Remains To Be Seen. - Review - book review

But then, recursively, how is it that Emerson constitutes a now of recognition for me? (Herman Melville's image of a "shock of recognition" would have interested Benjamin.) I might say it is because of the way I read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, the only part completed for publication signed in 1945, after various rumors and dictations to pupils over more than a decade, published with editorial addenda in English in 1953, followed by a stream of Nachlass. It was not until 1960 that I had found the now of legibility (or a now of legibility) for Wittgenstein's work. And how shall I know that my conviction was or is sound? It might help to say that it is confirmed in noting that Benjamin's redemptive reading invokes the idea of rescuing phenomena. This is a way of indicating how I put together Wittgenstein's remarking, "What we do is to lead words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use," with his observing, "We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the 'possibilities' of phenomena." This latter observation, as I argued a lifetime ago, virtually quotes Kant's idea of critique, but unlike Kant, for whom our possibilities of phenomena are fixed, Wittgenstein's vision is rather of human existence as perpetually missing its possibilities; put otherwise, as captivated by false necessities. One of Benjamin's definitions of "basic historical concepts" is: 'Catastrophe--to have missed the opportunity." Thoreau sometimes puts the perception comically, once, in Walden, when depicting his being interrupted in reading Confucius: "There never is but one opportunity of a kind." I note that Benjamin declares that his comments are saturated with theology, if necessarily inexplicitly, and that Wittgenstein advised a student to read Philosophical Investigations from a religious point of view.

Then I should not forbear seeking, or questioning, another of my nows in the antitheological Freud (not unrelated to a certain rescuing of Freud in the philotheological Lacan), when early in the Introductory Lectures, Freud confesses: "The material for [the] observations [of psychoanalysis] is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant--the dregs of the world of phenomena." This picks up Benjamin: "Method of this project: [ldots] I shall purloin no valuables.[ldots] But the rags, the refuse--these I will [ldots] allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them." (Freud's dregs and Benjamin's refuse are each interpretable with Wittgenstein's ordinary; the differences are where I come in.) But ours does not seem to be a time in which for many people Freud is legible, or usable. Nor is it a propitious time for the later Wittgenstein, nor for the other philosophers of missed possibility I have cited. None has the intensity of prestige that Benjamin's work seems to have acquired. If this is true, is it because Benjamin now brings something seriously new, unheard of, which would have to mean, for him, some other access to the archaic? Is it somehow his old capacity for having to be cared for taking hold on a large scale? Does it express our drive to reparation for having missed him? Is it that his isolation, expressed in his unforgettable suicide, is now to become legible?