The politics of Benjamin’s laughter at melancholy

Abstract

Following Agamben’s distinction between Adorno’s melancholy science and Benjamin’s Pauline Messianism, the present study aims to shed light on Benjamin’s project through scrutinizing his recourse to Brecht which was regarded by Adorno as ‘crude thinking’. Benjamin’s encounter with Brecht helps him to formulate laughter as ‘a trigger for thinking’ that retains, through a ‘spectral materialism’, its dialectical struggles with the surplus enjoyment of melancholy. This materialism moves from melancholic passivity toward revolutionary politics by causing in the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ of the conquerors’ unrelenting interruptions that are the ‘strait gate’ through which the undead ghosts of the past are de-animated for the Messiah to enter.

Keywords:

• Melancholy
• Dialectic
• Messianic
• Enjoyment
• Mediation
• Laughter

Notes

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Vol. 1 (A&C Black, 1973), p. 23.

2 Adorno calls his thoughts ‘melancholy science’ in his dedication of Minima Moralia to Max Horkheimer: ‘The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend … ’ (15).

3 Stanley Mitchell, ‘Introduction to Understanding Brecht’. in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, translated by Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 2003), p. ix.

4 Mitchell, op. cit., p. xiv.

5 Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (Verso Books, 2009), p. 22.

6 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 23-4, emphasis added.

7 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978), p. 247.

8 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., p. 3.

9 ibid.

10 Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 38.

11 ibid, 35.

12 ibid, 37.

13 ibid, 38.

14 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940 (Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 389.

15 ibid, 37.

16 ibid, 39.

17 ibid, 41.

18 ibid.

19 ibid.

20 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., p. 5.

21 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 144.

22 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, op. cit., p. 395.

23 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, transl. by Anna Bostock, introduced by Stanley Mitchell (London: Verso, 2003), p. 88.

24 Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, op. cit., p. 140.

25 ibid, 137.

26 G. Lukacs, ‘On Walter Benjamin’, in Judith T. Marcus and Zoltan Tar (eds) Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research (Routledge, 2020), pp. 173-178.

27 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 86.

28 ibid, 87.

29 ibid, 87-8.

30 ibid, 93.

31 ibid, 91.

32 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (University of California Press, 2002), p. 26.

33 We will present a psychoanalytical reading of this melancholy later in this essay.

34 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 95.

35 Eagleton, Marxism, op. cit., p. 58.

36 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 89.

37 ibid, 93.

38 ibid, 96.

39 ibid, 95.

40 ibid, 93-4.

41 Eagleton, Marxism, op. cit., p. 44.

42 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 95-6.

43 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New Yourk: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 83-4.

44 ibid, 88.

45 ibid, 89.

46 Mitchell, op. cit., p. xvi.

47 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 90.

48 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 60.

49 Walter Benjmain, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938 (Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 105.

50 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 90.

51 ibid.

52 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 31.

53 ibid.

54 ibid.

55 Benjamin, Illuminations, op. cit., p. 92.

56 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, op. cit., p. 268.

57 Interestingly, Benjamin poses the same argument in his ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater’. He talks about the children liberating their imagination through the proletarian theater and says that through this play their childhood will be fully realized, therefore no longer do they carry an extra burden ‘with them in the form of overemotional childhood memories’ which ‘may prevent them’ from acting in ‘unsentimental’ ways later (205).

58 Benjamin, Illuminations, op. cit., p. 194.

59 ibid, 161.

60 ibid, 157.

61 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 35.

62 The relation between ‘montage’ and ‘shock’ is also significant to Benjamin for this reason, since montage ‘became for him the modem, constructive, active, unmelancholy form of allegory, namely the ability to connect dissimilars in such a way as to “shock” people into new recognitions and understandings’ (Mitchell xiii).

63 Benjamin, Illuminations, op. cit., p. 257-61.

64 ibid, 157.

65 Walter Benjamin, One-way Street: And Other Writings (Verso Books, 2021), p. 214.

66 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 78.

67 Theodor W. Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics (Verso Books, 2020), p. 183.

68 Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, op. cit., p. 131.

69 Adorno et al, op. cit., p. 187.

70 Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, op. cit., p. 131.

71 quoted in Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (Verso Books, 2017), p. 62.

72 ibid, 63.

73 Adorno et al, op. cit., p. 183.

74 ibid, 183.

75 Quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 (Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 128.

76 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 3.

77 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 63.

78 ibid.

79 ibid.

80 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 81.

81 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (Polity, 2006), p. 141.

82 Slavoj Zizek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso Books, 2012), p. 219-20.

83 Adorno et al, op. cit., p. 194.

84 Adorno, History and Freedom, op. cit., p. 141.

85 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 169.

86 Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (Routledge, 2013), p. 122.

87 Adorno et al, op. cit., p. 194.

88 Eagleton, Marxism, op. cit., p. 36.

89 ibid.

90 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 41.

91 Agamben, The Time that Remains, op. cit., p. 61.

92 ibid.

93 Benjamin, Illuminations, op. cit., p. 264.

94 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), p. 141.

95 ibid, 142.

96 Agamben, The Time that Remains, op. cit., p. 69.

97 ibid, 100.

98 ibid.

99 ibid, 71.

100 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Melancholy and the Act’, Critical Inquiry, 26.4 (2000), pp. 657-681.

101 Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life (University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 80.

102 Benjamin, in ‘Central Park’, quotes Gottfried Keller, using a phrase that clarifies the ambivalence of melancholy: ‘petrified unrest’. This indicates both the manic side of melancholy (its ‘unrest’), and its ‘death’ and ‘coldness’ (‘petrified’).

103 The significance of shock, ‘as poetic principle’ in Baudelaire’s poems should also be understood in such a context: ‘the fantasque escrime (fantastic duel) of the city of the tableaux parisiens which is no longer home. It is a showplace and quite foreign’ (Benjamin, ‘Central Park’ 42).

104 ibid.

105 These descriptions by Santner are closely in line with Benjamin’s conception of ‘flaneur’ in his essays ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ and ‘Central Park’.

106 Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (MIT Press, 2003), p. 47.

107 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 141.

108 Zupancic, op. cit., p. 48.

109 ibid, 47.

110 Santner, op. cit., p. 83.

111 Zupancic, op. cit., p. 49.

112 Santner, op. cit., p. 81.

113 R. Comay, 'The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism' in Andrew Benjamin (eds) Walter Benjamin and History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), pp. 88-101.

114 ibid, 93.

115 We will present a theoretical explanation of the relation between fetishism and melancholy through Agamben and Santner later.

116 Zupancic, op. cit., p. 50.

117 Santner, op. cit., p. 86.

118 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 19.

119 Santner, op. cit., p. 88.

120 Santner, op. cit., p. 88-9.

121 Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 13.

122 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1 1927-1930, edited by Micheal W. Jennings et al. (Belknap, 2005), p. 383.

123 Zizek, ‘Melancholy and the Act’, op. cit., p. 660.

124 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (U of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 20.

125 Santner, op. cit., p. 91.

126 Zizek, ‘Melancholy and the Act', op. cit., p. 658.

127 Santner, op. cit., p. 91.

128 ibid.

129 Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), p. 41.

130 Adorno, History and Freedom, op. cit., p. 139.

131 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 458.

132 ibid.

133 ibid, 459.

134 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 143.

135 ibid, 144.

136 Benjamin, Illuminations, op. cit., p. 254-55.

137 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 145.

138 ibid, 146.

139 ibid, 148.

140 Agamben, The Time that Remains, op. cit., p. 141.

141 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 159.

142 ibid, 50.

143 ibid, 162.

144 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), p. 32.

145 Benjamin also quotes Brecht in the article ‘What is Epic Theatre? [First version]’: ‘In this way we could very soon have a theatre full of experts, as we have sports stadiums full of experts’ (Understanding Brecht 4). Moreover, Benjamin in ‘What is Epic Theatre? [Second version]’ writes: ‘The concept of epic theatre (developed by Brecht, the theoretician of his own poetic praxis) implies, above all, that the audience which this theatre desires to attract is a relaxed one, following the play in a relaxed manner’ (Understanding Brecht 15).

146 In Brecht on Theatre, in the section ‘Fun is catching’, Brecht writes about the difference between Shaw and other European writers who consider writing to be ‘a melancholy business’: ‘Shaw would agree with me, at least, when I say that he likes writing. Even on his head there is no room for a martyr’s crown of thorns. His literary activities have in no way cut him off from life: quite the opposite. I am not sure if it is any measure of his talent, but I can only say that the effects of his inimitable cheerfulness and infectious good mood are quite extraordinary. Shaw actually manages to give the impression that his mental and physical well-being increase with every sentence he writes’ (46).

147 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931-1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings et al. (Belknap, 2005), p. 779.

148 Brecht, op. cit., p. 277.

149 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 171.

150 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, op. cit., p. 84.