Benjamin, German Idealism, and dialectic

Benjamin often speaks of dialectic, the logical movement powerfully confronted by German Idealism, in favorable terms: calling someone a dialectician for Benjamin is a compliment. He says of the work of Karl Kraus that it deserves respect because of its dialectical character:

"...the fact that this man is one of the very few who have a vision of freedom and can further it only by assuming the role of chief prosecutor is a paradox that most purely reveals the dialectic at work."
-"Karl Kraus (Fragment)," Selected Writings, volume 2, part 1.

But if dialectic is to be sought after as an amazingly forceful way of thinking, why would Benjamin say of German Idealists that they have a view of the world like those of Jünger who longed for a return to the militarization of World War I?

...as far as anyone could see over the edge of the trench, the surroundings had become the terrain of German Idealism: every shell crater had become a problem, every wire entanglement an antinomy, every barb a definition, every explosion a thesis; by day the sky was the cosmic interior of the steel helmet, and at night the moral law above.
-"Theories of German Fascism," Selected Writings, volume 2, part 1.

Because dialectic is able to be lifted (cf. my post on Derrida, below, as well as the writings of Althusser on Marx's "overturning" of Hegel in For Marx) from the world of German Idealists.
Dialectic is an amazing force precisely because it holds things in indeterminate (immediate) contradiction through its effort to determine (mediate) them. This holding together, this arresting and immobilizing that takes place through the negative work of dialectic (the work of the dialectic to not arrest--that is, the work of the dialectic to mediate, to mobilize, or to bring forth total-mobilization) is the most forceful element of dialectic. Why? It (that is, this holding in indeterminate, immediate contradiction) does not lend itself without distortion (that is, without determination or mediation) to the objectification of capitalism, fascism, any of the organizing political-economic structures that reduce the world to what Heidegger rightly calls (also against Jünger) a "world picture:" a world of images fully determined by technology. Given this, one needs to think of how Heidegger in his critique of the objectified world-picture really thinks dialectic too much as a process that brings this picture about, and does not think enough that dialectic's suspension and overturning of objectification in its very process of objectifying is precisely the power of it--this would be Benjamin's contention if he were to confront many of Heidegger's texts dealing with Hegel (which includes Being and Time--in fact one could argue Being and Time is Heidegger's most expansive meditation on Hegel). In other words, dialectic, while it renders everything into a world of images fully determined by technology, can also bring forth a world of images that are indeterminate with respect to technology, that use technology to bring forth these indeterminate images or immobilizations--it is not necessary to retreat from the objectification and images wholly, as Heidegger seems to think.
The world of Geman Idealism is precisley not the world of dialectic, then, for Benjamin: however (dialectically, of course) it is that world in that it utilizes its power of determination and resolving (mediation) most. German Idealism's relationship to the dialectic therefore cannot be simply overcome and the dialectic extracted from it, just like its landscape (the First World War) cannot be merely passed by or simply improved by the view that blasted it apart. In being lifted (relever) from them, dialectic is always stolen--it belongs still in a sense to those who originally owned it.

From Benjamin

Benjamin on Karl Kraus:

...His entire fire-eating, sword-swallowing philological scrutiny of the newspapers is actually concerned not with language but with justice... His linguistic and ethical quibbling is not a form of self-righteousness; it belongs to the truly desperate justice of a proceeding in which words and things concoct the most implausible alibi simply to save their own skin, and must be incessantly refuted by the evidence of one's eyes or straightforward calculation.
-Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 195-6.

Derridian dialectic

...what would it be? Could it still be called dialectic? L'economie generale, yes. But this is precisely what is not dialectic in a Hegelian sense (l'economie restreinte).
Or is it? After reading him, one is surprised how much Derrida writes on Hegel. On: that is, not necessarily about, nor simply against Hegel. One is suprised how much Derrida writes not against the dialectic simply, but on it, on top of it, like graffiti, writing over it, lifted above it (Aufgehoben, relevé). One is surprised precisely because Derrida does not seem like the generation that wrote most about or against Hegel in France: the generation of Sartre, Lacan, Bataille, Kojeve, Hyppolite, even Althusser--the "existential" generation (in the sense that they react to existentialism in some way, or, better, to Heidegger). In a way he lifts himself above the fray of those thinkers, bogged down in critiquing dialectical reason, in writing against or about it, and thinks the trace and différance. But that he thinks this trace to lift Hegel above being merely written against or about--this is what one does not expect.
Those interested in Derrida need to think hard about this: Derrida does not write about Hegel (or) to critique him. Deconstruction, if it was the name for those writings about the trace and différance, was precisely what allowed him to write on Hegel and not just simply about Hegel or in such a way as to only critique Hegel.
If this was the case, it means that Derrida was not undoing the dialectic, but precisely lifting it above being written against or written about.
One has to think of this "lifting" if one wants to think what this means for the possibility of a Derridian dialectic. As much as it might mean rescuing or saving, "lifting" can also mean to steal, to pilfer. It is a transgression that precisely does not move into the sphere of a beyond, where something can be written about, comprehended, or written against, definitely opposed. The play on raising up out of the fray of "existential" Hegelianism and also stealing this Hegelianism from the "existential" age is precisely what characterizes the Derridian dialectic. It is what is suppressed and elevated by those Derridians who simply think Hegel exists to be critiqued in the texts of Derrida.
In Derrida's time, this play was also what was being suppressed and elevated--precisely not lifted--by Lacanians. And today, their suppression and elevation is the most tempting way to do away with the lifted Hegelianism of Derrida. Zizek, Badiou: they don't lift Hegel, they comprehend him, they are relieved that they are done with Hegel, that he is over with, that he has been finally made to be commensurate with a postmodernism so he can be used ethically against the old Hegelianism, capitalism. Thanks to Derrida--these Lacanians say--we are able to relieved of Hegel without having the guilt of lifting (relevé) him: thanks to Derrida we can now use him against himself when we write about him. But what--they continue--is all this writing on Hegel in Derrida, this talk about lifting, about relève? We can be relieved of Hegel without lifting him! Stupid Derrida! You do not see how against Hegel you can be in writing about him.
What is dangerous and disgusting about this is that it is a refusal to think about how being relieved of Hegel is precisely lifting him--how relieving (relève) is precisely just another translation of lifting (relève).
What is the Derridian dialectic, then? Can we specify this stolen trace, this trace of a trace? Provisionally: the plunge back into the transgression that Hegelian dialectic effectuates in its negations, but tarrying with this transgression as such, with its negativity just at the point (and time) it negates, so as to make it negate only indeterminately, generally, and yet without reserve. All this means is that the Derridian dialectic is seeing the impossibility of writing against Hegel, and why it could and should always only amount to a lifting of Hegel, a subscription (writing under, which for Derrida is the same as writing on) to the labor of the dialectic. The Derridian dialectic, then, is always a writing on Hegel, a writing that shows how Hegel can never be overcome or elevated (like it is said to be in Zizek, or in Heidegger), never be suppressed.
But what would this dialectic look like? Again, another provisional specification: it would look like "NOUS" (the French word for "we," and, despite or perhaps because of this, also the Greek word for knowing) written on a wall in the Centre Pompidou, traced by Brassaï. A graffiti that writes on something in order to engage what it can't overcome, what it can't write about or against, a dialectic of what can never be suppressed. That is, an infinite lifting, a stealing of what steals, over and over again without reserve.
I'll write on this more in another post. Sketching the relationship to a Hegelianism that seeks to overcome Hegel, and showing that this is precisely not what Derrida does--that he does not want to be relieved of Hegel without lifting Hegel--is all that is crucial here.