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Intensive Languages❦

Werner Hamacher

Cognition is a relation.1 In this relation, something is apprehended and it is apprehended in its cognizability.2 Cognizability, for its part, is not an object but the medium in which cognition relates to what is apprehended and in which the two are together constituted—the one as cognition, the other as cognized. Cognizability is neither a subject’s capacity to cognize, given as a transcendental structure independent of any object to be cognized, nor a property of objects, a capacity to be known that awaits the opportunity to actualize itself in cognition. Cognizability is not an atemporal, and in that sense transcendental, condition of cognition. Equally, it does not present itself belatedly as a tie between an already constituted subject and a pre-given object. Much more, it is that in which cognition grasps an object and is thus for the first time cognition, and that in which an object imparts itself to a cognition and is thereby cognized. Cognizability is impartibility: the medium common to cognition and the cognized; the medium thanks to which they are able to be what they are; the medium in which they touch, affect, and impart themselves to one another. But if cognizability is the go-between—the medium—through which cogni-tion and cognized impart or convey one another, then the essence of cognition itself is imparting. It is, in an as-yet indeterminately broad sense of “language,” linguistically constituted. Whoever would present

MLN 127 (2012): 485–541 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

1[Translator’s note: This translation has benefited immensely from the close attention of Julia Ng as well as from Werner Hamacher’s suggestions and corrections. Its failings are, empirically and concretely, my own.]

2Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-penhäuser [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1989] VI: 46 (hereafter cited paren-thetically in the text as GS).

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“the linguistic essence of cognition” (GS II: 168) must do as Benjamin does, basing the possibility of cognition, cognizability, in language as the medium of impartibility. This means, however, that the subject-object relation is secondary for cognition and that it is a distorting derivative of that relation that precedes every propositional cognition of things and every imparting of cognitions between subjects, and that precedes them, to be precise, as the immediacy of mediality.

Hence, in “On the Program for the Coming Philosophy,” Benjamin’s critique of Kant and of neo-Kantianism concentrates itself first of all on the insufficiency of “the notion of cognition as a relationship between some subjects and objects or some subject and object,” and, further, on the reduction of “cognition and experience to an empiri-cal human consciousness.” He writes:

These two problems are closely connected, and even where Kant and the neo-Kantians see beyond the object-nature of the thing in itself as cause of sensations, the subject-nature of a cognizing consciousness remains still to be eliminated. [. . .] It is, indeed, not to be doubted that some idea—how-ever sublimated—of an individual, corporeal-spiritual I plays a great role in the Kantian concept of cognition, with such an I receiving impressions through the senses and on this basis constructing its ideas (GS II: 161).

This “epistemological mythology” of subjectivism and of a closely bound psychologism, as Benjamin has it in the “Program,” is to be dispelled by a theory of “pure cognition-theoretical (transcendental) consciousness, so long as this term remains useable once stripped of all characteristics of a subject” (162–63). Such a theory of pure tran-scendental consciousness may be thought, still imprecisely but less unclearly, as a theory of pure transcendental language, the contours of which are to be found in Benjamin’s treatise “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”

Such a theory can no longer address a relation between “any and all subjects and objects,” and just as little a relation between empiri-cal human subjects or between merely human languages and objects. Rather, it must begin from relationships within languages and from relationships between languages, including those of things themselves: that is, relationships of impartibility and translatability. In the view of a theory of pure transcendental language, languages—human and nonhuman alike; enunciated and silent; artistically, technologically, or institutionally constructed; idioms and the languages of nations—all relate first and foremost not to one another, but to their translatabil-ity, their impartibility, their linguisticality. That is, this theory never considers languages as relating solely in the way that subjects orient

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themselves to objects, but rather addresses each language’s relation to its own medial [medialen] character and thus to that which Benjamin names its “essence.” Only in their linguisticality do the scope and structure of a cognition and an experience that are not impoverished in the subject-object relation, not immobilized in the transcendental subject, reveal themselves. The dynamics and horizon of a language open up only when grasped in their mediality and thus impartibility, which precedes every communicated meaning; language is not an instrumental mark and cannot be manipulated by a non-linguistic consciousness. Just as the essence of cognition is language, so the essence of language is impartibility.

Benjamin’s introduction to his rendering of Baudelaire, “The Task of the Translator,” sets out to demonstrate that and how, in translation, one language relates to another. This text, which complements and extends his earlier theory of pure transcendental language and offers up the theory of experience that took root in those earlier writings, presents the relation between languages as itself the essence of lan-guage: its mediality, impartibility, and translatability. Just as thinking in terms of speakers and addressees is insufficient—since speakers and their audiences occur only because of language, and as its functional extreme—so, too, must we move beyond the propositional content of a language. For what is decisive about translations—their carrying over3 into another language—arises independently of the intentions and semantic determinations of the texts to which they relate. Translation must follow a single law: that of the purely formal relation between languages, which is eminently material only by dint of its formalism. This law is dictated by the original’s pure translatability, which remains unconstrained by any human failings. Benjamin writes:

Translation is a form. In order to grasp it as such, it is necessary to return to the original, in which the law governing the translation lies: as its very translatability. The question concerning the translatability of a work has a dual sense; it can question whether among the totality of a work’s readers an adequate translator is to be found, or, and more properly, whether a work in its essence allows of translation and accordingly—such is the meaning of this form—requires it. At bottom, the first question can be decided only problematically, the second apodictically (GS IV: 9–10).

3[Translator’s note: I have rendered übertragen quite literally here as “carry over,” though it is also often “transmit” or “convey,” and the reader should note that—in German as in English—the verb in question is usually transitive. Man überträgt etwas, just as “one carries something over”; that Hamacher does not here offer an etwas, a something, is crucial to the motion of the thought. Translations themselves carry over as translation, languages as language.]

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The answer to the question of whether a work will find an adequate translator is problematic, is in Kant’s sense of the term dependent on empirical factors and thus not necessarily even possible; it is also, in principle at least, irrelevant. The real question concerns the purely formal structure of language as it presents itself in a translatability that is a matter of principle, and therefore independently of its actualiza-tion in any particular translation. By contrast, then, the question of whether the translation of a work or a language is possible and thereby also necessary is to be answered apodictically, that is, on the grounds of a priori reason, in the affirmative. Moreover, this affirmation is to be offered on the condition that the translatability of a language com-prises its very structure and is independent from the anthropologically limited capabilities of potential translators.

Benjamin insists that “certain relational concepts”—and that of translatability may be taken as the concept of linguistic relation par excellence—retain appropriate significance, and perhaps gain it in the first place, “when they are not from the outset exclusively oriented toward humans.” And he continues:

Thus, we could speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even should all human beings have forgotten it. That is, if its essence demands that it not be forgotten, then this predicate would be not false, but instead simply a demand that humans are not heeding, and at the same time also a scold-ing reminder of a realm in which they would heed it: in a remembrance of god (GS VI: 10).4

Like unforgettability, translatability is for Benjamin not an empirical predicate functioning on condition that it be realizable and conse-quently also that it fulfill a possibility in the actuality of finite reason. Quite the contrary, translatability and unforgettability are essential predicates of a language or a life, in principle indifferent to the capacities of any given subject to fulfill them. They are thus demands irrespective of the horizon of finite experience and operative within this horizon as calls back to the ground of experience itself, to a realm of speech and action ecstatically removed from understanding as a structure of judgment and correspondence. Languages remain trans-latable—or impartible—even when they will never be translated, even when they never could be translated—or imparted—by finite beings.

4[Translator’s note: Rather than render Gott here “God,” thus bringing Benjamin further into Christianity than he himself ventured, or “G-d,” thus according his Judaism an essentiality that is at least arguable, I have opted for a lower-case, generalist “god” that will not, I hope, seem less present for that.]

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The possibility that the concept of translatability bespeaks is not to be limited by propositional cognition; nor is this a possibility that must be converted into the actuality of experience, that is, bounded by a correspondence between concept and intuition. Kant develops only this latter possibility in the postulate of empirical thought, when he writes, “That which accords with the formal conditions of experi-ence (intuitions and concepts) is possible.”5 For Kant, it is always still only such an experience—and thereby also such a cognition—that is possible: one in which intuitions correspond with concepts with never an excess or a deficit, be it of intuition or of concept, and thus with never any transgressing of the boundaries of the subject principally regulated by their accord. Just as intuition and concept must accord with one another in order to fulfill the formal conditions for experi-ence and make the possible actual, for Kant these formal conditions for experience must also be actual in a way that prevents them from overtaxing themselves. Possibility is for him always the possibility of a possible actuality, such that possibility is thinkable from a theo-retical perspective only in correspondence with this actuality. What remains unthinkable for him—or merely thinkable, but not properly cognizable—is an experience that would present appearances not in accord with concepts, or that would offer up concepts with which no appearances accorded. What is unthinkable is precisely the experi-ence that must precede the correspondence of every experience: the experience of the demand for its correspondence. This is the experi-ence of the demand for an experience and thus of the experience in particular that would disclose—in excess of every possible material experience—another experience, the experience of a non-conceptual or imperceptible other and, with it, history.

For Kant, the possibility of such experience no longer belongs under the postulate of empirical thinking, but rather under the categorical imperative and the postulate of practical reason. This postulate’s stipu-lations are relieved of empirical conditions for fulfillment, because they raise the demands for freedom, absoluteness, and, in this sense, the impossibility of experience. Benjamin conceives of the linguistical-ity of language not as the appropriateness of its concepts for possible intuitions, but as a demand—and an excessive demand—made on intuitions by the concept of freedom, as an excessive demand on the

5Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ) A218/B265 (hereafter cited as KdrV).

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concept made by the intuition of something non-conceptual. Hence, translatability is for him not an empirical or epistemological-theoret-ical, but instead exclusively a practical possibility, transcending every given actuality. It is for this reason that translatability manifests as an infinite demand and for this reason that it initiates the event that, as the history of translation, is the event of language: no longer within the limits of empirical object-determination and the transmission of meaning, but instead bounded by mere imparting alone—by freedom, infinitude, and, like the unforgettable moment or the unforgettable life, by god. Translatability is translatability in history; linguisticality—and that means mediality—is linguistic historicality [Sprachgeschichtlich-keit]. Since this does not reach its end in any empirical occurrence, it operates to mark a metaempirical, theological event. Translation, imparting, language: these are structured as excessive demand and hyperbolic reference, and thus as historizing [historiogen] and, fur-thermore, theogizing [theogen].

Should there be cognition, this is only because it is based in cogniz-ability as the common medium of cognition and cognized. Should there be cognizability and therein impartibility, however, these must occur independently of the conditions of their actualization as the empirical cognition of things. If this is so, then history must be present as impartibility’s realm of operation and fulfillment, and there must thus be—with a postulative “must” that goes beyond every empirically verifiable cognition—god. Should language exist, then it does so only as essentially historical. Should history exist, then it does so only as the postulate of a god, in which it can find fulfillment.

Benjamin’s meditations start from a language that is not structured according to the schema of correspondence between intuition and concept, and thus not structured according to the schema of the judgment. The possibility of this language—language as such, as impartibility and translatability—is not to be defined as a possible actuality and thereby as the relation to the object of a propositional act; its truth cannot be the truth that would be limited by the schema of correspondence or adequation. For Benjamin, the possibility of imparting—and thus of translation—is in principle independent of every actuality that could be presented as a material accord between intuition and concept in the sense-impression of the subject of cogni-tion. Because translatability structurally exceeds the delimitations of finite subjectivity, because it is a possibility with which no concrete actuality must necessarily correspond—for these reasons, translatability has, as Benjamin emphasizes repeatedly, the character of a demand

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that, analogous to the moral law in Kant, is not structured accord-ing to the conditions of its actualization but rather, for its part, first enables the very thinking of such conditions. Translatability is not a demand made by some subject, determinate as ever, on a work or an utterance, but is rather a demand of the essence of every work and, moreover, of language itself, in which it is constituted.

When Benjamin opens his clarification of this concept with the question of “whether a work in its essence allows of translation and accordingly—such is the meaning of this form—requires it”; when he writes of the unforgettable that its “essence demands that it not be forgotten” (GS IV: 10); and when he terms translatability the law of translation, then in each case he speaks of essence as a demand [Forderung] that passes beyond the horizon of a subjectively limited actuality. This is essence as the overtaxing [Überforderung] of any and every subjectivity, and possibility as an excess over and above the possibility that is actualizable for subjects; Benjamin posits the essence of language—its translatability—and the essence of a life—its unforgettability—as resting in essence’s absolute surplus over any propositional content that could be attributed to it. Something’s essence defines it—indefines it and infinitizes it—as a demand infinitely in excess of every propositional actuality. The essence of language, its translatability, its possibility of translation, defines it as a possibility beyond all possibilities, as “extrapossibility” [Übermöglichkeit] and the possibility of an impossibility. But if translatability is the possibility of and demand for the essence of a work, and if as such a possibility it oversteps every possible actuality, then it must also be the possibility of—and demand for—an impossibility of translation, the possibility of—and demand for—untranslatability. Translatability must thus be a possibility and a demand which absolutely never applies to itself, but that does not thereby destroy its every application. Pure translat-ability—the law of language—can never manifest itself without simul-taneously withdrawing itself, and can thus appear only in the mode of withdrawal—and perhaps in the withdrawal of every categorical modality. In so appearing, translatability shows only that it demands the impossible actuality. Only because it is impossible—impossible even beyond categorical impossibility—does translatability open the possibility of realization independently of categorical limitations. Only therein does translatability contain the scolding reminder of the realm to which its demand corresponds: with respect to the unforgettable, this is termed “a remembrance of god”; with respect to the translatability of languages, it might be called messianic translation.

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It is in this sense that we should read Benjamin’s essay “Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot”; there, four years before setting down his thoughts on translation, Benjamin writes of the undying life and unforgettability of Prince Myshkin:

The undying life is unforgettable—that is the sign by which we know it. It is that life which, without memorial and without memento, indeed, per-haps without even witness, must be unforgotten. It cannot be forgotten. Without form or vessel, still this life remains imperishable. And in this sense ‘unforgettable’ says more than that we cannot forget it; it points to something in the essence of the unforgettable itself, whereby it is unforget-table (GS II: 239).6

Unforgettability is a sign of the undyingness [Unsterblichkeit] of a life, but this unforgettability occurs, as Benjamin sees it, “perhaps without witness” and hence without a sign. It is thus a sign of signlessness, a sign because it is without signs, an unsigned sign: “without memo-rial and without memento,” without addressee or referent. What is unforgettable is the incommemorable, which imparts itself prior to all commemoration and its signs as simple, unsigned, judgmentless speech. Because it is the unobjectifiable and therefore absolutely immemorial that is presented in every remembrance and for that rea-son captured by none, every statement that can be uttered of it stands under the condition of a “perhaps.” For Benjamin, the unforgettable life is perhaps without witness not because it would be the object of a fallible empirical judgment, but because it is not an object at all and thus cannot be accessed by any judgment.

Just as the unforgettability of a life overtaxes every remembrance, so the translatability of a language overtaxes every translation. Languages are translatable beyond the boundaries of every subjective capacity, and thus insofar as they put behind them every restrictive, Kantian, comprehended actuality of the subject: they are translatable solely as untranslatable. This does not mean only that they are languages solely by fulfilling the criterion of absolute translatability, where language is such only in being translatable over and above every limit on cog-nition. Rather, it also means that languages already—in themselves, in their essence or their structure—realize their translation in a sense that must still be made more precise. Language is that which, in itself,

6This piece, written in 1917, was first published in 1921—in immediate temporal proximity to the writing of the essay on translation (cf. the editorial comments in GS II: 977). This proximity, however, can only be one of the motives that explains Benjamin’s return to the thought of unforgettability in the later text. Decisive in both is the idea of an essential demand that transcends every possible realization.

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posits itself over and beyond itself; a language is itself only in being other than every self operating or positioning itself [sich feststellende] in propositional cognitions. Benjamin calls Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin unap-proachable, and speaks of his “solitude” as “ripe for disappearance” [bis zum Verschwinden reifen Einsamkeit] (238)—a mere, solitary language that disappears before itself might also be called unapproachable. Such a language alone could be called language as such.

The essence of a language lies in its translatability—in this, it imparts not its contents but rather its impartibility to another language. Only with respect to its translation, its status as translatable, does a text become an original; and only with respect to the language of the translation does the language of the original become language. The linguisticality of a language is defined not by what that language means, but by the other language toward which it points the way. Since, fol-lowing Benjamin’s formulation, the law of language as such lies in the a priori reference to another language, translatability is not one among the many laws of language, and is still less an asset that can belong to or be missing from language, but is rather its law par excellence. Translat-ability is the high law, the trans-law, so to speak, of language as such.7 In this key principle of Benjamin’s theory of language, however, law signifies both structure and demand, and translatability is thus the categorical imperative of language: the structural demand through

7[Translator’s note: It has unfortunately not been possible to present Hamacher’s continual play on words in this regard with due attention to its spirit: here, “Übersetz-barkeit ist das Über-Gesetz, das, sit venia verbo, ‘Übersetz’ der Sprache überhaupt.” Gesetz, or “law” (literally, “the placed” or “the posited” as this, in turn, places or posits) stems from setzen, “to posit, place, or position,” as does übersetzen, “translate” (literally, “place over” or “trans-posit”). Hence, in the above, translatability may be thought as “transplace-ability” or “transpositability,” which is in turn “the trans-placed or trans-posited, the trans-placing or trans-positing of language as such” (keeping in mind that the prefix trans- works to figure both a sense of motion-between and a sense of motion-beyond). Here, as elsewhere, I have been driven into an English that reproduces a certain feel and that remains loosely idiomatic, rather than opting for a precision that might rob Hamacher’s language of its fluidity, its own self-overcoming. However, as this essay suggests, the unfulfillable demand on translation is for both. Accordingly, one ought really to read Peter Fenves’ translation of Hamacher’s Entferntes Verstehen (as Premises) alongside this essay, as Fenves sometimes sacrifices fluidity in English for a precision that, though more technical in feel than the original, is crucial in exploring further ramifications of key terms. In particular, the verb setzen (posit, place) and the prefix über (over, beyond, past, above, trans)—by which übersetzen is formed—are both ubiq-uitous and importantly networked in German, and the reader would do well to pay special attention to these as they occur in Fenves’ translation, as also to his rendering of überleben as “out-living,” a term that here finds different emphasis as “living on.” Cf. Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).]

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which alone language is language, the language of the demand for another language, language’s laying claim to another language. It is in this law of languages’ laying claim to (and on) one another, in this law of immediate self-overcoming and becoming-other [Veranderung], that language’s linguisticality consists, even should the claim never be honored so much as a single time by a single language.

Every single language thus has reference to another as its very essence: a language is only language insofar as it is a language for another language, not in its place but in the face of it. This relation of one language to another is absolute in the twofold sense that what is essential for every language (GS IV: 9) is constituted through and through by the relation and that this relation is itself non-reflexive and irreversible. “A certain significance dwelling in the original,” writes Benjamin, “expresses” itself in its translatability; but the translation, he continues in three clarifications, one after another, can “never [. . .] signify something for the original [. . .], signifies nothing more” for it, and is an expression of its life “without signifying anything for it” (10). This indicates, however, that signifying, i.e., the gesture toward another language, is in fact the decisive operation for the essence of language and thus for its translatability. That is, the interlingual signi-fying function of a language expires in the realm of its translation; in the other language that it signifies—the language of the translation—a language no longer signifies and is itself no longer signified. The original, for its part and thus only in part, is original solely because in originally gesturing beyond itself, it had already abandoned itself. It is original and thus originary [ursprünglich] only because it is leaping [auf dem Sprung] into its translation.

In the leap [Sprung] by which it translates into another language, the language of the original leaves behind its signification. Accordingly, it must be said of the language of the original that it does not live [nicht lebt] in the translation—already in the original it did not live as itself, but only as its transition toward another—but rather that it lives on or survives [überlebt], and that relative to its “own” life and distanced a priori from itself, it lives forth or goes on living [fortlebt]. Translation is the a priori form of a language’s living on and living forth in another:

Just as the expressions of life are most intimately connected to the one who lives, without meaning anything to her, so the translation proceeds from the original. But in that, it proceeds not so much from its own life as from its “living on” [Überleben]. For if translation comes later than the original, and designates it indeed as being among the significant works, this is because their chosen translator is never to be found in the period

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of their emergence, and translation signifies the stage of their living forth [ihres Fortlebens] (10–11).

One will have to understand this formulation of an a priori afterlife [Nachleben] as indicating that a significant work is one that signifies its own afterlife; signification arrives for it only via immediate self-overcoming. Language makes a life for itself only in the medium of its “living on”; it “deploys” [einsetzt] not in its natural or its immediate but in its mediate, historical existence, its existence in translation.

Translation is language’s living on, towards which it was drawn from the beginning and without which it would not be language. Just as there is no life without living on, so, too, there is no positing [Setzung] without translation [Übersetzung]. Living on—as also translation—is in every instance living on in quotation marks; it is, as Benjamin writes, “living on,” because it is not simply a living that goes on beyond or outlasts life and thus also death, but is rather a living on that is real-ized, insofar as it is realized, in words: in the phrase “living on,” for instance.8 This is living on in citation and thus no living on at all, a “living on” that is only linguistic and yet that still means living on. Language first lives in “living on,” no longer signifying only its own life in the life of another. Language first speaks or languages in its “living on,” speaking itself and no longer of something and to someone. As living on, translation is the singular element—the medium—in which language and nothing but language occurs. Translation is the form of language’s history, and only as history is translation coextensive with language’s essence. If the language of the original signifies and demands another language, then it signifies and demands this other, the language of translation, as language as such. In translation, the language of the original transposes [setzt über] itself as language as such. Since language itself is the signified in all languages, translation, in which language qua language realizes itself, can for its part no longer

8Like Benjamin, Nietzsche—in aphorism 262 of Beyond Good and Evil—places living on quite intentionally in quotation marks. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1988); Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966) 211. On the motif of “living on in citation,” see my essay, “‘Disgregation of the Will’: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality” in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, 143–80. [Translator’s note: There, this phrase—Überleben im Zitat—is “outliving in citation.” Again, the reader should note that “living on” here is complementary—neither apposite nor opposite—to Fenves’ rendering, in Premises, of Überleben as “outliving” (following Kaufmann’s translation of Nietzsche), and that this Benjaminian “living on” or “outliving” is to be distinguished, in either event, from a Derridean survivre, which has also made its way into English as a “living on.”]

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signify. Hence, if history is the very occurring of language—its essence or having-been [Wesen], verbally understood—then this is a history without significance. For it is not in, but rather as history, as realized by translations, that language qua language appears openly without further intentions, without reference, and without addressees. Transla-tion is the history of language, and this history its apocalypse.

Translatability is the law of language. Only as translatable does one language enter into relation with another and only in this relation with another language can it itself be language. At the same time, translatability is the law of history; it is that law in a fact, an act, or a language, in which these relate to something other than themselves, and in which they “live on” in one another and are in that measure historical. Just as the a priori translatability of languages is the law of translation, translatability is the law of history irrespective of whether or not it can be accomplished by finite subjects. For Benjamin, this means that it is texts and languages themselves, by virtue of their fundamentally historical structure in translations, which are realized in interpretation and critique; and it means that these should by no means be taken as lifeless objects, upon which outwardly historical changes would play out as semantic redefinitions. Just as language’s mediality is immediately its own—and this immediability of mediability is characterized by Benjamin in his essay on language as intensity and as the fundamental problem of the theory of language—so the histo-ricity of linguistic entities, insofar as they are linguistic, is immanent. Languages’ capacity to “have” history is founded in their intensive historicity. They are, per Benjamin, not the stage of history; rather, it is from them that history comes to be (one could also say: languages exist only insofar as they are a priori exposed to their history). Ben-jamin writes:

Only when life is accorded to all that from which history emerges and that is not merely its stage will its concept be given its due. For the ambit of life is to be determined [. . .] in the end according to history, not to nature. Hence, the philosopher has the task of understanding all natural life from the more comprehensive life of history. [. . .] The history of great works of art recognizes their evolution from sources, their composition in the era of the artist, and the period of their fundamentally eternal living forth [Fortlebens] with subsequent generations. This latter, where it manifests, is called renown. Translations, which are more than mediations, arise when in living forth [Fortleben] a work has arrived at the era of its renown. [. . .] In them, the life of the original arrives at its continually renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding (GS IV: 11).

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These thoughts were so important to Benjamin that, more than twenty years later, he takes them up again in the epistemological notes to The Arcades Project and sees sketched in them “the very basis of his-tory as such.” Specifically, he writes, “[h]istorical ‘understanding’ is fundamentally to be grasped as the afterlife [Nachleben] of that which is understood, and hence what is cognized in analyzing the ‘afterlife of works’ as ‘renown’ [as this is discussed in “The Task of the Transla-tor”] is to be regarded as the very basis of history as such” (GS V: 574 –75). Historical cognition, so must one understand this note, is to be grasped as the expression of an afterlife belonging to that which is itself cognized therein. Cognitions can only belong to the cognized as its historical unfolding, since from the beginning of its life it “lived on” beyond itself and was in its implicit afterlife already with others, precisely its interpretation and historical cognition. In understanding, a hermeneutic subject does not represent the utterance of another as limited by its own historical determinants; rather, that which is understood presents itself in its becoming-other [Ver anderung], since it emerged in its basic comprehensibility from the very beginning only for another. Comprehensibility, like translatability, is a category of the a priori historical becoming-other of language. Translatability is historicity; translation is the only, and the historical, existence of languages, because it is in every instance the singular manner in which languages expose themselves as languages for other languages and, hence, the manner in which they expose themselves to their history.

So, too, may we understand Benjamin’s pronouncement that “[i]n them [translations], the life of the original arrives at its continually renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding” (GS IV: 11). Each translation is final and each is an integral translation of the original—not because there can be no others that would be more correct or more plastic, but because in each one another language has already been accomplished and with it the latest phase in the history of the original. Every language is only distanced from its end by an absolute, but irreducible minimum. Its historical “living on” does not play out in the homogenous continuum of a progressive development, in which its meanings might endlessly grow and accumulate, but rather presents itself in always singular expositions, of which none is comparable with another and each is an unsurpassable extreme. Every translation is an eschaton of the language of the original. In each, “fundamentally eternal living forth” realizes itself. Benjamin is able to term this liv-ing forth fundamentally eternal because in it the ground of language itself, its origin, is touched—and, therewith, a time that is no longer

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trapped within the horizon of subjective modes of intuition or, more naïvely, natural succession, but rather plays out openly, indefinitely and infinitely in its own incommensurable movement. Translation is origin or leap into being [Ursprung]. An event is historical if in it a time originates that is singular to it; and language is historical to the extent that it is translatable, is language for another language, is the language of an immediate and in each case singular becoming-other, and thereby allows history to originate. Translations—like all other intralinguistic and interlinguistic transformations—do not perform themselves in a time or history already playing out independently of them, which might serve as their stage; to the contrary, time and history first originate [entspringen] in translation, and originate in such a manner that they touch their ends already in their leap into being [Sprung]. Languages are fundamentally eternal in their historical unfolding, because in this respect they each appear for the only time and thus each time for the last time. They belong to a different order than that of the succession of substitutables, whether arranged logi-cally or temporally. Every historical instant is as instant of translation an instant of origin [des Ursprungs], and in that respect singular and thus—in and not beyond its historicity—fundamentally eternal.

A language can, so long as it speaks and pronounces itself as the claim to another language, never be the fixed, lifeless object of trans-mission, interpretation, or critique. Thus, no translation into another language, be it contemporaneous or later, dialect or national language, can produce its image and become like unto it. Benjamin leaves no doubt that any language that could be the object of reproduction would be unhistorical, untranslatable, and hence unlinguistic, and compares an analysis of the “impossibility of a theory of reproduc-tion” with the conclusion that the affinity between languages cannot rest in their similarity:

If it is shown there that in cognition there could be neither objectivity nor so much as a claim to it if this were to consist of images of the actual, then here it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if it were to strive in its ultimate essence for likeness to the original. For in its living forth [Fortleben], which could not be called such if it were not change and renewal of the living, the original transforms itself” (GS IV: 12).

It is the original, so Benjamin, that transforms itself: not its conceptions, readings, or translations, but it itself in its living forth in translations, interpretations, and usages. And because its life dates back only to its living forth, the original determines itself essentially as its own histori-cal, historicizing self-transformation. Since the original is not similar

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to itself, a translation can strive for similarity to it all the less. History as Benjamin understands it, the a priori of auto-alteration, renders the interdiction on images [Bilderverbot] superfluous: it is the impossibility of fixed images [starrer Bilder] and reproductions [Abbilder] that would be similar to them. Cognition can only be objective, or at least lay claim thereto, when its object is grasped as historically self-transforming and the cognition itself recognized as only a moment, indeed, one of the most powerful moments, of this transformation. Moreover, in fidelity to his programmatic critique of the Kantian subject-object schema, Benjamin insists that this moment of cognition in the historical process of the transformation of languages must not be misunderstood as a form of transcendental subjectivity, not as subjective addition or some individual arbitrariness, but rather grasped as nothing other than one of the expressions of the translational motion [Übertragungsbewegung] of language itself. Benjamin writes:

To seek what is essential in such transformations, or in the equally ongoing transformations of sense, in the subjectivity of successors rather than in the ownmost life of language and its works—this, even allowing for the crudest of psychologisms, would be to confuse the grounds with the essence of the thing. Put more rigorously, it would mean denying one of the most extraor-dinary and fruitful historical processes out of weakness of intellect (13).

While subjectivity may well be the “ground” of linguistic transformation, its essence must lie in the afterlife of languages themselves, since only their structural historicity, their a priori alteration, allows, demands, and conducts every change to their meaning and sense, which emerge as their very history. Thus, as foreign as languages are to one another, there is nonetheless a relation between them that is not that “between some subjects and objects” (GS II: 161); Benjamin names this with a concept that is important for him well beyond the essay on translation: “affinity” [Verwandtschaft]. One can think this as an a priori relation between the foreignnesses of languages in the medium of their own transcendental-historical objectivity—if objectivity can still be spoken of where subjectivity has become one of its historicizing functions.

The language of translation is not an idiolect that would operate outside of all languages already given or still to come, and it is none of these languages themselves, but rather it presents between them their relations to one another as a singular sort of form. It is in this way that Benjamin thinks about translation: not as another language that appears to the others and increases their number, not as a meta-language that signifies all other languages, but rather as a language that exposes their signification, their intimation of still others, and

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thereby also their allegorical intention. In a passage that is perhaps the decisive one for the essay on translation, he writes:

All purposive forms of life, like purposiveness itself, are in the end not pur-posive for life, but rather for the expression of its essence, the presentation of its meaning. In the end, translation, too, is purposive for the expression of the innermost relation of languages to one another. Of itself, it can scarce reveal this buried relation, can scarce produce it; but insofar as it realizes that relation germinally or intensively, it can. Indeed, this presentation of a signified is through that effort, an effort that is the germ of its produc-tion, an entirely individual mode of presentation such as may hardly be met with in the realm of non-linguistic life. For this [realm of non-linguistic life] finds in analogies and signs other modes of suggestion than intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization. By contrast, the intended, innermost relation of languages is that of a singular convergence. In this, languages are not foreign to one another, but rather are, a priori and apart from all historical conditions, related to one another in that which they wish to say (GS IV: 11–12).

Benjamin did not always differentiate between presentation and pro-duction. In his book on art criticism, he understood presentation “in the sense of chemistry, as the creation [i.e., production] of a material through a determinate process to which others are to be submitted” (GS I: 109). In the essay on translation, this equivalence of presenta-tion with production does not hold; rather, the “presentation of a signified”—that is, the presentation of the “innermost relation of languages to one another”—is understood as effort, as “the germ of its production.” Now, the organizing metaphor of the germ and of a “germinal realization” should not be mistaken for a suggestion that the relation of languages is to be understood by analogy with the life of nature, as Benjamin has already forcefully emphasized that “the ambit of life,” including nature, is first defined by history, and that this is defined by the translatability of languages.

Accordingly, germ is to be read here as the a priori of translatability and hence as every language’s transcendental-structural anticipation of its relation—and this anticipation itself as relation—with all others. Without being the disclosure or production of the innermost relation of languages—since this relation, writes Benjamin, remains buried [ver-borgen]—translation is “intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization” of this relation. The full significance of this formulation, in which the law of translation finds expression, remains incomprehensible so long as the strict interrelation between the concepts intensity, anticipation, and realization is not developed. So long, that is, as they are not placed

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in relation to Kant’s formulation, in The Critique of Pure Reason, of the principle of the anticipations of perception and its founding concepts: intensity, anticipation, and reality. And all this must be considered in light of Benjamin’s project for a critical transformation of Kantian transcendentalism.9 The citation of Kant implicit in the formulation intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization helps elucidate the prox-imity and distance of Benjamin’s linguistic theory to mathematical theories of intensive quantities, along with one possible motive for the letter Benjamin sent to Gerhard Scholem in 1916 in accompaniment to his essay on language, in which he emphasized that “especially the linguistic-theoretical consideration of mathematics [is] of quite fundamental significance for the theory of language as such.” That the title “Mathematics and Language” had for him to do not only with the relation between mathematics and thinking but just as much with that between mathematics and Zion suggests both an epistemological and an historical-philosophical-eschatological dimension.10 It was via this latter dimension that Benjamin hoped to make inroads into a linguistic-theoretical consideration of mathematics.

In the table of the principles of synthetic a priori judgments, which contains the rules for the objective use of the categories, the principle of the anticipations of perception stands in the second position, follow-ing the axioms of intuition. Together, these two comprise what Kant termed the mathematical section of the principles of synthetic judg-ment, which is concerned with the necessary conditions of possibility for objects of experience—and not, as in the case of the “dynamic” principles, with the contingent conditions of their existence [Dasein] (KdrV A160/B199). According to these principles, a precept must be operative in every intuition, dictating the conditions under which

9Clarifying the concept of intensity in this particular text, “The Task of the Transla-tor,” can also shed a certain light on its use in other writings of the early Benjamin. One thinks especially of the Hölderlin study (in which he speaks of the “intensity of communion of apparent and spiritual elements” [GS II: 108], characterizes “the law of identity” as “intensive penetration” of its elements [112], emphasizes a “plastic-intensive orientation” [118], etc.), of the essay “On Language as Such . . .” (which speaks of the “intensive totality of language” [144], of “language complete with regard to uni-versality and intensity” [145], and so forth), and of the letter of December 9, 1923, to Christian Rang (which identifies the essential bond between works of art as intensive, and recognizes an “intensive interpretation” and an “intensive infinitude.” Cf. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995- ) II: 390–94 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as GB).

10Letter of November 11, 1916 (GB I: 343–44).

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given phenomena may become objects of cognition. For the axioms of intuition, this occurs in their synthesis of a multiplicity of given phenomena, in their successive ordering in the concept of a quantity [Gröβe].11 “All intuitions are extensive quantities” (B202)—so goes the principle of the synthesis of intuition—because they produce the extensions of the pure forms of intuition, time and space, while at the same time producing the extensions of determinate manifestations of time and space in the phenomenon. The synthesis of intuition, which is simultaneously the coordination of pure intuitions with empirical intuitions and the coordination of a multiplicity of possible empirical intuitions, proceeds from the notion of parts to the notion of a whole comprised of these parts, and in that fashion successively makes all phenomena into aggregates of given parts (A163/B204). While the principle of the extension of intuition takes account of the necessity of a successive ordering of a multiplicity of phenomena in time and space—and thereby raises the problem of the antinomies of pure reason—it cannot account for the necessity that possible phenomena be substantial [sachhaltig]. This substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit]—and, it should be noted, not the actual being—of phenomena is incor-porated by Kant, with regard to intuition, in the principle of the anticipations of perception. That is, while the principle of extensivity simply prescribes the necessary form of intuition in the production of time and space, it is via the principle of perception that this same intuition relates itself to the substantiality of possible experience, to its reality or, as Kant translates this, to its thingness [Sachheit] (A143/B192; A574/B602). The principle of extension produces a relation to the form of intuition, while the principle of perception produces the relation to the material of intuition and to the specific material-ity of this material. The title “anticipations of perception” thus by no means indicates that perception is the agent of anticipations that reach beyond one or another already given perception or beyond the borders of perception as such. Rather, “anticipations of perception” signifies the a priori of perception: that, in order to be perception and

11[Translator’s note: It bears mention that the standard translation for Kant’s Gröβe is “magnitude.” Where the term Gröβe operates in a wide variety of capacities, however, appearing all throughout workaday German, “magnitude” has in English a specialist feel, the sort of feel that contributes to philosophy’s appearing more esoteric or rarefied than it intrinsically must be. By using the term “quantity,” I have sought to convey a sense both technical and everyday. Apart from this, and apart from “phenomena” for Erscheinungen (which I think better captures the dual character of Erscheinungen’s root-edness in the Schein—both that which seems and that which shines, making possible all seeming—than does the standard “appearances”), Kant’s terms of art are generally rendered here in the usual fashion.]

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thus empirical consciousness at all, it must in itself be structured as the anticipatory grasping of the reality of a sensation that offers up, in given phenomena, the material for object cognition. Perception is not anticipated; it is anticipation.

The problem that Kant seeks to solve by introducing the principle of anticipations is that of the empossibilizing12 of reality or of the thing-ness of objects of experience as such. Pure intuition produces merely a formal consciousness a priori of multiplicities in space and time, but does not entail the relation to the material that would be necessary for the fullness of this intuition. While formal consciousness places itself in relation with extensive quantities—and is in this relation itself extensive, that is, successively displaced—this same consciousness must, as material, relate itself a priori to more than formal extensions in time and space (since these are empty). It must posit in itself the ground, independently of these extensions, whereby it can encounter and stand opposite a something, a “what,” a real. It must posit in itself the ground for what Kant termed intensive quantities. Intuition posits this ground with the principle of anticipations of a something, that is, with a principle in which intuition relates itself to an inextensive, intensive quantum, a degree. Hence, in Kant’s formulation, the prin-ciple of anticipations reads, “In all phenomena, the real, which is an object of sensation, has intensive quantity, that is, a degree” (B207). Only by way of this transcendental structural principle can cognition extend out to the “material of perception,” being essentially nothing other than the anticipation of this material and, in this anticipation, itself already material. With this tenet [Grundsatz]—with this tenintent [Grundvorsatz]—and as such, the material is admitted into cognition itself. Fundamentally anticipatory, grasping out a priori beyond the immanence of mere analytical statements and toward the real, syn-thetic cognition is structured as the grasping in advance of its own material. It can now be understood of every “sense impression qua sense impression (without any particular impression being given)” (A167/B209) that it entails a quantity that is not a temporal-spatial extension and hence not the extension of a presentation of an object,

12[Translator’s note: The standard translation of Ermöglichung would be “enabling.” While adequate in many situations, what that would lose here is the sense of Möglichkeit or possibility that is being developed. Under discussion is not the “enabling” of reality, as though some external agent would make it possible—whether that external agent be thought as a principle or a principal—but rather quite precisely the “empossibilizing” of reality: the conditions of and immanent to reality whereby it, reality, is possible as such, immediately and without the intervention (theoretical or empirical) of any agent.]

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but is rather the unextended quantity of something as such. It is to this intensive quantity of sensory material as such that perception is related a priori, that is, before every particular sense impression, insofar as it is simply perception and without needing to be the perception of some determinate sensation. If perception occurs, then it occurs only as that of sensation, that is, as the perception of the material of objects as such and as perception of this “transcendental material” (A143/B182) in its always singular intensity.

The anticipation of the material of perception is immanent to every perception and is thus transcendental. Because the anticipa-tion of the material of perception is therefore not subordinated to extension in time and space and does not present a successive syn-thesis—but rather, as Kant writes, in each case fills “only an instant” and immediately grasps a whole (A167/B209)—anticipation of the material is in each case precisely a singular instant filling time through an intensive real. The principle of the anticipations of perception is the principle of the transcendental material of sensation, which empiri-cal consciousness cannot present to itself but as the intensity of the realitas noumenon. Only through the structure of the category of real-ity, then, is there linguistic access—for the category is nothing if not essentially linguistic—to the world of phenomenal reality; and only through this category is the performance or fulfillment of the form of intuition that is time possible.13 As intensive fulfillment, however, this fulfilling has in every instant the tendency—since intensio means gain, increase—to pass over into a higher one: it is filling [Erfüllung] in the leap toward overflowing [Überfüllung], a whole that swells out beyond itself. Though Kant does not draw this consequence, it can be said that intensity—that is, the character of the reality of sensory material—is not only the experiential correlate anticipated in the concept of the understanding, but has also for its part the structure of anticipation.

13[Translator’s note: It is worth noting that the standard translation of Kant’s erfüllen and Erfüllung in the first Critique—as “to fill,” “filling,” etc. in both Pluhar and Guyer and Wood, though with the caveat in Pluhar that “occupies” is also possible—treats time as already in a sense extant, available for filling. While this is to an extent appro-priate, since time is a pure apprehension of the form of intuition and may therefore be filled by sense-impressions, which themselves occur at a second formal-logical level, it does obscure the sense in which Erfüllung marks the “fulfillment” of conditions or “accomplishment” or “performance” of a demanded end or state. Hence, I have moved between the tradition of “filling” Kant’s time, especially when Hamacher is citing, and “fulfillment,” “accomplishing,” or “performing” in an effort to keep those latter senses alive in the text—for it is surely the case that time in the Critique is accomplished only in being filled, that its becoming full is the fulfillment of its structural promise and demand for itself, and that Hamacher’s reading of Kant should alert us to this fact.]

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It is an outer limit that seeks to shoot out beyond its own superlative. In his later conception of the “critical instant,” Benjamin was able to follow up on precisely this thought, which the Kantian construction preserved from Scholastic philosophy.14

Kant starts his construction of the a priori synthesis of the categories from the types of utterance that he conceives as pure forms of judg-ment. The relation to possible objects of experience is thus for Kant, even if concealed, always already a linguistic relation; and Benjamin, in his essay on a program for a coming philosophy, has good Kantian and not merely Hamannian reason for his demand that “the linguistic essence” of pure transcendental consciousness be reclaimed as the foundation for a new concept of experience (GS II: 168). If the rela-tion to objects in time and space and the relation to their materiality are anticipated in the pure concepts of the understanding as well as the principles for their application, then not only is an extensive and intensive reality within language, but reality is also prefigured therein as essentially linguistic—in the sense that the “pre-” there has, like the “ante-” of anticipation, not a chronological but rather an exclusively structural-implicative significance. Irreconcilable with this perspec-tive (which, granted, is nowhere in Kant’s work explicitly delineated, but is everywhere hinted at), there remains indeed the privilege of a singular language that rules over the entire Kantian construction of experience: that of the judgment and of the categories construed as forms of judgment. As Kant has it, the categories pre-form a realm of possible phenomena from which all autonomy is stripped, because they are encountered only as that which is given for the subject of a categorical and, furthermore, propositional cognition. For Benjamin, by contrast, these phenomena themselves have a linguistic character, and their language is not imputed to them by concepts of the under-standing, principles of judgment, and in the final instance a transcen-dental subject; rather, it comes to them as autonomous essentialities. It is not that a subject of cognition encounters a multiplicity of possible objects, but rather that one language relates itself to another and, in every other, to its own linguistic essence—to the possibility, namely,

14The concept of intensive quantities in Scholasticism is presented in Anneliese Maier’s 1939 “The Problem of Intensive Quantities,” collected in Zwei Grundprobleme der scholastischen Naturphilosophie (Rom: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1968). Regarding the structure of the “critical instant” and Benjamin’s later concept of history, I would point the reader to my essay “‘NOW’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” in The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, ed. Heidrun Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001) 161–96.

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of being not only the vehicle of impartings, but rather of imparting itself in its impartibility.

The anti-instrumental turn that Benjamin’s philosophy of language seeks to effect presses here, however, for an answer to the question of what form would bind the various languages to one another—to language as such—and in which language the relationship of the vari-ous languages to one another would present itself. For Benjamin, it is translation that offers the answer to this question. Translation is, he writes, “fundamentally oriented toward the innermost relationship of languages to one another” (GS IV: 12). In order to make clear how this linguistic relationship, the totality of language and ultimately “language as such” (16), “comes to expression” in translation, however, Benja-min reaches back toward that one among the Kantian principles of a priori synthesis that must, in some connections, count as decisive: the principle of the anticipations of perception. In this alone does Kant seek to think a relation between category and material of intuition in which the relata are not external to one another, not characterized by relations of quantity, by the succession of extensiva, or by purely formal relations of perception or causal relationships: a relation for which the perceptual forms time and space are not empty but materi-ally filled in every instant. Among all the synthetic a priori principles intended to secure the structural conditions for objective experience, the principle of the anticipations of perception exhibits the greatest affinity to Benjamin’s project for a new, language-philosophical foun-dation for the metaphysics of experience. It is here alone that the distance between categorical language and sensuality, between content of apprehension and form of time, between a priori and a posteriori cognition, contracts to a minimum. The density of their relation finds its pregnant formulation in that scholastic expression used by Kant, intensive quantities, which later takes on a central theoretic-strategic function in the texts of the neo-Kantians. Hence the privileging of the concept of intensity in Benjamin’s essays on Hölderlin, language, and translation. Hence, too, the critical reference—the only one to address a relatively clearly circumscribed lesson from Kantian philosophy: the principle of the anticipations of perception from the Transcendental Analytic—to the material of sensation in a 1916 introduction to the “Program” essay, bearing the title “On Perception.” There, Benjamin protests against the Kantian restriction of the concept of experience, arguing that “[t]he so-called ‘material of sensation’ arose as an expres-sion of the separation of the forms of intuition from the categories, artificially, so to speak, held at a distance from the animating center

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of the categorical interrelationship by the forms of intuition, in which it was incompletely absorbed” (GS VI: 34).15 While the aptness of the argument in this precise moment may be doubtful, it is beyond doubt that it attests to Benjamin’s concentrated interest in the category of sensory material, that is, reality as intensivum. Marked in this argu-ment, too, is his opposition to the interruption of the continuum of experience by the lifeless forms of intuition, his preference for the unrestricted operativity of irreducibly linguistic categories as guaran-tors of an expanded experience—and thereby also his insistence on the linguistic essence of cognition. What the essay on the translator protests five years later goes a decisive step further in the direction of this critique.

With Benjamin, the Kantian subject-object relation was transformed into an interlinguistic and, moreover, an intralinguistic relation. If translation is the paradigmatic form in which languages find access to other languages and, thereby mediated, to their linguisticality, then in fact they do so just as the category of reality, in the transcendental consciousness, finds the material of perception as an intensive quan-tity in sensation. That is, just as the linguistic categories and hence transcendental language anticipate the intensivum of sensory material, so, too, does translatability anticipate a language and translation, con-cretely speaking, language as such. Translatability is the transcendental of languages, translation is transcendental language with just this mediating function—for which Benjamin can admittedly no longer simply use the concept of synthesis—that Kant had assigned to the schematized categories. This mediation, this quasi-synthesis, is for Kant as for Benjamin anticipation: for the one, anticipation of the material of the senses, for the other, anticipation of the material of language. For Kant, the category of reality anticipates, without already designat-ing a particular sense-impression, the intensity of sense-impressions as such, and therewith the material of a possible world and thus the conditions for objective experience. For Benjamin, translation does not anticipate a language other than that of the original—since it already speaks this other language—but rather anticipates the “innermost relation of languages to one another” (GS IV: 12) and therein the language of languages, the ground for all experience.

15Benjamin’s thoughts here might also be related to the beginning of the chapter on the Transcendental Aesthetic, where a definitive distinction between the material of sensation and form of appearance is drawn (A20/B34), leaving unexplained only the relation to the “animating center of the categorical interrelationship”—which emerges organically from the chapters devoted to the synthetic principles.

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For Benjamin, this language is also material, though silent; but it is precisely in that respect that it is materially the truth, as he indicates in citing from Mallarmé’s Crise de vers: “penser étant écrire [. . .] tacite encore l’immortelle parole, [. . .] elle-meme matériellement la vérité.”16 That he speaks of a tone of feeling [Gefühlston] (17) in the determination of the connection between what is meant and the mode of meaning offered by a language might, in this respect, be understood as remi-niscent of Kant’s sense-impression; this, too, is implicit in the essentially linguistic category. But the principle of the anticipations of perception is thought by Kant as a principle of the precipitation of reality in the category.17 As such, it cannot hold for Benjamin, since the reality of language as such, in its purity, cannot be precipitated; it cannot be produced as an object, but rather can only be presented, as Benja-min emphasizes, in anticipation, in effort. This means, however, that the significance of the concept “anticipation,” which for Kant is as strong as a priori implication, has been transformed and now denotes the tentative assumption of something to come. The transcendental language of translation no longer determines the conditions under which experience is possible, but rather searches, attempts, hints at, and realizes the grounds of possibility of experience only “germinally or intensively,” that is, in such a manner that it reaches out beyond itself toward an other that it is not and that it cannot present other than through its own striving. The category, for Kant a transcenden-tal form that determinatively contained the data of the senses, has

16[Translator’s note: for Benjamin’s purposes, “thinking being writing [. . .] silent still immortal speech [. . .] would itself materialize truth.” As an appendix to her ex-cellent treatise on Mallarmé Rosemary Lloyd offers a translation of “Crisis of Verse,” from which the relevant passage is this: “Languages, which are imperfect in so far as they are many, lack the supreme language: because thinking is like writing without instruments, not a whispering but still keeping silent, the immortal word, the diversity of idioms on earth, prevents anyone from proffering the words which otherwise would be at their disposal, each uniquely minted and in themselves revealing the material truth” (230). Cf. Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).]

17In this regard, Hermann Cohen is a strict Kantian, insisting still on the production of sensory material through pure thought in the category (cf. Logik der reinen Erken-ntnis [Hildesheim: Olms, 1977] 28–9 and 58–9). Benjamin’s critique of Kant is at the same time a critique of Cohen. This is most evident in the epistemological preface to the book on Trauerspiel, in which he writes, “The category of the origin [des Ursprungs] is thus not, as Cohen would have it, purely logical, but rather historical” (GS I: 226). Indeed, Benjamin develops the elements of differentiation between the logical and the historical from the structure of the infinitesimal principle, which he may have come to know from Kant’s principle of anticipations and to which Cohen works to give pride of place in the logic of cognition (cf. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis 32–6).

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opened itself to that which, in itself, it can absolutely never include, that which as historical other exceeds its capacity to determine and must remain unreachable for it. The category has become historical, no longer defining what can possibly be present [das mögliche Vorlieg-ende], but rather signifying what lies historically ahead [das geschichtlich Vorausliegend] as an indefinable other. Translation, writes Benjamin, “signifies a higher language than it itself is” (15); it has become an ‘allocategory’ [Allokategorie], has become allegorical.

Translation is that principle of linguistic relation in which all indi-vidual languages must be inscribed, if they are to be languages at all. This means that languages do not signify one another and succes-sively fill one another out toward totality as merely formal and thus empty degrees of time and space in accordance with the principle of extensivity. The principle of extension and thus the principle of a successive progression of multiple languages toward a single true one is, in principle, insufficient for expressing the relationship of languages to each other; in the principle of extension, languages would remain alien to one another, without reality and hence without internal rela-tion to their own linguisticality. But as little as the relation between languages can be a relation of producing an external object, and as much as it must be an intensive relation of presentation, so for Benjamin—and herein lies a further decisive difference between his thought and Kant’s—it is just as little a relation of mere cognition. For languages live and live on in their relationship to one another, prior to every cognitive-propositional function, and thus it is essentially a relation of occurring, a historical relation, that binds them with one another prior to and in every epistemic relation. The presentation that translation offers, of the relationship of one language to another and thus of language as such, must indeed for that reason be compre-hended as historical, but cannot be thought as a linear succession, nor as a relation of production. The concept of history that Benjamin seeks to work out through his notion of translation eliminates all characteristics of a formal, homogenous series, which the concept of history had taken on under pressure from the idea of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He replaces the characteristic of extension—and thereby of quantity—with that of qualitative, intensive fulfillment [Erfüllung]. History proceeds in translations; it is nothing other than translation; and the linguistic essence of history, not only that of cognition, plays its part in the language of translation. Just as this language is intensive anticipation, so history must be structured

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as anticipation. Indeed, history must be the intensive “synthesis” of an instant with one to come that cannot be produced through history.

In his dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German roman-ticism, which precedes the essay on the translator by two years, Benja-min writes of the temporal infinitude of the historical process—and the same holds for the process of languages in translation—that it is “medial and qualitative.” He ties these thoughts on what he terms Romantic messianism together with an initial critique of the “modern” concept of progress, which he would take up again and sharpen years later in the theses on history.18 In the idiom of the essay on the trans-

18Benjamin writes in “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism” that “[t]he temporal infinitude in which this process [of unfolding and enhancement] takes places is likewise medial and qualitative. Accordingly, progressibility [Progredibilität] is absolutely not that which is understood under the modern expression “progress” [Fortschritt, lit. “forth-step”], not a certain relation of cultural levels to one another that is only relative. It is, like the entire life of humanity, an infinite process of fulfillment, not a mere process of becoming.” Benjamin uses the formula “Romantic messianism” twice in immediate proximity to these sentences (GS I: 92). Messianism was designated by Benjamin the “center of Romanticism” in a letter from April 7, 1919 that he wrote to Ernst Schoen after completing the rough draft of his dissertation (GB II: 23, note 3).

The idea that the time of history is to be grasped as qualitative had been worked out in preliminary fashion by Heinrich Rickert, with whom Benjamin studied in Freiburg, in his book on The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, though not without grotesquely conflating “quality” with “value.” Cf. Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung—Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913 [1896]). The concept of a qualitative historical time stands at the center of Heidegger’s lecture Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaften [The Concept of Time in the Historical Sciences], which was partially directed at Rickert and which Benjamin read shortly after its publication in 1916, while he was working on the early essay on language—he dismissed it as nonsense (letter to Scholem of November 11, 1916, in GB II: 344, note 3). Cf. Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1976–2011) I. Despite this derisive judgment, there can be no doubt that already at this time, Benjamin could not in principle have been at odds with Heidegger’s critique of the “homogenous, quantitatively determinable character” of time; it was just that Heidegger’s advocacy of the qualitative character of historical time led nowhere further than the communis opinio of the neo-Kantians and left it in a fruitless opposition with the quantitative time of the natural sciences. By contrast, Benjamin was about to bring his language essay to a close and already in possession of an argument with which he could think the qualitative time of history more precisely as a “medial” one, since he had already conceived of the quality of language, its in-tensity, as the “medial, that is, the immediacy of all spiritual imparting” (GS II: 142). In the same letter in which the verdict concerning Heidegger’s “horrible work” is to be found, Benjamin names—albeit without designating them as such—two entry-points to the language- and historical-philosophical theory of pure mediality so central for him: lessons from Kierkegaard, that is, from the theorist of mediable imparting, and lessons from Hölderlin’s commentaries on Pindar, in which it is not only explained that “strict mediability is the law,” but in which Hölderlin claims: “Should understanding be practiced intensively, still it maintains its force in the delapidated as well—so long as it easily apprehends the foreign in its own finely honed acuity” (Friedrich Hölderlin,

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lator and in accordance with Kantian terminology, historical time is qualitative and intensive; this means, again following Kant, that it is the reality of something “so long as it fills time” (A143/B183). This time is a process of fulfillment in the formulation of the work on art criticism, intensive in the idiom of the translator essay, and in both cases antici-patory; such is, in Benjamin’s understanding, the time of language, linguistic time. Anticipation is as little for Kant as “anticipatory [ . . . ] realization” is for Benjamin an anticipation in time regarded as the empty form of perception; rather, it is a moment’s anticipation of any other moment, a language’s anticipation of another language, and in that fashion—ana-chronistically, achronically—at once the consti-tution of historical time and of language. Translation, which draws this anticipation to completion, is the a priori of temporalization or time-ing [Zeitigung], i.e., the genesis of language as of history. It is lan-guage’s anticipatory grasping of language itself, its intensive realization in anticipation of itself and thus the basic structure of language and history as such. For translation is not the synthesis of already given languages. In its translation of the language of the original into its own, it transforms this language and its relation to the former, and projects a relation between languages in general that works toward their integral totality. Translation between two languages is thus always also the translation of languages into the one language as such that is not yet given and never given at all. As such, translation is proto-synthesis, from which languages can first emerge at all as languages and, indeed, as languages of the one language. Translation is as little a belated connection between two given languages as history is the relation between two already completed times, epochs, or stages of history. Like translation, history is the leap that leads from one instant to another that is not given and that only emerges from this leap in the first place.

Only the integral relation of all languages in the completeness of their historical unfolding would constitute language in general and language as such in the first place. This relationship, which does not exist as a positive fact, and which is nonetheless registered within every language as a transcendental demand, presents itself in allusive realization through translation and, hence, in the manner of anticipa-

Sämtliche Werke, ed. by D. E. Sattler [Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1975–2008], XV: 291; 293). Several years would pass before Benjamin would draw, like Heidegger before him (cf. Heidegger 1976–2011, 424 and 431), the consequences from the cri-terion of quality and would orient his critique of the dominant historical ideologies against the homogenous continuum of quantities that they supposed.

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tion. Language itself is only given to us in its a priori anticipation or pre-empting [Vorwegnahme]—that is, never as anticipation of some-thing already existing elsewhere, but rather of something first given through this very anticipation. The fact that translation is the organon of language’s reality [Wirklichkeit] in the anticipation of language, and that it is the organon of prealization [Vorwirklichung] of language, makes of translation a messianic project: in translation, language is messianic—messianic a priori—as its own “what lies ahead [ihr eigenes Voraus]. More specifically, Benjamin writes, the various languages’ manners of meaning complement one another to make up “the meant”:

For individual languages that are not complementing one another, their “meant” [which is, however, pure language] is never met with in relative independence [. . .], but rather grasped in constant flux, until through the harmony of all those manners of meaning it steps forward as pure language. Until then, it remains buried [verborgen] in languages. But when these swell up in this manner to the messianic end of their history, then it is for translation, which kindles itself in the eternal living forth [Fortleben] of works and the endless coming to life [Aufleben] of languages, to make always a fresh trial of that sacred growth of languages: at what distance what is buried there lies from revelation, how present it might become in the knowledge of this distance (GS IV: 14).

The messianic semiotics of the integration of specific linguistic inten-tions into a single intended within them may be formulated profanely, in Kantian fashion: experiences are only possible when, within the structure of the various media of experience, the one thing signified in them is already anticipated. Languages are messianically anticipatory and intensive, not in their particular utterances but in the manner of their meaning. It is not what is uttered in them, but how they speak that is significant in languages. The intention to language in general lies in the always singular manner of intention of the individual languages, and the how of their meaning makes of each an intensive, instantly fulfilled—but in this fulfillment still self-transcending—medium of language in general, and thereby of language as such. As the language of linguistic relations, translation attains to the degree of intensity of language as such, surpassing the individual languages but itself no longer surpassable. Translation is the messianic medium for the mes-sianic end of history in pure language. In translation qua transcendental anticipation of the end of languages and their—and every—history, language and history realize themselves.

Kant was not the first to think of anticipation as the foundational figure of the understanding. He himself justifies the introduction of

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this concept with a reference to Epicurus, writing, “[o]ne can call all cognition an anticipation—whereby I can know and determine a priori that which belongs to empirical cognition—and it is without question that such was the sense in which Epicurus used his expres-sion πρόληψις” (A166–67/B208).19 Now if this prolepsis is for Kant the form in which the transcendental language (of the categories) engen-ders possible empirical objects, so, too, is prolepsis for Benjamin the presentation—indeed, the only possible presentation—of the relation between languages, of language itself, and consequently of a language that precedes those of the categories and empossibilizes them. The internal generative structure of language is translation as prolepsis. Indeed, this structure is translation as prolepsis of language—and only on that account also of languages—to language: in it, languages prove themselves to belong to language; in it, they come to language; in it, they first realize their linguistic essence. Only as anticipation is this realization possible, not as revelation or as production—translation, Benjamin writes, can “impossibly reveal, impossibly produce” (GS IV: 12) the buried relation of languages—but only as the anticipation or preliminary design of a linguistic material that, for its part, is not to be found as a temporal or spatial existent, but only as this anticipa-tion and design of prolepsis itself. As prolepsis, translation trans-poses [setzt über] languages into languages not only that are in each case other, but into language; it poses them in relation to one another and, since translation itself is the “innermost relation of languages” to one another and thus implicitly to language itself, “germinally or intensively realized,” it transposes languages into translation, into language as translation, into pure language as pure prolepsis.

In translation, language realizes itself as anticipation of itself. But since the linguisticality of language is given in no other way and is in

19Presumably, Kant was familiar with the concept of prolepsis from Cicero’s De natura deorum (I.43), where it is translated with the Latin concepts “praenotio” (i.e., anticipation) and “anticipatio,” and where Cicero introduces his use by ascribing it to this sense of Epicurus’s prolepsis. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De natura deorum (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1968). Prolepsis and anticipation are thus synonymous for Cicero and Kant insofar as both designate the anticipatory grasping, pre-cept, or anticipation that allows access to the things meant therein. For Epicurus, the πρόληψις, in which πρῶτον ἐννόημα is at work, is additionally a σπέρμα, a seed or germ (Letter to Herodotus 39; cf. Letter to Menoeceus 124). Graziano Arrighetti, Epicuro, Opere, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1973). When Benjamin writes of a realization of language that is “germinal or intensive” and, again, “intensive, i.e., anticipatory” (GS 4:12), however, one must perhaps read in this combination of germ and anticipation less an immediate reminiscence of Epicurus than a reference to the germ and seed cult of the Romantics, in which the thought of λόγος σπερματιχός lived forth [fortlebte] from the Stoic tradition.

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no other way presentable—and is not producible at all—it consists in nothing other than this absolute, unconditional “what lies ahead” [voraussetzungslosen Voraus]. And since this absolute, historicizing “what lies ahead” is the a priori of prolepsis, indeed, prolepsis as the a priori-cization of language, and since it is only in this a prioricizing prolepsis that the individual languages communicate with one another, they do not impart to one another in translation a something and they do not impart some empirical or even transcendent agency; they impart instead only their impartibility and, with that, they impart themselves as the unconditional presupposition of every predicative and judging imparting. In translation, language realizes itself as absolute pre-supposition [Voraus-setzung] and only thus as the empossibilizing of judgingly intentional languages in that which Benjamin calls language as such. Prolepsis is thus less the founding principle of every possible experience than the proposition [Satz]—the leap [Sprung]—in which alone a basis for experience emerges, without however ever being fixed as availably given or as produced. And since it is only in this intention [Vorsatz] of language, in which every individual language transcends itself and language itself is its own transcendence in language, since it is only in this projection [Vorsprung] that languages speak at all, they are “language as such, its totality” in a non-extensive, non-aggregative manner in translation; in every individual instant, translation is the intensive realization of language, language for another language and for the otherness of language: “language of language” and hence, as the early essay on language puts it, of the name (GS II: 144). The intensity of languages is the a priori “what lies ahead” of translation in them, their pre-supposition in language. As projection that is absolute and in every case singular, language itself is intensive.

Anticipation, which for Kant belongs in the category of quality and furthermore of reality, thus designating their transcendental status, attains with Benjamin a simply limitless prerogative: it no longer marks merely the manner of operation of one among several categories, and no longer only the structure of categoriality, but rather the structure—indeed, the generative structure—of language as such. Prolepsis or anticipation designates the manner in which language realizes itself; it is, accordingly, the category of linguistic realization as such and, as the category before all categories, the proto- and anacategory under which alone language as language is possible and intensively real. With the generalization of prolepsis into the mode of realization of language as such, however, language—and all that can be said in it—becomes endless prolepsis: far beyond reach ahead of itself, unapproachably

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behind itself, it speaks only in efforts, degrees, intensities—each of which is grasped in its escalation and is hence the “latest and most comprehensive” (GS IV: 11)—as infinite finitude. Since prolepsis is the minimal juncture binding languages with language in general and manifesting their belonging to language itself, all languages are proleptic and all are intensive languages. To the extent that their intention and their intensity are directed toward language in general and thus toward bare, pure language—which is exposed by impart-ings—they orient themselves toward their own mediality. Language itself: this is their self-relation and, as the self in its role as the pronoun of emphasis indicates, it is such as pure intensity.

Intensive, that is, anticipatory, allusive realization of the innermost rela-tion of languages: in Benjamin’s definition of translation, “intensive” means, as for Kant, anticipatory; unlike for Kant, it also means allu-sive [andeutend] (not signifying [bedeutend]); and again unlike for Kant, it is not simply positive, not posited. In his commentary on the principle of anticipations, Kant insists that the real of phenomena, their thingness as well as their extension in the phenomenon, is never given in anything other than a continuum of degrees and, therefore, in mathematical determinations of quantity:

The property of quantities by which no part of them is the smallest possible (by which no part is simple) is called continuity. Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given save as included within boundaries (points and instants), and hence in such a manner that this part itself is still again a space or a time. [. . .] It follows that all phenomena as such are continuous quantities: extensive when considered in terms of their intuition and intensive when considered in terms of simple perception (sensation and consequently reality) (A169–70/B 211–2).

That there is no smallest part of a continuum means, firstly, that there is no part in which it has its end and thus that it is infinite in terms of both extension and intensity. In the world of phenomena there is no place at which it would cease to be reality; this indicates, so Kant concludes, that “from experience there can never be drawn a proof of empty space or of an empty time” (A172/B214). Experience is only possible insofar as its subject itself, in the concepts by which it is grasped, opens itself to being affected through phenomena; it opens itself to such affection inasmuch as it arrogates to appearances the character of a something, a positive determination, a thingly nature. It posits anticipatorily, as a presupposition, what is given to it in sense-

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impression, and attains access in this presupposition to an uninter-rupted series of realities.

The principle of anticipations thus includes a further principle—Kant calls it a regulative idea of pure reason—through which an unarticulated connection, if not quite with the actuality of objects, then with their reality, is buried within it: the principle of anticipa-tions must be based in the principle of continuity. In this principle, the mathematical formulation of which first becomes possible via Leibniz’s introduction of arbitrarily small quantities, the so-called infinitesimal, the uninterrupted and hence infinite presence of a thing as such, a real, becomes thinkable. When no number can be the smallest, when any given quantity of perception can yet be end-lessly reduced before disappearing, when there always lies between an arbitrarily small quantity of sense-impression and the next-smaller an interval that is smaller than that separating the first from zero, then the succession of these infinitesimal degrees constitutes a “continuous connection” of degrees (A168/B210) and this continuity itself must shelter within it the irreducible reality-character of these degrees. The continuum guarantees the ongoing presence of something as something at all in infinitely differentiated, but also infinitely real gradations. In stepping through the infinitesimal degrees within self-sameness, there are always only ever more degrees to be encountered, and hence the continuum suggests not only a connection—and even a fluid connection: Kant expressly refers to Newton’s “fluentes” when he speaks of flowing quantities (A170/B210)—but rather, in this dense connection of infinitely differentiated quantities, it always also sug-gests a structure for the identical: a quantity as such, but an intensive rather than an extensive one, a degree. Degree—or intensity—thus means unexposed [unausgesetzte] positive determination in an infinite continuum, something as such, thingness in the inseparable chain of singularities. Regardless of whether it is the determination of a merely possible or of an actual intuition, this thingness fulfills [erfüllt] each instant of time in such a manner that every “here and now” can be the “here and now” of a sense impression or experience; thus every “here and now” is, in an endless gradation that is each time singular, transcendentally material. The schema of reality that operates in the anticipations of perception is thus the schema of an unarticulated and infinitely singular fulfilling of time: “Apprehension,” writes Kant, “by means merely of the sense impression, fills only an instant [. . .]”

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(A167/B209).20 Every experience thus refers, according to Kant, to the real, to the thingness of objects as to that irreducible position of quantities that are in each case singular, in which the empty intuition-form of time fulfills itself as in instants.21

Kant derived the concept of reality, if not immediately from the Scholastic tradition or from the texts of Leibniz, then from Baumgar-ten’s Metaphysica.22 There, Baumgarten offers in §36 the following definition: “What is posited in something through determination is either a positive or affirmative determination, which if true is reality, or a negative determination, which if true is negation.”23 As positive determination—as position or as positing—reality is thus the counter-concept of negation, designating that which constitutes the character of a thing as thing, its essence or quidditas, independently of whether this thing is actual or merely logically possible. Kant translates this formal definition of realitas as determinatio into the terminology of the critique when he writes: “Now, that which in the empirical intuition corresponds to the sense-impression is reality (realitas phaenomenon); what corresponds to its absence, negation = 0” (A167/B209). The concept of being that Kant uses is also to be understood in this sense of reality as positive determination: “the real, that which corresponds to sense-impressions as such, contrary to negation = 0, would only pres-ent something the very concept of which includes being, and signifies

20Accordingly, Kant writes of “infinitely differentiated gradations with which space or time would be filled” (A173/B214). In the chapter on the Schematism, he speaks of a “schema of reality as the quantity of something insofar as it fills time” (A143/B183), and explicitly ascribes to this schema of reality the form of “determination of time,” which has to do with the content of time. Reality is thus the filling of time, every real not merely something as such but rather the “here and now” of a something in the continuum that is distinct and fills in a distinct fashion.

21That realities and hence intensities only ever occur in plural, and that they are organized in a continuum, also means of course that in each individual reality both the second category from the categorical group of quality, negation, and the third, the category of limitation, are operative: there is absolutely no reality that would not be accompanied by a negation and constrained in such a way that there can no more be a last negation or a final limit than there can be a final reality. Reality in the continuum is only ever possible as limn and hence as further determinable. This makes of the Kantian conception of filling time a paradox: as fully filled as it may be, it can always be more fully filled. Precisely this paradox constitutes the content of the term “intensity.”

22Treating the history of the concept of realitas, Anneliese Maier’s “Kant’s Categories of Quality” discusses these different possibilities with sophistication (Issue 65 of Kant-studien, Berlin 1930; reprinted in Zwei Untersuchungen zur nachscholastischen Philosophie).

23“Quae determinando ponuntur in aliquo, (notae et praedicata) sunt determinationes (Bestim-mungen [determinations]), altera positiva, et affirmativa, quae si vere sit, est realitas, altera negativa, quae si vere sit, negatio (Verneinungen [negations])” (Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysica, Editio VII [Hildesheim: Olms, 1982 [1779)] 11).

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nothing but synthesis in an empirical consciousness as such” (A175/B217).24 Just as reality is for Baumgarten and for Kant the affirma-tive positing of a material content [eines Sachgehalts], so for both it is, once more in keeping with the language of the Scholastics and of Leibniz, posited as the determination of quality only in degrees, in individual steps, gradations, and intensities, and thus in such a manner as to present itself only in quantitative determinations of difference. Hence, as Baumgarten writes in §246 of his Metaphysica, “[d]egree is the quantity of quality (or the quantity of capacity [des Vermögens]),”25 and Kant refines this definition with regard to quantities a priori: “It is noteworthy that of quantities as such we can know only a single quality a priori, namely continuity, but that of all qualities (the real of phenomena) we can know nothing further a priori than this intensive quantity itself, that is, that they have a degree; all else remains aban-doned to experience” (A176/B218). On the basis of the unexposed [unausgesetzten] continuum of the real and thus of the irreducible position of a quantity as such, and on this basis alone, the intensive quantity of realities in the continuum between 0 and 1, which are in every case distinct, allows itself to be anticipated a priori. All anticipa-

24Accordingly, he writes in the Schematism chapter while more precisely defining this being as a being in time: “Reality is that which in the pure concept of the under-standing corresponds to a sense-impression as such, and thus that whose concept in itself designates a being (in time). Negation, that whose concept presents a not-being [Nichtsein] (in time)” (A143/B182). As concept “in itself,” the simple concept (nota) is a determination and therefore a signal of the intratemporal being of a something. The problem of “correspondence” is thus resolved for Kant via a sui-correspondence of the concept of the understanding, a self-affection that he calls a “sense-impression as such” that opens up the possibility of an empirical, objective sense-impression with which it must, for its part, “correlate [entsprechen].” For Kant, “Correlations [Entsprechungen]” or “correspondences [Korrespondenzen]” between concepts and beings occur because the concepts themselves, “in themselves,” correlate in infinitesimal differences and, in that manner, “sense”: they schematize themselves, and Kant consistently speaks for that reason of the schema also as a “sensual concept” (A146/B186). This immediately schematizing movement of concepts, which means however their immediate mediability, appears nowhere more forcefully in Kant’s presentation than in his characterization of the concept and the schema of reality and, therefore, in his illustration of the structure of intensity.

25“Quantitas qualitatis est gradus (eine Stuffe, Staffel [a step, a relay]) (quantitas virtutis)” (Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 73). In §26 of his Prolegomena (A 95), Kant quotes this defini-tion of Baumgarten’s without citation, as though the source would be quite naturally known. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ). Moreover, in the paragraph following the one from which Kant quotes, Baumgarten defines the multitude of degrees that col-lect themselves in a degree as intensio, translating intensio with “the higher,” and uses the formulation qualitas intenditur to characterize the increase of degrees; he translates intenditur as “accumulating, strengthening in intensity” (Metaphysica 74).

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tion is anticipation of that which is posited in the concept [Begriff] as preconception [Vorbegriff] and anticipatory grasping [Vorgriff]. What is anticipated in the anticipations of perceptions is the endless mul-tiplicity of points of time and space that are posited and therefore fulfilled as things [sachlich erfüllt]. The plurality of possible perceptions is irreducible because reality as such can never be abstracted from its character as quantity: as positing, it follows the schema of number (A142/B182), which “makes every reality presentable as a quantum” (A143/B183), and which, even if mediated, subsumes reality under the pure concepts of mathematics. Kant can hence describe the anticipations of the real, of intensive quantities, as an “application of mathematics (mathesis intensorum)” in the Prolegomena (A 92).

For Kant, the multiplicity of possible experiences is an always already mathematically schematized multiplicity of degrees, and that means it is always already posited in the category of quantity itself. Only in the framework that affords positive determination, the positing of a thing as such as irreducible quantum or as number, can an intuition relate to phenomena and become the cognition of an object. For finite reason it is absolutely essential that its phenomena be “given”; it can-not analytically weave a world out of its concepts, but must grasp the given in synthetic judgments. But a given is, according to Kant, only ever given to finite reason in relation to the positing of this given—it is a given-to-positing [ein der Setzung Gegebenes]—and objective reality is posited exclusively in relation to the concept of a reality as such, while the empirical sense-impression is posited in relation to what Kant calls “sense-impression in itself” (B208); empirical sense-impression is thus posited in relation to the concept of a positing as such: a con-cept that “in itself includes a being” (A175/B217). Reality, and with it quality, continuum and intensity, is positing—determinando ponuntur, as Baumgarten defines it. It is the position of material content in the sense-impression in itself, and without this position, which is opera-tive in “every sense-impression, as sense-impression as such” (A167/B209), without this “autothesis” there would be no synthesis a priori with phenomena and no objective sense-impression, no experience. Anticipations of the real, of “being (in time),” are pre-suppositions [Voraus-Setzungen] of the real, the positing of its “what lies ahead.” Their synthetic anticipation is an anticipation of the concept of number, and only as such is it in the strong sense of the word propositional and does it proleptically constitute a presentation [Vorstellung]. The mathematical logic of the position is inscribed in the entire structure of cognition—including what Kant calls its dynamic part—and regu-

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lates the being of the real no less than the filling of time and space in the “here and now” of the continuum, and thus intensity. Being in the continuum of the real, or intensity, always means for Kant the intensity of a positing and hence posited intensity, posited being.26

In his “Program for a Coming Philosophy” and in the early philo-sophical studies of language and art in the midst of which it stands, Ben-jamin did not subject Kantian transcendentalism to critique because it was insufficiently empirical, much less materialist, but because it was not transcendental enough. “All authentic experience refers to the pure cognition-theoretical (transcendental) consciousness, so long as this term remains useable once stripped of all characteristics of a sub-ject” (GS II: 162–3). The pure transcendental consciousness, in which Benjamin hopes to “find the sphere of total neutrality as regards the concepts object and subject” (ibid.), is for him not to be an agency that would stand opposite [gegenüberstehen] a realm of sensual data; rather, this consciousness must itself immanently step out beyond its own experiences—and can for this reason still be called transcen-dental, though no longer subjective. “The great transmutation and remediation of the one-sidedly mathematical-mechanical concept of cognition that is to be undertaken” (168) must, per Benjamin, make of transcendental consciousness the exclusive ground of experience: “Thus the task of the coming philosophy is construed as the discovery or creation of that concept of cognition that, inasmuch as it at once relates the concept of understanding exclusively to the transcendental consciousness, logically empossibilizes not only mechanical but also religious experience” (164). This logical empossibilizing of concrete as well as religious experience, however, is to be founded in a pure transcendental consciousness that is not formal-logical but is instead solely linguistic. If this concept of experience is to be meaningful, then experience can, for its part and following the principle of the “linguistic essence of cognition” (168), only be a linguistic experience and an experience of language, and no longer mathematically schematized. With the exclusive foundation of experience in a transcendental language, however, it is not only the various disciplinary distinctions between mathematics and religion that must fall away; the concept of the transcendental, too, which with Kant (namely, the Kant of the

26[Translator’s note: Here, as ever, the reader should recall the multiple valences of setzen, “to posit or place,” especially the way it forms “the law,” das Gesetz. “Posited intensity, posited being,” “gesetzte Intensität, gesetztes Sein,” is always also regulated or legislated intensity and being.]

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first Critique) still stood entirely under the law of mathematics and mechanics, transforms itself.

An initial consequence of Benjamin’s transformation of the Kan-tian system concerns the concept of the sense-impression, which is for Kant “the material of perception” (A167/B209) but as “sense-impression in itself is absolutely not objective presentation” (B208). The sense-impression relates to the real as to the “object [Gegenstand] of sense-impression” (B207), but can only relate itself to it if this object is still not objective [objektiver]—not a thing standing opposite [gegenständlicher]—but rather only the subject’s affecting of itself.27 Sense-impression can thus only be an a priori synthesis if it is sensual self-impression and as such both sense-impression and its material, the real; and it can only be “synthesis of a sense-impression’s production of quantity” (B208), that is, the production or positing of an inten-sity, when it originally produces itself as quantity in its auto-affection. Hence, if there should be an empirical consciousness—and, strictly speaking, there is for Kant no other—then it is the auto-empirical consciousness of the subject in its transcendental apperception. In his account, Benjamin avoids these complications within Kant’s concept of sensation, but he strikes at its underlying model of presentation when he objects in the “Program” essay, in connection with his criti-cal commentary on “human empirical consciousness” and its “subject nature,” that

the “whole” is a thoroughly metaphysical rudiment in the theory of cognition [. . .]. That is, it is absolutely not to be doubted that within Kant’s concept of cognition the presentation—however sublimated—of an individual, corporeal-spiritual “I,” through whose senses sense-impressions would be received and who would on their basis form its ideas, plays the greatest role. This conception, however, is mythology, and as far as its truth content goes, it is equivalent to any other mythology of cognition (GS II: 161).

Thus Benjamin discards sense-impression as the criterion of the objec-tivity of an experience, since this remains bound to the subject-position of consciousness and imputes to experience the premises of a naturally developing subjectivity and thereby a mythology. With equal vigor, he discards sensation as the criterion of life when, now no longer in the “Program” but in the essay on the translator, he connects its concept

27[Translator’s note: It is useful to keep in mind that Gegenstand, though typically (and here, for the most part) translated as “object” or “thing,” decompositionally translates as “stand-against” or “stand-opposed.” This notion of the object as a preconstituted external thing standing opposite a subject entails still a Cartesian epistemology that Hamacher, following Benjamin, would move through and beyond.]

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with that of the animalistic and, as with the talk of subject-nature, with the concept of nature: “But it cannot be a matter,” he writes there,

of prolonging its domination by the feeble scepter of the soul, as Fechner attempts to do; never mind that life could be defined by the even less decisive moments of the animalistic, as also by sense-impression, which can only incidentally distinguish it. [. . .] For it is by history, not by nature and still less by such fickle matters as sense-impressions and the soul, that the ambit of life is to be determined (GS IV: 11).

Sense-impression, nature, subjectivity, and mythology thus stand for Benjamin in a configuration that could only remain decisive for the “metaphysical” concept of experience from Kant on to Fechner28 and the neo-Kantians because they did not determine the horizon of life in terms of history—and hence of “living on”—and of language—and hence of translation. What is mythical for Benjamin, as his essay “On the Critique of Violence” most forcefully makes clear, is the violence of law-giving [Rechtsetzung] and the positioning of power [Machtsetzung], the violence of positing [Setzung] as manifestation and as means (GS II: 197–9).29

In the center of that configuration of sense-impression, nature, subjectivity, and mythology—which Benjamin’s re-founding of the concept of experience in a transcendental philosophy of language seeks to eliminate—stands positing, and with it the concept of being, of a real and actual, which regulates the entire Kantian system and whose further development by Fichte into the notion of self-positing Benjamin had contended with in his dissertation on art critcism. The radicalization of transcendentalism means for Benjamin not only the erasure or redemption [Tilgung] of its empirical and naturalistic residues, but rather above all implies critique of the philosophy of

28Fechner’s justification of psycho-physical parallelism is given thorough critical attention in Hermann Cohen’s The Principal of the Infinitesimal Method and Its History and in Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Givens of Consciousness. There are good reasons for assuming that Benjamin was familiar with both texts. In the center of each stands the concept of intensity. Cf. Hermann Cohen, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948 [1927]).

29For clarification of the relations of violence and positing in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” and in particular for an exposition of that which Benjamin calls “deposing” [Entsetzung], see my essay “Afformativ, Streik” in Was heiβt “Darstellen,” ed. Christiaan Nibbrig, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994) 340-371 [translated as “Afformative, Strike” in Cardozo Law Review 13:1133].

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subjectivity and the transformation of every doctrine of positing and self-positing that defines its horizon.

The second consequence to emerge from Benjamin’s discarding of the subject-object model of experience concerns the principle of continuity. It stands in the middle of his reflections on the coming philosophy and on the theory of language. This transpires, without question, in connection with Leibniz, Kant, and above all Cohen (but also Bergson, Rickert, and Cassirer), but while for all these—with the problematic exception of Leibniz—the barrier between subject and object remains decisive for all experience, Benjamin’s concept of continuity must put aside precisely this barrier and with it the barrier between natural science or mathematics and religion. Thus Benjamin opposes the “reduction of all experience to the scientific” and pleads emphatically for a “continuity of experience” and for the necessity of establishing a “pure, systematic continuum of experience” in metaphys-ics (164). And after he has pointed, on the one hand (as already in his study of Hölderlin), to the “concept of identity, unknown to Kant,” and, on the other, to the Kantian concept of the idea in which the unity of experience consists, he proceeds: “For the deepened concept of experience, however, [. . .] continuity is only second in importance to unity, and it is in ideas [Ideen] that the ground must be shown for the unity and continuity of every experience that is not vulgar and not only scientific, but is rather metaphysical” (167). Consequently, he defines experience apodictically as “the unified and continuous multiplicity of cognition” (168).

As early as the language essay of 1916, Benjamin had already real-ized in outline his program for a philosophy in which language would be regarded as a transcendental-empirical continuum of experience and thus not merely as a form, but just as much the very material of empiricism. The conduit between spontaneity and receptivity, which he tries to capture with the concept of the continuum, is there termed the name, since it is in part given and in part received, and in fact received in language: it is the “conception of the nameless in the name.” As much spontaneous as receptive, the name is the “translation of the language of things into that of man” (150). Translation is thus for Benjamin the word for the crossover of the nameless into names, the sensual into the intelligible, the intuition and sense-impression into concepts of the understanding; and since for him their dualistically opposed spheres are languages, translation is the transcendence of languages in one another and, as such, the “language of language” (144). That which speaks or “languages” [spricht], translates. Indeed,

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it translates from one language into another in the medium of trans-latability and therewith in language itself as the continuum, without which there would be no crossovers or transformations. Benjamin defines it as follows: “Translation is the crossover [Überführung] of one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Continua of transformation, not abstract circuits of equivalence and similarity, cross-sect translation” (151). With this interpretation of translation—and hence of language as such—Benjamin is in fact closer to the Kant he later criticized than he would wish to concede, for he follows here the principles of homogeneity and specification, and that of continuity binding the first two, which are laid out in Kant’s first Critique for the regulative use of ideas of reason—most especially the idea of purposiveness. There, Kant writes: “datur continuum formarum, that is, all variations of species border on one another and allow no transition to one another via a leap, but instead only through all those smaller degrees of difference by which one can arrive from one species at another [. . .]” (A659/B687). If Kant characterizes this law of continuity, which mediates between the principles of unity and of specification, as a law of the “affinity [Affinität] of all concepts” (A657/B685) and of the “affinity [Verwandtschaft] of nature’s mem-bers” (A661/B689), here, too, Benjamin follows him, insofar as he speaks on the one hand of a “continuum of transformations” (GS II: 151) and, on the other, in the essay on the translator, of the “affinity [Verwandtschaft] of languages; he says, moreover, that languages are “a priori related [verwandt] to one another in that which they wish to say,” hence, related in that which he had previously termed translation’s purposiveness for expression of the relations between languages (GS IV: 12).30 The transcendental law of affinity or continuity (lex continui in natura), in which the merely logical law of forms is based, however, represents for Kant only a regulative idea “for which a congruent object in experience certainly cannot be shown” (A661/B689). For Benjamin, by contrast, this decisive Kantian constraint must be dropped entirely because, for him, nature itself has a linguistic character; it relates to language not as a phenomenon to a concept, but as a determinate degree of a thoroughly linguistic actuality relates itself to another, higher degree. In his understanding of the continuum of language, then, Benjamin must retreat from the Kantian distinction between

30Benjamin traces the theme of affinity in the 1919 sketch entitled “Analogy and Affinity” (GS VI: 43–5) and works it out more fully in the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften].

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concept and intuition, and between cognition and existence [Existenz], and instead characterize the relation of languages to one another with express reference to the Scholastic doctrine of levels of existence [Existenzstufen], as that “of media, which differentiate themselves by their density, so to speak, i.e., gradually” (GS II: 146). They gradually differentiate themselves, however, only as media crossing over into one another in a continuum. The “continuous multiplicity of cogni-tion” with which the “Program” essay is concerned thus corresponds, in the essay on language, with a continuous multiplicity of languages, which in turn determines itself as a continuous multiplicity of being. Benjamin expresses this straightforwardly enough:

For the metaphysics of language, the identification of spiritual with linguistic essence [des geistigen mit dem sprachlichen Wesen], which knows only gradual differences, proceeds in a gradation of all spiritual being [geistigen Seins] into levels of degree. This gradation, which is to be found within spiritual essence itself [des geistigen Wesens selbst], does not allow of comprehension via any overarching category and for that reason leads to the gradation of all spiritual and linguistic essence into degrees of existence [Existenzgraden] and degrees of being [Seinsgraden], as was already customary for Scholasti-cism with respect to the spiritual (Ibid.).

The thrust of Benjamin’s early writings is to prove not only the linguis-tic essence of cognition and of history, but just as much the linguistic essence of being. Being for him is being from language, linguistic being. And this being is in every case given only in a continuum of degrees or intensities, in a continuum of degrees of existence and intensities of language that “does not allow of comprehension via any overarching category” and whose scope is not limited by any higher agency, whether called idea, “I think,” or god. With the extrication of the continuity principle from the order of the categories, however, the opposition between mathematical and dynamic categories, between mere reality and actual existence, and ultimately also the opposition between the domains of mathematically based cognition and religious experience, falls to the side precisely in the manner that Benjamin programmatically requires. The absolutization of the continuum injects an ambiguity into its structure that brings with it consequences for the entire domain of linguistic being, and in particular for the mathematical and theological sounding of that domain. On the one hand, in releasing the continuum from all restrictions and conceiving of it as a dense infinity of degrees of existence, the ontotheological proposition of god as a supermajority of being, the consummately uttered and the absolutely revealed, becomes possible, albeit at the

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greatest conceivable distance from Kant—Benjamin characterizes the “highest spiritual realm of religion” as one that “knows no unutter-able” (147). On the other hand, it is at least implied that a superior being, and thus also a highest spiritual realm of religion, literally is not, as there are only infinite continua of degrees of existence and revela-tion, infinities of intensities among which none can be the highest or lowest. Accordingly, god would be the unutterable, that which is never uttered but only ever addressed in all languages, not despite but precisely because of his utterability (since this is infinite, but in its infiniteness inexhaustible): paradoxically, “the highest spiritual realm” is also described as “addressed in the name,” and the word of revelation is characterized by its untouchability (146–7). So, too, language and hence being would be unutterable in their infinite utterability.

The paradoxes of the continuum are the paradoxes of its infinite-ness. They reach their critical point in language and in being, in being from language and in being in language, and there burst asunder. If linguistic being presents itself in an infinite continuum of intensi-ties, i.e., in irreducible multiplicity, it can—no more than it abandons the realm of the revealed, of self-presenting in minima—never be absolutely determined in a single presentation and also never in the infinite and thus unfulfillable totality of presentations: on the grounds of its limitless continuity, linguistic being is unutterable in principle and thereby neither language nor being. In other words, the argu-ment for the immanent reversal in the principle of the continuum of media and presentation reads as follows: that which presents itself can never be the object of presentation, since as object it could no longer present itself but would rather be the victim of a restrictive exhibition. And, in turn, if the absolutely utterable is to be uttered, this can only be in each case in one among infinitely many intensi-ties—hence, only imperfectly—and moreover such that the intensity of its having been uttered appends to the utterable a further degree, which for its part must be uttered in the medium of another intensity, and so forth ad infinitum. The continuum cannot be presented in the continuum without at the same time being affirmed and interrupted: affirmed through its extension, interrupted through its presentation as continuum. When Benjamin founds cognition in translatability and hence in the continuum conceived as the essence of language, but relieves this continuum of all restrictive positions—first of which is the transcendental subject-position—he makes the continuum, translat-ability, the essence of language, and makes cognition into something that, for its part, cannot possibly appear or be revealed or be uttered

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as such in the continuum, in a translation, or in a language. Revela-tion cannot be the object [Gegenstand] of revelation. The movement of translation is itself untranslatable, presentation is itself unpresent-able, and language is in its revealability itself unutterable. Precisely because it consists of nothing but mere speaking [Sprechen], every propositional statement must fail it. And because it is mere language or speech [Sprache], speaking in and of it can only ever occur in a multiplicity of languages [Sprachen] and statements [Aussagen], which never bind together in a unity. Pure language, language as language, thus languages [spricht] only in its disintegration into the multiplicity of languages. And pure language itself speaks [spricht] only in failing itself. Its continuum is essentially discontinuous. This is the “crisis” at the “heart of language,” of which Benjamin speaks in a letter to his friend Herbert Blumenthal shortly after composing the essay on language.31

If impartibility is the essence of language, then there remains, as the translator essay insists, “over and above all imparting something final, decisive”; there remains in imparting “a non-impartible” that divides it from itself (GS IV: 19). Absolute translatability, which empossibil-izes and directs the movements and becoming of languages toward “language as a whole” (16), is just as much absolute untranslatabil-ity—namely, the untranslatability of just this translatability. Language is, in a word—though a disintegrating one—translatable. Cognizable, impartible, translatable [-bar]—in these transcendentalist concepts, which Benjamin uses at critical moments in his argumentation, the suffix of possibility reveals its adjectival sense and denotes: barring/open to [bar] every possibility of cognition, of imparting, of transla-tion.32 For Benjamin, the text is “absolutely translatable” where it “belongs immediately [. . .] to true language [wahren Sprache], to truth [Wahrheit], and to doctrine [Lehre]” (21). It is precisely there, however, that it is incapable of any further translation and, because it is true

31GB I: 349, note 3.32It is in this dual sense that the emphasis on suffixes in the early essay on language is

to be understood, as in the sentences: “Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is impartable [mitteilbar]”; “This impartable [Mitteilbare] is immediately language itself”; or “The medial, that is, the immediability [Unmittelbarkeit] of all spiritual imparting, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory [. . .]” (GS II: 142). Here, bar is not only the word for truth or revealability, but also for freedom (it constitutes one of the centers of the essay on the translator) and for purity—especially that of “pure language,” of the mere, of that free from all imparting [Mitteilung]. (For further reflections on the structure of bar, see my text “Maser: Bemerkungen im Hinblick auf die Bilder von Hinrich Weidemann,” Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 1998.)

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[wahr], it is barred from/open to [bar] every translation. This bar in its dual sense is the index of a crisis in the transcendental continuum of language and of linguistic being.

In the Kantianizing formula of intensive, i.e., anticipatory [. . .] realiza-tion, the anticipation of translation does not refer to an ever higher degree in the continuum of communications—in this, again, it would reach only one among the virtual infinitude of languages—but rather concerns their “buried relation” (GS IV: 12), their “withheld domain of reconciliation and fulfillment” (15), that is, language in the mere fact of its occurring. It is realized intensively, transcendingly, and anticipato-rily because no temporally, spatially, or idiomatically distinct, and thus extensively determinable language is indicated there, but rather the mere fact of uttering itself [das bloße Sprechen selbst], which is common to all. And it is only intensively, i.e., anticipatorily, that this realizes the language of language, because its accomplished actuality in any finite language is held back by its semantic load. In translation, as Benjamin understands it, this load is lightened to a minimum. This allows the continuity between languages in translation to become apparent, but also translation’s own discontinuity with language. Since the continu-ity of the continuum, the linguisticality of language, cannot appear within the continuum and can neither be semantically signified nor technically produced nor arbitrarily revealed within it, but functions rather as one of the “last secrets [. . .] harbored without tension and self-silently [therein]” (16), it must present itself from the perspective of the continuum itself as the continuum’s discontinuation.

Kant had noted that, on the basis of the continuum’s infinitude, one can abstract from its extension in time and space, and that the intensity of the real remains unaccounted for as a singular, irreduc-ible fact.33 In practice, however, and without expressly saying so, Kant abstracts from the continuum itself in order to retain the instant or the moment, and thus the intensive, as the sole marker of the real. Though for Kant the intensive is capable of infinite increases and diminutions, it is thus not a phenomenon within a continuum, but rather essentially the phenomenon of continuity and therewith of

33Thus, in the “proof” of the “Anticipations of Perception,” he writes: “One can thus abstract entirely from the extensive quantity of the phenomenon and conceive of simple sense-impression in a moment as a synthesis of the uniform increases from 0 up to the given empirical consciousness” (A176/B218).

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phenomenality itself—of the “sense-impression as sense-impression as such” (A167/B209)—and, as such, a phenomenon that only ever fills an instant, nearly a discontinuous phenomenon.34 But even this very intensity, which as mere sense-impression or self-sensation is relieved of all succession and realizes itself “in a moment” or “in an instant,” is thought by Kant as synthesis and thus as judgment, through which the cognizing subject imparts a phenomenon to itself as object [Gegen-stand]. For Benjamin, language is intensively realized in translation in another sense. In contrast to the synthesis of judgment, the structure of which is fundamentally regulated by the intention toward meaning, translation as Benjamin idiosyncratically defines it “abstains, in very large part, from the aim of imparting something, from sense” (GS IV: 18). What translation abstains from is thus judging predication and the intention that guides it, and therewith from the aim itself, from purpose and its positing in the subject. Translation, as Benjamin had defined it, is ultimately “purposive for expression of the innermost relation of languages to one another” (12). But in pure language, in which this relation realizes itself, translation arrives at a realm in which it “no longer means and no longer expresses, but rather is, as the expressionless and creative word, that which is meant in all

34As with many of his best insights, Kant here shies away from drawing this conse-quence because it would trouble his correspondence theory of truth: phenomenality cannot itself simply be a phenomenon anymore, and hence it cannot correspond with any possible concept. Only in the third Critique, with the principle of the inadequa-tion of cognition and aesthetic ideas, does a relation between phenomenality and the concept begin to take shape, checkmating the truth of correspondence. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer [later, de Gruyter], 1900- ) (hereafter cited as KdU). There, in the first note on the “dissolution of the antinomy of taste” (§57), Kant speaks of the aesthetic idea as an “inexposable presentation of the imagination” because it is an intuition of the imagination “for which an adequate concept can never be found” (342). He remarks of this designation: “Now, since bring-ing a presentation of the imagination into concepts is to expose it, the aesthetic idea can be termed an inexposable presentation of the same (in its free play)” (342). Inexposable thus means presentable or expressible in no concept. As Kant writes elsewhere (§49), aesthetic ideas give the imagination an impetus “to consider [. . .] more thereby than [. . .] allows itself to be embraced within a determinate linguistic expression,” making ready presentations “for which no expression is to be found” (315–6). This overtaxing of linguistic expression by the imagination and thus by the simple phenomenality of a phenomenon, this inexpressibility, the inexposable that bursts the continuum of concepts and their intention regarding the object, is too near to the Benjaminian expressionless [Ausdruckslosen] (GS II: 130; IV: 19; I: 181) for one not to suppose it to be one of the catalysts for Benjamin’s concept. Of course, in the transition from inexposable to ex-pressionless the perspective has changed; for Kant, a phenomenon is inexposable for a linguistic expression of the cognizing subject, while for Benjamin what is expressionless is pure, true language itself.

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languages” (19). That is, it is the expression of the expressionless, toward which translation and with it what is essential in every language is directed. Their intention orients them, finally, towards that which is itself intentionless and thus towards that which, as pure continuity, bursts the continuum. The language of language—that is, the continu-ity of its occurring—does not mean, passes no judgment, and offers up no utterances concerning objects. It says [sagt] nothing because it merely speaks [spricht], and it absolves itself [spricht sich los] of all the inhibitions of an imparting that does not impart itself.

The radicalization of the theorem of language’s thoroughgoing continuity thus does more than allow the ambiguity of this continuity to come to light, that is, reveal the fact that it is stripped of the condi-tions of presentation but for that very reason of presentation as well. The radicalization of the theorem is at the same time its explosion; since the continuum, in which all is included, is itself not included in the continuum, it is at once only continuum and no continuum at all. The continuum can only proceed in an aporia that allows no continuity between continuity and non-continuity, and can for that reason attest to itself only in its own breaking off. Benjamin, who was familiar not only with the Kantian antinomies and the paradoxes of Kierkegaard, but also with those of Russell’s mathematical philosophy,35 concludes from the aporia of the linguistic continuum that the continuum of language is to be founded in the caesura, according to his study of Hölderlin or in the expressionless according to the translator essay and a little later in the piece on elective affinities. Where no ground can be found in the continuum, the expressionless and the caesura offer foundations for the dissolution and the solution, the deliver-ance of the continuum in its discontinuity. Not the significance of an utterance, but rather that it belongs to a language; not the said of a language, but rather its saying: these are the aims of translation, its means and its end. This saying, which speaks alongside [mitspricht] in all expression, is itself what is sayable in no expression: language speaks or languages [die Sprache spricht] only from out of the expres-sionless and into it. In translation—for every language, as language for or at another, is in principle already language in the course of translation—all languages have in principle a share in language itself. But this “having a share” [Teilhabe] occurs for something that cannot

35Cf.“The Judgment of Designation,” the “Effort to Solve Russell’s Paradox” (GS VI: 9–11), and “The Paradox of the Cretan,” where Alexander Rüstow’s tract following Russell, The Liar’s Paradox, is cited (59). Cf. Alexander Rüstow, Der Lügner: Theorie, Geschichte und Auflösung (New York: Garland Publisher, 1987 [1910]).

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become a possible possession [Habe], cannot be the content [Inhalt] of a cognition, and cannot be the object [Gegenstand] of a concept. Insofar as translation brings one language into another, it extends the continuum of languages; but since the continuum itself cannot be expressed as a whole in any singular instance, every translation is the interruption of the continuum of languages in the expressionless: translation extends it [setzt es fort] by exposing it [indem sie es aussetzt] and allowing languages to fall mute. The expressionless, true language is for Benjamin—thoroughly logically and in no wise mystifyingly—the place at which the “secrets after which all thinking strives [. . .] are silently harbored” (GS IV: 16). What remains buried, inaccessible, and unutterable for languages and the language of relation that is translation is language as being silent [Schweigen].

The silent discontinuity of languages, however, has the gravest of consequences for the concepts of anticipation and positing, which for Kant designate the final structural elements of the synthetic relation between category and phenomenon. When Benjamin speaks of trans-lation’s anticipation of language as such, this is not only to say that translation anticipates the actuality of this language, but also that such anticipation alone realizes it: its realization lies in just this anticipation, its “what lies ahead” is its own actuality. Translation realizes language because there is no realization besides its “anticipatory realization.” It does not so much translate into another language as, much more, translate this other in advance into language itself. Since, however, as the realization of language translation is itself already language’s (intensive) actuality, it is essentially translation in(to) translation. Lan-guage is translation, and in every translation language itself is already speaking, as translation. Since it is the anticipation of language and since this language realizes itself only in anticipation, this language itself has the structure of anticipation and does not exist other than as prolepsis or as project. Translation is language itself in the move-ment of its a priori positing of what lies ahead [Voraus-setzung]. This is why Benjamin can describe the “essential kernel” of translation as “that which in itself is not, in turn, translatable” (15). Translations and everything in languages that is oriented toward translation—“what is essential in them” (19)—are untranslatable because they are, in every essential kernel, language itself, and thus because they are the element of absolute translatability. It is thus not only “for humans” that linguistic constructs are “up to a certain degree” untranslatable (10), as Benjamin moots in the introduction to his essay; rather, they are so in principle and by virtue of the constitution of language itself.

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Languages are untranslatable because they themselves move already in the medium of translation, and this is the medium of language. The anticipation [Vorgriff] of translation, its essential gesture and the gesture that makes of translation what is essential in language, is a grasping [Griff] that goes into languages’ void—into the intentionless, the expressionless, into mere language, into impartibility. Its “what lies ahead,” the gesture of its continuation and transcendence, is its breaking off.

But what, after all, then, does “realization [Verwirklichung]” mean, and what, once more, “intensive”? In the formulation, intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization, the concept of “realization” jumps out most clearly from the Kantian context of the train of thought. Intensity was for Kant the character of reality, of thingness, of the affirmative determination of the possibility of an object of experience. As what-ness (quidditas), reality [Realität] stands for Kant not for actuality [Wirklichkeit] or current being [aktuelles Sein], but rather for that con-stitution that an object must have if it is to be an object of experience at all.36 “Being [Sein] is obviously no real predicate”—Kant’s famous statement from the first Critique, which could hardly have been unfa-miliar to Benjamin, purports that being is no reality, that it does not represent the answer to the question of what something is, but rather of whether it is. The that of this being is, in contrast to the positive determination of thingness as Kant proceeds in his definition, “merely the position of a thing, or of certain determinations in themselves” (A598/B626)—indeed, it is the position of those modal determina-tions that distinguish it as possible, actual, or necessary being. Being [Sein], understood as being-there [Dasein], is “merely the position of a thing” on the horizon of the originarily unifying, transcendental apperception of an “I think.” In §76 of the third Critique, Kant says of the difference between the possible and the actual:

36Both Anneliese Maier (“Kant’s Categories of Quality,” 1930, note 12) and then, with greater emphasis, Heidegger (Die Frage nach dem Ding, [Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1962] 160–74; here 165–66), have pointed to the difference between reality [Realität] and actuality [Wirklichkeit] as decisive for Kant’s construction of the principles of experience as well as to Kant’s adoption of Baumgarten’s concept of realitas. More substantive, and moreover much more likely to have been familiar to Benjamin, is Hermann Cohen’s 1883 presentation in The Principle of the Infinitesimal Method (1968, 158), which lays out the basic dimensions of Fechner’s argument with Scholasticism regarding the concepts of reality and intensity and also brings in Leibniz’s and Wolff’s definitions of degree as “quantitas qualitatis” and “Intensitas sive Intensio” as reference texts for the Kantian construction. But, though he himself cites it, Cohen does not bring Baumgarten’s position in the Metaphysica, that “infinitudo est realitas” (§261), to bear in thoroughly distinguishing between reality [Realität] and actuality [Wirklichkeit].

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Now, however, our entire distinction of the merely possible from the actual rests in the fact that the former means only the position [Position] of the presentation [Vorstellung] of a thing with respect to our concept and the capacity to think as such, while the latter means the positing [Setzung] of the thing in itself (apart from this concept) (KdU 402).

As much as the positing of a thing in itself may occur apart from our concept and the capacity to think, it must nonetheless occur with respect to our capacity for cognition. Kant clarifies being’s relationship to the capacity for cognition in his explanation of the category of modali-ties, writing: “The categories of modality have the distinction that, as the determination of the object, they do not in the least enlarge the concept to which they are attached as predicate, but rather express only the relation to the capacity for cognition” (A219/B266). Being as being-actual [Wirklichsein] is thus a position in “relation to the capacity for cognition,” but thereby a position in relation to experience and hence to the perception of sensation. Furthermore, contemporaneous or actual being is the position of object-sensation relative to the subject of transcendental apperception; it is a transcendental predicate—not a real one—in which the actuality of the be-ing [des Seienden], and hence the objectivity of the object, is posited via its relationship to the unity of the subject. For Kant, actuality is positional being and only for that reason propositional (judged) being: being posited with a view to the “originally synthetic unity of apperception,” being as the position, proposition, and relation of transcendental subjectivity itself. As this positing, actuality completes the realitas of the category of quality, which for its part was never thought by Kant and his prede-cessors as anything other than positing—Baumgarten had offered an unambiguous definition in his Metaphysica: “quae determinando ponuntur [. . .] est realitas.”37

37Baumgarten, Metaphysica (note 13), 11. Heidegger works out the decisive movements of Kant’s theory of position most substantively in “Kant’s Thesis Concerning Being,” where he also delineates its connection with the dominant tradition of metaphysics: “Rather than ‘Dasein,’” Heidegger writes, “the language of metaphysics also says existence [Existenz]. To apprehend in sistere, the positing, the connection with ponere and position, it suffices to recall this word; the existentia is the actus, quo res sistitur, ponitur extra statum possibilitatis [. . .]” (Wegmarken [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976] 475). Heidegger’s attention, however, is directed so much toward the position-character of the concept of mediality—possible-being, actual-being, necessary-being—that he over-looks this same character entirely in Kant’s concept of reality. On position in Kant, see the chapter “Premises” in Werner Hamacher, Premises (esp. note 2), in which the ontothesiological constitution of metaphysics since Kant is treated.

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Thus, if Benjamin maintains a distance from precisely this subjectiv-ity in his program for a coming philosophy, but speaks nevertheless of the intensive [. . .] realization of language in translation, the concept of realization [Verwirklichung] is to be thought still in terms of actual-ity [Wirklichkeit] and—in accordance with the essay on language—in terms of being: being-actual [Wirklichsein] or becoming actual [Wirklich-werden]. But this being is no longer a being posited in relation to the subject of transcendental apperception; it is no longer the position of an object and no longer the result of a propositional act in which an “I think” relates to the objects of its experience. In taking his leave of transcendental subjectivity, Benjamin withdraws language and its being from being as position. With the “transmutation and remediation” of the philosophy of subjectivity (GS II: 168), the critical transformation of something that might be called the Kantian, and not only Kantian, ontothesiology comes together in his theory of language. The organ of this transformation is his theory of translation.

Translation [Übersetzung]—what is essential in language, language itself—is not positing [Setzung]. It is that which must precede every positing and even every capacity for positing, whether this be thought as understanding, form of intuition, or as the productive faculty of imagination. Translation [Übersetzung] does not posit [setzen], it trans-poses or places over [setzt über] . . . and trans-poses transcendently over every possible signification and its basis in the forms of intuition and self-relation. In order that a self might relate itself to itself, there must already be the possibility of translation, sheer impartibility—and this, for Benjamin, is called language. In order that there might be positing, there must already be translation and the unposited, lan-guage, in whose medium positing moves and toward whose revelation it works. In order that there might be being as position, there must already be being as trans-position and an appositive given in advance, of which it must remain open whether it can in some sense become an object of the predications of existence that accord or withdraw being to and from it.

Because translation cannot be an agency of a subject, it must first be thought without reference to subjects, whether these be termed producers or recipients, as solely the athetic realization of language. While Kant speaks of the phenomenon of objective reality [Realität] and of actuality [Wirklichkeit] as a position with respect to the capacity for cognition, Benjamin excludes every such consideration beginning with the very first sentence of his “The Task of the Translator”—and, indeed, not only consideration of an empirical subject, but also, equally

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emphatically, any consideration of an “ideal” subject of cognition. “Never,” he writes:

does consideration of those receiving it prove fruitful for the cognition of a work of art or art form. It is bad enough that every reference to a particular public or its representatives misleads, but the very concept of an “ideal” receiver is detrimental in all art-theoretical discussions, since these are put forward solely in order to postulate the being-there and essence of humans as such.

And he concludes this passage with the justly famous formula: “no poem is for the reader, no picture for the viewer, and no symphony for the listenership” (GS IV: 9). The disregard for the position of subjectivity ascribed here to works of art and art forms holds a fortiori for languages and for the language that emerges in their translations. Language cannot do other than disregard the subject, even if “ideal” or transcendental, because, as antecedent mediability, it is not deter-mined by a subject’s position. Not subjectivity, but rather alterity, is what is essential in it; not positing, but rather exposure [Aussetzung]. In translation, every language exposes itself to another and is nothing other than this self-exposure and hence this becoming-other: not the object of a positing or production, not this positing itself, but rather mere exposition [Aussetzung] in a domain in which languages no lon-ger mean something or somebody, but mean language itself as that which means nothing [das Nicht-Meinende]. In thinking the realization of language as translation [Übersetzung], Benjamin thinks it as the evic-tion [Hinaussetzung] of positing languages [der setzenden Sprachen] out into the domain of their neither positional nor propositional speaking and thus as the exposition and exposure [Aussetzung] of languages in a linguistic event that each of them harbors a priori in silence. Only for this reason is the hope and the “original danger of all translation this: that the gates of a language broadened and pervaded in this way might fall to and shut the translator in silence” (21).

The relation of languages to one another is one of affinity and, furthermore, of continuity, but language itself—its essence—is not sub-ject to the criterion of continuity, which is one of positing within the horizon of transcendental subjectivity. Insofar as translation translates from the plurality of languages into language, it exposes from out of the continuum of languages a single language, which is not count-able—not even as one—and does not form a continuum. The principle of continuity holds only under the precondition that being is absolute position, that is, only presupposing that the objectivity [Gegenständlich-keit] of the given is firmly established along with its connection with

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regard to the original unity of subjectivity. The mathematical category of quantity as well as of the quantity of quality—intensity—forfeits its synthetic function where being is no longer thought as position and thus no longer as presentation within the horizon of subjectivity, but rather as that which presents itself as itself in advance of all positing, in its own horizon: as a language that no longer lies under the restric-tions of the pure form of intuition and thus of number, no longer under the limitations of thesis and mathesis, of the concept and the judgment. In the apositional occurring of language, the mathemati-cal continuum and mathematically understood intensity are just as much dismantled by language as they were empossibilized through it in the first place.

Translation is the exposition of languages in language: in translation, language affords the continuum of languages its exposing. In transla-tion, language interrupts the intention that still determines the direc-tion of anticipation. In it, language exposes positing itself and being as the position of another being—or of another as being—which for its part presents itself not positively, as an actual object [Gegenstand], new and unconstrained in its otherness, but rather only as the move-ment of this ex-posure [Aus-setzung] and de-posing [Ent-setzung] of positing [Setzung]. Since translation reaches out in each case beyond the fixed status of languages and the intentions operative within them, moving proleptically in intentionless language, the being that realizes itself in translation is, unlike Kant’s pure positing [Setzung], presup-position [Voraussetzung]: a priori prolepsis of propositional language in a domain in which it is “harbored without tension and self-silently” (GS IV: 16). Benjamin’s thoughts on translation as an athetic move-ment of language interface with a consideration he brings to bear in the “Program” for the modification of the table of categories. There, he writes: “But beyond the concept of synthesis, the concept of a certain not-synthesis of two concepts in another will become of great systemic importance, since outside of synthesis another relation between thesis and antithesis remains possible” (GS II: 166). If this thought of a certain not-synthesis is extended to the original synthetic unity of transcendental apperception, as Benjamin’s critique of the subjectivism of Kant’s theory of experience suggests, then it emerges that cognitions can never simply have the character of synthetic and thereby thetic acts. Benjamin’s further remark, that this not-synthesis could “hardly lead to a quartering of the categories of relation,” makes it likely that he thought of this not as an equally ranked addendum to these categories, that is, not as a further, fourth category, but rather

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as the basis—actually, the abyss [Abgrund]—of all the others: namely, as a not-synthesis thanks to which thesis, antithesis, and synthesis can emerge in the first place; and as a not-synthesis that can never allow for the unlimited accomplishment of these three. It is this structure of the not-synthesis, and of the not-thesis buried within it, that further defines itself in the structure of translation as the a priori anticipatory grasping of a not-propositional, not-intentional language. Like not-synthesis for every thesis, translating language detains and suspends every language of positing.

That translation, and with it language, exposes before and in every positing, that it “lives on” before and in its life, makes of its being an essentially historical one—makes of it, that is, a discontinuum of proleptic expositions that are in each case singular and that cannot be drawn together beneath any greater unity. Transplanting [Verpflanzung] and transposing [Versetzung] are the concepts with which Benjamin characterizes the motion of this exposition of languages. He writes: “Translation thus transplants the original into a linguistic domain that is more ultimate at least insofar—ironically—as the original is not to be transposed away from it by any conveyance, but can only be raised within it, always anew and at different points” (GS IV: 15).38 If the transplanting of the original into a different linguistic domain, the transposing of one language into another, is not ultimate but is rather—“ironically”—more ultimate, although a further transposition and thus a homogenous continuum of transpositions is ruled out, what is thereby said is that each transposing is unsurpassably penultimate, preliminary and yet final and thus exposed and orphaned between the multiplicity of languages and their “ideal” unity. Every translation severs the connection between languages in precisely that movement by which it implies such a connection, in each case just a single time. Between the multiplicity of languages and their unity dwells transla-

38[Translator’s note: It is worth noting here not only, as Hamacher makes quite ex-plicit, that endgültiger is a comparative—“more final,” “more ultimate”—but also, and perhaps especially, that the term endgültig is itself already paradoxically provisional, in a sense comparative, in a manner that English translations like “final” or “ultimate” are not. Something is gültig as an end, counts or is valid as an end—something is taken as final, obtains or is applicable as the being-in-force of the verb gelten, “to count, be applicable, hold,” for an end, an “end.” But something can only count relative to some standards, be applicable in some situation, hold for somebody; and an ultimate end would be the end of standards—hence, no counting—an end of a situation—hence, no applicability—and an end of persons—hence, no holding. An ultimate end that is not absolute would be no ultimate end at all, but could only count as an end, would not be ultimate or final but rather endgültig.]

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tion, belonging to both and yet to neither, suspended—but suspended there with translation dwells language itself. From this observation follows, rigorously enough, the conclusion that what Benjamin termed language itself cannot be comprehended under the concept of linguistic unity. It also follows from this, however, that the historical dimension of language implied in the phrase more ultimate is that of an absolute between-time [Zwischenzeit], in which every moment is an end and at the same time not an end. In accordance with the absolute compara-tive of the more ultimate, the time of language—messianic time—is that of an ending without end. This form of time must be called ironic, because in it every moment marks a non-coincidence with itself. Just as the end, which is none, characterizes a life, which is essentially “living on,” so the language of translation—and language as such—is characterized by irony, signifying a language that refuses to surrender to the signifying. Like history, then, language is essentially ironic. It is the language of no one language.

Benjamin reiterates that the “living on” of language in translation—which is ironic—is also always a living in advance of itself [Sich-Voraus-Leben] and a pre-life [Vor-Leben], stressing:

that all translation is only a somewhat provisional manner of grappling with the foreignness of languages. A resolution of this foreignness that would be other than temporal and provisional, that would be instantaneous and ultimate, remains withheld from mankind, or is in any event not to be sought out directly (14).

If translation’s provisionality and anticipation of language itself comprise the sole manner in which this language realizes itself, then language realizes itself solely as pre-language [Vor-Sprache], as promise [Versprechen], and speaks or “languages” in promising [spricht im Versprechen] once more solely as withheld, that is, as a language of and through which nothing—not something, no determinate thing, but only an infinite, determinable content—can be uttered. That translation, in Benjamin’s words, “suggests in a wonderfully haunting manner [ . . . ] the predetermined, withheld realm of the reconcilia-tion and fulfillment of languages” (15) makes of it a sort of negative mysticism of pure language, a wonderfully haunting—i.e., once again intensive—anticipation of that which is accessible to no anticipation, an intention toward that which refuses to be intended. Thus the inten-tionless moves into intention and makes intensity—piercing, pressure, increase, escalation—which is bound together with every intention, into an intensity of the intentionless. The pre [Vor] and “what lies ahead” [Voraus] that every intensio bears down upon is, as concerns

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language itself, the pre of a language that refuses positioning in any time-series; it is the pre as decisive determination of the category of quality, the quantitas qualitatis, and it thereby disqualifies, indetermines, and ex-poses every positing as such. There could be no predetermined domain of language that was not withheld and did not take from pre-determination both its “pre” and its “determination.” The promising [Versprechen] of language is always this: that there will not emerge a pre or a language. Only herein lies the power of this promising: that it places itself beyond itself. Only herein lies the intensity of language: that it is the intensity of its extinguishing.

The philosophies of language, the theories of cognition and phi-losophies of history with which Benjamin was confronted in his work were, whether programmatically recognized under this title or not, all phenomenologies. They were arranged following the logic of possible phenomena, their laws and constraints. As minimally empirically as they might have proceeded, as phenomenologies, the domain of that which could not become phenomenon or contribute to it had to be suspect or else remain buried for them. In the domain of languages, there is prima facie nothing that could not qualify as a phenomenon—as a morphological, semantic, syntactical, or rhetorical phenomenon. When Benjamin turns his attention to translation as the irreducible structure of language, he turns to it as a form that is without doubt a linguistic phenomenon, but that as language presents a liminal phenomenon between languages, encompassing no independent content. The language of translation is not a language among oth-ers, but rather a language between others, an intermediary language [Zwischensprache] that expresses nothing other than the relation of languages, but that expresses this relation, in turn, not as given but as becoming. Translation expresses that which is not yet there; to this extent, it is historical—oriented toward a historical distance—but, to this extent, it is also not a simple phenomenon, but rather the phe-nomenon of something still and perhaps indefinitely buried, withheld, and aphenomenal: language as a whole and as such. For this reason, Benjamin’s philosophy of language is an aphenomenology; it holds for a dimension that does not enter into appearance and a law that designates not the constraints on possible appearance but rather struc-tural buriedness [Verborgenheit]. And the same holds for the concept of intensity as well. Concerning the “language of truth,” which could only be language in its integral totality at the “messianic end of its his-tory” (14)—concerning this true language, Benjamin writes: “precisely this, in whose divination and description lies the sole perfection for

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which the philosopher can hope, is buried intensively in translation” (16). Buried intensively: that hardly means—since the discussion is here of true language—that it is buried as intensivum, that it is buried in translations only up to a certain degree but is otherwise manifest. If the formulation is to have some sense to it—granted, it might main-tain only very loose contact with that sense—then this must be that translations are in excited tension with what is buried in them—true language—and that they tend toward the buried and themselves strive to enter into this buried. If Benjamin speaks of “final secrets” that are “harbored” in the language of truth “without tension and self-silently” in immediate connection with this formulation, then what intensive buriedness or the intention toward buriedness signifies is a tension in that which lacks tension, the tendency of language to enter into silence as true language. It is in precisely this sense that Benjamin formulates the language-philosophical program he presents to Martin Buber in a letter of July 1916: “Only the intensive orientation of words toward the kernel of innermost falling mute [Verstummens] attains to true operativity.”39 If language thus tends, for the sake of its immanent political substance, toward “that which is barred the word,”40 then translation tends, for the sake of the language of truth, toward silence. If this true language is buried intensively in translations, then its intensive [. . .] realization is none other than the realization of buriedness; then language is the language of silence and its intensity is that, once more, of the intentionless. Benjamin’s theory of translation, the heart of his philosophy of language, is not a logic of linguistic phenomena, but rather of language’s aphanasis; it is a sigetics or doctrine of silence.

In Benjamin’s formulation, where translation is the intensive, i.e., anticipatory, allusive realization of language, the term intensive thus does not signify a degree, still less the highest degree, in a continuum of languages—the continuum has no maximum, and the comparative more ultimate domain of language knows no superlative; rather, in contrast to the linguistic usage of the philosophical and mathematical tradi-tion, intensive here means relative to the interruption or breaking off of the continuum, relative to a language with which no relation can be produced. Intensity is only accorded translation insofar as it leaps out of the continuum of languages, leaps over the degrees of existence or degrees of being (GS II: 146) of linguistic being-there, and springs discontinuously into language: into a being other than that which

39GB I: 327, note 3.40Ibid.

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could be measured according to intensities, and into a being other than that of position, one by which alone intensities determine and measure themselves. It is intensive because language realizes itself only in and as this leap of the continuum into the discontinuous; and it is thus paradoxical because the concept of intensity, the anticipation and the projecting of intensity, shatters itself in this event. If Benjamin ties the realization of language together with the concept of irony, then this is because translation designates the state of “living on,” the living on beyond themselves of works, while irony, as Benjamin’s study of art criticism shows, designates “the living on of the work” (GS I: 86) and represents, as formal irony and as an objective moment in the work, the “paradoxical attempt” to “continue building on a structure even through demolition” (87). What is demolished, however, is the con-tinuum of empirical languages, in order to present in its demolition the language that precedes all empiricism and all mathematical idealities. Cognition is in this wise relation—but it is relation with a something that is essentially relationless. The intensity that languages attain in their translation and in their “living on” is the intensity of the break in the series of intensities. It is—ironically—the utmost intensity in that it is already intensity no more. In the leap of intensity, in the origin, a linguistic being is revealed that allows neither of production and determination nor of positing, nor, within the paradigm of positing, of transposing or recomposing. It is being as ex-position: orphaning, externalization, singularization, stoppage, pause.

Translated by Ira Allen with Steven Tester