Chapter 1: Walter Benjamin’S Briefcase

Chapter Two:

The Brief Case of Benjamin Walter—A Trunk Call

His last archive remains a secret: the

briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried

over the Pyrenees in September 1940 is

lost… Only one document that was

transported in it survives . . . Any more

detailed information is lacking. What is

certain, however, is that the briefcase

had some sort of texts by Benjamin in it.

Walter Benjamin’s Archive1

Each day and every hour, the telephone

was my twin brother…There was

nothing to allay the violence with which

it pierced me. Powerless, I suffered,

seeing that it obliterated my

consciousness of time, my firm resolve,

my sense of duty. And just as the

medium obeys the voice that takes

possession of him from beyond the

grave, I submitted to the first proposal

1 that came my way through the

telephone.

Walter Benjamin, “Berlin

Childhood Around 1900”2

Gershom Scholem . . .

telephoned me. . . . “The

manuscript doesn’t exist.” No

manuscript. No one knows a

thing about the heavy, black case

containing the work that was

more important to Benjamin than

anything else in the world.

--Lisa Fittko,

Escape through Pyrenees, 114

There is no off switch to the technological

Avital Ronnell, The Telephone Book3

And always in the name of the salvation of the trace, here of the manuscript to be saved, at the instant of death, during the Second World War, the following, which

Michel Lisse brought to my attention: “Whatever happens, the manuscript must

2 be saved. It is more important than my own person.” (Walter Benjamin to Lisa

Fittko, cited by Bernard Witte, Walter Benjamin: Une biographe, trans. Andre

Bernold [Paris: Le Cerf, 1988, p. 253)

Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg

(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000), endnote 16, 113.

It begins always and again with a briefcase, or with the mention of a briefcase and its relation to a manuscript—a manuscript that will be said to be more important than a man’s life.

Stanford, California. 1980. “Professor Chimen Abramsky was on sabbatical leave,”4 writes Susan Buck-Morss, in the Afterward to The Dialectics of Seeing, “when he met Lisa Fittko, a seventy-year-old, Berlin-born woman, who told him she had led Walter Benjamin over the Pyrénées to Spain forty years before. She remembered well that he had carried a heavy briefcase, containing a manuscript more important, Benjamin said, than his life.” Abramsky tells

Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s friend and one of his literary executors. Scholem calls Fittko “[on May 15, 1980] and records from her the following story.” There’s a change of state. The briefcase becomes a phenomenon to be inquired into, to be tested for. This call acquires a precise date. Notes are taken. The conversation, at least Fittko’s half of it, is transcribed. Chance meetings give way to purposed calls.

But the briefcase and the manuscript go missing. The bearer is also, of course, missing. He went missing either by his own hand or from causes pronounced natural, but he was missing long before he died, as he fled the Nazi

3 advance along with millions of other “bare lives”—stateless and fatherless

(apatrides), paperless, and on the run. Fittko helps Benjamin reach Port Bou, but he discovers that such papers that he has are voided overnight. The customs post receives a call perhaps—more likely a telegram punctuates his flight. “End of the line.” Terminus. Burial.

His grave goes missing too—when the rental of a niche in the cemetery at

Port Bou arranged by Henny Gurland, his fellow traveler, expired, Benjamin’s bones were likely translated to a communal grave. First there was a grave. Then there was not. Now there is a monument—a place to visit, to pay homage. But there remains, somewhere, (perhaps) still now, the incompetent surplus of a manuscript, which may be, as Rolf Tiedemann maintains, as prosaic as another copy of “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that Benjamin had already mailed to Theodore Adorno, trusting it to the parcel post in Paris on …1940, or as valuable (perhaps) as a “text on the Arcades project.” “Given his microscopic handwriting,” as Tiedemann observes, it’s hard to judge the heft of this manuscript even though Fittko found the bag very heavy. Killjoy Scholem

“believes the possibility cannot be ruled out ‘that for reasons connected with what happened after Benjamin’s death, to which she referred ony vaguely…’ Mrs

Gurland might have destroyed the letter.” “Detailed information,” as the laconic editors of Walter Benjamin’s Archive suggest, “is lacking.”

But, nevertheless, the mere mention of a briefcase and of a manuscript, missing or not, that is said to be more important than a “life,” offers a structure of referential possibility that is almost impossible to ignore. For to do so, would

4 seem to abandon Benjamin once again, to leave him stranded at Port Bou, paperless, to allow him to die, again. Retrieve the manuscript, open the briefcase, reduce it merely to a container, exhausting it in the process, and we who have survived to read Benjamin will have perhaps in some sense “saved” him or some part of him. We will have made good on what minimally begins to manifest in Scholem’s very sensible note-taking protocol that seeks to prepare for or to make thinkable the phenomenalization of what remains, otherwise, always, in its mode of appearance, referential. Of course, the briefcase remains closed. It is missing and so is the manuscript that it is said to have contained.

Perhaps they were both destroyed. Perhaps they are both off in some archive somewhere awaiting discovery. Insert your preferred outcome here. And so, the triadic figure of a briefcase-manuscript-life remains, doubling or troping the dyadic grave-monument coupling, as a destabilizing but incompetent surplus, the figure of a surplus (perhaps) re-activated every time it is recalled.

Winking in and out of existence, amped up by the eventalizing ring of the telephone, or more insistently still, by the figure of the missed message only now being heard and no longer capable of being returned, the news of Walter

Benjamin’s missing briefcase, missing manuscript, missing grave, and missing life, constitute an almost irresistible haunt for his readers. And it is hard, wrong, to find fault with anyone. Such habits or attachments are hard to break for “just as the medium obeys the voice that takes possession of him from beyond the grave,” as Benjamin puts it, so we “submit…to the first proposal that [comes our] way through th[is] telephone.” We are all taken by it and all of us are compelled

5 to respond. Of course, when Benjamin recalls his own childhood as mediated by the telephone and seeks to capture its spirit life, the way, as Avital Ronell puts it,

“the telephone cannot be regarded as a ‘machine’ in the strict sense of classic philosophy, for it is at times ‘live’” or “at least ‘life’ gathers in it,” he does so to offer his childhood as a lens that makes visible, via time lapse photography, as it were, the telephone’s migration through the bourgeois house. Inverting the apparent rules of the genre, childhood becomes a topos or staging ground rather than a retrievable content. To read his short telephonic memoir is to watch and listen as the calls of the telephone, muffled and nocturnal, grow to a more insistent, triumphant front room ring of the fully instantiated and owned up to

“thing”—which gathers all to it and brooks no interruption. “Each day and every hour,” he writes, “the telephone was my twin brother. I was an intimate observer of the way it rose above the humiliations of its early years. For once the chandelier, fire screen, potted palm, console table, gueridon, and alcove balustrade—all formerly on display in the front rooms—had finally faded and died a natural death, the apparatus, like a legendary hero once exposed to die in a mountain gorge, left the dark hallway in the back of the house to make its regal entry into the cleaner and brighter rooms inhabited by a younger generation.”

The telephone redeems itself—but only for future generations, for it was not always the hero that it becomes. Benjamin is of course present in the story, his childhood is to be vividly gleaned from the descriptions, but he subsists, now and then, in the infrastructure of the house and the worlds connected with it by the telephone. His story lies in the focalization that as child he provides.

6 Taking our cue from Benjamin’s staging of both the telephone and his childhood, we aim to inhabit the ideological which is to say the tropic or tele/tropical structure of this figural briefcase, eschewing the desire for disclosure, that is for phenomenaliation over reference, that it activates in favor of the metonymic satisfaction of its sides, dimensions, lines, and accretions—that is to say its performances in the texts generated by so many of its readers. In what follows, then, when the phone rings or when we replay the message, we give ourselves over to the various performances of the briefcase and the manuscript it is said to contain and in doing so hope that our continuous re-s/h/elving of it might constitute a type of lost and found office, at which all claim checks may be presented, as long as claimants will make do with retrieving merely a reading and by that retrieval our insistence that what counts will be nothing less than the necessity of a reading, that is of dealing head on with the ideological ripples or winking, the “confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism,” as Paul de Man once put it, that the briefcase-manuscript-life

“thing” anchors.

Before he died, Benjamin placed four telephone calls.

Sometimes the reader is aware of the prior traffic. Sometimes she is not.

“The story is by now so well known that it barely needs to be retold,” apologizes

7 J. M. Coetzee, in 2001, marshaling the briefcase as placeholder for a review of the then recently published volumes of the Complete Works in English. “The setting,” he goes on “is the Franco-Spanish border, the time 1940. Walter

Benjamin, fleeing occupied France, presents himself to the wife of a certain Fittko he has met in an internment camp. He understands, he says, that Frau Fittko will be able to guide him and his companions across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain.

Frau Fittko takes him along on a trip to scout out the best routes; he brings along a heavy briefcase. Is the briefcase really necessary, she asks? It contains a manuscript, he replies. 'I cannot risk losing it. It…must be saved. It is more important than I am.'5 The escape goes wrong. Papers are refused. Benjamin dies. The briefcase is lost. The manuscript is lost also. “What was in the briefcase,” continues Coetzee, “and where it disappeared to, we can only guess.

Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem suggested that it was the last revision of the unfinished Passagen-Werk, known in English as the Arcades Project.” Thankfully then, Coetzee manages to give “the story… a happy twist.” That is as long as publication is taken as a happy ending. “A copy of the Arcades manuscript left behind in Paris had been secreted in the Bibliothèque Nationale by Benjamin's friend Georges Bataille. Recovered after the war, it was published in 1982 in its original form, that is to say, in German with huge swathes of

French. And now we have Benjamin's magnum opus in full English translation, by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, and are at last in a position to ask the question: Why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in nineteenth-century France?”

8 Anthropologist Michael Taussig is just plain tired of the briefcase

It is perhaps an understatement to suggest that the writings of Walter

Benjamin constitute a contested series of objects within criticism or philosophy.

Setting aside, for a moment, what they actually might be said to say, there remains sufficient difficulty in approaching the texts themselves merely as texts.

What are the limits of his archive? How should it be understood and staged? To a certain extent, the appearance of the five volume Rolf Tiedemann edition of the collected works in German (1968) and their translation into a four volume English edition and a separate volume of The Arcades Project (1999) might be said to have settled the issue, making available the majority of the published texts and those which exist only in manuscript. That said, as the editors of Walter

Benjamin’s Archive (2006) make vividly clear, any rationale for inclusion that stops at publication or which takes modest common sense of linearity as its guide risks rationalizing, in effect, what appears, in retrospect, a continuous project of writing and overwriting, of producing paper objects from which singular, temporalized textual performances might be sloughed off into this or that present, in response to this or that thing, event, potential moment.

It may seem obvious and easiest merely to agree that, given the curious relationship of Walter Benjamin to the great variety of operations and techniques we call “writing,” that we should simply include the total production of his hands, the total production of all the limbs, body parts, and bodily substances (why not?) with which he might have said to have written, and include, thereby, all the

9 books, essays, journalism, manuscripts, notes, lists, inventories, boxes, folders, index cards, scribbles, doodles, ink blots, bus tickets, etc. Why not include also the impressions left by paper clips (fig. 1) that we imagine he placed there, on this sheet of paper, for a reason or just because? The problem that remains, however, is how then to process our exposure to this total archive, our exposure, if you like, to the self-mediatizing of Walter Benjamin as he translated or failed to translate himself into paper and was subjected to the exigencies of the writing machine then and now? This archivalization proceeds only on condition of its interruption. Not surprisingly, then, the problem turns out to be an economy of reading, of what to read and of what not to read--the archive constituting a mirror and a window in which what we see reflected are the routines or protocols by which we produce various Walter Benjamins. Some of us detect leitmotifs in his work, rendering him via that operatic figure and so growing him anew by translating him to the growing medium of a Wagnerian Petri Dish.6 Some of us detect a practice or operation which evolves, in which we see Benjamin giving

“different names” (allegory, translation, the machinery of cinema, materialist historiography), translating him via the “bewitched spot” we might call form and history in Anglo-American criticism.7 Some of us do our best to have him read himself, “the posthumous fate of Benjamin’s lifework,” writes Richard Wolin, in carefully chosen words, “confirms his own conviction that every product of culture experiences an autonomous post-history by virtue of which it transcends its point of origin.” For him, which is to say for the Walter Benjamin that Wolin tries to conjure within himself, “his oeuvre does not present itself as a harmonious

10 synthesis…it assumes the form of a ruin.”8 Some of us read him by his own pronouncements on media and inventory him by his writing practices, processing him as collector, writer, doodler, and pack rat.9 As we hope is clear, while we might like some of these growing media and some of the Benjamins so grown more than others, what we wish to register is that all of us are engaged in an essentially similar set of endeavors.

Walter Benjamin resists. Hell, he resists himself. Why not then, simply concede and read each of his textual operations as a sometimes concerted, sometimes idle, sometimes botched or interrupted, attempt to intervene in the general or generative text by which the West constitutes the cadre of beings it takes as its own and which it processes as other.10

It is for this reason that we attempt to stage Walter Benjamin’s archive not outside or beyond the antinomies of presence and absence, monument and ruin, or intentional ruin as monument, but within them, rendering the infra-archive via the figure and materialization of the self-storage unit. It is in the nature of such units to be abandoned, even as what is abandoned within them is retained. But such units, we suggest, productively sideline or read between the lines of the metaphysics of storage and retrieval, setting such issues in motion, unraveling them as a series of metonymic chains that form and which proliferate along lines of transit. In Benjamin’s case, these lines of transit include the circuit of cities

(Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Naples, Marseille) and islands; the timetables of trains and boats; the opening times or availability of depositories, human-ish (Arendt,

Bataille, etc) and not (La Bibliotheque National); the price of postage; the cost of

11 placing a telephone call; the stops and searches of the police, and the Gestapo; the possession or dispossession of the wrong papers; the terminus or failed interchange, Port Bou; the grave (missing and apocryphal); and the monument.

Some questions occur. When we speak of storage units, are you to understand that there is still the possibility of organization? In a word, “yes.” Are they the product of a conscious intention? “Of course, though that intention is no longer proprietary, merely custodial.” Do they units offer a melancholy ruin?

“Why, absolutely, they are sad and happy but, don’t worry, we’re here to offer s/h/elf help!” Do they come with a devastating figural and ideological cost? Well

—what do you think? “Really, it’s funny you should ask us. Obviously, you’re getting the hang of things. But the question, for us, is a little different. The question is rather what order or form of life do they make thinkable, what kind of response to living by the living do they encode.”

The Trunk Call S/h/elving (Topos)

Within the Benjamin archive, the topos or tele-topical figure for the metaphysics of storage and retrieval that condition the emergence of his texts must surely be the briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried across the Pyrenees in

September 1940. This briefcase, which disappeared following his death

The briefcase promises reading matter even as it voids the posiblity of reading. It fuels and funds the desire for more text even as it frustrates that desire, and demands that the reader substitute another text by Benjamin or their

12 own text for what remains missing. The briefcase stages the possibility of a simple end or destruction of reading even as it demands its continuance.

However important the life, which has long since ended, this manuscript has gone missing. The briefcase has gone missing also.

This briefcase belonged to Benjamin Walter who died, as the official record shows, at 10.00pm on September 26, 1940 in his room at the hotel,

Fonda de Francia, in Port Bou, Spain. “Benjamin” is a popular Catalan first, although here it seems appropriate to write “Christian” name. And so, it is assumed that in death, at least, Walter Benjamin was processed as if a Christian, and his name reversed. On September 25, Walter Benjamin had crossed the border with a small group of refugees by an old smuggler’s path, only then to discover that “their transit visas for Spain, which had been valid until then, had been made null and void overnight on the orders of the government, and that all refugees from France had to be sent back at once.” (254). As the record shows, and as his burial in a Catholic cemetery would seem to confirm, the artefactual

Benjamin Walter, at least, died of natural causes. Walter Benjamin died, perhaps, from natural causes also. Or, as is conjectured from the remembrances of those who encountered him in his last months, weeks, and days, perhaps, his death was suicide. This we will not know. This, though it concerns us, we will not inquire after.

13 What attracts us, as it has attracted almost all of his readers and critics, is the briefcase. The briefcase

Call Collect

As Susan Buck-Morss tells us, in the Afterward to The Dialectics of

Seeing sub-titled “Revolutionary Inheritance,” “Professor Chimen Abramsky was on sabbatical leave in Stanford, California in 1980, when he met Lisa Fittko, a seventy-year-old, Berlin-born woman, who told him she had led Walter Benjamin over the Pyrénées to Spain forty years before. She remembered well that he had carried a heavy briefcase, containing a manuscript more important, Benjamin said than his life. Mindful of the potential significance of her account, Professor

Abramsky notified Gershom Scholem in Israel, who telephoned Lisa Fittko [on

May 15, 1980] and recorded from her the following story.” Working from

Scholem’s transcription of the telephone call, cited in Rolf Tiedemann’s German edition of Benjamin’s collected works, Buck-Morss places or stages the call. But there’s no dialing, no fingers doing the walking, no ring, just a series of clicks […], a bit of static in the places where the transcript and Buck-Morss’s further transcription fails, or the conversation was interrupted. Fittko’s own account appeared in German in 1985, but the English translation would not appear until

1991. But here comes the call now.

Click […]. No pleasantries. No salutations. The call has already been received and we’re simply on the line, listening in to Scholem listening to a

14 woman talking, describing her present past, describing the man that was his friend, recalling his words, and Scholem, placing the call in order to be on the receiving end, finally getting the call that Benjamin never placed, but which now, nevertheless he receives. In a telepoietic economy, Fittko figures not as telephone but as switchboard, operator, and receiver. She speaks and Benjamin speaks through her. When you hear these words in your head, supply whatever order of voice seems right:

I noticed that Benjamin was carrying a large black briefcase […] It looked

heavy and I offered to help him carry it. “This is my new manuscript,” he

explained. “But why did you take it for a walk?” “You must understand that

this briefcase is the most important thing to me,” he said. “I cannot risk

losing it. It is the manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I

am.”

Mrs Gurland’s son, José—he was about 15 years old—and I took turns

carrying the black bag and it was awfully heavy […] Today, when Walter

Benjamin is considered one of the century’s leading scholars and critics—

today I am sometimes asked: What did he say about the manuscript? Did

he discuss the contents? Did he develop a novel philosophical concept?

Good God. I had my hands full steering my little group uphill; philosophy

would have to wait till the downward side of the mountain was reached.

15 What mattered now was to save a few people from the Nazis; and here I

was with this—this Komisher Kauz, ce drôle de type—this curious

eccentric. Old Benjamin: under no circumstances would he part with his

ballast, that black bag; we would have to drag the monster across the

mountains.

Click […] End of call. Buck-Morss switches codes. Augment the call with different media. There is a letter from Mrs. Henny Gurland, fellow-traveler with Benjamin, who makes it out with her son, and who writes a letter to her cousin on October

11, 1940, describing the circumstances of their escape and Benjamin’s death. In the letter, Gurland recounts that during the night of his death, “Benjamin had asked for me. He told me that he had taken large quantities of morphine at 10 the preceding evening and that I should try to present the matter as illness.” He gives her a letter for Theordore Adorno, which she can’t quite relate, having destroyed it while in transit: “It contained five lines saying that he, Benjamin, could not go on, did not see any way out, and that he [Adorno] should get a report from me, likewise his son.” Later, Gurland will revise her memory of the letter so that it reads, “‘Please transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and explain the situation in which I find myself placed.” “Did these thoughts refer to the manuscript in the briefcase?” wonders Buck-Morss, going on to tell us that when

Max Horkheimer made inquiries of the Spanish border police in 1940, he was told that his “‘personal effects taken into custody consisted of ‘[…] a leather briefcase of the type used by businessmen, a man’s watch, a pipe, six photographs, an X-ray photograph [radiografia], glasses, various letters,

16 periodicals, and a few other papers, the contents of which are not noted, as well as some money.’” “No mention of a ‘heavy’ manuscript,” she writes, “the ‘few other papers’ have not been preserved. Nor was his grave marked or tended.”

(334). Here Buck-Morss draws the parallel, make the connection, equating the missing manuscript, the missing briefcase, the missing grave, and the life gone missing that is Walter Benjamin become Benjamin Walter.

But news of the missing manuscript proliferates—generates its own compensatory pages, calls, letters, conversations. “Scholem believes the possibility cannot be ruled out ‘that Mrs Gurland might have destroyed this manuscript […].” “Tiedemann cannot agree.” In the “‘more more than a quarter of a year’ that Benjamin spent in southern France…he had ‘time enough to complete a short or even somewhat lengthy manuscript,’ and that ‘it could have concerned scarcely anything else than a text on the Arcades project.’” Given

Benjamin’s “‘microscopic handwriting,’” anything is possible. Perhaps it was a copy of Theses on the Philosophy of History that he’d committed to the postal service while still in Paris. Perhaps it was something else.

Buck-Morss backs off, dials down the drama. End of call. We only have the Arcades project, she observes because “ironically,” Hitler decided not to destroy Paris. And if, indeed, Scholem was right, and the missing briefcase had contained a revised plan for the Arcades project, well, she remarks, in another much less ironic but no less insistent irony, “then this opus…was destroyed by a woman who feared desperately for her son’s safety, and for her own.” Fair dues, she seems to say, rejecting Benjamin’s figuration of the manuscript and its

17 briefcase as more important than “himself” or better still, another self or selves.

The cost would be too great. “You must understand,” she seems to say, rewriting but never reading Benjamin’s telepoietical formula, and addressing all of us,

Scholem, Tiedemann, Adorno, and all of Benjamin’s readers, “this briefcase is not the most important thing for me. It is lost. We can’t risk finding it.

“One month before Benjamin’s suicide,” she goes on, raising the ante still further, “his own son Stefan, five years older than José Gurland, escaped with his mother to England. He survived the aerial bombings, settled in London as a book collector, married, and had his own children. This afterward is dedicated to them, Benjamin’s granddaughters, and to the memory of an evening in their

London home when we read to each other from their grandfather’s collection of nineteenth-century children’s books.” Substituting lives for papers, Buck-Morss declines Benjamin’s call or chooses to respond to it in the manner of the evening she spent in London with his book collecting descendents, returning to child-like things, to borrow Benjamin’s own phrasing from his work on toys, not last things.

Click […]. Buck-Morss shuts the briefcase—suspends its routine, its program. Or, more correctly, she embarks on her own telepoeitical gambit, inviting her hosts that night, and her readers in every today to accept this afterward, this lack of conclusion that nevertheless marks the end of a book, in lieu of the missing briefcase and the missing manuscript. “In One way Street,” she recalls,

“Benjamin wrote [that] ‘[…A]lready today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card filing systems. For everything essential is to be found in the

18 note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own note file’” (336). It’s these kind of boxes, she implies, that Benjamin has left us, and we would do well to respond to them in the way he imagines here in One Way Street. “He has left us ‘everything essential’,” she observes, the Arcades project “is a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection of concrete, factual images of urban experience. Benjamin handled these facts as if they were politically charged, capable of transmitting revolutionary energy across generations. His method was to create from them constructions of print that had the power to awaken political consciousness among present-day readers. Because of the deliberate unconnectedness of these constructions, Benjamin’s insights are not—and never would have been lodged in a rigid narrational or discursive structure. Instead, they are easily moved about in changing arrangements and trial combinations, in response to the altered demands of the changing ‘present.’ His legacy to the readers who come after him is a nonauthoritarian system of inheritance, which compares less to the bourgeois mode of passing down cultural treasures as the spoils of conquering forces, than to the utopian tradition of fairy tales, which instruct without dominating, and so many of which ‘are the traditional stories about victory over those forces.”

What can we do here except agree with this wonderful formulation of the

Arcades project as a necessary ruin in the manner of the Trauerspeil? It would be an error, we think, to hear in Buck-Morss’s deployment of the toy, of the child

(the doubled figure of José / Stefan), the grand-daughters, and of “fairy tales” any

19 trace of sentimentality. For in these gestures we read a desire to come to a reckoning with whatever perhaps occurred at Port Bou in 1940 and which recurs every time someone mentions a briefcase, and to embark on a translation of the arcades project that as Sam Weber has taught us, is unconcerned by questions of fidelity or betrayal, which is unconcerned by the retrieval (perhaps) of an interpretive key that will unlock doors, codes, and provide superlative credentials, and which instead fixates on the after-life of the project, on the project as it lives on in “our own note file[s].”

We were wrong, then, to suggest that Buck-Morss does not accept the call

Benjamin places through Fittko—it is more the case that in accepting it, she declines the party line, accepting the news that a reading of Benjamin enjoins us to our own telepoietical and perhaps telepolitical acts.

Just the sound of a woman speaking, a woman describing—or the look of a woman describing—supply whichever voice which was placed — which by the end will have staged Benjamin’s archive not as paternal legacy so much as remainder or left-over, the project as fragment, fragmenting further into so very many pieces of paper, boxes, dossiers, folders, konvoluts which demand our reading, inhabiting, and retasking, “, Susan Buck-Morss places the call, or stages the call that inaugurates the brief case of Benjamin Walter, the specular reversal of the Walter Benjamin who died at Port Bou on September 25-6, 1940. This

20 Benjamin Walter was buried as a catholic (Benjamin is a popular Catalan first or, for here it is appropriate, Christian name,

Weber and Agambern on which Benjamin—how to remember him: Critique of

Violence….and mediality…

1. Who’s skull is this?

It is almost impossible to read of Walter Benjamin’s last days or to encounter the debris of his passing on September 26, 1940 and not to seek after some redemptive gesture, some way of remedying the evacuation of a life into so very little, so very few “last things”—some of which are lost, some of which remain.

An inventory of Benjamin’s possessions was made as part of the inquest concerning the cause of his death on October 5 in Figueras. These include “‘a leather briefcase like businessmen use, a man’s watch, a pipe, six photographs, an x-ray picture, glasses, various letters, magazines, and also some money.’”11

The translation of his last acts, his last hours, and the handling of his body into a few receipts made out for the man they called Benjamin Walter and whom the authorities in Port Bou buried as a Catholic, offers little more—just a few prosaic, sometimes clinical details that are hard to reckon with: a “four-day stay [at the

Hotel de Francia] that includes five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse…disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress;” a “receipt made out by the physician [Ramón Vila Moreno] for seventy-five pesetas for his injections and taking the blood pressure of the traveler,” as well as for a blood-letting; a receipt “tendered by the carpenter to the

21 Judge in Port Bou for making a cloth-lined coffin;” “a receipt that includes eight pesetas for the work of a bricklayer closing a niche in the cemetery;” a receipt

“made out by the priest dated October 1, 1940, for ninety-six pesetas, six of which were for a mass for the dead man and seventy-five for ‘five years’ rent of a niche in the Catholic cemetery.”12

As is frequently noted, Hannah Arendt, herself fleeing the Nazis, was first on the scene, but was unable to locate Benjamin’s grave. In a letter dated

October 21, 1940, addressed to Gershom Scholem, she writes “it was not to be found; his name was not written anywhere.” No “Walter Benjamin.” Not even his specular reversal, “Benjamin Walter.” Nothing. Still, she describes the cemetery facing the bay as “by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have seen in my life.”13 “Many years later,” writes Scholem, who did not travel there, “in the cemetery Hannah Arendt had seen, a grave with Walter Benjamin’s name scrawled on the wooden enclosure was being shown to visitors.” “The photographs before me,” he continues, “clearly indicate that this grave, which is completely isolated and utterly separate from the actual burial places, is an invention of the cemetery attendants, who in consideration of the number of inquiries wanted to assure themselves of a tip.” “Visitors who were there,”

Scholem ends, “have told me that they had the same impression. Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” Case closed. Scholem, who does not travel to Port Bou, who does not make inquiry of the cemetery attendants, recognizes the beauty of the scene but side-steps the confusion or condensing of a sublime landscape with the incompetent technics of less a fake than a tacked

22 on (apocryphal) or retrospectively necessary grave. He knew the man. He was his friend. He makes no pilgrimage.

In 1979, as Benjamin’s biographer Momme Brodersen tells us, a small plaque was erected in the cemetery” (figure 1). Then, in 1990, a monument was commissioned by the AsKI (Arbeitskreis selbständiger Kultur-Institute) and designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan. Brodersen’s description of the monument, titled Passages, remains the most exact and is worth quoting at length:

Its centerpiece is a flight of 70 narrow steps cut into the cliff at the

seaward side of the cemetery, running down at an angle of 30º through

rusty iron walls to a dizzying dead-end overlooking the rocks and sea

below. A glass screen terminates the passage: compelled to retrace their

steps, visitors turn to face the cemetery and, before emerging from the

tunnel, are confronted by a wall of undressed stone, set in axial extension

of the corridor into a rock-face surrounding the cemetery forecourt. The

sea, the cemetery: no way out. Engraved into the glass that blocks the

passage is a single quotation from Walter Benjamin’s theses On the

Concept of History. “‘It is more arduous to honour the memory of the

nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to

the memory of the nameless.’”14

Understandably, with the erection of this breath-taking monument (figures 2 and

3), the Benjamin-inspired traffic through Port Bou has increased. Generations of his readers and interpreters come to pay homage, make pilgrimage, or to puzzle

23 why exactly they have come here or have felt the need to come here. As anthropologist Michael Taussig observes, the monument, which seems far too static a word for this conveyance, “passage,” or translation tool, seems to lead its visitors into the “fosa común—the common grave” into which Benjamin’s bones were likely deposited following the expiration of the rental of a niche in the cemetery. The downward motion mimes a descent into the underworld, a descent into a common grave “where even if you were buried at first with a name,” Taussig continues, “you end up nameless.” Turning to face the sky, the monument “compels” visitors to turn around, blank out, draw a blank, confronting them with a square of sky or worse the sun, the absence or wound of a passing.

For Taussig, this “blank” inaugurates an identification with the victims of such regimes and a hard, drained climb back out of the grave—the brute circumstance of Benjamin’s death redeemed as the occasion, topos, or “spot,” for all the nameless or “bare” lives that have died in camps, on borders, in their homes, or in transit. The monument literally now become a site of translation, translating his absent or disseminated bones qua public relic as the bones of all.

Quite how the experience of Karavan’s monument might do more than stage a necessary decoupling of theory and praxis even as it perhaps eventalizes that dilemma is unclear to us. Visitors, though “compelled” (to quote the careful Brodersen’s word again) experience merely a temporary askesis or emptying out before their resurrection—papers and passports intact. Quite how this yoking of technics and the natural differs from the earlier scrawl that Scholem supposed was the concession of a few cemetery attendants eludes us also.

24 Surely, the lesson here lies in an altered set of formal engagements by which the events of World War 2 are mediatized, captured by a mode of production? Quite how the responses of those readers of Benjamin accredited, like ourselves, as academics differ from those of differently accredited readers or simply tourists who make a holy day of retracing his steps, who blog about their days on the road, about where to eat, what to do in the time that remains when the cemetery is closed, who make the mistake of staying over, or who read their guidebook and drive in, for Port Bou is such a “dump,” or who, perhaps, strong egos that they are, counter-identify with such prejudices and opt for the rental or purchase of a local villa whose realtor trumpets its proximity to this “known site,” we do not know. But in saying this we cast no aspersions, we make no judgments. Memory is difficult. The past is harder still. We all require s/h/elf-help.

“Cemeteries,” as Taussig notes “exist to ensure at least the appearance of a direct bond between name and body” but as Scholem remarks, in a sentence which disavows the chiasmus in favor of the figure of a disconnect or a blockage

(it is the last sentence, the last words, in his memoir to his friend: terminus):

“Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” Refusing the folding together of the sublimity of the “spot” with the technics of the grave marker, or perhaps what he takes to be the gesture implied in Arendt’s formulation, he pulls the “spot” apart, keeps things separate, offers no consolation. Following

Scholem, then, when we are “compelled” to turn and look up to the sky in

Karavan’s monument, we see neither the faithful nor the botched translation of

Benjamin’s bones, but instead the figure of a blockage, not testimony so much as

25 an inhuman index to the untranslatability of a death and a life other than via the proliferation of a chain of variously mediatized “things,” which are already fragments, fragments of what was and what tremains a fragment still. “There is,” as Avital Ronnell writes, “no off switch for the technological.” “When you’re on the telephone there is always an electronic flow

In a letter dated 26 May 1939, the German Embassy in Paris had been informed that the Gestapo’s request for Walter Benjamin’s expatriation had been granted.15 Following the German invasion of France in May 1940 and the rapid clos, The succession of visitors to Port Bou, some fleeing for their lives, There is the gravestone…

Knock. Knock.

“Who’s there?” Memory is difficult. But, she’s sure about times and places. “It was the twenty-fifth of September 1940, in a narrow garret in Port-Vendres.”16

She’d “lain down to sleep a couple of hours earlier,” but the “knock on the door w[a]kes her.” “The grey morning light [filters] through the high attic window” and she thinks “‘That can only be the little girl of the house from downstairs.’ The knock comes again.” She “g[e]ts up drowsily and open[s] the door.” Not a girl.

She “rub[s]…her eyes—before [her]…stood Walter Benjamin, one of the friends who, like many others, fled Marseille as the Germans overran France. ‘Der Alte

26 Benjamin,’” “Old Benjamin,” [she] called him, though she can’t remember why

—“he was only forty-eight or so.”

Benjamin is all politeness: “‘Gnädige Frau,’” “Please forgive this intrusion

—I hope this is not an inopportune time.” Her “honored spouse,” “‘Ihr Herr

Gemahl’,” has told him: “she will take [him] over the border to Spain.” And so here he is. “The world is falling to pieces,” she thinks, “but Benjamin’s courtesy is unshakeable.”

As with her command of times and places, Benjamin’s politeness is the second constant. Both serve as anchoring points for Lisa Fittko’s memory writing that by their maintenance in her accounting of the past, become features of the world she summons into being, referential spin offs that resonate as clearly as the knock on the door that begins the katabasis. The young girl from downstairs turned inside out, ages, morphs by the rubbing of her eyes into the uncannily

“Old Benjamin”—the man who once upon a time spoke so politely to her, and who now, dead and gone, speaks again. The moment for them was always

“inopportune.” There is no good time to be had here. He died. She lived. And she guided him to his death—as he asked her to do.

This is no memory game, no “knock, knock” joke. Lisa Fittko is trying hard, trying to reckon with what did and did not occur that night and the nights thereafter. She’s hearing his voice again, rendering it as best she can, embarked, as she is, on a reckoning, a coming to terms with a past that permitted no self storage, for which she lacks s/h/elf-help. She’s not sure now about her reactions to this man who seems to come from another time, who she designates as “alte,”

27 who was frequently out of breath, who slowed her down, and who’d fallen prey to escape “plans involving fantasy boats and fictitious captains, visas for countries not found on any map and passports issued by nations that did not exist” (105) back in Marseille. She and her husband, Hans, “had to laugh,” she writes, “time and again at the humorous side to such tragedies. One has to imagine Dr. Fritz

Frankel, with his fragile appearance and his grey mane of hair, and his rather awkward friend, Walter Benjamin, with the intellectual scholar’s head and the searching gaze behind thick lenses—this pair dressed as French sailors, had bribed themselves aboard a freighter” (105). “They didn’t get far,” she adds, but

“luckily they succeeded in evading capture in the general chaos.” They laugh because of the absurdity of the two men’s incompetent mimesis. They laugh because “bare life,” if one is to live, must be barely lived, which means being prepared to slough off, at a moment’s notice, those things normalized as

“everyday items” (now luxuries) and those stories one tells oneself about how the world is supposed to work (ideology). If as Benjamin writes in “The Critique of

Violence” the institution that patrols this zone, the police, is constituted as a “kind of spectral mixture,”17 an “ignominious” institution which uses “violence for legal ends (in the right of disposition), but with the simultaneous authority to decide these ends itself within limits (the right of decree),” whose “power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states,” then so also must its suspects turn ghostly and learn to fade. Agamben on the camp here.

28 This “fading” is not a strong but a weak mimesis. Never a full identity, but just enough traces of sameness so as not to be noticed, to pass in the shadows cast by ones fellow travelers. Hans and Lisa Fittko do not laugh because Frankel and Benjamin looked silly in their sailor suits or handled it badly in Marseille. The instructive part of their botched mimesis lies in their escape, in the luck that comes with confusion and chaos, with the press of so much “bare life” moving barely. The ghostly fading required of those persons who are no longer processed as citizens constitutes not a powerful counter-technology, but instead an almost intolerable giving oneself over to the infra-worlds in which bare life is forced to live, a giving oneself over to a world in which the police enforce and decide the law in one breath, and in which one’s ability to influence the circumstances, to slip through, depends on this or that piece of paper. Hans and

Lisa Fittko take rightful pride in their mastery of the vast array and hierarchy of papers that punctuate the bare lives of those persons deprived of citizenship in

WW2 Europe —the passport (which they lack), the visa, the carte d’identité, the sauf-conduit, the refus de sejour, the foreign exchange permit, and so on— papers, without which, life, movement, flight became impossible.18 But these papers are not simply so much matter, not simply objects that one hands out or points to—supplements to this or that identity that they guarantee. Not at all, these are papers whose redundancy, whose lack of remarkability, communicates the salient message: “There is nothing to be read here.” Send the bearer of these papers—which are the true interlocuter with the police or customs official— on his or her way. Move along. “Alles in ordnung.”

29 Later in her story, Lisa Fittko narrates an episode in which the granting of a sauf-conduit permitting her to travel is held up by a group of friendly gendarmes and representatives of the Mayor’s office in Babyuls-sur-Mer who feel hamstrung because she does not have the requisite “Pièce d’Identité” demanded by the form. “Then the adjutant said to the sergeant, ‘If right after the printed ‘Pièce d’Identité’ you simply wrote by hand: Pièce d’Identité, you’d be sticking to the truth; at a checkpoint they’d surely think you must have made a mistake and really intended to write Carte D’Identité—especially since her husband has one” (161-2). “Everybody found that to be brilliant,” because it was.

Mimesis remains, as Benjamin wrote, years before in “On the Mimetic Faculty,”

“the…capacity for producing resemblances.” And this capacity remains “the rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” (333). But, here, in Banyuls-sur-Mer in 1940 that compulsion takes the form of a mimicking of the human boredom, fatigue or inattentiveness generated by the infra-world of papers. Write “Pièce” instead of “Carte” and the reader notes the error, the difference, but fails to read it, for he or she knows what it is to be one of those police ghosts, how boring, tiresome, and fatiguing it all is. So the official in Banyuls granting the sauf-conduit tuned out and copied out the form itself. It’s easily done. And her husband’s is correct. On you go.

It’s against this world of papers and the altered relationship to things that is the experience of bare life, that Benjamin’s politeness registers. But is it a fault or a style? Early on in her story, following their internment after the invasion of

France, Lisa and her friend Paulette once “made a list of all the things [they]

30 should need” (8). “Finally…[Paulette] wrote down what each of us should bring for herself.” Here’s the list:

Toothbrush

A pot with a handle, a spoon

Lipstick

Razor blades (in case there was no other way out) (9)

It’s understandable then, that a man with a briefcase might stand out, that a man with a briefcase he will not give up might cause annoyance, a lack of comprehension, anger. The third constant is the briefcase.

The Briefcase

On their way out of Banyuls on the afternoon of September 26 to reconnoiter the route to Spain as advised by Mayor Azéma, Lisa Fittko “saw that Benjamin carried a briefcase” (106). “It appeared to be heavy, and I asked if I could help with it.” “‘It contains my new manuscript,’ he explained to me.” “‘I dare not lose it.

The manuscript must be saved. It is more important than I am, more important than myself.’” Lisa Fittko recalls that Benjamin had had this briefcase with him in

Marseille when disguised as a sailor. He will not be parted from it. When they’d gone a third of the way, Lisa Fittko turns back but Benjamin refuses to return to the village. He tells her that “his decision to spend the night in the clearing was irrecovable, because it was based on simple, logical deliberation. His goal was to cross the border so that he and his manuscript would not fall into the hands of the Gestapo. He had attained one-third of this goal.”

31 For Lisa Fittko, the briefcase and Benjamin’s attachment to it signifies as a problem. The briefcase slows him down, makes them all slower. It limits his ability to disappear. “Maybe his will to live was malfunctioning” she remarks, thinking forward towards his terminus. “At a perilous moment, in which direction would his singular mode of thinking steer him?” (107-8). It’s hard to say. For Lisa

Fittko’s account of her memory is so determined by the fas

So begins Lisa Fittko’s attempt to reconstruct her meeting with Benjamin in 1940. He’s sought her out at her “honored spouse[‘]s” urging—as Lisa will

“take you over the border to Spain.”

It begins always and again with the mention of a briefcase—a briefcase that remains closed even when opened, which fails to deliver its contents even as those contents have been subject to inventory.

“His last archive remains a secret: the briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried over the Pyrenees in September 1940 is lost. Only one document that was transported in it survives—an authenticated letter from May 8, 1940, in which Max Horkheimer confirms Benjamin’s membership of the Institute for

Social Research in New York, and confirms that his researches have proven to be extremely helpful for the Institute.” (1)

Grave Digging

32 Collect Call

“And today, it is the same with the human material on the inside of the arcades as with the materials of their construction. Pimps are iron bearings of this street, and its glass breakables are the whores. Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver. BA 59

“The panel purposely has a bullet hole near the bottom, and a huge crack across the center, evoking shocking violence and violation. It’s an amzing vision to come down at the bottom of the interior staircase, down the oxidized path to nowhere or everywhere: you can see, all at once, the blue-green sea, steep cliffs across the bay, the nearby Pyrenees, and the reflection of the sky and clouds overhead—to say nothing of your own dark shadow. Lamentably, the day I visited the site, it looked depressingly forlorn, with litter, stones, straws, and cigarettes in the passageways, familiar debris from our own storm of progress”

Andy Merrifield, MetroMarxism 190-191.

Stalin thing

33 Zizek on Stalin Thing

Benjamin’s Grip

“I have chosen the format of direct speech to present an easily grasped and humanizing view…” (xv)

“a blend of autobiographical and biographical impulses” (xvi)

“I decided to deal with my four subjects through selected sketches, which are not necessarily chronologically connected. In this instance my choice was based on themes that in my opinion have hitherto been largely underrepresented or even misrepresented in their otherwise over documented biographical records”

He does it because modern mathematician are forbidden access to the old dialogue traditions of Renaissance humanists.

Parnassus = “ultimate recognition of literary, musical, or intellectual achievement”

“Four Men” Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement—Adorno has called these four men together (4) “What have I got to do with Benjamin or Scholem?”

Benjamin is a smarty pants, and wants to know where he’s buried. “It was Sept.

26, in my anno diaboli 1940 when I killed myself in Port Bou (Chuckles to himself.) It took my death to put that fishing village on the tourist map. If I’d waited one day…or had come a day earlier, I could’ve crossed into Spain” (5).

He takes umbrage with Lisa Fittko calling him “Der alte Benjamin” (6)

34 “Agesilaus Santander” + biographers (7)

Scholem takes Benjamin to task for turning a dialogue into a lecture…(8)

“So what’s the gist of your self-reflective lecture?”

“Facts! Facts…missing facts.”

“This is a different difference…” he wants to know what happened—is there a grave? What happened to the briefcase?

“I know where I died…but my grave?” (12)

“You two argue about recognitions. I would like to know what they did with my body” (15)

Private lives….sex lives…Four Wives…

We meet Dora Sophie…

Interlude

Henny: But Professor, why the bag?

Walter: It’s my grip. But I’m no professor.

Henny: Bag…grip…whatever. You aren’t going to a lecture. You’re escaping…to a new life. Here we’re climbing up the Pyrenees and you wear a tie.

Walter: I always wear a tie…always

Henny: All right, the tie doesn’t weigh much. But papers (points to the briefcase)? You need stuff to survive” 30-31—he plays around with misrecognizing what the “papers” might be, confusing official with personal, and then asks if she’ll destroy the contents without “looking” at them—not reading—so the performance stages a non-reading so profound that it requires not even seeing

35 whatever it is that appears on these papers, not perceiving (De Man re cognition / reading here ?)—and that is the sign called pornography in this text??? For Benjamin? Degenerate art—we know it when we see it—the same logic applied to Jewish bodies by the Nazis—so please don’t even look…let alone read….?

“we are entering the realm of speculation, starting with the question of

Benjamin’s death” (145) murder or suicide—he favors suicide

“preoccupied with what happened after he died” (146).

So—for Djerassi, the briefcase becomes a library—it’s disappearance but persistence becomes an equivalent structure to the closed section called l’enfer

(147)—he flips the papers, turns them into something else, a way of making present or accessing, summoning another Benjamin into being. We may or may not like it. But the paper trail makes it possible, thinkable…

So, Djerassi gets Walter high (148) so that he’s in “the proper mood for our final conversation” (149). Hashish / briefcase correlation. Speculation?

Scholem: “You mean the satchel, the bag, the briefcase, the grip…or whatever you had with you on that fateful last day”

Benjamin: “It’s contents. Isn’t that what everybody is still so curious about?”

36 So, why’s he taking hashish—because “it isn’t easy, you know, to cope with your fascination…and seemingly everybody else’s…with the vanished contents of that black bag of mine.”

Scholem: “So it was black! That’s what Lisa Fittko told me forty years later…and that’s what she put on paper. She claimed it was a very heavy bag. Is that also true?” “A heavy bag implies a manuscript or books”—seeding the switch that’s coming…

Runs through the theories on what was in it…

Benjamin makes them all take turns venturing their theories and deep sixes each one—there’s a peculiar use of the viva voce here, a metaphysics of presence that Djerassi signals on p.1 re the combination of biography and autobiography— this is Benjamin lived as and by Djerassi—with his interests but Benjamin’s style…a Benjamin skin job? Think about the weird identikit photos that cast

Benjamin in various modes or media…as hippie….weird failure to understand what the arcades project is---not a book, precisely not a book…

Adorno: “Are you suggesting that we ascribed the wrong motivation? That it was not preservation you were concerned about?” (153)

Benjamin: “Perhaps.”

Adorno: “That you took it with you so that others couldn’t see it?”

The motive—“Shame? Embarrassment? Fear?”

“Porno Adorno” (154)

37 They ask him for his definition of pornography…

Benjamin: “suppose you came across a satchel, a briefcase, a grip…or whatever you like to call it [reprising Henny Gurland?????—oh, look at how the briefcase just morphed into any generic container—we’ve switched to contents…but what order of contents—contents that were not even to be looked at…]…that had been found after the owner’s death. You opened it and found in it books, pictures, articles, objects…you name it…dealing with the following topics pygophilia” (155)

Schonberg’s never heard of it—“a fondness for the rear end”—“ass licking in the vernacular” chimes in Porno. But there’s more: “aglamatophilia,” “a fetish for statues or mannequins”

“presbyophilia” “gerontophilia” (alte Benjamin?)…coprophilia…doraphilia

(fondness for leather)…pederasty, necrophilia, “some pictures of genuphallation”

Schonberg: “Most of it is pure pornography”

Benjamin: “Agreed! Agreed! Agreed! But suppose you were found carrying such a collection with you?” (156)

Materials for a supplement to the work of art essay (159)

Why porn? (161)

Benjamin: “It all started with Georges Bataille at the Bibliotheque Nationale”—

Djerassi goes on essentially to explore Bataille through Benjamin as a cover?

38 Bataille is the extreme one—but her permits Benjamin to pose a question: “by reflecting on what pornography might mean to me” (164)—his answer is pretty banal…

“So there it is: my answer to the puzzle of my lost grip” (Ha!) (165)

Essay “Pornography in an age of technical reproducibility…reproduction by

Transmissability” (167)

But the folks on Parnassus are blocked from producing text—they can only access the web and writings of the world below—not add to them—these are passive hauntings, ghost-witnesses, hosts for their author to speak on subjects he wishes to pursue

In the end, Benjamin just wants to know where’s he’s been buried: “You know what I schlepped over the Pyrenees,” he says, “But what about satisfying my concern? (With emphasis) Where was I buried?” (169)

Scholem tells him about the rental and that after Henny Gurland’s account for his grave “fell into arrears, someone else took it over. A Spanish family named

Morell. Apparently they took good care of it” (169)—but the bones were still moved..,

Consolatio: There are thinkers of such greatness that they are not dead. “You are one of them. You shouldn’t pine after a nonexistent grave” (169)

39 Meanwhile—Hannah Arendt has been listening in and in the end she supplies the Brechtian solution for an epitaph—ascribing his description to Benjamin: “He made suggestions. We carried them out” (174).

So, in the end, the non-pilgrimage becomes a pilgrimage processing his texts as his missing corpus. This seems like another way of refusing the call a la Buck

Morss but doing so by talking all the time, by splicing bio and autobiography together so that it’s a kind of reverse possession. Djerassi is preventatively placing a call to Benjamin, deploying his own telepoeitic tropes in order to have

Benjamin speak so that he may be consoled. Or is Benjamin merely the inoculating occasion that enables Djerassi to think about Bataille?

40 1 Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, eds., Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, trans., Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2007), 1. 2 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. trans., Edmund Jephcott et al., eds. Michael Howard Jennings (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 349-350. 3 Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 4 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1989), 331. 5 J. M. Coetzee, “The Marvels of Walter Benjamin,” The New York Times Review of Books, 28: 1, January 11, 2001. 6 Demetz 7 Cohen, 3 8 Wolin, 251. 9 Walter Benjamin’s Archive 10 This position is implicit in Buck-Morss, Cohen, Wolin, and Weber. 11 Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 260. 12 Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5 and Brodersen, 257. 13 Quoted in Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 226. 14 Bordersen, 261-62. 15 240. 16 Lisa Fittko, Escape from the Pyrenees, trans. David Koblick (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 103. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. 17 “Critique of Violence” 286-7 18 Cuban ship