Benjamin and Derrida

In a Blauer Reiter Frame: Walter Benjamin's Intentions of the Eye and Derrida's "Specters
of Marx"
Author(s): Marcus Bullock
Source: Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 177-195
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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In a Blauer Reiter Frame:
Walter Benjamin's
Intentions of the Eye
and Derrida's Specters of Marx
MARCUS BULLOCK
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
The blind and the sighted are not equal, nor are darkness and light,
nor are a shady nook and a heatwave.
The living and the dead are not alike.
Qur'an, XXII, "The Angel," 35:20
When Walter Benjamin states at the beginning of his essay "Die

gabe des Ubersetzers" that "kein Bild dem Beschauer [gilt],"' he imp
sets a task for the eye that will compensate for that lacking intention i
image. The task taken on when we contemplate a painting will play
equivalent to that which he sets more explicitly for the reader when he
"kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser" in that same sentence. He does offe
explicit foundation for the reader's task, since he proceeds to devel
proposition in a theory of language. The same thing cannot be said f
problem of the eye and the image as he has raised it. Like the reade
beholder of a painting has to acknowledge an insecure position, adrif
subjective impressions, but the difference lies in the discipline provi
language.
The essay identifies its own standpoint with a theology of language
based on the Book of Genesis, and developed in Jewish mysticism by the
Kabbalah. Language and law exist together in a relationship that might be
weakened, but cannot be lost completely. That essence of lawfulness iden-
tifies the starting point and the direction to take in settling the issue of
reading. According to Benjamin's view, this invites a resolution by the res-
toration of a previous state in language which will be accomplished as the
Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 2, 2001 177

0026-9271/2001/0002/0177 $01.50/0
a 2001 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wiscon
178 Bullock
task of the
exists as a p
which an o
all too easil
Their force
mains of m
sanction in
He is by n
alone, but n
In "Uber da
about the o
through an
nen Mensch
che den alt
2/1, 210). B
in what hist
it can scarce
as being po
sich dabei u
formierun
suasive treat
expressions
leans quite f
Benjamin a
graphologic
depends on
beginnings
"Vermittlu
by a no less
in the proc
when he clo
and hierogl
writing adv
die der Ma
vanished w
The contem
port from t
magic from
derive from
different d
contemplat
rests on th
elements co
Benjamin and Derrida: Intentions of the Eye 179
recognizes that what we see within the frame rests on a completel

activity of the eye than the objects we may identify outside t
he shows when he takes this issue up in "Der Autor als Produz
he alludes to the Dada practice of gathering the most mundan
changed within the framed space as a collage to show how th
"sprengt die Zeit" (GS 2/2, 692). The question of what one ca
form composed inside the frame remains, however, since Benja
on to his exploration of what the frame has now revealed abo
outside-namely that the times there are already disrupted
joint-and does not linger over the matter of how the experien
object leads to the other.
A direct and personal reference to what Benjamin claims t
in a specific set of paintings might open our eyes to the elu
encounters in a pictorial work of art.
On 26 March 1921, in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, he
mentions some pictures he has seen on exhibition in Berlin, and notes:
"Wiewohl ich mehr und mehr zu der Erkenntnis gelange, daB ich mich
gleichsam blind nur auf die Malerei von Klee, Macke und vielleicht auch
von Kandinsky verlassen kann. In allem anderen liegen Abgriinde, vor de-
nen man auf der Hut sein mu3. Nattirlich gibt es auch von jenen Dreien
schwache Bilder-aber ich sehe, daB sie schwach sind."2 This confident in-
terest in the Blauer Reiter group and apparent grasp of their style may
confirm his indifference to an intention on the artists' part. Indeed, the
distinction Benjamin asserts so forthrightly runs counter to the most basic
convictions of the movement. Their art addresses a universal spirit, and
recognizes the aesthetic equality of the styles produced by different times
and circumstances. Moreover, according to the principles of that movement,
the distinction between the strong and weak expressions of a style also rests
on a dubious foundation.
In an essay published in 1912, "Uber die Formfrage," Kandinsky de-
clares that, "man sollte nie einem Theoretiker (Kunsthistoriker, Kritiker
etc) glauben, wenn er behauptet, da3 er irgendeinen objektiven Fehler im
Werke entdeckt hat."3 It is clear that the expressed principles of the Blauer
Reiter do not help to explain this privilege of their work in Benjamin's eyes.
Yet he was aware of these principles, and admired their formulation, al
though it is noteworthy that Benjamin did not react to this movement or
the writings in which it explained its values until its own epoch, the exhil
arating years of innovation before the First World War, had passed away.
His first significant reference to the movement occurs in a letter writ-
ten on 13 January 1920, where Benjamin reports: "... ich [las] jUber das
Geistige in der Kunst von Kandinsky. Dies Buch erfullt mich vor seinem
Autor mit hichster Achtung, wie dessen Bilder meine Bewunderung
wecken. Es ist wohl das einzige Buch tiber den Expressionismus sonder
180 Bullock
Geschwitz;
Lehre-von-der-Malerei."4
The closing comment suggests that Benjamin's response to the paint-
ings has already moved beyond the specific doctrine by which the painter
explained their style and has found a connection in the emphasis on a pur
address to the eye that permits him to find a very different form of value
there. Nonetheless, as he pursues that value in a pictorial expression, he
will have to manage without the special theological solution through th
agency of translation that he adduces for writing. We should expect a rad
ically different sense of the difference between a privileged conception o
a full or redeemed domain of meaning, and the faltering, incomplete pic
torial language that some special process might restore. The very notion o
a "weak" image or expression here may function quite differently-possi-
bly even in a way that Benjamin himself may not have thought through a
that point. Yet certainly the impulse to radicalize the powers of the eye that
draws him to this "theory of painting" and to the experiments with a com-
pletely abstract, non-figurative manner in art will turn him away from the
representations of the common judgment as though this faculty were blind.
The philosophy by which Benjamin considers the visible world as a
screen of disrupted appearances will resemble the theory of abstract paint
ing in that it requires that he both look at the world and look away in th
same process. The idea of looking away here means an absolute scepticism
about the authority of representation. This would clearly correspond to the
forms of a movement that accomplished the abandonment of representa-
tional demands and introduced the first fully abstract images in the Western
tradition of painting. As with those paintings whose weakness must be evi
dent if he is to trust his senses, he must search for the confidence to so fix
objects that he can unmask them as deficient in their appearances, or ulti
mately invisible. Only then will they release the eye from that fascination
with their apparent meaning and value which presently holds a disjointed
society in its thrall. This power to defeat a false currency and authority o
appearances by latching on to the deficiency of apparent forms develops
through the collection of brief glimpses assembled in Einbahnstraf3e, for
example where he confronts the turmoil of German inflation by declaring
in the "Kaiserpanorama" section, "So bleibt nichts, als ... die Blicke z
richten" on this catastrophe (GS 4/1, 95). Nonetheless, it remains important
to reflect on the difference between what Benjamin sees and what he doe
not see as he develops this rhetoric of the gaze.
His persuasiveness as a witness depends on the pertinence of what he
sees, on the responsibility that his testimony can sustain by his ability to
find the most concrete material spectacles. Much of Einbahnstraf3e fixes
attention on the power of surfaces to reveal the superficiality of meanin
in modern times. The section "Diese Flachen sind zu vermieten" offers a
sort of critique of criticism in this vein. In response to its qu

macht zuletzt Reklame der Kritik so tiberlegen?" the passage
"Nicht was die rote elektrische Laufschrift sagt-die Feuerlac
dem Asphalt sie spiegelt" (GS 4/1, 132). Yet he also consisten
yond what he sees, developing that rhetoric by which he represen
as a seer who does much more than reveal the flawed surfac
ances. In such contexts, readers can recognize plainly that he b
commonplace phenomena of a familiar world to ground his ob
and at the same time moves the restrained image of the penet
beyond its common implications. In so doing, he makes claim
perceived something beyond that restraint, so that those rea
quite suddenly at a place where they no longer see plainly at a
In the "Kaiserpanorama" he presents what appears to be a
thesis about the powers of "Angespanntester, klagloser Aufm
describing that as a state which sets us "in einem geheimnisvo
mit den uns belagernden Gewalten." Benjamin seems to prese
sibility of an active power in this contact, for it could "wirklich d
herbeiftihren" or represent "das Auterordentliche, das allein
kann" (GS 4/1, 95). Without doubt this theme of a real power
history through the figure of the penetrating eye persists and
the way through Benjamin's writing, concluding with the ima
power of the materialist historian in "Uber den Begriff der G
Yet to construct this theme into an argument that presents Be
consistent view here can fall foul of the difference between what meets the
eye in question, and what evades it. To map out the subsequent elaborations
and the precursors of that figure, and therefore harden Benjamin's apparent
thesis about the power of this gaze into any firm knowledge, leads away
from such a power.
That might seem paradoxical, for the scholarly attention paid to a
body of texts in order to draw up a progress of primary themes may appear
to bear a deep kinship to the scrutiny of social phenomena by virtue of
which Benjamin hopes for an effective illumination. The reason for this
paradox lies in the mysteriousness of the two powers that Benjamin himself
has invoked, and the consequent mysteriousness of the relationship of a
third power-that of critical scholarship-to those passages and all others
from which readers may argue over the critical construction of Benjamin's
gaze. Certainly, eliding that precaution with which Benjamin surrounds
his claims at this point and settling on the "wirklich" against the unreality
of the "Wunder" that intention might "herbeifiihren," would scarcely do
honor to a critical reader.
Benjamin restricts that which he presents in the domain of observation
to what he knows as evident to his own and the reader's eye. The immediate
phenomena of miserable conditions occasioned by inflation, and that
182 Bullock
"Feigheit u
ots, stand q
ports. Thes
with the po
1, 95). The
burden Ger
reflection t
the weakne
Benjamin's
come anothe
operates as a
of its own
of magic, w
"angespann
miracle. Its
he has heard
comes to r
deceptions
ear. The fig
magic if it
emptiness
gen" (GS 4/
knowledge
ness embed
The appare
pattern of
also weaken
of repetitio
usage in wh
we turn his
now begin
use of the e
continuous e
expression.
which in t
thereby asse
to sustain i
sion to whic
critical eff
pressive fun
traced out
This repeti
into a phen
seer for whom history lights up into revelation. The ghost

vation whose promise returns through passage after passa
writing takes on an independent existence in the medium of t
reflection. We may hark back to reservations by which Be
holds to the idea of inconsistency, and resist, as mere artef
the potentiation of his references to an otherworldly radiance
we do so only by running against an undeniable consistenc
of seeking an illumination in order to free the gaze from a m
This certainly describes Benjamin's characteristic use of th
torical figure by which he represents the mysterious dist
true and false knowledge.
We cannot assert that Benjamin does not, at moments whe
returns with its most vivid clarity, fall prey to the riveting fo
ise, even in language that directs our vigilance to acknow
"stumme, unsichtbare" separate essence. Nonetheless, we
more restrained, critical construction of his meaning wh
the argument for a subjective power in Benjamin's position
the frequency with which the texts come back to that figure
demonstrate the current of vision that flows beyond the visib
articulates hidden essences of the world, but this subjectiv
take a limited place in the understanding of his critique. S
enumeration in our reading reveals something that might
accompaniment, or even as the necessary condition, for the
of his observation. The assertion of mysterious modes of
states of intense contemplation, or any other privileged form
leaves us with the paradox of a contrary impulse and mod
in each critical, resistant phase. There is an aspect of compulsi
writing, and that compulsiveness both comes out of a will
and yet runs in step with a critical grasp of what that will sig
Clearly this not only has a bearing on those utterances
that smack of magical or prophetic knowledge. The same
almost unchanged in claims to privileged knowledge base
theory of history. Benjamin writes in the opening passage
werk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit"
tete seine Unternehmungen so ein, daB sie prognostischen
and acknowledges "prognostische Anforderungen" for the
are to follow (GS 1/2, 473). Yet he retreats discreetly befo
mand except in so far as it lends weight to his analysis of
which he puts forward the notion that modern media will
an inherent resistance to fascist uses of culture. In retrospect
figures as self-deception rather than prognosis, since fil
moved toward comfortable assimilation in the hands of re
Despite his care to work through the complexities of the
184 Bullock
dialectical
draws his ob
media, but
the opposit
he can iden
tradition w
wert," whic
in his essay
This repea
its sole pow
the elemen
asserting v
as such con
tication wi
determine i
one side in
tactical mo
peting inte
oes Das Man
Where Ma
spenst des
hasten to u
terror with
selves. The
and could b
as that fea
Benjamin a
threat. "Di
ner rings u
observes in
ance, he pr
Gnade oder
1, 95).
Benjamin, therefore, sees his present, the 1920s, as already having
brought that power further on toward its appointed victory, though it has
still not ceased exercising its influence through spectral terror. Yet it stays
invisible now for a different reason. It reflects nothing back from the present
whose perceptions offer no inkling of substance at all, but only error,
contradiction, blindness. It stays silent because in the face of the unimag-
inable yet predestined fate of annihilation, the world of self-deception
that Benjamin sees around him has no speech left beyond the empty
phraseology with which he began his complaint. The threat has become
the ghost of a ghost. This terror does not even deign to participate in
the realm of political discourse, for no matter how desperat

wish to hear its terms, "die stumme, unsichtbare Macht, welche E
gegenilber ftihlt, verhandelt nicht" (GS 4/1, 95). Our effort to qu
significance of those motifs of true or privileged vision in Benjam
ing as they invoke a theological dimension of understanding
support through this point of contrast with Marx. Precisely a
where Benjamin appears to be making a statement about mira
ers of sight and the mysterious discipline of the gaze, he is ju
refraining from laying claim to a vision.
In his book Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida works inten
a point of conflict within Marx's analysis of history and societ
further bring out the distinction between Benjamin's use of the e
assertion of a philosophical subject to whom clarity of sight bring
knowledge. Derrida is able to cite in repetition after repetitio
relies on the motif of the ghost to portray irreal presences a
those that possess real substance and sustain real historical un
Whereas Benjamin considers the capacity not to be seen as the
imminently triumphant power, and views the sinking of this
deeply into its spectral separation from politics as evidence for ju
is the cause that opposes it, Derrida emphasizes the contrary i
in the engagement to which Marx looks forward, so Derrida
the political struggle in which communism is to emerge trium
the form of a birth. The specter does not exist in the traditio
sequence of a haunting, lingering on after death. It precedes th
birth of a new power. Though it is known at first only as the nig
a future that will eliminate the enemies of the proletariat, eve
pends on that nightmare proving to be a prophetic dream.
That proof of the dream will fall to the responsibility of tho
Marx addresses in his rousing words. The response with which
ary history must echo will confirm that it is "hohe Zeit" to trans
munism from an idea or spirit, to end the time in which it ha
substantial than that "heilig[e] Hetzjagd" which hopes to exorci
ter.6 Now it shall acquire the same bodily substance in the wo
who have hitherto spoken their magical formulae against it. I
full part of historical reality by assuming the substance of a real
organizing real persons. They shall fulfill the promise of powe
naled only in the fear of that form as it now goes around in
warning of a real potential. Derrida notes that everything dep
ibility, conviction, acknowledgment in this account. Marx rea
reality of a phenomenon he can observe in the world, from th
fear discernible to his eye, in order to arrive at a plausible r
which to affirm a future for what causes that fear: "From th
186 Bullock
Marx draws
diagnosis is t
Marx's tho
to unite log
existence, a
doubt in th
other's powe
value in wh
being more
the brink o
over the fie
ghostly nat
ancien rdgim
bility by ann
The vision
has the pow
tence: "This
it is announ
formance li
logical cons
oppressed cl
tain it), wit
symptom li
that is most
grounds that
than turnin
have less th
have nothin
benefit of h
possess no v
The chains
of steel. Th
same fear w
moment wh
presently ru
by the force
progress is
The fear sha
from the we
perhaps the
The spectra
hegemony t
The future
irreal as that which dwells outside time, the eternity from w

been banned, nor quite as real as the present whose value
way to its loss in time. The visionary performance that ch
festo from mere prophecy to a power depends less on the glow
borne aloft in the promise than on the plausible light of a
that marks a road from present to future. After all, the w
can never rival the treasures of eternal life no matter how fu
dictions of temporal rewards. Therefore the power of Mar
does not spring in the first instance from the positive or acti
of his observations, but rather by his determination of what
of the opposing powers-namely the weakness of its hold o
cannot predict except in the vague projections of progress. If
by which history predicts progress falter, and the signs indic
of regress, then the promise of a revolutionary performative
a progressive one.
The power of communism depends on the weakness o
and this in turn limits the value of communism. The constative force of a
historical analysis that could predict the future by elucidating laws of de-
velopment would offer a different value. If communism rested on a devel-
opment that operated like a natural law-precisely as effective whether or
not it existed as an explicitly declared formulation or equation-then it
would not share in the process of performance on which Derrida here in-
sists. As it is, communism can only enter the arena of history when it be-
comes a power like other powers, which is to say, when it is acknowledged
as such. Derrida quotes Marx's formulation of the dialectical process by
which communism has taken up its position in history through an accession
that has found the source of the enemies' best strength: "Communism is
already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power."9 Yet
the political rise of the communist analysis of history takes another form as
well. It incorporates the worst weaknesses of its enemies.
In the communist vision of history, Marx paints what he sees, and in
his portrait of present conditions, capitalism sees the reflection of its own
weakness, namely that it may have nothing to offer those on whose labor
it depends for its existence. The value of the communist vision, negating
that nothing or less than nothing, holds up a portrait of the future. Here
Marx does not paint what he sees: he paints a deduction. He deduces the
future salvation by deriving a process of logic out of the analysis of illogic
in the circulation of commodities. He declares that exchange value, and the
magnetic power of cash profits that move commodities through markets,
has masked or displaced the real human gravity of use values whose au-
thority has to be restored, and whose restoration will repair the disjunction
between productive forces and human needs. It does not escape Derrida's
eye, naturally, that in order to represent this exchange value as the basis of
188 Bullock
an illogical
prior and s
As one wo
process of
against the
him in a pr
In short, an
more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he
thinks of nothing else. He believes rather in what is supposed to distinguish
them from actual reality, living effectivity. He believes he can oppose them,
like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence.
He believes enough in the dividing line of this opposition to want to de-
nounce, chase away, or exorcise the specters, but by means of critical analysis
and not by some counter-magic. But how to distinguish between the analysis
that denounces magic and the counter-magic that it still risks being? (Derrida
47)
The theme that Derrida's book promises to debate as what he calls

"the state of the debt" in his subtitle provides a repeating term for the
connections that run between generations and between succeeding stages
of understanding in the historical succession. A danger threatens through
the weakness of the Marxist heritage in the closing decade of the twentieth
century that leaves no plausible opposition to the heirs of Marx's adversar-
ies. Derrida's book takes up the notion of responsibility, the task that comes
to us in the form of our inheritance from Marx, and the impossibility of
circumventing Marx in the responsibility we inherit from history. Conse-
quently he claims that his critique of Marx sustains that responsibility in
the sign of an appointed conjunction between Marxism and deconstruction,
for Marx's own critique was "pre-deconstructive."'o
Observing a cautious apologia as he does so, Derrida ventures to bring
Marx out of his counter-magical quandary, and aligns his own deconstruc-
tive endeavors with the same active political responsibility by which Marx
distinguished himself. Derrida too claims the dignity of action for his ut-
terances, as though deconstruction performed a change in the world beyond
that alternative in the inheritance of speculative philosophers who merely
interpreted the world:
Pre-deconstructive here does not mean false, unnecessary, or illusory. Rather

it characterizes a relatively stabilized knowledge that calls for questions more
radical than the critique itself and than the ontology that grounds the critique.
These questions are not destabilizing as the effect of some theoretico-
speculative subversion. They are not even, in the final analysis, questions but
seismic events. Practical events, where thought becomes act, and body and
manual experience...
One would have to be a strange reader indeed not to su

magical claim in this declaration, or a would-be perform
thought retreats to the inner drama where it now thinks of i
earthquake of action. Nor does the evocation of Heidegge
ately follows do much to reassure us. Clearly, Derrida find
stake his claim to power in a political praxis because to do
be precisely to fail as an heir to Marx and to incur the gu
failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility."12
This brings us back to Benjamin, and to the notion of
power rests in the weakness of what it sees, for we see Der
edly on show as a man who refuses to see all the way dow
in Marx. The doubling of Derrida's negatives does not hide
consequences of history when he insists that he brings his
ward "so as not to flee from a responsibility.""3 It is true
flee from responsibility, for flight would leave too definite a
out that to which no response was made. He defers, dissol
utes it so that it cannot be seen anywhere in particular. He ass
situation for every eye whose viewpoint might appear bef
judgment: "If Marx, like Freud, like Heidegger, like ever
begin where he ought to ... it is doubtless not his fault."
cannot disappear from view by slipping into the crowd, amon
else. Nor is Marx like Freud or Heidegger, for he asserted
of communist power among the select company of other powe
he took up his dispute.
Marxism at the end of the twentieth century emerges
degree of nakedness determined by its claim to fulfill a progn
ment and thus assert a value. With that prognosis strippe
finds his own identity dependent on the same veil over the fu
Marx's power depended. He claims he must resist the tempt
the basis of this loyalty which was "for me, and for those of
who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience
paternal figure of Marx.""5 The filial piety that refuses to
kedness of the father surrenders its own strength in order to
from that same exposure of its own. The claim to a seism
worldly forces clearly has contradicted itself here in orde
of the guilt that follows every act in a world whose future
and which will yet reveal us and our errors in its own time th
of its own uncontrollable judgment.
The explicit point of connection with Benjamin that D
to make in Specters of Marx occurs through the concept o
when he refers to Benjamin's having associated "historica
with the inheritance of a "weak messianic force."'6 But what of the messi-
anic idea that runs through Specters of Marx? Is it, to recall that character-
190 Bullock
istic locuti
to say, an u
in the text
That is to as
to m which a
which it ha
with time?
defines the
mation, a c
from any d
any messian
This anxiet
rida from B
and the inh
"experience
promise) tur
on to the g
emancipatio
insists, "wh
deconstruct
ise";18 this
tion, preser
kedness. W
formality o
messianic w
promise of
an actual cl
idea of just
man rights
determined
Derrida m
ternal auth
received fr
a weak mes
"eine gehei
unserem."2
an angel; th
Geschichte"
of ruined e
not turn to
with which
about a kno
edge that b
concretely in common. Like them, "ist uns, wie jedem Ges

uns war, eine schwache messianische Kraft mitgegeben, an
gangenheit Anspruch hat" (GS 1/2, 694). This claim of th
us through the memory of a defeat and a weakness that l
the hope for redemption, and in the image of happiness form
generation has seen in its own time. For this reason, we d
happiness of the future any more than we believe that we
envy of the past whose hope for redemption we carry forwar
selfishness of individual desires may overpower our vision wh
plate a happiness "in der Luft, die wir geatmet haben, m
denen wir hatten reden, mit Frauen, die sich uns hitten ge
1/2, 693), the subtler power of happiness that enlivens o
future as well as our grasp of history, depends on the element
at work in it.
The weakness and the messianic content of the power
inseparably. Like the condition Benjamin describes in "Ka
it may amount to no more than the power to turn our g
messianic future, "das Au(erordentliche, das allein noch r
this sense, the special capacity of the weakness to constitute i
of messianic truth means that it has a double relationship t
On the one hand, it is the connection to the defeated and
that empowers it as a cognitive force. Yet, at the same tim
not only in its truth, but in its strength too, which makes it
for victory in the struggle for power. The messiah come
the redeemer, but as the "U!berwinder des Antichrist" as B
the sixth of the theses in "Uber den Begriff der Geschicht
The two elements seem to concur in the form of the signal th
should pick up. In that "Echo von nun verstummten [Stim
693) named in the second thesis, the weakness of the signal is
distinguishes it for the historian who understands that "Billig
spruch nicht abzufertigen" (GS 1/2, 694), since he must rec
provide the utmost power of perception in this process th
those more apparent but less truthful manifestations wh
astray. The reader of the past has to infiltrate a line of comm
eludes the noisy positivities of banal, bombastic language,
to eschew them precisely where they offer themselves m
easily.
Therefore Benjamin takes pride in a capacity of his eye that leaves
him in full possession of his gaze while entering into the aesthetics of the
Blauer Reiter, and experiencing its promesse de bonheur. The conviction
that one can see where a painting is weak supports a belief in the emanci-
pation of one's eye from representations that may fascinate us by an insis-
tence on their own power. It lets us feel we may look beyond the charm of
192 Bullock
a vision from
piness whic
The obligat
der Hut" bef
ing up the
of fascinatio
promise for
hope. The tr
full possess
that accepts
edge to wh
action of b
jamin sets
which is no
Derrida br
criterion of
tions ("... w
rights ...") r
by which t
nized by Be
what has so
and reappea
Derrida refe
were it per
Marxism an
elements of
overstepped
in common
and does so
of redempti
Derrida asserts for the Marxist text contrives to confine the voices that
demand justice within a narrow frame, and does so on the grounds of their
worldliness. That might appear to situate his authority where it coincides
with Benjamin's notion of a weak messianic power in the relationship be-
tween the present and the past generations. But that would depend on the
subtlety and restraint of the claim to knowledge that accompanies it. It
might also be that the forms of power that Derrida permits himself to find
attractive and promising are precisely those most intimately connected with
that sphere of restricted, present desires which Benjamin associates with
the limited vision of envy.
The narrow frame encloses and subordinates the desire that these
voices bring into view, displaying it as a mere image and example, rathe
than the fullness of a world. It is the very concreteness of these "right
that necessitates the resistance to them, for those who desire

claim everything on the basis of a worldly visibility in the things
Both deconstruction and the place for which Derrida reserves
Marxism, by contrast, oppose the worldly ethics of facts and fact
grounds that these are naive, and need to undergo splitting ap
activating at a higher level. If those worldly elements encroach on
evolution of insight and foresight held in a text, the result will b
donment and loss of a potential vested in the world, yet not
worldly light. This relationship of seismic mourning by which Der
Marxism close to his own project, confers an opposing right on th
will not permit the factitious realm to act equally across the
pressing a claim on the basis of fact, diminish the claim of the te
has reduced what exists beyond it to a mere realm of example
not assert itself critically against the language that has define
drawing on powers that are not free of envy, the world withi
made for it by the text will emancipate indications along a pat
struggle and sacrifice that are more immediately persuasive, b
brutally so, than that messianic future which only supplies the cr
but no spectacle in itself. The debt that the world owes Marx,
reading, means that nothing in the world may qualify or limit th
to see according to the frame. Moreover, coming down to us in th
a debt, it takes possession of us like the air that fills us wit
manifests itself as a power that is jealous of other powers, o
other visions of past or future.
The difficulty this construction presents has little to do w
construction it presents. The unravelling of what lies within the f
not really justify the self-protection of the unravelling proce
of triumph in Derrida's presentation depends on his having
what remains a missing part, and only this preserves the novelty
ence from any other kind of claim to success in the generatio
edge. At the crucial point for any such construction, we do not fi
outside is really inside, except in a rather obvious and formalistic
of course it has composed the image according to its own force
that the inside is essentially empty. That we can actually put noth
frame, that the act of framing reveals the abstractness of wha
there, appears most vividly in the aesthetic practice of the Bl
even more than in their theory. And this was precisely the po
Benjamin in the unique moment when he discovered a visual
that corresponded to the philosophical task he had begun to
himself. This also left him stranded far from any triumphalist vi
understanding and the imagined grandeur of philosophical pen
The price that Benjamin will pay when he settles his own
to preserve knowledge from sinking back into mere fantasy entai
194 Bullock
praising as
stricting wh
identity wi
Chronik, he
the youth m
inevitable failure of the belief that one could "die fordernden Schatten der
Enterbten mit philanthropischen Zeremonien beschw5ren" (GS 6, 478).
Only the knowledge of that failure, the awareness of an idealist illusion still
settled within the determination not to continue with the delusions of an-
other, larger, and more brutal world of banality, gives him that assurance
with which he contemplates the same trace of failure running through the
Blauer Reiter artistic style. It is the subsequent knowledge of what had lain
ahead for their endeavors to redeem the world before the outbreak of mod-
ern imperialist war, which emboldens his eye and permits him to make out
weaknesses in those aesthetic ceremonies.
Just as the war had taken his friend Fritz Heinle and shattered the
first ideals by which Benjamin had hoped for a philanthropic redemption
of the world, so the Blauer Reiter lost Franz Marc and August Macke, and
saw the seismic pressures of warfare end its vision of a redemption accom-
plished by a transformation of the senses. The same lesson of failure persists
in Benjamin's apprehension of a future in Marxism when he contemplates
joining with a new set of comrades in the Communist Party. He writes to
Gershom Scholem on 29 May 1926 that the most interesting question this
possibility raises is "weniger das Ja und Nein, als das Wielange?"21 The
encounter with a doctrine, or a way of seeing, or a form of critique, no
matter how radical, becomes knowledge at the point where a frame may
be drawn around it. That disjunction sets it apart in time as always partial
and subject to the dislocations of history. Everything in human history, ev-
erything encountered in time, suffers this coming to knowledge as a dis-
junction, for, as Derrida repeats so insistently in Specters of Marx, the times
are always out of joint.
SWalter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 4/1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhhuser (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972) 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the
text as GS, with volume and page numbers.
2 Walter Benjamin, Briefe I, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt/
M.: Suhrkamp, 1964) 260.
3Wassily Kandinsky, "Uber die Formfrage," Der blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky
and Franz Marc (Mtinchen: R. Piper, 1965) 164.
4 Benjamin, Briefe 1 229.
SKarl Marx, "Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei," Friihe Schriften II, ed. Hans-
Joachim Lieber & Peter Furth (Stuttgart: Cotta Verlag, 1971) 816.
6Ibid.
7Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, transl. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge, 1994) 103.
"Ibid.
9'Ibid. "Der Kommunismus wird bereits von allen europiischen Mhchten als eine Macht
anerkannt" (Marx 816).
"'Derrida 170.
" Ibid.
12 Ibid. 13.
'3"Ibid. 51.
Ibid. 175.
'"Ibid. 13.
'6 Ibid. 55.
'7Ibid. 89.
Ibid. 59.
"'Ibid.
2""Uber den Begriff der Geschichte," GS 1/2, 694.
Benjamin, Briefe 1 425.
Errata
Monatshefte apologizes for errors in the Personalia entry for Harvard University
that appeared in the winter issue (volume 92, number 4). We herewith repeat Har-
vard's listing, with corrections.
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138-6531 (G + D)
Prof.: Peter J. Burgard, Ph.D.
Richard 7T Gray, Ph.D. (vi i)
(U WA)
Karl S. Guthke, Dr. phil.
Stephen A. Mitchell, Ph.D.
Eric Rentschler, Ph.D.*
Judith Ryan, Dr. phil.
Eckehard Simon, Ph.D.
Maria M. Tatar, Ph.D. (Iv)
Sabine Wilke, Dr. phil. (vi i)
(U WA)
Asso. P.: Beatrice Hanssen, Ph.D.
Bernd Widdig, Ph.D. (viii) (MIT)
Sr.Preceptor: Charles P. Lutcavage, Ph.D.
Preceptor: Annette Johansson-Los, M.A.
Sylvia Rieger, Ph.D.
Emer.: Dorrit Cohn, Ph.D.
Margret Guillemin, Ph.D.
Reginald H. Phelps, Ph.D.

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Benjamin and Derrida

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In a Blauer Reiter Frame: Walter Benjamin's Intentions of the Eye and Derrida's "Specters

When Walter Benjamin states at the beginning of his essay "Die

Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 2, 2001 177

recognizes that what we see within the frame rests on a completel

sort of critique of criticism in this vein. In response to its qu

seer for whom history lights up into revelation. The ghost

the realm of political discourse, for no matter how desperat

irreal as that which dwells outside time, the eternity from w

The theme that Derrida's book promises to debate as what he calls

Pre-deconstructive here does not mean false, unnecessary, or illusory. Rather

One would have to be a strange reader indeed not to su

concretely in common. Like them, "ist uns, wie jedem Ges

that necessitates the resistance to them, for those who desire

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