Benjamin on Nietzsche

Walter Benjamin has an interesting reading of Nietzsche that is much less favorable than Heidegger towards the conception of the eternal return. Its power probably merits a rereading of Nietzsche against Heidegger's reading of him--a task Derrida prescribes as necessary in Of Grammatology (that is, rereading Nietzsche against Heidegger, not using Benjamin to do so), probably because of a vague sense of what Benjamin concretely works out in his reading (that is, not necessarily because Derrida has his later Spurs in mind).
Benjamin essentially says that in order to comprehend the eternal return, or even to be able to think it, one must have had an intimate experience of modernity, where the experience of singular events changes into an experience of massenwiese, the mass-like, multiple singularity. In other words, in order to think the eternal return, Nietzsche had to have had an experience of various events as the same. This does not mean that they had to be the same event, but instead that Nietzsche had to experience the quality of the event as sameness, as the "ever-same" (see below)--an experience that is distinctly modern.
Here is one sample of what Benjamin says (it appears all over his work), initially with reference to Baudelaire:

Baudelaire's project takes on historical significance, however, when the experience of the ever-same, which provides the standard for assessing that project, is given its historical signature. this happens in Nietzsche and in Blanqui. Here the idea of the eternal return is the "new," which breaks the cycle of the eternal return by confirming it.
-"The Study Begins With Some Reflections on the Influence of Les Fleurs du mal," Selected Writings, Vol. 4 (1938-1940).

Eduardo Cadava looks at this in his amazing book, Words of Light: These on the Photography of History, and covers it quite thoroughly. But still I wonder what Heidegger would say about this reading, and what differences between Benjamin and Heidegger become apparent on the basis of it.
This should take the form of a contestation of Heidegger's idea of time, which Benjamin found "awful," (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, 81) for an unarticulated, though obviously very definite, reason.

Even more basic introduction to Hegel

Here is an even more basic introduction to Hegel (and particularly Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and "dialectic") than the one before. It should provide a good sort of primer for anyone reading Derrida's "The Pit and the Pyramid" in Margins of Philosophy, in that it gets you thinking in the general mode of Heidegger and Hyppolite about Hegel and language--this is the mode of thought that Derrida in that essay elaborates, investigates, and to which he reacts:

Here are some simple passages in the chapter on sense-certainty that have to do with language, and particularly the conflicts, the frustrations, the impossibilities—in short, the problems—of language:

In J.N. Findlay’s analysis of the Phenomenology: “In the use of demonstrative words, there is a conflict between what we really say and what we mean to say (our Meinung, was wir meinen [i.e. what we ‘intend.’])” (p. 508).

Also in Findlay’s analysis: “Language, being divine and rational, frustrates the attempt of sense-certainty to grasp… particulars” (p. 509-10).

And in the Phenomenology itself: “If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language” (§110).

I’m taking these quotes (especially the last one) about language and its specific relation to sense-certainty as representing how language relates to the larger task of the Phenomenology. If I can tease out the significance of language in general, then, this should orient you so that you can understand specifically what is going on in the quotes—i.e. language’s relation to the “this” to the “now,” to “particulars,” to the “bit of paper” and the like.
What does this mean if I can do this? It means I’m elaborating a thesis of Heidegger’s (as well as Kojeve’s and Hyppolite’s) about the meaning of language in the way this task unfolds or accomplishes itself (cf. “Hegel and the Greeks” in Pathmarks).
To put it plainly, the task of the Phenomenology is to try and show thought, or have thought show itself. This thought is thought in action, thought beyond the distinction between thinking and doing—Hegel calls it Spirit. A culture is in a sense this type of thought; battles between nations or plays in the theatre are types of this thought in some way, in some aspect of their existence. This thought, then, shows itself in acting in various forms, forms like “Consciousness” “Self-consciousness” “Reason,” etc.—the general divisions of the Phenomenology—and also in more specific forms, like “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and “understanding”—the individual chapters of the work. It should be obvious that when there is no more showing of thought, when thought just simply is what it is and does not show itself as what it is, the task of the Phenomenology is completed. Hegel then goes to describe how this thought is, beyond its appearance, beyond its being a phenomenon. This is the task of the Science of Logic. But it is clear that if the task in the Phenomenology is to have thought show itself, when Hegel is writing about sense-certainty, he is trying to make thought in this particular form show itself as thought that takes this particular form. He is trying to show how sense-certainty—a way our consciousness is sure of the objects to which we relate—is thought showing itself in some way, and furthermore is thought in its action as showing and not simply just being itself.
Now we can understand that in claiming that language has some relationship to the task of the Phenomenology I’m claiming that language has a relationship to the way that this showing of thought has to unfold. In short, it means how this showing must be described by Hegel, how it must be put into language.
Now, taking a step back, we usually say that Phenomenology is an unfolding of something called “the dialectic.” Could it be that this putting into language is “dialectic?”
But don’t we normally think of dialectic as a threefold structure (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) of some sort that organizes or is the organization of what comes to light in the Phenomenology? Or, better, as the twofold interplay between something and its own contradiction?
Heidegger claims that both of these interpretations are right in a sense, but only if they get their meaning from this first meaning of dialectic—in the sense of the relationship of language to the unfolding of thought. I’ll note now that for Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojeve, and thus for Derrida, this is the case too. The dialectic, for these philosophers, is a going-through-language. Heidegger specifically reads dialectic as “dialegesthai:” from dia, Greek for “going through,” and legein, “the gathering (and only gathering, not unifying) of disparity, of multiplicity, under a signifier or movement of signifiers, that is at the heart of logos, language.”
But we can think this more simply if we just think that dialectic will come on the scene when the showing of thought has a relationship to language. It is only in this sense that the dialectic is the threefold or twofold structure in the Phenomenology that we might normally think it is—before it is the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” or the interplay between “identity and contradiction,” it is this establishing of the relationship of thought to language.
So when thought indeed has a relationship to language, sense-certainty, as a way thinking shows itself, it will be dialectical in the way it unfolds, in the way it accomplishes this showing. But then why do all the quotes above talk about the failure of language to get at what sense-certainty wants it to get? Why, in general, is language a problem in the Phenomenology?
Because these represent moments in the Phenomenology when thought is trying to establish a relationship to language that is not dialectical, that is, when it is, in an effort not to show itself but to hide itself, trying to twist language into a mode that it does not want to inhabit. What is this mode of language? A mode where language disappears in front of what it communicates, where it undoes itself as language and does not, rather, make thought show itself in language, through the mediation of language. In short, a language that erases itself so that we get only the showing of thought, and no language with it.
This is impossible for Hegel: just this pure showing is precisely what “cannot be reached by language.” In the chapter on sense-certainty, we have portrayed a form of this showing of thinking that is nothing but this desire to have language erase itself, to have what is meant to be shown exceed the attempt to mean by putting it into language. It wants to have the showing of thought be just a “this,” a “here,” a “now.” But this is precisely what, in its frustration, Hegel says is “divine and rational.”
So we have a problem, don’t we? Thought when it does not show itself is precisely when it shows itself purely, without language, when language disappears in front of what it shows. Thought when it shows itself purely does not show itself, but hides itself.
I leave this for you to think about. Meanwhile, what has been proven, if we accept this, is that dialectic is the only way that thought can show itself—that is, as a way thought relates to language. If dialectic does not appear, there we have no showing, and in fact no thought as well. Dialectic, properly understood, is a relationship of thought to language without which thought is incomprehensible. The failure of language in these instances in the chapter in sense-certainty then only serves to prove how dialectic is necessary for the thought to appear, if we understand dialectic as the relationship between thought and language.

Basic Introduction to Hegel

I’m just going to tease out what Hegel says in the Phenomenology of Spirit in three phrases. Each is representative of a separate concern that consistently takes place throughout the Phenomenology as a whole, and also in the unbelievably rich history of the interpretation of Hegel. But I’m not going to be so concerned with what is asserted and where and why it is said so much—i.e. the particular arguments within each of them—so much as with the general way of thinking about things or general point of view that could allow something like these phrases to be written:

1. “It is clear that the dialectic of sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience, and sense-certainty itself is nothing else but just this history” (§109). Here we are concerned generally with history and experience and its relation to the dialectic (of sense-certainty, but also the dialectic qua dialectic).
2. “The Here pointed out, to which I hold fast, is similarly a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, a Right and Left… The Here, which was supposed to have been pointed out, vanishes in other Heres, but these likewise vanish. What is pointed out, held fast, and abides, is a negative This, which is negative only when the Heres are taken as they should be” (§108). Here we are generally concerned with the negative and negativity being what something is when it is taken as it “should” be.
3. “If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness” (§110). Here we are concerned about language and how it cannot reach the “This” of sense-certainty, which Hegel says early on is the immediate.

If we can say something about each of these and how they enunciate the larger themes of the work and of Hegel’s thought in general, we might be able to connect them together.
Let’s first orient ourselves. You’ve probably heard “the dialectic” described as thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This interpretation has some foundation in Hegel, but it’s much more helpful, and much more complex (richer and more deeply problematic when indeed it proves problematic), actually, if we look at the dialectic as a movement between two terms Hegel uses a lot, terms you can easily trace in the movements of the Phenomenology: the immediate and the mediated (Unmittlebare, Mittelbar)—defined loosely, what has not gone through a process of some sort, and what has gone through that process. Sometimes it is good to think of the immediate as the undetermined or indeterminate, and the mediated as the determined. If we restrict our view to the movement of these two terms (and not yet considering exactly what “process” the mediated goes through and the immediate refrains from undergoing), the dialectic can be roughly characterized as the movement whereby what is immediate shows itself to be only properly immediate, only properly itself, when it is mediated, when it undergoes mediation (or becomes determined). To put it a better way, dialectic can be said to appear when anything taken immediately shows that if it is to be taken as what it is, it has to be taken as mediated (as determined).
Here in the chapter on sense-certainty, Hegel is dealing with something that is immediate—namely, sense-certainty itself (sense certainty is “immediate knowledge itself,” §90). We can presume, then, that if the Phenomenology structures itself around something called “dialectic,” as we usually think is the case with Hegel’s works, sense-certainty will show itself to be properly immediate only when it is mediated. Let’s take a step back and orient ourselves further to understand what all this means.
What is Hegel doing in the Phenomenology as a whole? Hegel has a lot to say on this, but his exact meaning is very confusing, and any way you reduce the confusion gives you a radically different interpretation of Hegel. I’ll just note this so you can get a different story than the one here if you want—go to some of the people on the handout. Put simply, however, Hegel is trying to think about what he calls Spirit (Geist). Spirit in its structure is something like the freedom (the determined indeterminacy) of thought or knowing in action—considered on a world-historical scale but never reducible to what we would call history or even freedom in its historical manifestation (Introduction to the Philosophy of History, III, “freedom is the only truth of Spirit”). It is a governing, proscriptive, disciplinary force in thought that also, like ideology or like a government, arises and is constituted by the actions of people. In short, Spirit is something like “the spirit of the times.” Hegel is trying to think about this Spirit, but, in the Phenomenology, not this Spirit itself, in its internal, determinate structure, in its being determined as freedom—this is only an indirect effect of Hegel’s primary concern.
This primary concern is in the Phenomenology is, rather, Spirit in its difference from itself, in its not being determined yet as itself, in its becoming-itself—in short, Spirit when it is not itself. When Spirit is itself and it returns to itself from out of the state of not-being determined as itself, the Phenomenology is over. Hegel can only then describe the logic of that Spirit, its internal structure in its completeness—this is why his next book after the Phenomenology is the Science of Logic. So, the Phenomenology describes or outlines or thinks about what Spirit is in its process of becoming-determined-as-Spirit, in a state in which it cannot be accurately described as a determinate structure, but in how it seems when it is not yet itself, when it is indeterminate. In short, the phenomenology describes the appearance and not the structure of Spirit: we can see now why and, more important, in what sense it is called a phenomenology—the phenomenon is what Spirit does and is when it remains in its difference from itself… it appears, and is appearance, the appearance of the structure (logic) of Spirit (which is freedom). (It should be clear that it is nothing Husserl would describe with his “phenomenology.”)
The form of the resistance of Spirit to becoming-itself, the phenomenon, Hegel understands as consciousness. This makes sense: if the freedom of thought or knowing in action is what we defined Spirit as, then there would have to be a mode of thinking in action that is not yet as free. Consciousness is that type of knowing: it is not as free for Hegel primarily because it takes everything from the subject-object point of view. Thinking things beyond the subject-object point of view is another way of saying that Spirit has returned to itself, that a mode of knowing or thinking exists that is free in its action. As we have been saying, this is the thought of the logic of Spirit, that takes place in the Science of Logic, but we should also note that from the perspective of the Phenomenology it is what Hegel calls “Absolute Knowledge,” a knowing that is fully Spiritual or free knowing/thought, a thought beyond consciousness or consciousness in its “absolute” form.
Now we know generally what sense-certainty is: it is a type of consciousness, a type of knowing that is the appearance of that free knowing or thought that is Spirit in its not-being itself, in its becoming-itself, in its resistance to Absolute Knowledge. If Hegel wants to describe what this consciousness is, because he wants to get at Spirit in the state of not-being itself, he will then only be able to describe it insofar as it remains this resistance to becoming Spirit.
But in doing this, in suspending the becoming-itself of Spirit, describing sense-certainty will have to end up effectuating by itself the intrusion of Spirit into this consciousness, the lifting up of sense-certainty into the process of the becoming-itself of Spirit, simply because sense-certainty will not be anything that seems to be something, but will be something, will be seen as described. It cannot remain a phenomenon, it cannot seem. In other words, if this form of Spirit is to be taken as what it is, as not-Spirit, it has to become Spiritual. Put differently, it has to become a part of the movement not of the difference of Spirit from itself but of the structure of Spirit as it is described.
Now we have fully oriented ourselves: we see the connection between this wider view we took that explains what Spirit must be, and the more narrow characterization of the dialectic that we set out with. In other words, we see how Spirit is immediate and how it is mediated: it is immediate in its not-being Spirit, in its becoming-Spirit, in forms of consciousness like sense-certainty, and it is mediated when it is as itself, as the freedom of thought in action. But according to the schema of the dialectic that we laid out earlier, immediacy is itself when it is mediated. This means that Spirit is immediate, is fully the becoming-Spirit of Spirit, when it has indeed become Spirit, when it has become itself. On a more local level, sense-certainty will be itself when it is described, when it is seen to be not itself, to already be beyond itself, to already be another form of consciousness (namely, what Hegel calls perception).
Let’s be a little clearer, and think about why this is so. Given what we said about Spirit as a phenomenon when it is not itself, we can see what Spirit itself, beyond the Phenomenology proper (or at the end of it, in the chapter on “Absolute Knowledge”), would have to be described as, from the point of view of a study that only traces what Spirit is not (the Phenomenology). Spirit would have to appear as, and be described as, the fully mediated itself, as what has gone through a process. This also means that becoming Spirit is that “process” which the mediated qua mediated goes through and the immediate holds off. But if beyond the Phenomenology (or in the consideration of “Absolute Knowledge”) this is the case, this means that the immediate is what makes up that Phenomenology. But at each stage of this Phenomenology, if what is to be described is the immediacy as it is itself, it must be mediated, it must show itself as immediate in its being mediated or undergoing mediation.
Thus we have oriented ourselves fully, because we see how Spirit is the result of the dialectic. With this, we can look at the first quote, and see how it is possible for Hegel to say this simply because he is saying just something like this: “the dialectic of sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience”—this means simply the movements of sense-certainty in how we try to describe how it knows exactly correspond to the dialectical way of considering it, because, essentially (remember we’re not considering the real content of these phrases, just how they are able to assert something like what they are saying), describing will have to show the Spirit in it, and this means describing its immediacy as itself in mediatedness.
But this gets proven when we consider what sense-certainty is again. It is, as we said, the immediate. But we also said it was consciousness. It is, then, the most immediate sphere of the development of immediacy into mediation, but also what it contains is immediate: it is just that type of immediacy that has a relation to itself (to itself as subject-object) as immediate. In other words immediacy is in sense-certainty, and (on a more general level) as sense-certainty. Thus throughout the section Hegel shows what is immediate about sense-certainty in particular and in doing so shows what is immediate about consciousness in general by mediating them. We’re taking the quote above as referring to consciousness in general, but this is also true of sense-certainty in particular, like the third quote, to which this leads us.
This third quote is essentially about the impossibility of grasping immediacy at all outside of a dialectical structure: the sensuous “This” is the immediate in sense-certainty, not sense-certainty as immediate, but of course this applies too: “the sensuous “This” that is meant cannot be reached by language.” In general, the immediate as immediate cannot be reached in description if we want it to be different than what is being described—in the case of consciousness, as what is part of a mediating movement of Spirit. In short, the immediate can’t be seen to be something totally apart from the mediated: it is what is is only as mediated, as determined—there is no total indeterminacy.
The second quote is the most crucial, but also the most vague considering what we have done. “What is pointed out, held fast, and abides, is a negative This, which is negative only when the Heres are taken as they should be…” We know that if something is taken as it should be, it should be mediated. What this indicates is that there is an affinity between negation and mediation, that allows one to be what one is, that allows Spirit to return to itself. We can indicate one way in which we have already seen this. Immediacy, we said, was immediate only when it was mediated. Another way we can describe this is that immediacy can only be itself when it is its negative, when it is its negation, when it holds fast within its negation as itself. In this sense, mediation comes about through the death of the immediate: it is the holding fast within death of the immediate itself. Now we see that the mediated and the immediate are not different, but both are just two sides of the phenomenon of negation: when negation surfaces, we don’t see them as different—they are mediation.
This connects the three quotes together roughly, and hopefully it has helped to make Hegel’s general approach in this confusing book clear.