Kafka Benjamin 1

University of Oregon

Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem by Robert AlterReview by: Margaret CohenComparative Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer, 1994), pp. 314-316Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771476 .Accessed: 11/11/2014 04:11

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

much idea of the subtlety with which he develops them. Nor does it say anything of the many other authors and texts he cites. But it does, I think, reveal once again- and this was the opposite of my intention-the persistence across this broad and varied range of textual practices of the fundamental deconstructive insight. Wher- ever Taylor looks, he finds logocentric claims being asserted and subverted. As he presents it, all writing is vagrant, all semiosis disorderly. In this, he more nearly resembles Hooker's puritan opponents than he does Hooker himself. For the pu- ritans "what appears to be a temporal progression reveals itself in truth as the perpetual repetition of an archetypal moment . .. the life and passion of Christ" (p. 26), and for Taylor what appears to be discursive difference from one field to another reveals itself as the perpetual repetition of still another archetypal moment-in this case, the primal split between signifier and signified. Puritan logocentrism and deconstructive logomachia are equally foreign to Hooker's sense of a "human temporality in which historically specific formations . . . are free to emerge" (p. 25). Inasmuch as those other studies of Renaissance culture I mentioned in my opening paragraph are in fact, as they have all been labeled, "historicist," they take Hooker's side in this debate. But this is no reason for dis- qualifying Taylor's book. On the contrary, the book provides, though it never bothers to say so, a welcome challenge to our by now familiar claims to have dis- covered historical specificity. Taylor doesn't deny such claims, but his book does much to subvert them.

RICHARD HELGERSON

NECESSARY ANGELS: TRADITION AND MODERNITY IN KAFKA, BENJAMIN, AND SCHOLEM. By Robert Alter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. xv, 131p. Robert Alter's title is aptly chosen, for his text is concerned, from first word to

last, with the perhaps unexpected necessity of angels to "the imaginative world" of Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (p. 113). Why, to make explicit the stakes of Alter's interest in these sacred figures, is the work of three exemplary German modern- ists permeated with the concepts and imagery of Jewish theology? How do we explain their attraction to a body of thought which would seem to run counter to everything modernity stands for, at least modernity as understood in Enlighten- ment terms?

"Scholem, Benjamin, and Kafka stood at different points which did not remain wholly fixed for any of them, in the no-man's-land between religious tradition and modern secular culture, and," Alter continues, "it is a tricky business to define their location" (p. 111) . With the adjective "tricky," Alter articulates his acute awareness of the panorama of dangers threatening his task. He pursues an atten- tive consideration of religion in the secularly biased arena of contemporary academic culture; he enters into the embroiled critical problem of the constitu- tion of modernity and modernism; he writes about the wrenching historical period of the rise of Fascism on the edge of the Holocaust; and he reads writers notorious for their simultaneous seductiveness and resistance to interpretation (notably Benjamin and Kafka, who have proved black holes for critical commen- tary, endowed as they are with a seemingly bottomless ability to suck into their vortices vast quantities of critical ink).

Alter's stance in the face of such difficulty is emblematized by the adjective that he chooses to gesture to the enormity of the problem: "tricky." His voice is under-

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BOOK REVIEWS

stated and appealingly personal, as he threads his way skillfully through the perils of his task. His text numbers a brief 120 pages with sparing reference to the im- mense existing critical bibliography (to Alter's well under 100 footnotes, compare, for example, Susan Buck-Morss's Dialectics of Seeing on Benjamin's Passagen-Werk, where one 33-page chapter alone warrants 191 notes). Alter's tone is echoed in the historico-biographical approach which constitutes, along with fine close reading, the skeleton of his critical methodology. From "grand pro- nouncements about modernity," Alter tells us, he found himself being drawn instead to "observations about the distinctive cultural moment of German-speak- ingJewry in the early decades of this century" (p. xiii).

Central to Alter's historical explanation for the necessity of angels is the fact that Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem "shared a sense that the route of assimilation which their fathers had followed ultimately led to a dead end" (p. 22). So, for example, when Alter speculates why all three were fascinated with Hebrew, and, by extension, the notion of a sacred language, he isolates their attempt to mediate the ambiguous linguistic estrangement resulting from their problematic experi- ence of assimilation. So, too, Alter links their fascination with tradition to their cultural position: "This whole turning back toward origins was the fundamental expression of the rebellion against the German bourgeois patrimony" (p. 99). And Alter gives a historico-biographical explanation to their interest in a sacred view of history, and, specifically, their fascination with "the paradoxical nothing- ness of revelation" (p. 119). Thus Alter comments: "All three feared there could be no real return to origins, that where God once stood there was now only Melan- choly. Nevertheless, they variously felt there was no adequate modern substitute for the richly layered spiritual vocabulary that the bearers of tradition had devel- oped in their quest for the truth-surely not in technology, not in science, not in aestheticism, not in psychoanalysis, not in Marxism" (p. 119). But while Alter ar- gues the historical specificity of Kafka's, Benjamin's, and Scholem's positions, he also suggests that it is characteristic of modernism generally. "The peculiar cultural location of the Jewish writer in German. . . makes him a modernist writ large," Alter writes (p. 62). And in doing so, Alter challenges literary and cultural history that understands modernity, or at least the modernity informing modernism, in Enlightenment terms. One of the aspects of his project most compelling to non-specialists is Alter's indication of the possible constitutive importance to modernity of the sacred, the esoteric, revelation, tradition-in short, of concepts an Enlightenment account of modernity tends to obscure.

Alter's mode of situating himself in contemporary critical debate parallels his approach to his subject. The polemical overtones of Necessary Angels are understated, but they are not absent. The tenor of Alter's polemic would seem to be a return to historical specificity: "[1]atter-day intellectuals express a pronounced tendency to convert all three writers into prophets of our own postmodernist di- lemmas. I hardly want to dismiss their contemporary relevance, but it is important to keep in mind that . . . the three men were deeply rooted in the spiritual con- cerns of the German-Jewish sphere of the early twentieth century" (pp. 89-90). Typical of Alter's understated polemic is his previously mentioned discussion of the German-Jewish writer's uncomfortable relation to German. In giving this estrangement historical coordinates, Alter implicitly challenges, although he does not mention, Deleuze and Guattari's celebrated postmodern and politicized reading of Kafka as crystallizing the dilemma of marginalized intellectuals and writers seeking to speak both within and against a dominant discourse.

Despite Alter's defense of historical specificity, however, we should not neglect 315


COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the persistence of his own, albeit underplayed, interest in the constellation the present makes with the past. For example, when Alter discusses sacred concep- tions of language, he is interested in how they may provide a fruitful alternative to watered-down post-structuralist theories of language in current circulation. So, too, although Alter's preoccupation would seem to be with German modernism, he situates us in a postmodern landscape even before we have opened his book. The title of his text invokes the father of American postmodernism, Wallace Stevens: "Yet I am the necessary angel of earth." And Stevens's 1950 fascination with angels proved prophetic. Any observer of postmodernism cannot help but be struck by the pervasiveness of theological and specifically redemptive imagery, such as Wim Wenders's Cassiel and Damiel brooding over that no man's land of the Berlin Wall which no longer exists (post-postmodernism?) but which once ran through the ruins of pre-War German modernity. This pervasiveness is all the more intriguing because it conflicts with the explicit cynicism saturating so much of the period's intellectual and creative works.

Wenders's angels are, of course, Benjamin's angels: "in 1921, Walter Benjamin bought Klee's Angelus Novus," whispers the sound track as Wenders first takes us into the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. And, polemic not withstanding, Alter presents ample indices that these are his angels as well. Finally, then, Alter's study leaves me pondering a rather Benjaminian methodological problem: how to accommo- date a crucial responsibility to historical detail with the pressure of making sense of the present, and specifically, the present as it emerges against the most recent past.

MARGARET COHEN

New York University

STRANGERS TO OURSELVES. By Julia Kristeva. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. i-ix, 20 p.

"The French will never accept us. We are in different worlds, different coun- tries, we have nothing in common." These words by Khamdiat Mohammed, a part-time student interviewed in St. Denis, a run-down, heavily Muslim Paris sub- urb, were recently quoted in an article in The Washington Post about race relations in Europe. They also seem to speak to the urgency of Kristeva's topic: the history, status, and psychology of the foreigners among us/the stranger within us. Her newest book opens with a question: "Can the 'foreigner,' who was the 'enemy' in primitive societies, disappear from modern societies?" (p. 1). What the text elabo- rates, however, is not disappearance but acceptance, an acceptance-external as well as internal-that neither censors nor appropriates who (or what) is other in our lives. Her second question puts the issue more directly: "shall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to live with the others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without leveling?" p. 2)

When Etrangers &a nous-mimes appeared in 1989, Kristeva-by then a foreigner in France for 24 years herself-received the Prix Henri Hertz, given by the Chancellerie des Universit6s de Paris to the best book of the year by a faculty member. It is her most accessible book to date, of broad historical scope and deep personal passion. It is also a very wise book, written by an internationally ac- claimed linguist and theorist, a practicing psychoanalyst, a woman, a mother, an other ... Kristeva knows intimately what it means to be "in" and to be foreign.

In the "Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner," the first section of nine that make

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Article Contentsp. 314p. 315p. 316

Issue Table of ContentsComparative Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer, 1994), pp. 225-320Front MatterPoetic Speech and the Silence of Art [pp. 225-239]The Significant Silence of Race: La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno" [pp. 240-266]Reading the Age of Names in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [pp. 267-287]Review EssayReview: Getting Bakhtin, Right and Left [pp. 288-303]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 304-306]Review: untitled [pp. 306-308]Review: untitled [pp. 308-310]Review: untitled [pp. 310-312]Review: untitled [pp. 312-314]Review: untitled [pp. 314-316]Review: untitled [pp. 316-319]Review: untitled [pp. 319-320]

Back Matter

Documents

Kafka Benjamin 1