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

Abstract This article explores the relation between violence and literature as it informs Benjamin's 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 Benjamin's citation of "Paris Gutted by Fire" in the Arcades Project underlines the articulation of violence and literature that informs the Arcades Project's 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" (Hugo's phrase) amidst the ruins of the commune. For both writers, reading testifies to a divine violence that confounds legal and historical normativity, and Hugo's lines find verbal echoes in Benjamin's 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. Notes 1. The following essay is closely based on a paper delivered at the 2008 conference of the 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. 2. 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 52–54, Derrida, Düttmann, Fritsch 103–39, Hamacher, Lloyd, and McCall. I have also benefited from discussions of Derrida's reading of Benjamin's essay in Fritsch 140–56, De Vries 275–87, and from the discussion of Agamben's reading of Benjamin's essay in Weber 195–208. 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.) 3. 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 'fate's orders themselves that seem to cause and bring about this infringement, this offence'" (248). Commentary on Benjamin's "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 essay's 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 Benjamin's Arcades Project. 4. 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 Benjamin's numerical/ alphabetical markers rather than page numbers. 5. 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. 6. 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 Düttmann (especially 174f.) who reads Benjamin's entire essay as a commentary on positing and depositing. 7. For Benjamin's 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 essay's 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, Gasché 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 Gasché 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 Benjamin's 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). 8. For the German, see Illuminationen 55. 9. "Pure means" sets to work an allusive relation to Kant's aesthetic formula of "zweckmäßigkeit 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 Benjamin's claim (and, as I shall argue, Hugo's) 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 Agamben's equation of divine (or pure) violence and the "pure language" of Benjamin's early speculative essays on language. Weber emphasizes that Benjamin's 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 language's mediality as always moving away from itself rather than turning in on itself (Weber, 197; cf. his earlier discussion of Mitteilbarkeit 40–48). 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. 10. Cf. Fritsch 130 (who recalls both Hamacher and Derrida in this context): "Benjamin's 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. 11. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin notes Blanqui's (premature) "exclamation" at the time of the 1830 revolution: "'The Romantics are done for!'" (a19,7) or "'Enfoncés, les Romantiques!'" (1003). 12. I am quoting from the Blackmores' face‐à‐face translation. The lines appear in "Reply to a Bill of Indictment," "Réponse à un acte d'accusation," 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 development from "ultra" royalist to liberal socialist. Hugo's 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 Hugo's understanding of revolution see, too, Rosa, "Hugo et la Révolution." 13. 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 208–209. 14. Convolute K of the Arcades Project ("The Commune") echoes Marx's 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." 15. Cf. Seebacher's essay on Hugo's Paris as "Capitale de la Violence." 16. Cf. Jellinek 321 and 332 and Horne, 128–129. 17. 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 1870–71 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 Mendès 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 L'Année 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 222–228, Rosa, "Politique du Désastre," and Starr 20–85 as well as Gohin's preface to the Gallimard edition of L'Année terrible. 18. "The Two Trophies," "Les Deux trophées," balances the damage to the Arc de Triomphe by government shells against the destruction of the Vendôme 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. 19. "Les Fusillés," ("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 Fusillés," 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 "[Agrave] Qui la Faute?" and "Les Fusillés" (alongside other poems in L'Année terrible) as offering a kind of meditation on the problem of social diversity and class struggle. According to Hugo's 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 misère to the French senate in the 1840s and again in L'Année terrible – he exposes the program to its own contradictions as if in recognition of a diversity that cannot be universalized. 20. For these lines, I use the English translation that appears in the English edition of the Arcades Project. 21. The stanzas of "Les Précurseurs" ("The Precursors") were originally written for "Les Mages," a visionary tribute to genius that appears in Les Contemplations. (Benjamin quotes a verse from "Les Précurseurs" as the epigraph to Convolute W, "Fourier," citing a brochure on Fourier by A. Pinloche which uses the same lines for its epigraph.) 22. I am slightly modifying the Fahnestock and MacAfee translations. For the French, see Roman II 514. 23. The site of one of the novel's most famous scenes, the labyrinthine sewers of Paris, are themselves described as "Some grotesque alphabet of the East jumbled together, their deformed letters joined to each other" (1260, French 994) as if Jean Valjean's flight through the sewers were another scene of reading. Cf. Benjamin's references to the description of the sewers as an "alphabet of the East" in the Arcades Project L3a, 1. 24. I am indebted to Elissa Marder for drawing my attention to this passage. 25. Cf. Benjamin Selected Writings 4.34 in which he quotes from Brecht's translation of Shelley's Peter Bell the Third: "Hell is a city much like London …" 26. Benjamin's 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.'" 27. 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 Benjamin's refusal of normative temporal and spatial structures … From its very origin (which is not an origin in the usual sense), Benjamin's 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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