European Romantic Review Vol. 20, No.

2, April 2009, 247260

The burning library: Benjamin, Hugo, and the critique of violence

Deborah Elise White*
Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
dwhite2@emory.edu Deborah Romantic 0 200000April 2009 20 2009 & Francis Original Article 1050-9585 Francis EuropeanEliseWhite Review 10.1080/10509580902840533 GERR_A_384223.sgm Taylor and (print)/1740-4657 (online)

This article explores the relation between violence and literature as it informs Benjamins essay Towards a Critique of Violence read in conjunction with two poems by Hugo on the Paris Commune: Whose Fault? and Paris Gutted by Fire. It further considers how Benjamins citation of Paris Gutted by Fire in the Arcades Project underlines the articulation of violence and literature that informs the Arcades Projects account of the dialectical image. Towards a Critique of Violence opposes the revolutionary force of divine violence to the oscillating rhythms of law in which law posits itself in lawmaking violence and maintains itself in law-preserving violence. As an interruptive force that suspends the normative operations of law, divine violence disrupts normative language in a way that corresponds to the modern function of literature. Hugo often seems to offer an analogous pairing of revolutionary and literary violence, but his poems on the commune show how the commune disturbs the coherence between revolution and romanticism that he elsewhere locates within a larger history of progress. At the same time, these poems point to the more radical relation between the violence of the revolution and the violence of the letter that literature foregrounds a literal violence that cannot be assimilated to progress. In particular, the passage Benjamin cites from Paris Gutted By Fire figures reading as an encounter with an unfathomable abc (Hugos phrase) amidst the ruins of the commune. For both writers, reading testifies to a divine violence that confounds legal and historical normativity, and Hugos lines find verbal echoes in Benjamins reflections on the Arcades Project itself and the literary and literal violence that haunts its account of the dialectical image as an image to be read.

To what degree does the critique of violence call for the critique of literature?1 Walter Benjamins essay Towards a Critique of Violence responds to a different imperative. Its opening sentence declares that the task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of presenting its relation to law and justice. For a cause, however effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it enters into moral relations. The sphere of these relations is defined by the concepts of law and justice (236).2 Language features directly in the essays account of nonviolent means as verbal technique (the proper sphere of understanding, language [245]) and obliquely in its account of mythic-legal violence as performative (arising in a verbal challenge that calls down fate [248]), but literature per se seems to remain just outside its purview.3 Yet Benjamins concluding evocation of a revolutionary or divine violence that exceeds all legal normativity may well entail the critique of literature or at least the critique of a certain concept of literature or literariness. In what follows I explore that possibility, and I do so in part through a consideration of two of
*Email: dwhite2@emory.edu
ISSN 1050-9585 print/ISSN 1740-4657 online 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10509580902840533 http://www.informaworld.com

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Victor Hugos poems on the final days of the Paris Commune, Paris Incendi (Paris Gutted by Fire) and Qui La Faute? (Whose Fault?). Benjamin quotes a passage from Hugos Paris Incendi on the burning of the Bibliothque Nationale, the French national library, in his notes for Convolute N of the Arcades Project On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress. In the context of Benjamins reflections on methodology and historiography, the lines serve to allegorize the imbrications of violence and literature that inform the Arcades Project itself. Taking the allusion to Hugo as a cue, one finds a critique of literature that has implications not only for thinking divine violence but also for thinking the relation between divine violence and the now of recognizability (Arcades Project 867) that flashes for an instant in the dialectical image. What is at stake is the convergence of divine violence with linguistic violence including the violence of the letter that literature foregrounds and that the dialectical image cannot elude, for the place where one encounters [dialectical images] is language(N2a, 3).4 Towards a Critique of Violence (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) argues that law originates in a revolutionary act of lawmaking violence which consolidates itself as state power (Staatsgewalt) and reiterates itself in acts of law-preserving violence: All violence as a means is either lawmaking [rechtsetsend] or law-preserving [rechtserhaltend] (243). The necessary lawlessness involved in the act that founds or makes law is justified retrospectively through its law-preserving iteration even as the latter, law-preserving violence (or the legal system), inevitably bears traces of the original lawless imposition of law. But, in Benjamins historico-philosophical narrative (238), law-preserving violence eventually degenerates from its revolutionary origins, dissipating its violent and performative energies. In doing so, it becomes unstable and must therefore give way before a new lawmaking violence. As a result, the history of violence appears to repeat itself in a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving formations of violence (251).5 The cycle can only be broken with the abolition of state power, an abolition, Entsetzung or deposing, that Benjamin equates with the inauguration of a new historical epoch. (252).6 Divine violence is the Entsetzung the breaking of the cycle. Divine violence interrupts the systemic violence of things as they are and initiates the new historical epoch. As Werner Hamacher writes, deposing is a political event, but one that shatters all the canonical determinations of the political and all canonical determinations of the event (115). Even as divine violence opposes itself to law, it is not merely oppositional, for it does not participate in the dialectic of lawmaking and law-preserving, but brings it to a halt, disrupting the instrumental relation of means to ends that informs all law and state power. Divine violence is what Benjamin calls a pure means, a means without end. Like Shelleys Mont Blanc it has a voice to repeal / large codes of fraud and woe but not to assert them. Therefore, its violence is, in a manner of speaking, nonviolent. Arguably, this pure means is already inherent in the act of lawmaking violence that founds, or will have founded, law, but only as a remainder that lawmaking can never subdue to its own ends, however often it reiterates itself in acts of law-preserving violence. As a remainder, divine violence haunts law with its own impossibility.7 For all these reasons, divine violence may also be said to suspend the language or the relation to language which characterizes everyday symbolic negotiations with the world. In that suspension, language takes on an immediate relation to its own mediating or representative powers. Benjamin refers to such powers in The Task of the Translator as the way of meaning, die Art des Meinens, as opposed to what is meant (257).8

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As a way of meaning, language posits itself not so much as its own end, but as a means without end or a reference without guaranteed referents. In doing so, it becomes (or shows itself to be) a pure means the kind of language for which a privileged modern name is literature.9 As pure means, literature haunts the language of representation and information with the power to repeal its claims. It promises access to the divine textuality evoked in The Task of the Translator: Holy Writ in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation. Where the literal quality of the text takes part directly, without any mediating sense, in true language (262).10 In Force of Law, Derridas reading of Towards a Critique of Violence underlines the logic according to which re-presentative, mediating language or language that is technological, utilitarian, semiological, informational becomes, for Benjamin, the site of lethal power (259). The revolutionary situation inaugurates a different language or a different relation to language. For this reason, as Derrida argues, there is something of the revolutionary situation in every reading that founds something new and that remains unreadable in regard to established canons and norms of reading that is to say the present state of reading or what figures the State (with a capital S), in the state of possible reading (271). In any consideration of these claims, romanticism plays a crucial role, for, in a double gesture that only seems ambiguous, romanticism characteristically addresses itself to the claims of revolutionary violence on the one hand and literary language on the other. In the context of French Romanticism, in particular, Victor Hugo makes the most hyperbolic claims for the equation of the political experience of revolution and the literary experience of romanticism, especially in the later part of his career, after Louis Bonapartes 1851 coup dtat when romanticism would have appeared to many of his readers as a dead letter.11 For Benjamin, too, Hugo seems to have missed the date with modernity and he sometimes figures in the Arcades Projects as the anti-Baudelaire of the nineteenth century (cf. J35, 6; d2, 3). But he is perhaps also something more. The Convolut marked with a small letter d is titled Literary history, Hugo as if Hugo were the privileged figure of the literary history that haunts modernity that is, of the romanticism that is never as much of a dead letter as its readers would like it to be. The older Hugo defines romanticism as a literary revolution that brings an end to the diction and the decorum of literatures ancien regime. Yes, I am that Danton, that Robespierre! / Yes, I incited the ignoble valet word / Against his rapiered and noble master (Selected Poems 171). What is at stake is not just the word, but the very alphabet of articulation: I am the destroyer of the ancient A B C D; Je suis le dvastateur du vieil A B C D (164/165; translation modified).12 The equation of literary and political revolution in Hugo is something more than a metaphor. In the 1864 volume William Shakespeare (the first work in which Hugo directly embraces the epithet romantic), he looks back to the generation of 1830 and recalls that critics attacked its rebellion against neo-classical norms as a form of terror, a literary 93 or quatrevingt-treize littraire. His point is that the critics were right:
This epithet, a literary 93, was relatively precise in that it indicated in a confused but genuine way the origin of the literary movement proper to our era even as it attempted to insult it. [] Good news at times require a mouth of bronze. 93 is that mouth. Listen to the tremendous announcement that emerges from it. Lean forward alarmed and softened. The first time, God himself said fiat lux, the second time he had it be said.

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By whom? By 93. So, we men of the nineteenth century, let us seize this insult as an honor: you are 93. But dont stop there. We are 89 as well as 93. The revolution, all of the revolution, that is the source of the literature of the nineteenth century. (Critique 432f.)13

The Revolution announces the terms according to which the century must be understood, for it is the centurys original creative utterance its divine and divinely violent word. As such, it is an utterance at once literary and political or, rather, as the source, it precedes the distinction between literature and politics. And, though writing from exile, Hugo seems comfortable (as Benjamin would not have been) with the capacity of this divine fiat to enter into compacts of founding or institutionalization that both establish new law and inspire the literature of the nineteenth century. Seizing insult as honor, Hugo also implies the necessity of a revolutionary restoration even though, by his own account, the revolutionary source is divided (89 as well as 93). The division prefigures the conflicted character of its return a few years after the publication of William Shakespeare. What happens when the Revolution reasserts itself the second empire falls, the republic is restored and then, in a second violent eruption, interpreted by many at the time as a second 93, it appears both to turn on itself and to turn against literature?14 What happens when the Paris Commune rejects the Third Republic founded at the fall of the second Empire and still more catastrophically rejects the state of reading that Hugo recognizes as literature? These are the stakes of The Terrible Year, LAnne terrible, Hugos month by month verse chronicle of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune. In confronting them, he ultimately confronts the problem of violence as it once again touches and is touched by the ancient A B C D. The volume is dedicated to Paris capital of the peoples (Posie III, 5) a sobriquet that captures in condensed fashion Hugos peculiar mixture of universalism and provincialism even as it looks forward to Benjamins Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century (the title of the two exposs for the Arcades Project). For Hugo, it is the capital of peoples precisely because of its historical relation to revolution. As he wrote for a guidebook in 1869, Paris is the place of the revolutionary revelation the human Jerusalem (Politique 20). As the capital of peoples and the place of revolutionary revelation, Paris is necessarily the capital of literature, the site of new language alongside new rights, new laws (Posie III, 115). Yet throughout his career Hugos writings are also haunted by a vision of Paris in ruins and the Commune, especially in defeat, seems to realize his most apocalyptic fantasies.15 Thus in LAnne terrible Paris is The flame at which we warm ourselves, La flamme o nous nous rchauffons (115), even as the flame gives way to literal conflagrations. Several poems in the volume refer specifically to the conflagrations that arose during the final days of the Commune when a combination of shelling by the national government and arson by the communards set the city on fire.16 The burning of Paris and, more particularly, the burning of the national library confronts the poet with the collapse of his literaryrevolutionary mythology and its sacred capital.17 One short programmatic poem entitled Qui la Faute? takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between the poet-speaker and a (fictive) communard who admits to having burned down the national library. Hugo is characteristically interested in mythologizing events and drawing the moral; the scenario has little relation to how the fires actually began. Most of the poem is given over to the poet-speakers shocked

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insistence that by destroying the library the communard has destroyed his own revolutionary inheritance. The burning of the library is a Crime committed by you against yourself:
The book, hostile to the master, has always been On your side. It always took up your cause. A library is an act of faith. Generations still caught in shadow Who, amidst the night, bear witness to the dawn. Le livre, hostile au matre, est ton avantage. Le livre a toujours pris fait et cause pour toi. Une bibliothque est un acte de foi. Des gnrations tnbreuses encore Qui rendent dans la nuit tmoignage laurore. (133)

By burning books, the communards reduce literature to its material substratum the better to annihilate it. They reject the tradition of knowledge and the self-knowledge that the library promises. The critique is not unlike that of the staunchly conservative anti-communard Catulle Mends reflecting on the Communes demolition of the Vendme column (also the subject of one of the poems in LAnne terrible).18 As Kristin Ross summarizes, for Mends, the destruction of the column abolishes history (7). For the liberal poet-speaker of Hugos poem, the additional frisson is that the history being abolished is or should have been the history that the Commune assumes. Instead, at once patricidal and suicidal, the Commune turns against literature in the name of the revolution and ends by destroying both. These may well be the historical Hugos own views. (They can easily be aligned with the historicist mythologizing of William Shakespeare.) But in this poem at least, he ventriloquizes them at something of an ironic distance. The last line of the dialogue is just half a line of verse the communards response to the poet-speakers speech: I dont know how to read (134). No comment of any kind follows. With this abrupt ending, the poem suggests that however hostile the book is to the master, it remains both an instrument and a symbol of mastery. Even the most revolutionary literature serves to perpetuate class rule not least because it draws the line between those who know how to read and those who do not. Of course, Hugos poem is not intended for the equivalent of his fictive communard who, if he existed, would not know how to read it but for literate middle class readers including many no more sympathetic to the Commune than Catulle Mends. And its implied polemic is fairly straightforward. Whose fault? the title asks. Whose fault that literature no longer guides the revolution? Whose fault that the library burns? It is the fault of the literate middle class, of those who have failed to teach others how to read or who have not even tried to do so. In the exchange between arsonist communard and shocked bourgeois poet, Qui la Faute? contrasts what Z i zek in his recent book on violence calls directly visible, subjective violence performed by an identifiable agent (1) and systemic violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems (2). Such systemic violence paradoxically sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance (1). Following the implications of the paradox, the poems polemic may not be as straightforward as it appears. In contrast to the subjective violence performed by the communard, the systemic violence revealed by the poem is not simply the violence of a failed educational system
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but also the violence that sustains the very effort to improve the educational system, an effort always already implicated in class hierarchies. Therefore, despite Hugos reiterated conviction that education can solve the problems he decries, the poem testifies to a residual discomfort with its own pedagogical humanism. The library, like education itself, provides an anchor for the oppression it supposedly helps to overcome. The communards I dont know how to read unsupported by any narrative explanation or personal pathos registers an opacity or even exteriority within the text that hollows out its liberal polemics. As a violent rejection of the poet-speakers good intentions, it remains as if unfathomable to its implied author and its implied readers as well.19 In still another poem, Paris Incendi, unfathomable violence erupts within the library itself, a violence that somewhat complicates Z i zeks opposition between subjective and systemic violence. Paris Incendi allegorizes Paris as the sacred city of secular inspiration: a flame that speaks; it fills the blue sky / With the eternal departure of its tongues of fire; Une flamme qui parle; il remplit le ciel bleu / De Lternel dpart de ses langues de feu (113). The Pentecostal imagery functions as if to prefigure the violence that has overtaken Paris in reality the literal fire brand or tison (117) that sets the city alight: a torch [that is] miserable, abject, blind, and ungrateful (115). Between the two flames, the logic of biblical typology unfolds in reverse: the spirit collapses into the letter. But the letter itself is also under threat. Almost exactly midway through the poem, Hugo invokes the burning of the national library:
Z] z] [c c o o a [ r a n r n

What! Sacrifice everything! What! The library, arch where dawn arises, Unfathomable ABC of the ideal, where progress, Eternal reader, leans on its elbows and dreams Quoi! Tout sacrifier! Quoi! La Bibliothque, arche o laube se lve, Insondable A B C de lidal, o rve Accoud, le progrs, ce lecteur ternel (115116) 20

Benjamin cites these lines in his notes for Convolut N, On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, of the Arcades Project, describing them as a revealing [verrterisch] vision of progress (N15a, 2). Verrterish implies a tell-tale sign or inadvertent self-betrayal. Presumably, what betrays itself in Hugos lines is the image of progress as a dreamer, since, for Benjamin, the nineteenth centurys belief in progress is one of the signs that it has not yet awoken to reality not yet awoken to the absence of progress that the dream itself perpetuates. As a dreamer, progress inevitably withdraws from the historical experience in which alone it might realize itself. Leaning on its elbows (accoud) it recalls Hugos description of himself leaning on his table, accoud sur ma table, in a short verse preface to LAnne terrible (13). It recalls, too, the precursors who appear later in the volume, geniuses of science, literature, and exploration whom the poet-speaker portrays urgently poised on their elbows as they search for truth: O foreheads whence ideas blaze forth! / On the edge of the abyss, in the depths of the skies, / How many figures leaning on their elbows [accoudes]! (97).21 The latter image reiterates the timeless character of Hugos progress. Adorno, reading Augustine through the medium of Benjamins reflections, comments that If progress is equated with redemption as sheer transcendent intervention, it forfeits any graspable meaning along with the dimension of time, and

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evaporates into ahistorical theology (87). Hugos dreaming progress betrays just such a transcendent, ahistorical vision. But Hugos progress is also a reader who, like himself, must try to determine the relation between the letter and the spirit of the texts it reads. The unfathomability of the ABC of the ideal suggests the overdetermination of the relation of letter and spirit and the final impossibility of translation between literal and figural interpretations of history. In the immediacy of alphabetical inscription, the mediating powers of language stall. One is riveted to a linguistic means without end that is something other than a mere dream. Thus, while the gesture of reading accoud may initially appear as a sign of narcissistic reverie and aesthetic reflexivity, it also serves as a sign of reading that remains painfully affected by the materiality of a signifier that cannot be fully subsumed by self-reflection. In the instant of reading, the events of history can no more be absorbed into the narrative of progress than the letters of the alphabet into the symbolization of history. In his book on Shakespeare Hugo had asked What is the human race since the origin of the centuries? and answered It is a reader. It has long spelled things out and is still spelling them out; soon it will read (Critique 291). The soon it will read promises something more than a painful sounding out of letters. In Paris Incendi Paris initially seems to embody that promise: the great cities of the world have created the alphabet from which Paris writes the book (113). But as the library and Paris burn, the book disintegrates, and progress, the eternal reader, still spells the alphabet of the ideal, endlessly caught in the mediating passage between letter and spirit that is never entirely one or the other. The library itself is an unfathomable ABC and never more so than when it is burning down. Metonymically figuring the books that it contains, the library names the place where a spiritual ideal inscribes itself as a literal mark. For that very reason it becomes an emblem of its own destruction. Progress leans on its elbows to read texts that, as texts, or as literature, draw attention to the gap between the materiality of the letter and the dreams of the spirit. Therefore, they prefigure the experience of ruin or ashes that consumes both letter and spirit in the fires of the commune or, rather, that consumes the literary configuration that brings letter and spirit into contact in the idealizing figure of progress. The burning library is the place where tongues of fire and firebrands of insurrection mutually annihilate one another. Therefore, as a reader of the unfathomable ABC, progress does not so much dream away the revolution as directly enter into its violence. As Derrida observes, reading participates in the revolutionary situation insofar as it founds something new and that remains unreadable in regard to established canons and norms of reading that is to say the present state of reading (271). These two poems, Qui la Faute? and Paris Incendi, thematize the violence of literature in two seemingly quite different ways. Qui la Faute? addresses the systemic social violence of the educational system and its archive. A freer commentary might extend its implications beyond the hierarchizing effects of literacy to those of literary norms, asking not only who knows how to read, but also who knows how to read in the right way? Who controls the archive and its interpretation? In contrast, Paris Incendi foregrounds inscription or the very letter of the literary as an originary archival violence. The latter poem seems, as it were, textual in its presentation of violence, the former contextual. But both poems disturb the very opposition of text and context (as they do the opposition of letter and spirit) even as each in some way implicates the other. As already suggested, the communards I dont know how to read is something of an unfathomable mark. As a literal declaration it can be made

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figuratively meaningful as a polemic on behalf of public education, but as a violent refusal of the poets benign intentions it remains more elusive. And the ABC of reading as it occurs both in and as the library is the occasion of a revolutionary violence, the burning of the library, from which it cannot be entirely distinguished. It figures violence as an exteriority that literally divides the text from within. Hugos novel, Les Misrables, published a decade before LAnne terrible, confirms a literary or literal relay between the violence of the two poems. In Les Misrables the secret political society with which the young hero Marius becomes involved calls itself Les amis de LA B C (The friends of the A B C). The novels narrator explains that the name encrypts a secret meaning. As friends of the A B C the group poses publicly as a club supporting the spread of literacy a politically and socially acceptable cause. But in French Les amis de lA B C is a homonym for the friends of the abased, labaiss: The abased that is the people. They wanted to raise them up. A pun one would be mistaken to laugh at. Puns can be serious in politics (647).22 Labaiss may also be translated as the abject or the wretched; in other words, it is a synonym for Les Misrables as if the very title of Hugos most famous work encrypted a riddling reference to the alphabet.23 Les amis de LA B C testifies at once and undecidably to benign liberal humanism (a campaign for literacy) and revolutionary struggle (a fight for the abased) and in doing so it also testifies to the violence of inscription in which both projects articulate themselves as if they were one and the same. Notably, the law cannot read the revolution that reveals itself in the punning contingencies of the letter. In a different sense than Hugos mythical communard, the police do not know how to read which is why the conspirators of Les Misrables are never arrested (though most are killed during the failed 1832 uprising against the liberal monarchy of Louis Philippe). Puns are serious in politics because the violence of the letter ensures that the canons of meaning necessary to sustain law cannot even sustain themselves. They are serious because they set to work the Entsetzung or deposing that haunts all acts of lawmaking (rechtsetzend) violence. I am suggesting that the letter of the literary, the unfathomable ABC of the ideal, may be a type of Benjamins divine violence or pure means. Benjamin concludes Towards a Critique of Violence by underlining the unreadability of divine violence. Whatever revolutionary promise it brings, it can never be known in its immediacy: But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man is possible, and by what means. Less possible and also less urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases. For only mythical violence [that is, legal violence] not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty because the expiatory power of violence is not visible to man (300). Divine violence suspends all representative and communicative norms which means that no norm exists according to which it can be determined. The literariness that exposes the relation between letter and spirit as an unreadable alphabetical imposition offers a way to think the operation of this structural undecidability. Benjamins rejection of the discourse of progress embraced by Hugo (however ironically) makes any relation between them seem equivocal at best. Yet the lines that Benjamin cites from Paris Incendi in Convolut N still generate striking associations within the Arcades Project and suggest possible points of contact between the critique of violence which is to say, the critique of literature and the later Benjamins reflections on the dialectical image. Margaret Cohen has noted that the

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lines on the National library (the Bibliothque Nationale) in Paris Incendi echo in the conclusion of Benjamins evocation of the Bibliothque Nationale as he describes the Arcades project itself:
These notes devoted to the Paris arcades were begun under an open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the foliage; and yet owing to the millions of leaves that were visited by the fresh breeze of diligence, the stertorous breath of the researcher, the storm of youthful zeal and the idle wind of curiosity theyve been covered with the dust of centuries. For the painted sky of summer that looks down from the arcades in the reading room of the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris has spread out over them its dreamy unlit ceiling. (N1, 5; cf. Cohen 218)

Hugos lines on progress as an eternal reader, dreamily absorbed in the alphabet of the ideal, prefigure Benjamins own experience of the Bibliothque Nationale at a time when European ideals of progress were approaching their nihilistic apotheosis. The association between Benjamins reading for the Arcades Project and Hugos progress as it reads in Paris Incendi only increases with another allusion to Hugo that Benjamin makes in Convolute N, a quotation from La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan) which similarly maps the idylls of nature onto the indoor spaces of learning and the leaves on the trees onto the leaves of a book: Tradition, errant fable one collects, / Intermittent as the wind in the leaves (quoted in N8a, 2). Like the library with its dreamy painted ceiling of sky above the foliage and the Paris arcades as they cut the opening of the street through a block of buildings, the lines from La Fin de Satan disturb the opposition of interior to exterior spaces and texts to contexts. In doing so, they recall Benjamins concern for establishing a means without end in languages immediate relation to its own mediating powers, that is, to powers of mediation that cannot be owned at all because they can never be completely internalized: The interior turned inside-out marks the movement of medialization in Benjamin (Weber 50). Letter and spirit configure the time of reading as a Mbius strip. The allusion to the Satanic is not fortuitous (though one may be doubtful of its titular end). For Benjamin, as for Hugo, the library is on fire. In a 1935 letter to Alfred Cohn, he reports playfully on his success in obtaining permission to work in the enfer of the library: obtaining permission to use it is one of the few successes I can chalk up for myself in this country (Correspondence 493).24 The enfer of the Bibliothque Nationale is its collection of pornography, but enfer literally means hell and hell had long served Benjamin as a privileged name for the worse depredations of modernity.25 Working in the enfer or, for that matter, invoking La Fin de Satan, Benjamin locates himself in the fires of reading. Like Hugos progress, Benjamin reads while books burn. He reads the better to fathom the violence that threatens reading from inside-out, for the image that is read, that is, the image at the now of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, dangerous impetus that lies at the source of all reading (N.3, 1; my emphasis). The image that is read is the dialectical image, which is also to say, the enigmatic methodological hinge of the Arcades Project. I do not propose to explicate it here, but only to recall that, like the ABC of the ideal, the dialectical image confirms the necessity of the link between the critique of violence and the critique of literature.26 Like divine violence and like the letter of the literary, the dialectical image suspends the powers of representation. It thus suspends the instrumental teleology of historical interpretation that moves from prefiguration to fulfillment or from letter to spirit.27 In the dialectical image, letter and spirit collide in the undecidable violence of a

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chiasmus between past and present in which things-as-they-were abruptly enter into the now of recognizability and become something altogether new in the process: It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash [Blitz] with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill (N3,1). As with divine violence one may find that it is less possible for humankind to decide when exactly the image has been authentically realized. The now of recognizability erupts in a Blitz, a lightening flash, and it subsides just as quickly, recognizable no longer. One must catch the revolution on the fly or watch it go up in flames or, more likely, both at once. For just this reason, the image at the Now of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, dangerous impetus that lies at the source of all reading. For Benjamin, as for Hugo, one must track the impetus of reading, as far as it can be tracked, to the divinely violent source of danger an unfathomable ABC. Notes
1. The following essay is closely based on a paper delivered at the 2008 conference of the

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism on the theme of Romanticism and Diversity and hosted by the University of Toronto. I thank the organizers of the conference for their hospitality and David Clark for organizing the special session on the critique of violence at which I spoke. In preparing the text for European Romantic Review, I have benefited from the searching questions posed by Rei Terada and Joshua Wilner during discussions in Toronto. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Benjamin refer to volume 1 of the Harvard Selected Writings. For the German text of Towards a Critique of Justice, see Benjamin Zur Kritik der Gewalt. The essay has inspired an extensive literature to which my argument is indebted. I have especially benefited from Agamben 5254, Derrida, Dttmann, Fritsch 10339, Hamacher, Lloyd, and McCall. I have also benefited from discussions of Derridas reading of Benjamins essay in Fritsch 14056, De Vries 27587, and from the discussion of Agambens reading of Benjamins essay in Weber 195208. See, too, the essays collected in the Cardozo Law Review (13.4) on the topic of Walter Benjamin: Justice, Right, and the Critique of Violence the first section of an issue On the Necessity of Violence for Any Possibility of Justice. (I comment further on several of these texts in the notes below.) On the illocutionary or performative character of the initial challenge to fate, see Fenves Testing Right, 1105f. and McCall 188ff. As Benjamin specifies, the verbal challenge to fate already gives evidence of the power that fate holds over the challenger. He quotes Hermann Cohen who has spoken of the inescapable realization that it is fates orders themselves that seem to cause and bring about this infringement, this offence (248). Commentary on Benjamins Towards a Critique of Violence often discusses it in conjunction with his early essays on language On Language as Such and the Language of Man and The Task of the Translator (see below, notes 9 and 10). With this perspective in mind, I aim to clarify the essays relation to an idea of literary language or literariness that can be traced through the example of Hugo and the place of that example in Benjamins Arcades Project. All quotes from the Arcades Project in English refer to the Arcades Project and those in German to Das Passagen Werk. For ease of reference I give Benjamins numerical/ alphabetical markers rather than page numbers. As commentators frequently remark, the semantic complex of Gewalt already implies the dialectical rise and fall that Benjamin describes; Gewalt can mean both violence and its consolidation in forms of power as in Staatsgewalt or state power. See, for example, Derrida 262, 264f.; Fritsch 214, note 1; Havercamp, How to Take it, 1159; Lloyd 349. Fritsch usefully underlines the ambiguity of any claim to inaugurate a new historical epoch in the context of an argument in which divine violence can only depose not impose law (125ff). On the difficulties of deposing (or depositing) cf. Hamacher 115f. and Dttmann

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7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

(especially 174f.) who reads Benjamins entire essay as a commentary on positing and depositing. For Benjamins references to pure or unalloyed means, both translations of rein, see 244 and 245; for a reference to unalloyed violence, see 252. Some readers differentiate divine violence as invoked in the essays final section from the pure means that it describes earlier and locates in a verbal sphere of human understanding that remains outside the law and in the proletarian general strike. See, for example, Gasch 1123: pure means, because they are still means, cannot ever hope to untie the binding circle of law as divine violence does. As I read the essay, one cannot absolutely locate divine violence either inside or outside the dialectical oscillations of law an impossibility that prevents the essay from falling entirely prey to the messianism that it nonetheless solicits. As Gasch argues, the word means is precisely the wrong word for divine violence (as is ends), but for that very reason one may also read divine violence as an (impossible) pure means. As a pure means divine violence is already implied in Benjamins earlier invocations of pure means such as the proletarian strike (to which he alludes again in the final discussion of divine violence on page 252) just as it is already implied in the power of law-making violence to originate what it cannot master. (On pure means see, too, note 9 below). For the German, see Illuminationen 55. Pure means sets to work an allusive relation to Kants aesthetic formula of zweckmigkeit ohne zweck which confirms the relay between divine violence and modern notions of literature. On hearing the paper on which this essay is based Rei Terada suggested that the pure means associated with literature may always be instrumentalized to serve the ends of literature itself or (as I understand the implications of her comments) its construal of itself, even its interest in itself, as self-referential and thus disinterested. With literature the means to its own ends, a certain version of aestheticization seemingly subsumes the interruptive force of divine violence that I align with the letter of the literary throughout this essay. However, the radicalism of Benjamins claim (and, as I shall argue, Hugos) may well open up the possibility of thinking literature and the aesthetic as a means that cannot be entirely subsumed even to self-referential or aestheticizing ends. Samuel Weber addresses a related set of issues concerning self-reference in his discussion of Agambens equation of divine (or pure) violence and the pure language of Benjamins early speculative essays on language. Weber emphasizes that Benjamins account of communicability cannot simply be equated with self-referentiality without closing off the opening of language beyond itself. Language is communicable or mitteilbar which Weber translates as impartable, and impartability characterizes languages mediality as always moving away from itself rather than turning in on itself (Weber, 197; cf. his earlier discussion of Mitteilbarkeit 4048). My reading of Hugo and, more particularly, the Hugo cited by Benjamin aims to elucidate how literary language stages the purity of a means without end in such a way that the literary text ceases to be an expression of itself, or a means to its own ends, but, to quote Weber, operates a movement that separates from itself and yet in so doing establishes a relation to itself as other (197). Literature cannot entirely instrumentalize its workings on its own behalf any more than the law can. It always involves an elemental remainder that imparts itself, however unpredictably, as and to an other. For a related but differently inflected reading that emphasizes the temporality of pure means as one in which all final purposes withdraw or are suspended, see Fenves Out of the Order of Number, 45ff. Cf. Fritsch 130 (who recalls both Hamacher and Derrida in this context): Benjamins notion of a pure language (reine Sprache), expounded in the essay The Task of the Translator, might thus be said to correspond to the notion of pure violence. Cf. Agamben 62f. and De Vries 281ff. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin notes Blanquis (premature) exclamation at the time of the 1830 revolution: The Romantics are done for! (a19,7) or Enfoncs, les Romantiques! (1003). I am quoting from the Blackmores face--face translation. The lines appear in Reply to a Bill of Indictment, Rponse un acte daccusation, in Les Contemplations. One may assume that Hugo has not forgotten that early French Romanticism often aligned itself on the side of reaction not revolution; he retrospectively chooses to situate it within a larger, more encompassing narrative, one that implicitly includes and explains his own political

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development from ultra royalist to liberal socialist. Hugos increasing identification of his poetic project with revolution takes a number of different forms over the course of his career and is discussed throughout the critical literature on his work. For a recent series of compelling analyses, see Laforgue. For an overview of Hugos understanding of revolution see, too, Rosa, Hugo et la Rvolution. Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hugo in the remainder of this essay are from the Laffont edition with individual volumes identified by title. I identify passages from the poems by page number only. All translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are my own. For a discussion of the lines concerning 93 as fiat lux see Guerlac 20. Cf. Brombert 208209. Convolute K of the Arcades Project (The Commune) echoes Marxs criticism of the commune as too much under the spell of the Jacobin tradition. Cf. k1, 3: The Commune felt itself to be, in all respects, the heir of 1793. Cf. Seebachers essay on Hugos Paris as Capitale de la Violence. Cf. Jellinek 321 and 332 and Horne, 128129. In The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross shows how the commune challenged wider cultural assumptions about literature as a specialized sphere of activity. Although the Hugo of 187071 partly participates in such assumptions, he remains committed to a direct link between the political project of the new republic, the aspirations of Paris, and the literary heritage that underwrites them both. Unlike, say, the reactionary Catulle Mends with whom Ross opens her analysis, Hugo cannot simply reject the commune anymore than he can simply embrace it. His immediate personal solution was to retreat to Belgium to wrap up the financial affairs of his son Charles whose funeral had taken place in Paris exactly as the uprising began on March 18th. For a fuller account of how Hugo figures the commune as an interpretive crux or cipher for historical understanding in LAnne terrible and Quatrevingt-Treize (Ninety-Three), see my essay, Untimely Revolutions: Victor Hugo and the Spectre of the Date. On Hugo and the commune generally, see Albouy 222228, Rosa, Politique du Dsastre, and Starr 2085 as well as Gohins preface to the Gallimard edition of LAnne terrible. The Two Trophies, Les Deux trophes, balances the damage to the Arc de Triomphe by government shells against the destruction of the Vendme Column by the communards as examples of the mutually annihilating and self-annihilating madness of the civil war. For Hugo (unlike Mendes) both sides have cut themselves off from the history of the Revolution. Les Fusills, (The Executed or, literally, The Shot) offers another particularly striking example within the same volume of a poem in which the speaker voices a progressive discourse that the poem (and, in Les Fusills, the speaker himself) at least partly problematizes. The poet-speaker of the latter poem reflects on the poor that were executed summarily on the streets of Paris during the final bloody week of the Commune. He argues that the middle classes must act on their behalf and yet, at the same time, presents them as uncanny figures that his words can never fully comprehend or address. One may read Qui la Faute? and Les Fusills (alongside other poems in LAnne terrible) as offering a kind of meditation on the problem of social diversity and class struggle. According to Hugos reiterated political and social program, the gulf that separates the classes should be superficial, subject to at least partial dissolution with the spread of education on the one hand and employment on the other. But, at various points in his writing for example, in the attempt to articulate misre to the French senate in the 1840s and again in LAnne terrible he exposes the program to its own contradictions as if in recognition of a diversity that cannot be universalized. For these lines, I use the English translation that appears in the English edition of the Arcades Project. The stanzas of Les Prcurseurs (The Precursors) were originally written for Les Mages, a visionary tribute to genius that appears in Les Contemplations. (Benjamin quotes a verse from Les Prcurseurs as the epigraph to Convolute W, Fourier, citing a brochure on Fourier by A. Pinloche which uses the same lines for its epigraph.) I am slightly modifying the Fahnestock and MacAfee translations. For the French, see Roman II 514. The site of one of the novels most famous scenes, the labyrinthine sewers of Paris, are themselves described as Some grotesque alphabet of the East jumbled together, their

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

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24. 25. 26.

27.

deformed letters joined to each other (1260, French 994) as if Jean Valjeans flight through the sewers were another scene of reading. Cf. Benjamins references to the description of the sewers as an alphabet of the East in the Arcades Project L3a, 1. I am indebted to Elissa Marder for drawing my attention to this passage. Cf. Benjamin Selected Writings 4.34 in which he quotes from Brechts translation of Shelleys Peter Bell the Third: Hell is a city much like London Benjamins concept of the dialectical image has inspired an enormous literature. For a still important introductory account, see Tiedemann and, for a more recent overview, Cohen. For a discussion that specifically emphasizes the readability of the image and its location in language, see Havercamp, Notes on the Dialectical Image. Cf. Marder on the negative teleology of the Arcades Project: [] the more the project advances, the further it recedes from the horizon of an imaginable end. In this figure of negative teleology we can already discern the faint traces of Benjamins refusal of normative temporal and spatial structures From its very origin (which is not an origin in the usual sense), Benjamins Passagen-Werk demands to be read through its relentless resistance to the familiar categories of production and completion (185). The phrase negative teleology suggests another way of thinking or translating pure means. Taking up different issues than I do here, Marder also explores the conjunction of reading and danger in the Arcades Project (190ff.).

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