Textual Conspiracies Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political Theory pptx

Textual Conspiracies

Textual Conspiracies

Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and

Political Theory

James R. Martel

the university of michigan press

Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,

including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying

permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law

and except by reviewers for the public press), without

written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

c Printed on acid-free paper

2014 2013 2012 2011 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martel, James R.

Textual conspiracies : Walter Benjamin, idolatry, and political

theory / James R. Martel.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-472-11772-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-472-02819-1 (e-book)

1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Political and social views.

2. Capitalism. 3. Liberalism. 4. Conspiracies. 5. Politics and

literature. I. Title.

pt2603.e455z73315 2011

838'.91209—dc22 2011007220

Acknowledgments

I want to express thanks to many people who helped me to write this

book. Two people in particular merit great thanks for this book’s publica￾tion. Joyce Seltzer has been an invaluable friend, advisor, and mentor in

facing the publishing world and conceptualizing my projects, this one

very much included. Melody Herr has been a phenomenal editor; her ad￾vice, enthusiasm, and advocacy have made getting this book to press a

truly enjoyable experience. Susan Cronin, Kevin Rennells, and Mike Ke￾hoe have also been very helpful at University of Michigan Press. I also

want to thank my university, San Francisco State University, and especially

my dean, Joel Kassiola, for giving me a sabbatical to help ‹nish this proj￾ect and for his support in general. Jodi Dean was instrumental in starting

this project; she got me thinking about conspiracy in the ‹rst place and

has been an astute and generous reader. Karen Feldman has also been a

great reader and was present at the ‹rst incarnations of my work on Kafka.

In October 2010, I was fortunate to be able to present the principal ar￾guments for this text at a conference entitled “Dangerous Crossings: Poli￾tics at the Limits of the Human,” held at Johns Hopkins University. Thank

you to the conference organizers: Drew Walker, Nathan Gies, Katherine

Goktepe, and Tim Hana‹n. Thanks also to Jennifer Culbert, Jane Bennett,

Willam Connolly, and Bonnie Honig for their excellent comments and

contributions to my project as well as their friendship. Other readers, col￾leagues, allies, and friends include, as always, Nasser Hussain and Mark

Andrejevic, and many other people whose support and wisdom are in￾valuable to me: Marianne Constable, Ruth Sonderegger, Jackie Stevens,

Martha Umphrey, Paul Passavant, Angelika von Wahl, Melissa Ptacek,

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Sara Kendall, Wendy Lochner, Jeanne

Scheper, Zhivka Valiavicharska, Jimmy Casas Klausen, Alex Dubilet, Ra￾mona Naddaff, Lisa Disch, Stephanie Sommerfeld, Adam Thurschwell,

Kennan Ferguson, David Bates, Shalini Satkunanandan, Stuart Murray,

Anatole Anton, Sandra Luft, Anatoli Ignatov, Miguel Vatter, Libby Anker,

Alex Hirsch, Vicky Kahn, Keally McBride, Dean Mathiowetz, Brian

Weiner, Ron Sundstrom, Kate Gordy, Wendy Brown, Kyong-Min Son,

William Sokoloff, Vanessa Lemm, Tom Dumm, Peter Fitzpatrick, Colin

Perrin, Austin Sarat, Linda Ross Meyer, and many others. I want to thank

my many students in my two (to date) Walter Benjamin graduate semi￾nars at SFSU including Loren Lewis, Evan Stern, Rion Roberts, Steven

Swarbrick, Sharise Edwards, Tyler Nelson, Dieyana Ruzgani, Loren Stew￾art, Katrina Lappin, Veronica Roberts, Kenny Loui, Joshua Hurni, Cecily

Gonzalez, Rebecca Stillman, Randall Cohn, Brooks Kirchgassner, and

quite a few others. Finally I want to thank my wonderful family: my hus￾band, Carlos, my children, Jacques and Rocio, and Nina, Kathryn, Elic and

Mark, Ralph, Huguette, Django, and Shalini.

I give thanks to my mother, Huguette Martel, for her painting that is

used on the book cover. Thanks also go to Alice Martin at Service IMEC

Images (which holds the Gisèle Freund archives) and to Julie Galant at

Fotofolio (the company that made the postcard that the image came

from). I also thank Rich Stim, who did the research figuring out how to

obtain permission, and Javier Machado Leyva, who photographed the

painting and prepared the electronic file for use here.

An earlier version of chapter 2 ‹rst appeared as “The Messiah Who

Comes and Who Goes: Kafka’s Messianic Conspiracy in The Castle,” in

Theory and Event 12, no. 3 (2009). Copyright © 2009 James Martel and The

Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by The Johns

Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as

“Machiavelli’s Public Conspiracies,” in MediaTropes 2, no. 1 (2009): 60–83.

vi | Acknowledgments

Contents

Preface | No Hope ix

Introduction | Textual Conspiracies 1

Part I

1 | Walter Benjamin’s Conspiracy with Language 25

2 | Kafka: The Messiah Who Does Nothing at All 62

3 | Machiavelli’s Conspiracy of Open Secrets 88

Part II

4 | Rendering the World into Signs: Alexis de Tocqueville

and Edgar Allan Poe 115

5 | Hannah Arendt, Federico García Lorca, and the

Place for the Human 153

6 | Reconstructing the World: Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar 190

Conclusion | A Faithless Leap: The Conspiracy

That Is Already Here 226

Notes 259

Bibliography 287

Index 295

Preface | No Hope

What does it mean to be a leftist in our time? There are those who still call

for and believe in revolution—those, that is, who conform to an earlier

version of the Left—but more widely, it seems safe to say, few think such

an event will occur in our lifetime. In this moment in time, it seems that

for most people such a revolution is impossible, nearly unthinkable.

When we speak of revolution today in much of the world, we generally

mean the creation or restoration of liberal democracy, not the overthrow

of capitalism. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and other events cur￾rently sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa may deservedly

be called revolutions. They have been thrilling and promise a justice that

is long overdue. But there is little or no expectation that the dictators be￾ing challenged are going to be replaced by any kind of radically demo￾cratic, anticapitalist political arrangements. These revolutions are not of

that kind. While there have been moments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya

where truly spontaneous, decentralized resistance movements came into

being, overall such movements have been absorbed into “normalizing”

discourses of sovereignty and market order. Without the immanent possi￾bility of radical revolution—the central theme that animated the Left for

much of its early history—direct and explicit opposition to capitalism be￾comes murkier and more diffuse. The Left, such as it is, exists today in

pieces and tatters. There is an important subculture of resistance in terms

of opposition, for example, to the World Trade Organization. Examples of

guerrilla theater, large and disruptive demonstrations, and other forms of

protest have gained widespread media attention. There are a handful of

countries, such as Cuba and (to a lesser degree) Bolivia, where opposition

to capitalism remains entrenched, at least ideologically. There are also (as

this book will argue further) an in‹nite number of microresistances and

oppositions to capitalism that appear in the most ordinary and unex￾pected places. Yet, for all of this, capitalism goes largely unchallenged; it

has been knocked back on its heels, to be sure, by the recent and massive

“Great Recession,” but it has been down before, and capitalism, and the

political forces that accompany it (traditionally liberal democracies, but

now increasingly, authoritarian states such as China and Russia as well)

have proven fantastically adept at changing with the times.

Against many predictions of its demise (even many from liberals) cap￾italism has not only survived but thrived into the twenty-‹rst century. It

could be argued that capitalism today enjoys a monopoly of unopposed,

unrivaled political, economic and social primacy that it has never had be￾fore, this not so much in terms of the “end of history” predicted by ‹gures

like Fukuyama (a perusal of any newspaper today will quickly dispel that

idea) but rather in terms of serious challenges to capitalism as a totalizing

norm, a global way of life.

Leftists living in the early decades of this new century seem to be fac￾ing a series of unpalatable choices in terms of what we can actually do.

One choice, which many have made, is to ‹nd a way to live with capital￾ism, to engage in what once was called “united front” tactics, alliances with

left-leaning liberals in order to stave off the scary alternatives. This tactic,

however, has never worked. When the Left allied with liberals in past

decades, all it got was more liberalism. There is no reason to believe that

such alliances will lead to any different kind of outcome now (especially

when capitalism is ascendant). The election of Barack Obama may help

attest to this. The election of an African American as president surely

ranks as one of the United States’ ‹nest hours in many ways, but Obama

is no radical (to be fair, he never pretended to be one). Many leftists who

put great store in his election have been bitterly disappointed by the com￾promises that he has made, by his own moderateness, and by, well, his lib￾eralism. As I see it, Obama’s election is an example of capitalist homeosta￾sis; after the fangs of capitalism were too brutally exposed (i.e., the Bush

years) a return to a “kinder, gentler” form of authority helps to keep the

entire system intact and operative. Surely it is true that putting any store

in liberals to help us in our ‹ght with capitalism (and, by extension, with

liberalism) is a case of misplaced trust.

Another choice would be to ‹ght for revolution anyway, to ‹ght against

our own temporality and keep alive the original goals and values of the

Left. This is an admirable, brave, and often lonely track, and yet it too seems

sure to lead to just more failure. Indeed, the Left has failed for virtually its

entire history, and even when it has succeeded, it has failed. The short-lived

revolutions of the nineteenth century were inevitably crushed by forces of

reaction. The revolutions in Russia and China that actually succeeded led,

x | Preface

not to radical democracy (although there were moments where that was

achieved) but eventually to dictatorship and misery. The history of left rev￾olution, as Arendt attests, is a history of great, wondrous episodes, sepa￾rated by long decades of reaction, capitalist domination, and failure. Jodi

Dean, whose work I will discuss further in this book, argues that the Left

has fallen in love with its own failure.1 As she suggests, failure may offer its

own kind of solace (a kind of romance of failure), but it does not make for

a viable political alternative to capitalism.

A third choice might be to just wallow in despair, to do nothing and

feel terrible about the world. Certainly there is no end to left despair (the

›ip side of its romance of failure), but this is, by de‹nition, a dead end and

an accommodation to capitalism. Despair in and of itself is not resistance

and it is not political.

Younger leftists, less laden by the baggage of past failures (or even of

past “successes” like the 1960s), are understandably less gloomy about

things. They tend to be more accepting of and interested in acts of micro￾resistance, and many of them have grown up without the expectation of

revolution. There is something to be said for this view, and at the end of

this book, I will take up this question more seriously, but to take this view￾point on its face means, once again, to generally accept that capitalism will

remain the essential bedrock of our political, social, and economic order

for the foreseeable future and then some. We may resist and we may en￾dure; is that enough for the Left today?

Overall, when we think about the Left and its prospects from a his￾torical perspective, from the perspective of all that it sought and all that

once seemed possible, we seem to live in very dark times indeed. One

could be forgiven for asking whether there is in fact even the slightest

modicum of hope.

As I will argue in the following pages, one answer to the hopelessness

of the Left, to our respective despair, indifference, complicity, resistance,

joy, anger, is to give up on (one kind of ) hope altogether. In a famous line

that I will return to repeatedly in this book, Franz Kafka, when asked

whether there was any hope, replied,“[There is] plenty of hope, an in‹nite

amount of hope—but not for us.”2 This seemingly “Kafkaesque” joke

bears, I will argue, a great deal of wisdom and is worth thinking more

about. If we ‹nd that we are trapped by time, facing an endless future of

capitalism without viable alternatives (or perhaps more accurately with

alternatives that are viable but thoroughly unpalatable), perhaps it is hope

itself that is helping us to keep ourselves so trapped. If, as I will argue fur￾ther, we seem truly unable to transcend our temporality, then our hope

Preface | xi

too is a re›ection of this trap—and of our time—a perpetuation of, rather

than an escape from, our conundrum.

In this book I will try to think about another form of hope, speci‹cally

a form of hope for the Left, that is “not for us.”What does it mean for hope

to exist outside of our own subjectivity, outside of our own time? What, if

anything, does this hope do for “us,” such as we are? And who (i.e., what

“not us”) might we have to become in order to bene‹t from such hope?

In order to think further about this question, I turn to the writings of

Walter Benjamin (as well as many other ‹gures that I read via his work) as

a way to begin to think about how to not merely be “ourselves” and in order

to avoid replicating the traps that we are already suffering from. For Ben￾jamin, as I will show further, human beings have always been susceptible to

what he calls “the phantasmagoria,” a miasma of false, idolatrous forms of

reality based on our misreading of the world and its objects. Capitalism for

Benjamin has only ampli‹ed this tendency; through commodity fetishism,

capitalism has produced an elaborate, and false, sense of time and space, a

“reality” that results from capitalist forms of production. So totalizing is

this reality that even the most ardent leftists among us are endowed with a

secret desire for capitalism to succeed; the failures of the Left are, in a sense,

an effect of our participation in the same reality that feeds capitalism. Even

our “hope” for revolution or the end of capitalism is similarly informed by

a dark eschatology that is a product of the phantasmagoria.

In the pages of this text, I will examine Benjamin’s analysis of this

predicament and also consider his possible solution: to ‹ght the phantas￾magoria we must, in effect, cease to rely on our own conscious thoughts

and desires, which are thoroughly complicit with it. We must conspire

against our own tendency toward idolatry, engaging in what I will call a

“textual conspiracy” with the very material objects and symbols of the

world that we otherwise treat as fetishes.

The hope that Kafka identi‹ed, the hope that Benjamin looks to, lies in

a very literal way beyond us, but it is not too far beyond. A hope that is not

for us resides in the very world that we dominate and in our own, already

existing radical democratic (or, as I will later suggest, anarchic) practices

that we do not recognize as such. So long as our allegiance and attention

is oriented toward the idolatrous understandings of politics, community,

and self that are produced by the phantasmagoria, we will not be able to

see that hope lies just within our reach, hence both the need and possibil￾ity for resistance and conspiracy.

xii | Preface

Introduction | Textual Conspiracies

Conspiring against Our Time

If it is true that we live in dark times, that we are trapped by our tempo￾rality, some solace can be taken from the fact that such periods have been

faced before. By the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin was witnessing the poten￾tial victory of fascism across Europe. The only “hope” seemed to come

from the United States, itself a prime instigator of capitalist power. Ben￾jamin did not make much of the difference between fascism and liberal

democratic variants of capitalism (although presumably his attempt to

›ee from occupied France was a de facto recognition that in the latter sys￾tem he would at least be permitted to remain alive). To him, it was all dif￾ferent faces of the same phenomena: unbridled capitalism, a system of

governance based on the worship of commodity fetishism. Such a system

produced, or as least reinforced, the “phantasmagoria” that insinuates it￾self into every facet of human life. In that time, as during our own, there

seemed no hope for revolution, no respite from the ravages of capitalism

in all of its guises.

For Benjamin, the purpose of making comparisons between various

historical moments was not just solace, however, but resistance. It was

during that time, toward the very end of his life, that Benjamin composed

his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a response to this sense of be￾ing trapped by history and time. In that essay, Benjamin famously tells us:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the

way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it

›ashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to

retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man

singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects

both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat

hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In

every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away

from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah

comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Anti￾christ. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of

hope in the past who is ‹rmly convinced that even the dead will not

be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to

be victorious.1

“At a moment of danger” such as Benjamin was experiencing (and such as

we are experiencing in our own time, albeit in an entirely different con￾text) he tells us that we can connect with other such moments in order to

allow us to change our relationship to time. The image of the past we use

is “unexpected” because for Benjamin our conscious minds are themselves

largely products of our time and context. By accepting a particular view of

time and history as constituting reality, we risk “becoming a tool of the

ruling classes,” and succumbing to “a conformism that is about to over￾power [us],” whether we know it or not.

For Benjamin, time is not a continuity but a series of moments inter￾related “through events that may be separated from [one another] by

thousands of years.”2 He tells us further,

A historian . . . stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of

a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has

formed with a de‹nite earlier one.3

Benjamin looks for these “constellations” for the purpose of doing battle.

By resorting to these kinds of transtemporal connections described above,

Benjamin is attempting to circumvent our own compromise, our own par￾ticipation in a sense of time and inevitability that is inherently self-defeat￾ing. In this way, he can be said to be engaging in a kind of transtemporal

conspiracy, one that occurs despite and not because of our own deeply

compromised desires and wishes. It is a conspiracy not only against some

external enemy but even against ourselves, a conspiracy that therefore has

no members even as it is undertaken on behalf of each and every one of us.

The Green Flags of Islam

The conspiracy that I will describe in the following pages is, above all, set

against our own phantasms; it is a conspiracy against our participation in

2 | Textual Conspiracies