I just ran across a fragment of Benjamin's in volume two (part one) of the English Selected Writings (in the German, it is located in Gesammelte Schriften VI, pages 188-190), entitled "Notes on a Theory of Gambling:" it represents Benjamin grounded extremely deep within his particular perspective on existence. I'd like to (quickly) suggest that perhaps the most important differences between Heidegger and Benjamin can be traced back to this fragment, for while it is characteristic Benjamin, one sees immediately that Heidegger could never, ever have written it.Benjamin says the following, which at first just seems--like much in Benjamin--to be a mere description of what gambling is like:
What is decisive [in gambling] is the level of motor innervation, and the more emancipated it is from optical perception, the more decisive it is. From this stems a principal commandment for gamblers: they must use their hands sparingly, in order to respond to the slightest innervations.
-Selected Writings 2, part 1, 297.
But perhaps this fragment is nothing less than the exact refutation of what Heidegger means by Augenblick (the "moment of vision" in Being and Time. In other words, gambling here functions exactly like being-towards-death in Heidegger, except that it moves along completely different contours and has a completely different result. It is similar, however, in that it is the archetypal experience or experiential structure for both of these thinkers.
The Augenblick is, for Heidegger, a moment of presence without present--it is the present as determined by the futural essence of time. That is, because time flows from the future in its being-present, it is never present. It is present only as not-present: as a futural present--a present that springs from and withdraws back into the future. The present is only an experience of the "future-to-come." And yet, Heidegger maintains that this is precisely what gives one vision, i.e. what gives Dasein the ability to be (ek-sist) within its essence.
For Benjamin, we can see that the time of gambling, if one can put it this way, is a time that moves ever closer, not to vision, but precisely towards emancipation from optical perception--that is, towards their hands. In order to understand Benjamin's point of view here, one cannot understand the present as issuing from a from a future like with Heidegger: that is, one cannot understand the non-presence of the present as due to the withdrawal of a present back into the future. Rather, this non-present present in the time of gambling, the time without vision, stems from the fact that the experience of the present is always an experience of rupture without origin--that is, even a futural origin. The present stems only from the shock within any present, but this shock is not the future-within-the-present of Heidegger. Thinking the difference between the future and the shock, the Augenblick and the gambler's emancipation from optics.
I'll have to think about this much much more--but its here in case anyone can make anything out of it.
3 comments:
Regarding your previouis post, I'm really happy to be considered an 'awesome interlocutor.' I'm Nick Ramsey, a high school student from Springfield, MO.
Keep up the good work with this blog - is the best I've found so far.
I realize this is a really old post, but maybe this comment from Samuel Weber's excellent new book, Benjamin's -abilities, would be helpful here, or at least interesting to think about. Who knows if it addresses the relationship to Heidegger (you'll know better than I), although just what Benjamin means by 'the present' or 'the now,' and the way thought and language relate to it, may be a clue. Talking about the suffix -barkeit that Benjamin uses so often to give his concepts a sense of potency and/or non-determinacy, Weber says, "Perhaps it is this convergence of looking at, looking away, and looking up that explains why the primary of Benjamin's -abilities is readability. And also why the now of knowability--das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit--is also the moment in which readability parts company with determinate meaning and knowledge, not by dissolving its relation to it, but by acknowledging the irreducible immediacy--the Un-mittel-barkeit--of its medium of language to be the greatest -ability of all."
That's awesome--I've been wanting to read that book and waiting for it to come out... but now haven't had the time to get around to it. I'll definitely get to it now. Sam Weber is amazing. I enjoy the combination of potency and non-determinacy--that's a good summary of what goes on in Benjamin's writings. The real thing that makes him unlike Heidegger though is not introducing non-determinacy along with potency, but by precisely linking it to a now... so though that now departs from meaning and knowledge, it still--unlike a now in Heidegger, which becomes a presencing rather than a representation--retains a sort of fixedness that only something like a scientific or technical instant would have. In other words, Benjamin moves in the direction of Heidegger, but then resists him as well--that's whats interesting. That Weber characterizes this as a sort of readability is precisely right: it's not for nothing that Heidegger retreats from everyday language in the way that he does (by finding the pure language), and Benjamin retreats from it in a completely opposite direction (aphorism, condensing language). Just some scattered thoughts--thanks for relating what Weber says to me! (I like the "looking up" especially: that gets at how the process of research is integrated into all this effort to be, paradoxically, irreducible to knowledge., which I find perhaps the most interesting in Benjamin.)
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