
is understood as a rehearsal (Probe) of the distance between the world's
many languages and the pure language of revelation; and up to the theses
"On the Concept of History'' (1940), one can observe an ongoing and con-
tinuously reconsidered work on constellations of dialectic of secularization.
It is grounded in the philosophies of language and history. With reference
to the idea of redemption, which coincides with the end of history, images
of history are necessarily distorted or displaced-like dream images.
Above all, Benjamin's critique is concerned with the adoption of reli-
gious concepts such as justice (Gerechtigkeit) and redemption (Erlosung) to
political philosophy or historiography. It also touches on a field of rheto-
ric and metaphorics that profits from the perpetuation of sacred and bibli-
cal terminology: precisely all the practices in which theology becomes the
small, ugly hunchback who, as the first of the thought-images to appear in
"On the Concept of History," "enlists the services" of another sphere and
is, through the refined representation in its puppet, invisible. Benjamin's
engagement with secularization in his "Theological-Political Fragment" is
xxxu Foreword

formulated in condensed form as an episterna-theoretical configuration, a

thought-image that describes the relationship of the profane order to the
messianic as a "teaching of the philosophy of history." In it, he rejects the
adoption of 'theocracy' as a political term. Instead, he stresses the princi-
ple asynchrony between historical events and the alignment of the secular
order with the idea of happiness on one hand, and the messianic (which
coincides with the end of history) on the other. Only from this funda-
mental division can one discuss the specific manner in which the pursuit
of happiness orients itself toward the messianic within the dynamic of the
secular, namely, in the "rhythm of messianic nature" in which the pursuit
of happiness and transience come together (Chapter r).
Benjamin's essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities constitutes thus a type
of foil to the "Critique of Violence." He recognizes a "Nazarene breach"
within the novel: that Eduard praises Ottilie's striving nature as an incom-
parable martyrdom, describes the dead as 'saints' and then places them in
Christ's line of succession. His critique in this text, however, applies more
to a modern cult of the poet that, under the provenance of Stefan George
and Friedrich Gundolf, ascribes sacred attributes to poetry. According to
Benjamin, when poetry is built up to be a quasi-religion it results in a
remythologization of art that reaches back before the separation of art
and philosophy, a split that came with the end of mythology in Greek
antiquity. He sets this remythologization of art, in which it appears as a
crypto-religion, up against a strict border between the discourse of art and
a "speech of God" and then develops this basic distinction in his reading
of Goethe's novel. Benjamin's text makes this contention in the course of a
systematic differentiation between the terms of human and divine orders:
between 'task' and 'exaction,' between 'formed structure' and 'creature,'
and between 'reconciliation' (which occurs among humans), transcendent
'atonement,' and the notion of'expiation' through a divine element. In the
form of the dialectic construed between natural and supernatural life es-
tablished by these terms, and then the motif of the "the guilt nexus of the
living," the essay on Goethe maintains a direct connection to the "Critique
ofViolence," a text in which Benjamin's efforts concentrate on conceptual
and terminological differences between law and justice (Chapter 4).
WALTER BENJAMIN
 The Creaturely and the Holy
Benjamin's Engagement with Secularization

It is characteristic of Walter Benjamin's simultaneously fascinating

and difficult writing that he neither presents his thoughts in a discursive
continuity-ordering them in terms of subject matter, themes, and as-
pects-nor provides his readers with a conceptual resume. Although the
composition of his texts is founded on a conceptual systematic, he rather
unfolds his arguments and his work on concepts and theorems by means
of readings, quotations, and thought-images. This manner of writing
means that even after multiple readings certain passages may always catch
one's eye that hitherto have largely escaped the notice of scholars and that
launch new and different ways of reading his works. An example of this is
a long quotation from Adalbert Stifter, taking up more than half a page in
his 1931 essay Karl Kraus, which has up to now attracted little attention. 1
It is one of the few places in Benjamin's writings in which he talks overtly
about secularization. For the purposes of my reading, it is the point of de-
parture for an investigation of his concept of secularization, or rather, his
way of dealing with secularization. Benjamin does not so much work with
a theory of secularization, a term he seldom uses explicitly; instead his ap-
proach to language, concepts, and images involves a rhetorical and episte-
mological practice that presents scenes of secularization.

1. This is also the case in my own earlier reading of the Kraus essay as a critique of the

paradigm of 'mind versus sex' and as a theory of Eros and language: "Eros and Language.
Benjamin's Kraus Essay," in Benjamin's Ghosts, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford UP 2002). An
exception is Alexander Honold's recent article on Karl Kraus for the Benjamin handbook.
Honold had already examined the central significance of Benjamin's literary quotations in
his study onDer Leser Walter Benjamin (Berlin: Vorwerk 8 20oo).
4 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

"This insolently secularized thunder and lightning":

The Holy, the Law and the Creaturely

The aforementioned passage is a commentary on a lengthy quotation

from the preface to Stifter's Bunte Steine (Colored Stones, 1853) in which
Stifter describes natural phenomena as the "effects of far higher laws" and
compares the "wonder" felt in relation to them with the reign of the moral
law in the "infinite intercourse of human beings." Benjamin comments on
this passage as follows:

Tacitly, in these famous sentences, the holy has given place to the modest yet ques-
tionable concept oflaw. But this nature of Stifter's and his moral universe are trans-
parent enough to escape any confusion with Kant, and to be still recognizable in
their core as creature. 2

Though appearing harmless at first glance, Benjamin singles out the fact
that Stifter describes natural phenomena as the effect of "far higher laws"
and thus discovers therein a far-from-harmless operation: a tacit substitu-
tion of the holy with a concept of law whose origin in religion is to be dis-
cerned only in the attribute "higher." He continues:

This insolently secularized thunder and lightning, storms, surf, and earthquakes-
cosmic man has won them back for Creation by making them its answer, like a
statement of the Last Judgment, to the criminal existence of men; only that the
span between Creation and the Last Judgment finds no redemptive fulfillment
here, let alone a historical overcoming. (II.I/340; Se!Wr 1.437; emphasis S.W) 3

2. Our modified translation gives creature or creaturely instead of creation for German

Kreatur. Benjamin's essay reflects on the relations and tensions between Kreaturlcreature,
Geschiipf/creation, and Schiipfung/Creation in the sense of Genesis. This leitmotif gets lost
in translation since all English translations of the Kraus essay translate Kreatur by "creation."
For the problem of translations of Benjamin's writings, see here Chapter 7· Benjamin's
Kreatur emphasizes the relatedness of human beings to animals, i.e., to creaturely life, where-
as Geschiipf means a product of God's Creation. In addition to this the discussed relation-
ship between Genesis/ Schiipfung, generation/ Erzeugung, and procreation/Zeugung opens the
door to sexual connotations. For this see my earlier article on "Eros and Language" (note 1).
J. Our modified translation gives "like a statement of the Last Judgment" instead of
'world-historical' for the German weltgerichtlich, which seemingly has been mistaken as
weltgeschichtlich. Benjamin's reference to Weltgericht in its double meaning of Last Judg-
ment and worldly court is crucial for the whole essay in which he illuminates the biblical
legacy in Kraus's references to justice and to worldly courts/laws. What is at stake here is
 The Creaturely and the Holy 5

What instantly catches one's attention here is the word 'insolently' (schnode).
It separates Stifter's version of a poetic secularization of natural phenomena
both from a secularization that would somehow not be insolent, and from
one that would be more than insolent, perhaps contemptible. Notable,
too, is the characterization of the concept of law as "modest yet question-
able" (dem bescheidenen, doch bedenklichen Begriffdes Gesetzes). The ambi-
guity of the attribute bescheiden, which means 'moderate' but might also
be read as 'scanty' or 'insufficient,' is echoed in the oscillation of bedenklich
between 'requiring interrogation' and 'dubious,' even 'discreditable.'
Benjamin's commentary on this insolent secularization consists of
two arguments. The first is that in speaking of the 'effects of far higher
laws,' Stifter replaces the concept of the holy with the concept of law, a
substitution that, since it has occurred 'tacitly,' remains concealed. The
questionable (bedenkliche) character of the concept of law is not least the
result of the tacit substitution through which the formulation 'higher laws'
can continue to profit from the allusion to the holy even as law seems to
have left the sphere of the holy behind. The second argument is initiated
with the word 'but' and highlights the transparency of Stifter's concept of
nature and of his moral universe, through which their creaturely status
remains discernible: this is why they therefore cannot be confused with
the Kantian moral universe. Benjamin does not undertake a closer exami-
nation of the opposite form, that is, of a form of appearance that would
be obscure and not transparent, so that the creatureliness of Stifter's na-
ture would then not be recognizable. At most, such a contrast is hinted
at through the reference to the Kantian moral universe, lest it concern
Stifter's nature alone. The pathos formula of the "two things" that "fill the
mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe" that we find in
the Critique of Practical Reason in the form of the much-quoted phrase
"the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me" 4 is contra-
dicted in Bunte Steine by the way in which Stifter distinguishes between
these "two things." Stifter views "conspicuous events" in nature as mani-
festations of general laws that act silently and incessantly, while "the mir-
acles of the moment when deeds are performed" are for him only small

the notion of a Last Judgment that already casts its shadow on all notions of justice within
this world.
4· Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 161.
6 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

signs of a general power. This power is the moral law, which, in Stifter's
view, "acts silently, animating the soul through the infinite intercourse of
human beings" (SelWr 1.437). Hence admiration in the face of natural laws
is distinguished from admiration owing to moral laws. By means of his
commentary on Stifter, Benjamin indirectly criticizes Kant's ethics, which,
in assuming a life of 'intelligence' independent of the entire world of the
senses, 5 fail to recognize the creaturely core of nature-including human
nature. Although Benjamin emphasizes the greater transparency in Stifter's
differentiation between nature and moral universe, what still troubles him
in the text is the use of the concept of law to function as a term projected
onto nature that, like a screen, conceals the notion of the holy.
The definition of a form of non-insolent secularization remains a
void in Benjamin's text, and the task of imagining it is left to his read-
ers. This much is clear, however: the question concerning the possibil-
ity of different forms of secularization that is automatically posed by the
word 'insolently' points toward the issue of the cognizability of the substi-
tutions through which secularizing operations take place. Benjamin's ob-
servation that Stifter's substitution has taken place 'tacitly' implies that
another linguistic or rhetorical mode would be required if it were to be-
come cognizable. Secularization that does not operate insolently is thus
implicitly defined as a reflexive stance in one's dealings with the legacies of
religion in the modern age. The argument up to this point may be sum-
marized as follows: in the context of secularization, Benjamin criticizes the
concept of the law as a screen term to the extent that it conceals within it
the precise relationship between the holy and the creaturely. Thus the pas-
sage gathers together the three central terms-the law, the holy, and the
creaturely-that have been the object of widespread interest in recent Ben-
jamin scholarship.
In order to clarify the importance of insolent secularization for the
work on Karl Kraus, the context of the passage needs to be explained. The
quoted sentences occur in the first part of the essay Karl Kraus of 1931,
which is composed as a triptych whose three chapters are titled Allmensch,
Damon, and Unmensch. Translated in the English edition as 'Cosmic Man,'
'Demon,' and 'Monster,' the pair of ambiguous words All- and Unmensch
(profiting from the tension between the prefixes all and un, and literally
meaning 'every men' and 'an a-human being') is strongly determined since

5. Kant, r6rff.
 The Creaturely and the Holy 7

cosmos' (stemming from Greek KO<JJ..LO<;, the order of the world or the
state) emphasizes the aspect of order or universe and 'monster' carries a
negative connotation. Unmensch, on the other hand, personifies the lack
of all ordinary human attributes and attitudes; he is less a monster than an
a-human being similar to the angel and the envoy (Bote).
In Benjamin's essay, Kraus is presented as a polemicist with an atti-
tude that Benjamin characterizes as noblesse in armor. Kraus's criterion for
world-historical villainy, according to Benjamin, lies beyond any bourgeois
respectability, which he sees as only being capable of plain (home-made)
villainy. His criterion is instead described by Benjamin as a 'theological
tact.' Tact is thus understood not as a skill that eases social interaction but
as "the capacity to treat social relationships, though not departing from
them, as natural, even paradisiac, relationships, and so not only to ap-
proach the king as if he had been born with the crown on his brow, but the
lackey like an Adam in livery" (Il.J/339; SelWr 2.436ff.) This means that
tact is, far from adherence to a social norm, a means of treating the crea-
ture as a divine Creation.

Kraus "In the temple of the creature"

In order to clarifY what the theological means in this context, Benja-

min interprets Kraus's concept of the creature as an inheritance from the-
ology. Kraus's "concept of creature contains the theological inheritance of
speculations that last possessed contemporary validity for the whole of Eu-
rope in the seventeenth century'' (339, 437; emphasis S.W). These specu-
lations have not been able to maintain their validity in unchanging form;
rather, the theological legacy in the concept of the creature has undergone
a transformation in order for it to find expression, for example, in the "or-
dinary (all)-human (allmenschlichen) credo of Austrian worldliness" (339ff.,
437). 6 Benjamin expresses this article of faith in a telling image: the fog
of incense that occasionally still recalls the rite in church into which Cre-
ation has been transformed. Incense and church are here interpreted as
the zero degree of rite and Creation. For Benjamin, then, Kraus's concept
of creature is a symptom of theological legacy in a world in which the idea

6. Benjamin's usage of allmenschlich connotes not only cosmos (All) but also the ordi-
nary notion of human in the sense of menscheln.
8 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

of Creation has been transformed into an ecclesiastical order, or in other

words, in which the cult has been institutionalized. This is the constella-
tion that constitutes the insolent secularization for which Stifter has been
introduced as representative.
In contrast to the unambiguous positioning of Stifter as an exponent
an allmenschliche "credo of Austrian worldliness" or, alternatively, of a "pa-
triarchal (altviiterliches) credo" (SelWr 2-437ff.), the status that Benjamin
ascribes to Kraus is more ambivalent, although the reading of Stifter leads
immediately to his portrait of Kraus. The diagnosis that he operates in "the
span between Creation and Last Judgment" without finding any "redemp-
tive fulfillment" (437) remains valid, however, for Kraus as well. Landscape
is for Stifter's prose what history is for Kraus, so that "for him, Kraus, the
terrifYing years of his life are not history but nature, a river condemned to
meander through a landscape of hell." This image makes it clear that Ben-
jamin's critical gaze is not just directed at the mythologizing process, at the
perception of history as nature; what particularly interests him is the viru-
lently theological topology (the "landscape of hell"). For Kraus, Benjamin
writes, history is "merely the wilderness wasteland (Einode) separating his
genus ( Geschlecht) from Creation, whose last act is world conflagration"
(II.II34I; SelWr 2.438). And further: "As a deserter to the camp of the crea-
turely-so he measures out this wilderness (wasteland)." An apocalyptic
worldview and devaluation of history are therefore not just two sides of the
same coin. In Benjamin's perception, they also evoke an attitude in which
the human subject allies itself with the animal creature and finds itself mir-
rored in it. The role of the animal creature thus becomes a symptom of an
anti-historical theological mythologization of modernity, an attitude Benja-
min describes as a legacy of the Baroque.
Benjamin elaborates the stance toward the creature from both of its
sides: in terms of affection toward animals, and of their transformation
into Creation's mirror of virtue, which is an act of imagination. He sees
an echo of the "all-human credo" wherever "Kraus concerns himself with
animals, plants, children" (340, 437). Benjamin treats the way in which
Kraus "inclines toward" the animal "in the name of creature" with undis-
guised irony. For Kraus, writes Benjamin, the animal is "Creation's true
mirror of virtue, in which fidelity, purity, gratitude smile from times lost
and remote" (SelWr 2.438). His irony is directed at the projection involved
when virtues that have emerged only in the course of human cultural his-
 The Creaturely and the Holy 9

tory are mistaken for the innocence of paradise and where "purity'' is dis-
cerned in, of all things, animals. The name 'creature' stands precisely for
this projection of the state of Creation onto history. When the human
being sees its own face in the mirror image of the animal creature, Cre-
ation and history merge into one. fu emblems of Kraus's attitude, Benja-
min discovers something "infinitely questionable" in the animals, above
all because they are his own creations, "recruited solely from those whom
Kraus himself first called intellectually to life, whom he conceived (zeugte)
and convinced (iiberzeugte) in one and the same act" (438). Here Benja-
min takes Kraus's work as an example of an autopoetic system wherein
his own imaginative projections are regarded as the embodiments of Cre-
ation, and in whose mirrorings a reflection of the Creation falls back
upon the author. The critique is then intensified in Benjamin's image of
the "temple of creature." Benjamin poses a grave objection against such a
procedure, one central to present-day debates about fictionalized works of
Holocaust witness: 7 "His testimony can determine only those for whom
it can never become an act of procreation (Bestimmen kann sein Zeugnis
nur die, denen es Zeugung nie werden kann)" (II.I/341; SelWr 2.438). With
this statement, Benjamin criticizes reference to animals as the represen-
tatives of a creaturely state of innocence, as if conferred upon them by
divine Creation, a reference that disregards the real living animals. In-
stead Benjamin reserves the act of witnessing (Zeugnis) for a constellation
free of'intellectual' procreation (Zeugung), that is, the generation of'life'
through an act of imagination.
His commentary on the ambiguity of meaning that is character-
istic of Karl Kraus's speeches and writings cannot be discussed in detail
here. However, in the course of his discussion of the concrete themes, ob-
jects, and motifs in Kraus's texts, Benjamin comes back again and again
to the basic structure of a significant historico-philosophical topography:
the "span between Creation and Last Judgment." For Benjamin, Kraus
embodies a stance that-in the midst of modernity and its technological
features-takes up a relation to the theological inheritance through such

7. In respect of the aftermath of the Holocaust, I have analyzed the concept of Zeugnis by
differentiating between the gesture of witness and the historical and legal notion of testimo-
ny; see my article "Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft. Klage und Anklage. Zur Geste des Bezeugens
in der Differenz von identity politics, juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs," in
Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft. Einstein Forum jahrbuch I999 (Berlin: Akademie 2000), m-13 5.
10 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

concepts as that of creature, although without leading into a redemptive

history. He presents Kraus to us as a persona operating in a complex and
complicated intermediate space between the world of Genesis and the pres-
ent. By neglecting history, which would fill this intermediate space in the
form of a time-span, Kraus finds himself in a position on "the threshold
of the Last Judgment" (SelWr 2.443). Benjamin compares this perspective
to the foreshortening found in Baroque altar painting. Where Creation
and Last Judgment abut one another in a relation of immediacy (that is,
with no intervening historical time), their orders come into conflict, a con-
flict of principles: "If he ever turns his back on Creation, if he breaks off
lamenting (Klagen), it is only for accusing (anzuklagen) at the Last judg-
ment' (II.I/349; SelWr 2-443, emphases S.W.). Anklage, the language of the
law, and Klage, the language of creatures, are directed at different authori-
ties; they are not only incompatible but in direct conflict with one another.
This conflict finds expression in a multiplicity and polyphony of linguis-
tic and bodily gestures. Polemicism, headstrong stubbornness, biblical pa-
thos, theological tact, lamentation, and demonic voice are all the effects
of a stance in which the speaker, maintaining his position on the thresh-
old, turns first in one direction, then in the other, addressing himself as he
does so to different authorities. At issue in the Kraus essay (first published
in four parts in the Frankforter Zeitung in 1931) is not so much the histori-
cal figure of Karl Kraus as the illumination of this intermediate space and
the clarification of the aftereffects of the theological inheritance in specific
present concepts. Benjamin's commitment is directed at a precise analysis
of the various overlays, substitutions, transformations, and references that
connect contemporary concepts to ideas derived from a divine order.
In two of the central motifs-that of the creature as the mirror of
virtue or morality and that of the perception of history as nature-Ben-
jamin's Kraus essay comes back to his book on German Baroque theatre,
developing ideas first set out there concerning secularization. There he ex-
plored the Baroque attitude toward the world in The Origin ofthe German
Mourning Play in the view of which history itself appears as a mourning
play. In such drama, history and Creation have become indistinguishable.
And this is precisely the theological legacy of speculations from the seven-
teenth century which for Benjamin belong to the prehistory of that inso-
lent secularization through which the 'wonders of nature' are seen in the
literature of the nineteenth century as the effects of higher laws.
 The Creaturely and the Holy II

The Secularization of the Historical

in the State of Creation in the Baroque

In Benjamin's book the Baroque serves as the site and stage of the sov-
ereign prince who, on account of his Janus-like stance between "the unlim-
ited hierarchical dignity, with which he is divinely invested" and his state
as a poor human being, can develop in both directions: to become a tyrant
as well as a "victim to the disproportion" between the two states (Origins
70). Yet also in this book, the creature takes on a similar significance to that
in the Kraus essay:

The creature is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed
to the baroque. A concave mirror; for this was not possible without distortion.
Since it was the view of the age that all historical life was lacking in virtue, virtue
became of no significance also for the inner constitution of the dramatis personae
themselves. It has never taken a more uninteresting form than in the heroes of
these Trauerspiele, in which the only response to the call of history is the physical
pain of martyrdom. And just as the inner life of the person in the creaturely condi-
tion has to attain mystical fulfillment, even in mortal pain, so do authors attempt
to freeze the historical events. The sequence of dramatic actions unfolds as in the
days ofCreation, when it was not history which was taking place. (I.I/2 70; Origins
91; emphasis S.W)

In the conditions of history in which virtue and historical life have become
separated, the person reverts to the creaturely condition-a constellation
which for Benjamin is characterized by three elements: the standstill of his-
tory, physical pain, and the meaninglessness of inner virtue. This descrip-
tion may help to explain Benjamin's barely comprehensible interpretation
of the Baroque as the complete secularization of the historical in the state
of Creation (Origins 92).
The Origin ofthe German Mourning Play occupies a particular position
in Benjamin's works as in it he writes explicitly of secularization, using the
term itsel£ It is admittedly less striking when he calls the Baroque Trauer-
spiel a "secularized Christian drama'' (78) or when he refers to the king in
the Spanish Baroque drama as a "secularized redemptive power." The no-
table formulation concerning the "comprehensive secularization of the his-
torical in the state of Creation," which he describes as the last word in the
escapism of the Baroque, is, however, not so easy to understand. The un-
usual reference to the "secularization of the historical," which runs coun-
12 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

ter to conventional notions of secularization as a process of transformation

moving from the sacred or theological to the historical, and not vice versa,
already introduces a complex dialectic into secularization. With the "secu-
larization of the historical in the state of Creation," Benjamin thematizes a
form of transformation of history back into a precarious version of a natural
state, a kind of"restoration of the timelessness of paradise" (92) with the ef-
fect that history merges into the setting of the scene (Schauplatz), thus dis-
appearing in its capacity as history.
For the concept of secularization being addressed here, then, the
image of the creature is central. If Benjamin understands the reduction of
the human being to the creaturely state as secularization, then this process
must be accompanied by the withdrawal of that significance which points
beyond the creaturely and belongs to the historical. Even if this signifi-
cance has accrued to the human being within history, it is an indication
of his origin in another sphere. Elsewhere, in the "Critique of Violence,"
Benjamin wrote of the double meaning of such words as 'existence' and
'life' as being derived from their reference to "two distinct spheres" (SelWr
1.251). What is withdrawn from the human being in the "secularization of
the historical in the state of Creation" is the aspect of existence that is more
and other than "mere natural life" (200, 250). Originating in a biblical
concept, human existence-understood as simultaneously both natural
and supernatural-is a product of history. Awareness of the other sphere,
the consciousness of loss that finds expression in the concept of the crea-
ture, is nevertheless informed by the knowledge of it. When persons who
find themselves reverted to mere life understand themselves to be in the
state of Creation, then their notion of the creature refers to the loss, and
not to the original state of Creation. In this sense, an origin in Creation
is inscribed into the concept of the creature just as much as the distance
from the "innocent first day of Creation" (I.I/253; Origins 74). This im-
plies that the concept of secularization in this context appears as a kind of
counterconcept to messianism. The messianic aims at redemption through
the fulfillment of history; secularization here means the withdrawal of sa-
cred significance within history, the transformation of existence back into
the creaturely state or of history back into nature.
In another passage concerned with the figure of the tyrant, Benjamin
ascribes the utopia of a "restoration of order in the state of exception" to
the dictatorship of the tyrant: this, too, is then a form of transformation of
 The Creaturely and the Holy 13

history back into nature, or, more precisely, into the "iron constitution of
the laws of nature" (Origins 74) whereby standstill, in the sense of petri-
faction, is seen as both the ideal and goal of dictatorial force. The image
of a counterhistorical or antihistorical stance appears as a leitmotif in the
Baroque drama, establishing the framework within which the Baroque is
constituted without being able to lessen its distance from the "innocent
first day of Creation." Since there can be no return to the paradisiacal state
in which nature and Creation were still identical, the world image that is
the product of an antihistorical attitude bears the features of an (in the
final analysis impossible) imitation of Creation: "The sequence of dramatic
actions unfolds as in the days of Creation, when it was not history which
was taking place" (91). Benjamin speaks in this context of an antihistorical
re-creation. This renewed creation is not only directed against history but
also presumes, in opposition to history, to be able to orient itself in respect
of the world of Creation.
One example of the embodiment of an "antihistorical new-creation"
is for him the case of the "chaste princess" of the martyr-drama, who, like
Gryphius's Catharina, resists the tyrant despite being subjected to torture.
Her "chastity'' is as far removed from "innocence" as nature is from para-
dise. Rather, it is the result of a stoic technique, not dissimilar to the "iron
laws of nature" the tyrant attempts to substitute for history. The difference
is that, unlike in the case of the tyrant, it is the result not of unlimited ab-
solutist power but rather of a kind of empowerment to "a state of excep-
tion of the soul, the rule of affects," through "stoic technique" (I.I/253;
Origins 74). Analogies to this in the Kraus essay are biblical pathos and the
phrasings described by Benjamin as a "spawn of technology" (II.I/336ff.;
SelWr 2.435).
In comparison to the complex constellation of secularization in The
Origin ofthe German Mourning Play, the relevance of secularization to mo-
dernity in the Kraus essay is patently reduced, whereas the theological heri-
tage of the Baroque is above all tied to the concept of creature. Perhaps this
also helps to explain why in "Karl Kraus" he speaks only of an insolent secu-
larization. In claiming that theAllmensch has won back for Creation the "in-
solently secularized thunder and lightning, storms, surf, and earthquakes"
by turning them into a Last Judgment's answer to the criminal existence of
men, Benjamin here emphasizes the other side of secularization. It is char-
acterized less by the withdrawal of a supernatural significance in the state of
14 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

nature than by the tacit sanctification of "natural wonders" as the "effects of

far higher laws," a notion that goes hand in hand with the idea of Creation.

The Kraus Essay:

Nodal Point of Controversial Readings of Benjamin

When one reads the Kraus essay, a number of aspects and strands
of the critical reception of Benjamin's works come into play. There is in
the first place the debate about Benjamin's position vis-a-vis theology
and secularization, which began with the diagnosis of the "rescuing aban-
donment of theology, its unrestrained secularization," as Adorno formu-
lated it in his introduction to the first, two-volume edition of Benjamin's
Schriften of 1955. 8 It was continued, for example, by Hans Heinz Holz,
who thought to have discovered in Benjamin's work a connection between
a "metaphysics grounded in a philosophy of religion" and Marxist philos-
ophy of history, 9 and with Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner's refusal "to interpret
Benjamin theologically." 10 Gerhard Kaiser intervened in this debate, turn-
ing above all against Adorno and arguing that Benjamin does not belong
in the intellectual history of secularization since his thought moves in a
counterdirection that draws very clear distinctions between the profane
and the messianic. 11 At the same time he observed in Benjamin a freedom
"to think strictly theologically while at the same time, without there being
any contradiction to this approach, surrendering the human being to his
,12
autonomy.
This debate is largely founded upon the paradigm of transferal,
whereby secularization is understood as the transferal of religious or theo-
logical meanings into worldly affairs. It is motivated by an opposition

8. Theodor W. Adorno, in Walter Benjamin, Schriften, eds. Th. W. Adorno, Gretel

Adorno, F. Podszus (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1955), xxii.
9· Hans Heinz Holz, Philosophie der zersplitterten Welt. Reflexionen iiber Walter Benja-
min (Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein Nachf, 1992).
ro. Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner, Die "Geschichrsphilosophischen Thesen," in Materialien zu
Benjamins 7hesen, 'Ober den Begriffder Geschicht; ed. Peter Bulthaupt (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp
1975), 38.
n. Gerhard Kaiser, "Walter Benjamins 'Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen'. Zur Kontro-
verse der Benjamin-lnterpreten," in ibid., p. 74·
rz. Kaiser, 73·
 The Creaturely and the Holy 15

between messianism and history and in large part circles around the ques-
tion of which side is given priority in Benjamin's writings-though Benja-
min himself, as the so-called Theological-Political Fragment demonstrates,
has shaped the relationship between the two as an interacting counter-
striving constellation. In 1992, Uwe Steiner rescued the issue of seculariza-
tion from the two opposing camps (the supporters of theology on the one
hand and those of Marxism on the other) by trimming it back to the ques-
tion of secularization as a descriptive historical category. 13 It was a reason-
able and liberating step for critical reception of Benjamin's work in view
of the previous deadlock, but it circumvented the problem that there can
be no contribution to the history of secularization that does not adopt a
position vis-a-vis its preconditions, because theories of secularization al-
ways imply certain ways of addressing concepts derived from the spheres
of cults, theology, Holy Scripture, and religion. This is certainly true in
Benjamin's case.
This was already noticeable at the beginning of the controversy, for
example when Adorno suggested that Benjamin's position is close to that
of Karl Kraus: "Reading profane texts as if they were holy ones is not the
least of the operations by which theology is secularized for the sake of its
own salvation. This was the basis of Benjamin's elective affinity with Karl
Kraus." However, when Adorno argues that the historical appears in Ben-
jamin's work "as if it were nature," then he is overlooking the fact that
Benjamin talks of the secularization of the historical, not of theology. The
same can be said of Adorno's diagnosis of a mythical trend in the "imagis-
tic character of Benjamin's speculations," which, he argues, comes from the
fact that "beneath the contemplative gaze what was historical was trans-
formed into nature on account of its own frailty and everything that was
natural into a piece of the story of Creation." 14 Here he fails to see that
Benjamin ascribes this process to the "escapism of the baroque" and does
not subscribe to it himself.
At the heart of this reading is a misunderstanding of the concept of
nature in Benjamin's book on the Trauerspiel. Adorno reads it as evidence
of a "deep, somewhat antiquarian allegiance of Benjamin's to Kant, above

13. Uwe Steiner, "Sakularisierung. Oberlegungen zum Ursprung und zu einigen Implika-
tionen des Begriffs bei Benjamin," in Walter Benjamin, r892-I940, ed. U. Steiner, Uwe (Bern:
Peter Lang 1992), 141.
14. Adorno (note 9), p. xvi.
16 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

all to his conclusive distinction between nature and the supernatural," and
he claims to discover in Benjamin an "involuntary reformulation and alien-
ation'' of Kantian categories, whereby he additionally equates Benjamin's
idea of the supernatural with reconciliation. 15 Yet although the category of
the supernatural in Kant's essay "The Only Possible Argument in Support
of a Demonstration of the Existence of God" (1763) is relevant to the su-
pernatural character of divine Creation, Benjamin uses this word in order
to discuss the double meaning of the term "life": as mere and higher life, or
as natural and supernatural, as can be seen in his essay on Goethe's Elective
Affinities (SelWr 1.308).
An offshoot of the controversy concerning Benjamin's position vis-
a-vis theology is the debate over his relation to Schmitt, which has in part
picked up the confessional gesture that meanwhile has cooled down in the
arguments over theology. Although this debate is still conducted in terms
of pros and cons, the aspects of the two writers' references to one another
as well as their major differences have nevertheless been usefully elucidated
in a number of contributions dealing with the differences between Benja-
min's interpretation of Baroque sovereignty and Schmitt's theory of mod-
ern sovereignty, as well as those between their specific conceptualizations
of the state of exception. It must be said, however, that the consequences
these differences have for the understanding of and the approach to secu-
larization have not yet been analyzed.
A further development of the controversy about theology is to be
found in the discussion of Benjamin's stance vis-a-vis Jewish tradition and
doctrine. At the center of debate here is Benjamin's complicated dialogue
with his friend Gershom Scholem, which will be analyzed in the sixth
chapter of my book. The controversy touches upon the demarcation line
between the Jewish and the Christian traditions, which in Scholem's view
needs to be strictly observed, 16 but which Benjamin constantly crosses in
his work, in particular when referring to biblical or Adamite language.
The most important site of this argument is Benjamin's essay on Kafka
and the differences in their understanding of Kafka that emerged between
Scholem and Benjamin in its wake. Stephane Moses recently provided
a lengthy account of the intellectual dialogue between the two dissimi-

I). Adorno, ibid., xviii-ix.

r6. Gershom Scholem, "Zum Verstandnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum," in
judaica I (Frankfurr/M: Suhrkamp, 1986).
 The Creaturely and the Holy 17

lar friends and of their sensitive personal relationship in an article in the

Benjamin handbook. 17
The contributions on Benjamin's approach to the Jewish tradition
have produced a separate strand concerned with the significance of the
creature and creaturely life in the context of the German-Jewish tradition,
taking the significance of creatures and beings such as Kafka's Odradek as
its starting point. This has generated a canon of literary reference points
that are also paradigmatic for the deconstructivist reception of Benjamin:
Buchner, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Heidegger, and Celan. 18
Eric Santner has recently broadened this strand of debate in his book On
Creaturely Life (2006). There, he argues the case for a natural history of the
present and an ethics of the neighbor, pursuing his theme into the post-
Benjaminian present and adding the name W. G. Sebald to the canon.
Finally, there is the debate on the concept of "bare life" initiated by
Agamben, whose book Homo Sacer 19 was motivated by a remark in Ben-
jamin's "Critique of Violence" that it would be worthwhile tracking down
the "origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life." The debate that ensued
paid no attention to the sentence that follows, however, which sees this
dogma as a kind of surrogate, "last mistaken attempt of the weakened West-
ern tradition," the aim of which is "to seek the saint it has lost" instead "in
cosmological impenetrability." Already in this work, written ten years be-
fore the Kraus essay, Benjamin criticized the tacit substitution of the holy
with a cosmological dogma: in the Kraus essay, the problem is the substitu-
tion of the divine with higher laws; in the "Critique of Violence," with the
sanctification of mere life. Even in this context, the substitution is rated as
questionable or worth further reflection: "Finally, this idea of man's sacred-
ness gives grounds for reflection that what is here pronounced sacred was,
according to ancient mythic thought, the marked bearer of guilt: mere life"
(II.Iho2; SelWr 1.251).

17. Stephane Moses, "Gershom Scholem," in Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-

Wirkung, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2006).
r8. See, for example Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History: On Stones, Ani-
mals, and Angels (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).
19. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Die souveriine Macht und dds nackte Leben (Frankfurt/
M: Suhrkamp, 2002); Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
r8 On the Threshold Between Creation and Last judgment

In addition to the triad of the law, the holy, and the creature, the
concepts discussed in the Kraus essay include justice, the relation between
Last judgment and Creation, and that between witness and procreation.
With these concepts, the themes of the various strands of the reception
of Benjamin discussed above become entangled in a single site. Various
traces of Benjamin's work on a dialectic of secularization, addressed in
earlier essays in relation to single themes using a number of registers, such
as Eros, language, justice, history, sovereignty, also converge in this essay.
If one looks back from the Kraus essay over these preceding texts, then the
work on a dialectic of secularization becomes visible as a constant motif
in Benjamin's writings. It pertains to the theory of language in his early
texts, one derived from the caesura between Adamite language and the
language of signs. This dialectic is relevant to his interpretation of transla-
tion as the measure of the distance from pure language ("The Task of the
Translator"), his analysis of the relation between justice and the law ("Cri-
tique ofViolence"), and the development of the figuration, instructive for
the theory of history, of the counterstriving constellation of the profane
and the messianic-all of which come from the early 1920s. It is relevant,
too, to his critique of the attempt to appropriate a divine mandate into
the theology of poetry propagated by Stefan George and his disciples, the
discussion of the idea of a nexus of guilt among the living (in the essay
on Goethe that followed a few years later), the examination of the Janus-
like figure of the sovereign and of allegory in The Origin of the German
Mourning Play, and the figure of profane illumination found in the essay
on surrealism from the late 1920s-to mention only the most important
points during this period. And of course the trail continues even after the
Kraus essay, in the way Benjamin elucidates the afterlife of such theo-
logical concepts as inherited sin, guilt, and shame in the world of Kafka's
Trial, for example. This world appears to Kafka's characters, who have lost
the doctrines and knowledge of the theological origins of their concepts,
as a purely creaturely world. The trail also runs through the "Urgeschichte
der Moderne'' (an ur-history or archaic history of modernity) in which the
phenomena of a world saturated with technology and machines appear
to those who have produced them as natural history and modernity itself
becomes the time of hell, and finally through the concept of the Now or
jetztzeit, as the model of messianic time, in the theses "On the Concept
of History."
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
 Naturally enough, when private libraries were the fashion there
were numerous public libraries as well. According to Publius Victor,
there were no fewer than twenty-nine of these public libraries in
Rome. Asinius Pollio, the friend of Cæsar, and the famous patron of
literature of his time, who died in the year 6 b.c., was credited with
being the founder of the first public library, although there is a
tradition that Orielus Paullus, the conqueror of Macedonia, brought
back with him to Rome a large collection of books in 168 b.c. Be that
as it may, there probably was no very great taste for reading in
Rome at that early period, and it was not until the time of Augustus
that public libraries began to assume real importance.
Augustus himself, carrying out the intention of Julius Cæsar,
founded two public libraries, one called the Octavian, and the other
the Palatine. From that time the founding of public libraries became
a fashion with the emperors, Tiberius, Vespasian, Domitian, and
Trajan successively adding to the number, the most famous
collection of all being the Ulpian library of Trajan. No available data
have come down to us as to the exact size of these libraries, but the
respectable proportions of some of the private collections make it a
safe inference that some, at least, of these public libraries must have
contained hundreds of thousands of books, since we can hardly
suppose that a private library would be allowed to outrival the
imperial collections.
When one reflects on this prevalence of books, the very natural
query arises as to how they were produced, and the answer throws
a vivid light on the social conditions in Rome. The enormous output
of books, almost rivalling the productions of the modern press, was
possible solely because of the great number of slaves in Rome.
Book-making was a profession, but it was a profession apparently
followed almost exclusively by slaves, who were known as librarii.
These educated slaves were usually Greeks, and a large publishing
house, of which there were several in Rome, would keep a great
number of them for purposes both of making the materials for
books, and of transcribing the books themselves.
 It is known that shorthand was practised extensively in Rome, and
it has been supposed that a very large number of the current books
were written in this abbreviated hand. This supposition, however,
appears more than doubtful, for it is hardly to be supposed that the
general public took the trouble to learn the Tironian system, by
which name the shorthand script was known; Tiron, the secretary of
Cicero, being commonly, though no doubt incorrectly, credited with
its invention. As to the latter point, there are various references in
the Greek classical authors to the practice of shorthand in ancient
times. It is said even that Xenophon took down the lectures of
Socrates in this way, and whether or not that statement is true, the
existence of the rumour is in itself evidence of the prevalence of the
custom from an early day. Very probably Tiron developed a modified
and greatly improved system of shorthand writing, and doubtless
this became popular, since lexicons were written interpreting the
Tironian script in terms of ordinary Latin. But, as has been said, all
this does not make it probable that the average reader understood
the script, and it seems much more likely that the popular authors
were represented in the ordinary script, subject, however, to
numerous abbreviations. The writers who were most in vogue in
imperial Rome are said to have been Ovid, Propertius, and Martial
among the satirists; Homer, Virgil, and Horace among the poets; and
Cicero, Livy, and Pliny among prose writers. It is alleged that the
works of most of these were in every private collection. Of all this
great store of literary treasures not a single line has been preserved
in the original manuscript, save only a few rolls from the library at
Herculaneum, and most of these are charred and damaged beyond
recognition.
Thanks to the use of slave labour, it would appear that the Roman
publisher was able, not merely to put out large editions of books,
but to sell these at a very reasonable price. According to a statement
of Martial himself, a very good copy of the first book of his epigrams
could be purchased for five denarii. This presumably must refer to
the cheapest edition, probably a papyrus roll, though no definite
data as to the relative cost of papyrus and parchment are available.
Naturally, there were more expensive editions put out for those who
could afford them. It was customary, for example, to tint the back of
the parchment roll with purple; at a later day the inscribed part itself
was sometimes tinted with the same colour, and this custom also
may have prevailed as early as the Roman time. Certain books were
illustrated with pictures, as appears from a remark of Pliny; but this
practice was undoubtedly very exceptional. It may not have been
unusual, however, to ornament or emphasise portions of the
manuscript by using red ink, for the ink wells illustrated in the
paintings of Pompeii are often shown to be double, and the
presumable object of this was to facilitate the use of ink of two
colours.
The pen employed by the Roman scribe was made of a reed and
known as a calamus. It was sharpened and split, not unlike a
modern quill pen. The question has been raised many times as to
whether the Romans did not employ the quill pen itself. Certain
pictures seem to suggest that the quill pen was used not merely by
the Romans, but by the Egyptians as well. There seems little ground
for this supposition, however, and the first specific reference to a
quill pen was in the writings of Isidorus, who died in 636 a.d. This
proves that the use of quills had begun not later than the seventh
century, but it is extremely doubtful whether the Romans employed
them, though the quill seems so obvious a substitute for the reed
that its non-employment causes wonder. But the history of all simple
inventions shows how fallacious would be any argument drawn from
this obvious inference. Incidentally it may be noted that the reed
pen held its own against the quill for some centuries after the
invention of the latter. Even in the late Middle Ages the reed was still
employed for particular kinds of writing in preference to the quill,
and no doubt a certain number of people for generations continued
to prefer the reed, just as there are people now who prefer a quill
pen to the steel pens that were perfected in 1830. Every desk in the
reading room at the British Museum to-day is supplied with a quill as
well as a steel pen; and a fair proportion of the readers there seem
to prefer the former.
 It would not do to leave the subject of Roman books without at
least incidental mention of the tablets which were in universal use.
These were probably not employed in writing books for the market,
but it is quite probable that many authors used them in making the
first drafts of their books. The so-called wax tablet was really made
of wood, quite in the form of a modern child’s slate, the wax to
receive the writing being put upon the portion that corresponds to
the slate proper. These tablets were usually bound together in twos
or threes, and only the inner surfaces were employed to receive the
writing, the outer surface being reserved for a title in the case of
business documents, or for the address when the tablet was used as
a letter. When used as business records or in correspondence, the
tablets were bound together with a cord, upon which a seal was
placed. It was quite the rule for a Roman citizen to carry a tablet
about with him for the purpose of making notes. The implement
used in writing was a pointed metal needle known as the stylus. It
was almost dagger-like in proportions, and was sometimes used as a
weapon. It was said that Cæsar once transfixed the arm of Cassius
with his stylus in a fit of anger in the senate chamber itself. The
other end of the stylus was curved or flattened, and was used to
erase the writing on the tablet for corrections or to prepare the
surface for a new inscription.j
Turning from the practicalities of literature to a yet more important
phase of everyday life, let us witness

THE CEREMONY OF A ROMAN MARRIAGE

The solemn ritual of marriage was based on the virginity of the

bride, and so appeared in a curtailed version when a widow married
again, which, even in later times, was regarded as somewhat
shocking and in the earliest period of antiquity was of rare
occurrence.
Particular care was taken in choosing the wedding-day, because
certain times of the year were, from a religious point of view, ill
adapted for the wedding ceremony, particularly the whole month of
May and the first half of June. For the Lemuria and the sacrifice of
the Argei fall in May, and in the beginning of June come the dies
religiosi, devoted to the holiness of Vesta, which come to a close on
the 15th of June with the purification of the temple of Vesta. Other
days to be avoided were the dies parentales (from the 13th to the
21st of February), the first half of March, the three days on which
the Nether World was open (mundus patet on the 24th of August,
the 5th of October, and the 8th of November), all dies religiosi, the
calends, the nones, and the ides. But solemn marriages were not
conducted on festival days chiefly because, in early times at all
events, the participators in the marriage were hindered by the
festival. Widows on the other hand did not exclude such days from
their selection.
All that we are told of the decoration of the bride is again
concerned with virgins. On the day before marriage the girl laid
aside her virginal attire (toga prætexta), sacrificing it with her toys
to the gods and perhaps originally to the Lares of her father’s house.
As was the custom for a youth before taking the toga, she was
invested (ominis causa) with a new garment suitable to her new
condition before going to sleep, a tunica recta or regilla, and upon
her head was placed a red hair net. The bridal dress itself was a
tunica recta, that is to say a garment woven according to ancient
custom with vertical, not horizontal, threads, held together with a
woollen girdle (cingulum) that was bound with a nodus herculeus;
instead of the hair net she was provided with a red scarf
(flammeum) with which she veiled her head (nubit, obnubit); its red
colour only distinguished it from those scarfs which all women wore
when they went out. Her hair was arranged in sex crines, that is,
plaits or locks held together not with a comb but with a crisping pin
bent at the end (hasta cælibaris) and separated by ribbons. Beneath
the scarf on her head she wore a wreath of flowers gathered by
herself, and at a later period the bridegroom himself also wears a
wreath.
 The ceremony of the marriage day falls into three parts: the
handing over of the bride, her home taking, and her reception into
the husband’s house; with regard to the disposition of the separate
customs appertaining to these three acts we are to some extent left
to conjecture.
The solemnisation of marriage began with auspicia, which were
usually taken by proper auspices in the silence of early morning, just
as at the sponsalia it was sought to inquire into the will of the gods
by an omen before sunrise. In the earliest times the flight of birds
was observed, this kind of divination being later on replaced in
private life (as it already existed in public) by the easier process of
causing a haruspica to examine entrails. But the sacrifice made with
a view of consulting the gods, the performers of which have also
been called auspices, must not be confounded with the main
sacrifice, for it took place before the handing over of the bride. The
sacrificial animal was probably a sheep, the skin of which was
afterwards used for the confarreatio.
On the assembly of the guests the auspices entered to announce
the result of their investigation. After this only is the marriage
contract completed, and even in later times before ten witnesses
such as were accustomed to be present at the ancient confarreatio;
the bride and bridegroom then declare their consent to the wedding,
and where there is a confarreatio the former declares her will to
enter into the manus and thereby the family of her husband,
originally announcing also her readiness to exchange her own name
for that of her husband in the formula quando tu Caius ego Caia.
After this declaration the bridal pair are brought together by a
married woman (pronuba) and take each other’s hands (dextras
jungunt), upon which, at the confarreatio, in accordance with the
most ancient Roman sacrificial custom, a bloodless sacrifice is
brought consisting of fruits and a panis farreus. It was dedicated to
Jupiter and so was probably performed by the flamen Dialis present;
he pronounced the forms of prayer in which the gods of wedlock,
especially Juno, and the rustic deities Tellus, Picumnus, and
Pilumnus were invoked. During the sacrifice the bridal pair sat upon
two chairs joined together, over which the skin of the sheep that had
been slain was stretched; at the prayer they wandered round the
altar from right to left; a camillus lent his services, bearing a
cumerum in which mola salsa and other requisites of the sacrifice
were received.
Whether at the confarreatio there was an animal sacrifice besides
the sacrifice of grain, or not, we do not know; Ulpian seems to
assume that there was. In later times the sacrifice of corn fell into
desuetude, but for the rest the old ritual was maintained as far as
possible, so that for instance there was always a prayer delivered, if
not by a priest, by an auspex nuptiarum and addressed to other
gods. Also in these later times the celebration of marriage centred
round the sacrifice of a calf or even of a pig, and the newly wedded
pair set out this sacrifice themselves, not always in the house but
sometimes before a public temple. Not only have we express
witnesses to testify to this, but also pictorial representations in which
partly the temple is sketched and partly the sacrifice in process of
performance, which would have no sense if the sacrifice took place
in the house. So it comes that sacrifice of animals could only be
conducted in the house, as in the temple, under certain conditions,
whereas it was quite common on the sacrificial altars erected
especially for private sacrifice in front of the temples. The witnesses
having expressed their congratulations (feliciter) in a shout of
approval, the sacrifice was followed by the cena, which, like all
earlier portions of the celebration, was usually held in the house of
the bride’s father.
 Head-dresses

The guests having risen from this at fall of night, the deductio
begins. The bride is taken from the arms of her mother and
conducted in solemn procession to the new house, the procession
including not only the guests but also the interested public. Flute-
players and torch-bearers lead the way, the procession sings a
fescennine song and echoes the cry talasse; the boys bid the
bridegroom strew walnuts as he is now taking leave of the games of
childhood. The bride is accompanied by three pueri patrimi et
matrimi, one of them bearing a torch in front, the other two leading
the bride; after her are borne distaff and spinning-wheel. The
bridegroom’s torch is not, like the others, made of fine resin, but of
white thorn (Spina alba), which is sacred to Ceres and a charm
against witchery; it is captured by the guests and carried away by
violence. The procession having reached the new house, the bride
anoints the door-posts with fat or oil and binds them with woollen
fillets; then she is borne over the threshold of the house and
received in the atrium by her husband into the common possession
of fire and water; that is to say, she is made a partner in domestic
life and the service of the gods. In the atrium, her future living
room, opposite the door, the lectus genialis is made ready by the
pronuba; here she prays to the gods of the new home for a happy
marriage. On the day after the wedding she receives relations at the
feast of repotia as a matron and presents her first sacrifice to the
gods of the house.f

THE STATUS OF WOMEN

 The restoration of the temples of Juno by Augustus and his
consort indicated the interest the new government felt in the
institution of marriage. Neither the history nor literature of Rome can
be understood without clear ideas upon this branch of her social
economy. All nations have agreed in investing marriage with a
religious sanction; but religion and policy were closely connected
through every phase of the social life of the Romans, and in none
more closely than in this. Marriage they regarded as an institution
hallowed by the national divinities for the propagation of the Roman
race, the special favourite of the gods. Its object was not to chasten
the affections and purify the appetites of man, but to replenish the
curies and centuries, to maintain the service of the national temples,
recruit the legions and establish Roman garrisons in conquered
lands. The marriage therefore of Caius and Caia, of a Roman with a
Roman, was a far higher and holier matter, in the view of their
priests and legislators, than the union of a Roman with a foreigner,
of aliens with aliens, or of slaves with slaves. Even the legitimate
union of the sexes among the citizens was regulated by descending
scale of confarreation, coemption, and mere cohabitation; and the
offspring of the former only were qualified for the highest religious
functions, such as those of the flamen of Jupiter, and apparently of
the vestal virgins, on which the safety of the state was deemed most
strictly to depend.
These jealous regulations were fostered in the first instance by a
grave political necessity; but the increase of the power of Rome, the
enlargement of her resources, the multiplication of her allies, her
clients and dependents, had long relaxed her vigilance in
maintaining the purity of her children’s descent. The dictates of
nature, reinforced by the observation of foreign examples, had long
rebelled in this matter against the tyrannical prescriptions of a
barbarous antiquity. After the eastern conquests of the republic it
became impossible to maintain the race in its state of social
isolation. In his winter quarters at Athens, Samos, or Ephesus, the
rude husbandman of Alba or the Volscian hills was dazzled by the
fascinations of women whose accomplishments fatally eclipsed the
homely virtues of the Latin and Sabine matrons. To form legitimate
connections with these foreign charmers was forbidden him by the
harsh institutions of a Servius or Numa; while his ideas were so
narrowed and debased by bad laws, that he never dreamt of raising
his own countrywomen by education to the level of their superior
attractions. Gravely impressing upon his wife and daughters that to
sing and dance, to cultivate the knowledge of languages, to exercise
the taste and understanding, was the business of the hired
courtesan, it was to the courtesan that he repaired himself for the
solace of his own lighter hours. The hetæræ of Greece had been
driven to the voluptuous courts of Asia by the impoverishment, and
perhaps the declining refinement, of their native entertainers. They
were now invited to the great western capital of wealth and luxury,
where they shared with viler objects the admiration of the Roman
nobles, and imparted perhaps a shade of sentiment and delicacy to
their most sensual carouses. The unnatural restrictions of the law
formed a decent excuse for this class of unions, which were often
productive of mutual regard, and were hallowed at least at the
shrine of public opinion.
Such fortunate cases were, however, at the best, only exceptional.
For the most part, the Grecian mistress of the proconsul or
imperator, the object of a transient appetite, sought to indemnify
herself by venal rapacity for actual contempt and anticipated
desertion. The influence of these seductive intriguers poisoned the
springs of justice before the provincial tribunals. At an earlier period
a brutal general could order a criminal to be beheaded at his supper
table, to exhibit to his paramour the spectacle of death; at a later,
the luxurious governor of a province allowed his freedwoman to
negotiate with his subjects for the price of their rights and privileges,
or carried her at his side in his progress through Italy itself. The
frantic declamations of Cicero against the licentiousness of Verres
and Antony in this respect were a fruitless and, it must be admitted,
a hollow attempt to play upon an extinct religious sentiment.
The results of this vicious indulgence were more depraving than
the vice itself. The unmarried Roman, thus cohabiting with a
freedwoman or slave, became the father of a bastard brood, against
whom the gates of the city were shut. His pride was wounded in the
tenderest part; his loyalty to the commonwealth was shaken. He
chose rather to abandon the wretched offspring of his amours, than
to breed them up as a reproach to himself, and see them sink below
the rank in which their father was born.
In the absence of all true religious feeling, the possession of
children was the surest pledge to the state of the public morality of
her citizens. By the renunciation of marriage, which it became the
fashion to avow and boast, public confidence was shaken to its
centre. On the other hand, the women themselves, insulted by the
neglect of the other sex, and exasperated at the inferiority of their
position, revenged themselves by holding the institution of legitimate
marriage with almost equal aversion. They were indignant at the
servitude to which it bound them, the state of dependence and legal
incapacity in which it kept them; for it left them without rights, and
without the enjoyment of their own property; it reduced them to the
status of mere children, or rather transferred them from the power
of their parent to that of their husband. They continued through life,
in spite of the mockery of respect with which the laws surrounded
them, things rather than persons; things that could be sold,
transferred backwards and forwards, from one master to another, for
the sake of their dowry or even their powers of child-bearing. For
the smallest fault they might be placed on trial before their
husbands, or if one were more than usually considerate in judging
upon his own case, before a council of their relations. They might be
beaten with rods, even to death itself, for adultery or any other
heinous crime; while they might suffer divorce from the merest
caprice, and simply for the alleged departure of their youth or
beauty.
The latter centuries of the Roman commonwealth are filled with
the domestic struggles occasioned by the obstinacy with which
political restrictions were maintained upon the most sensitive of the
social relations. Beginning with wild and romantic legends, the
account of these troubles becomes in the end an important feature
in history. As early as the year 330 b.c., it is said, a great number of
Roman matrons attempted the lives of their husbands by poison.
They were dragged before the tribunals, probably domestic, and
adjudged to death. As many as 170 are said to have suffered. In the
following century, after the promulgation of the Oppian law, which
forbade women to keep more than half an ounce of gold, to wear
robes of various colours, and to ride in the carpentum, they formed
a new conspiracy—such at least was the story—not to destroy their
husbands, but to refuse conversation with them and frustrate their
hopes of progeny. This was followed at the distance of half a century
by the lex Voconia, “the most unjust of laws,” in the judgment of the
Christian Augustine, which excluded women from the right of
inheriting. Of these laws, however, the first was speedily abrogated,
the other was evaded, and, by underhand and circuitous means,
women came to receive inheritances, to the great scandal, as
afterward appeared, of the reformers under the empire. But the
continued quarrel of the sexes was exaggerated by mutual jealousy,
and at the outbreak of the Catilinarian conspiracy, it was currently
reported among the men that the traitors obtained money for their
enterprise from a multitude of matrons, who longed for a bloody
revolution to exterminate their husbands.
In the primitive ages the state had not only regulated the forms of
marriage, but had undertaken to enforce it. Among the duties of the
censors was that of levying fines upon the citizen who persisted in
remaining single to the detriment of the public weal. The censure of
Camillus and Postumius, 403 b.c., was celebrated for the patriotic
vigour with which this inquisition was made. In process of time the
milder method of encouraging marriage by rewards was introduced,
the earliest mention of which, perhaps, is in a speech of Scipio,
censor in the year 199 b.c. At this time it appears, certain immunities
were already granted to the fathers of legitimate, and even of
adopted, children, which last the censor denounced as an abuse. But
neither rewards nor penalties proved effectual to check the
increasing tendency to celibacy, and at the period of the Gracchi an
alarm was sounded that the old Roman race was becoming rapidly
extinguished. The censor of the year 131 b.c., Metellus Macedonicus,
expounded the evil to the senate in a speech which seems to have
been among the most curious productions of antiquity. “Could we
exist without wives at all,” it began, “doubtless we should all rid
ourselves of the plague they are to us; since, however, nature has
decreed that we cannot dispense with the infliction, it is best to bear
it manfully, and rather look to the permanent conservation of the
state than to our own transient satisfaction.” It is still more curious,
perhaps, that above a hundred years afterwards Augustus should
have ventured to recite in the polished senate of his own generation
the cynical invective of a ruder age. But, so it was, that when the
legislation of Julius Cæsar was found ineffectual for controlling the
still growing evil, it was reinforced by his successor with an
enhancement both of penalties and rewards, and the bitter measure
recommended by the arguments and even the language of the
ancient censor.
The importance attached by the emperor to this fruitless
legislation appears from his turning his efforts in this direction from
the first year of his return to Rome. When he took the census with
Agrippa in 28 b.c., he insisted on carrying into execution the
regulations of the dictator, which had been neglected during the
interval of anarchy, and were destined speedily to fall into similar
neglect again. Upon this one point the master of the Romans could
make no impression upon the dogged disobedience of his subjects.
Both the men and the women preferred the loose terms of union
upon which they had consented to cohabit to the harsh provisions of
antiquity. They despised rewards, and penalties they audaciously
defied. Eleven years later Augustus caused the senate to pass a new
law of increased stringency, by which the marriage of citizens of
competent age was positively required. Three years grace was
allowed for making a choice and settling preliminaries; but when the
allotted interval was expired, it was found expedient to prolong it for
two years more; from time to time a further respite seems to have
been conceded, and we find the emperor still struggling almost to
the close of his life to impose this intolerable restraint upon the
liberty or licence of the times.
The consent of the fathers themselves, subservient as they
generally were, was given with murmurs of reluctance, the more so,
perhaps, as they alone were excepted from the indulgence, which
was now prudently extended to every lower order of citizens, of
permission to form a legitimate marriage with a freed woman. The
measure was received indeed with outward deference, but an inward
determination to evade or overthrow it. Even the poets, who were
instructed to sing its praises, renounced the obligation to fulfil its
conditions; while others, whose voices were generally tuned to
accents of adulation, exulted openly in its relaxation or
postponement.
The nature of the penalties and rewards assigned by this law
shows that the views of Augustus were for the most part confined to
the rehabilitation of marriage in the higher classes, and the
restoration of the purest blood of Rome. On the one hand, celibacy
was punished by incapacity to receive bequests, and even the
married man who happened to be childless was regarded with
suspicion, and mulcted of one-half of every legacy. On the other, the
father of a family enjoyed a place of distinction in the theatres, and
preference in competition for public office. He was relieved from the
responsibilities of a tutor or a judex, and, as by the earlier measure
of the dictator, was excused from a portion of the public burdens, if
father of three children at Rome, of four in Italy, or of five in the
provinces. Of the two consuls, precedence was given, not to the
senior in age, according to ancient usage, but to the husband and
the father of the most numerous offspring. It is clear that such
provisions as these could have had little application to the great
mass of the citizens, who lived on the favour of their noble patrons
or the bounty of the treasury, and bred up a horde of paupers to eat
into the vitals of the state.
The perverse subjects of this domestic legislation seem at first to
have sought to evade it by entering into contracts of marriage which
 they afterwards omitted to fulfil. It was
necessary to enact new provisions to meet
this subterfuge. The facility allowed by the
ancient usage to divorce formed another
obvious means of escape; but again did the
vigilant reformer interfere by appointing the
observation of onerous forms for the legal
separation of married parties. When a
divorce had actually taken place, the parties
fell again under the provisions of the
marriage law, and were required to find
themselves fresh consorts within a specified
interval. Another mode of driving the
Roman Terra-cotta Toy reluctant citizens within the marriage pale
(Naples Museum) was the infliction of penalties and disgrace
upon unchastity beyond it; while now, for
the first time, adultery, which had been left
to be punished by the domestic tribunal as a private injury, was
branded as a crime against the general well-being, and subjected to
the animadversion of the state. But Augustus was not satisfied with
directing his thunders against the guilty; he sought to anticipate
criminality by imposing fresh restraints upon the licentious manners
of the age. After the example of his predecessors in the censorship,
he fixed a scale of expense for the luxuries of the table, and
pretended to regulate the taste of the women for personal
ornaments. At the gladiatorial shows, from which they could no
longer be excluded, he assigned different places for the two sexes,
removing the women to the hinder rows, the least favourable either
for seeing or being seen, and altogether forbade them to attend the
exhibitions of wrestling and boxing.c

PATERNAL AUTHORITY AND ADOPTION: THE SLAVERY OF

CHILDREN
 If the Roman custom in relation to marriage and the position of
women generally is decidedly to be preferred to that of the Greeks,
it cannot be denied that the reverse was the case as regards the
relations of children, as the arbitrary power which the father had
over them in Rome was a flagrant injustice: the freedom of an
individual was thus limited in a most unjust manner, and the child
held in an unnatural dependence on his father. The great mistake
consisted in the Roman father considering the power which Nature
imposes as a duty on the elders, of guiding and protecting a child
during infancy, as extending over his freedom, involving his life and
death, and continuing during his entire existence. The Grecian law
differed in two respects from the Roman: first, that the father’s
power ceased with the son’s independence, and this he attained
either by arriving at a certain period of life, or by marriage, or by
being entered on the list of citizens. Secondly, the Grecian father had
merely the right of terminating the relation between child and
parent, by banishing him from his house, or disinheriting him,
without daring to injure either his liberty or life.
The patria potestas of the Romans was in theory indeed very
different from absolute possession (dominium), but in reality it
approached very near to it, especially in ancient times; only the
latter extended over things, the former over persons. Consequently
this potestas gave the father the right over the life and liberty of his
child. This law, said to be as early as Romulus, but at any rate very
ancient, was revived in all its severity in the Twelve Tables. The
unnatural part of this decree was somewhat modified, in that the
right of life and death belonged in fact to that of discipline and
punishment, which was permitted by the state to the pater familias,
and as the father could not act on his own judgment, but must,
conformably to custom, summon a family council. This judgment is
mentioned by Valerius Maximus,k where he says of T. Manlius
Torquatus, ne consilio quidem necessariorum indigere se credidit, as
his son had been accused by the Macedonians on account of
extortion. The father sat in judgment for three days, hearing
witnesses and so on, and at last banished his son from his presence,
whereupon he killed himself.
Other examples are related, of sentence being passed on sons by
their fathers, without mention of the family council, and probably
because the official position of the father rendered such aid
unnecessary, as in the harsh judgment of Brutus and T. Manlius
Imperiosus. In capital offences, too, the father could by himself
inflict punishment, as it is deemed more proper that he should
himself condemn his son, than that he should come himself as his
accuser. Valerius Maximus relates two instances of a father’s
judgment in the time of Augustus. In the latter case the father
condemned the son for parricide, letting him off with exile only. A
solemn family council also preceded, to which the emperor was
invited; there the kindness of the father openly prevailed, and whilst
he made use of his right, he protected his son from the punishment
which he would have found in the public court of justice. The second
case proves the harshness and misuse to which this right could be
applied. But after all, not one case of absolute death is mentioned,
but only of cruel punishment. If a misuse of the patria potestas
occurred in earlier times, the censor could resent it. Orosius even
speaks of a public indictment; in later days the emperor saw to it, as
it is related of Trajan and Hadrian. In the two-hundredth year of the
empire this power was taken away from the father by law.
Although the right of sale undeniably existed, and was recognised
by the Twelve Tables, no recorded instance of it exists; and we may
therefore suppose that it was early abolished, and used only as a
form in the emancipatio. Numa even seems to have limited this
right, according to Dionysius. In the form of emancipatio, the father
had the right to sell the son three times; after the third time he did
not again come into the patria potestas.
From the patria potestas must be entirely separated the right with
which we frequently meet in antiquity, of killing or exposing new-
born children. In Rome it did not exist to so great an extent as
elsewhere. Romulus is said to have interdicted sons and first-born
daughters from being killed. On the other hand, it seems to have
been commanded that the deformed should be put to death. That
the exposure and murder of the new-born was not infrequent, even
in the most important families, many instances show.
The son remained in the father’s power until his death, unless
either of them had suffered a capitis diminutio. The patria potestas
ceased if the son became a flamen dialis. Other dignities made no
difference. In the case of a daughter it ceased when she entered
into marriage with manus, or became a vestal virgin. If a father
wished to renounce the patria potestas over his son, it must be done
either by adoption (by which he passed into another potestas) or by
the formality of emancipation.l
Created by nature or transferred by adoption, the paternal
authority could be replaced, at the death of the father of the family,
by guardianship (tutela) for the protection of children (tutela
impuberum, pupillaris) and women (tutela muliebris), or it could
even be revived after it had expired under the name of trusteeship
(cura), for the protection of persons of full age but recognised as
incapable of managing for themselves.
Jurisprudence concerning guardianship and trusteeship was first of
all dominated by the principles of the ancient gentilitious law as
sanctioned by the Twelve Tables.
At the death of a father the feminine portion of a family—the
widow and grown-up but unmarried daughters, were looked upon as
sui juris in the sense that they could administer their own property,
but as they could not bring actions (except in the case of the
vestals), they needed for all legal acts which concerned them, the
authority (auctoritas) of a guardian. The sons reached the age of
puberty at fourteen; under that age they required a guardian. If the
family had a new head over fourteen years old, he was the guardian
of all those under age and of all the females of the family; in the
contrary case the guardian came from outside the family.
 The law of the Twelve Tables did not allow those interested the
choice of their guardian; the legitimate guardian was the nearest
relation (agnat) of the deceased, or, in default, one of the members
of the gens. It was exactly the same for the trusteeship which came
into operation when a citizen sui juris was recognised as mad, or
decreed by the interdictum of the prætor to be in the position of a
maniac on account of prodigality. The trustee had the most unlimited
powers over the person and property of the person so decreed.
The lawyers laboured to make the guardianship of the young
secure and effective, to suppress the guardianship of women and to
abolish the interference of the gentilitious customs in favour of
natural relationship.
A first step had already been taken in the time of the Twelve
Tables—the father of the family was permitted to choose and
appoint by will the guardian of his children. The legitimate guardian
according to the gentilitious law was called upon to replace the
testamentary guardian in case the latter refused to undertake the
guardianship. Later the law Atilia, about 190 b.c., empowered the
prætor urbanus or the college of the tribunes of the plebs to
nominate a guardian (tutor atilianus) in default of a legitimate or
testamentary guardian in case the latter refused to undertake the
guardianship. The custom was even introduced at this epoch of
leaving to the widows, by will, the choice of their guardian (tutor
optivus), either allowing them to change them once or twice (optio
angusta), or as many times as it pleased them (optio plena). Women
could even escape effective guardianship—especially with the object
of acquiring the right to make wills—by tricks of procedure. For this
purpose they made use of fiduciary co-emption. Co-emption
substituted the co-emptionator for the guardian. The man who thus
acquired the rights of a husband ceded the woman to a third person
by mancipation. The latter emancipated the woman whose guardian
he remained in form (tutor fiduciarius). This procedure was well
known in the time of Cicero. It must be added that it was not
applied in such an easy fashion when the guardian was the tutor
legitimus of gentilitious law; the latter could not be forced to give his
consent to the fictitious marriage which began the work of
deliverance.
Thus it was against the legitimate guardianship that the legists
directed their efforts. Augustus released from ordinary guardianship
all women having three children, and freed women who were
mothers of four children. Claudius absolutely suppressed gentilitious
guardianship for women. It was only kept up for children. There
remained only ordinary guardianship to be annihilated. Hadrian
rendered fiduciary co-emptions unnecessary by giving women the
right of making wills with the consent of their guardians, and
Antoninus in certain cases recognised the legality of wills made
without this sanction. As women had already received the right of
administration of their property, guardianship was from that time
almost objectless as far as they were concerned. It disappeared of
itself. The movement of emancipation continued; from the time of
Diocletian women began to acquire the right of guardianship over
their own children.
As to the guardianship of young boys the legists had tried to
extend, not the liberty of the wards, but the responsibility of the
guardians. They even thought good to extend the guardianship
under another name beyond the age fixed by the ancient law, which
declared male children to have attained puberty at the age of
fourteen. From the commencement of the second century before
Christ, a law Plætoria created a state of minority from fourteen to
twenty-five; for fear the minors should be “circumvented,” it decreed
that the loans agreed to by them should only be legal if they had
been witnessed by a trustee named by the prætor. Marcus Aurelius
made it a duty of the magistrates to give permanent trustees to all
minors who requested them, and it was to the latter’s interest to do
so, because otherwise they could not appeal to the law. The
trusteeship of minors had, in spite of distinctions, a singular
resemblance to that of madmen and persons interdicted, and to the
guardianship of children. And, from the time of Constantine, it was
much the same as the other kinds. There was however one
difference; this was that the interdicted persons were reduced to a
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com