To literary critics and philosophers, from critical theorists

We get assaulted a lot for being critical theorists. We get assaulted by people who study literature, and by people who study philosophy: why aren't we doing the tasks of just one or the other? Why can't we stay at the level of the text and read, or go elsewhere and think and be philosophers? Going into a literature or philosophy classroom and engaging people as a critical theorist immediately produces a sort of crisis (especially in the latter). You see people asking themselves, "what does this abstraction have to do with

literature?" or "what does this particular reading have to do with philosophy?" It would be better if we simply went away, wouldn't it? It might even make our work more rigorous: you see, many among us love that crisis just for the sake of it being a crisis--we tend to be a little ostentatious in our thinking, in our reading, because we cite both of you.

So you say, thinking needs to be done by thinkers, reading by readers. But can thinking ever completely distinguish itself from reading?

We aren't asking this question: you ask it.

Philosophers, you ask it in the structure of your discipline, in how you write articles (you read and comment on a philosopher), in how you teach a class ("the readings for this week are"), in how you contradict each other ("X misreads Carnap in saying X"), in how you assert ("One must read X in this way"). You ask it in the figure of Heidegger, you ask it in the figure of Wittgenstein, you ask it, perhaps most directly, in the figure of Jacques Derrida (in fact, this is all he means by "text"). You come to us in these figures: we didn't make them do it. You ask it most forcefully when you use an example from a literary text--what philosopher has not done this, if only to illustrate something? When you do this, you gesture in our direction and you ask us how you can do

this. We do not ask this question.

Literary critics, you ask it whenever you read, even when you "close read," as you call it: isn't close reading illustrating merely a philosophical relation between form and content? When you close read, you are not merely presuming a connection there between the two, you are demonstrating it, thinking through the question of its validity in a situation, and thus thinking like a philosopher as you read. So you, too, gesture in our direction because you ask us how you can do this. You come to us and ask it in the figure of Samuel Johnson, of Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Cleanth Brooks, and Stephen Greenblatt. We do not ask this question.

Can thinking ever be dissociated from reading? This question you put to us, that you burden us with, that you distract us from our work to answer (maybe we should just ignore you), this question can indeed be answered by us.

And not just by answering it in the negative. Critical theory is not a discipline founded only on the premise that there are no differences between thinking and reading. It doesn't just open up in the hole in your discipline, in the problem you have yet to resolve. If this were the case, what legitimacy could you have as a discipline if you could have let this question be posed, if you could have let us exist? We are not just composed of you two. We are more than just you (we are also history, various cultural studies, law, economics, and other disciplines). Nor are we just interdisciplinarity itself. We don't rise and fall with any discipline--only, perhaps, with the people in them.

In fact, we answer in the positive: yes, there is a difference between thinking and reading. And we articulate the contours of this difference--that is to say, not merely comparatively. Critical theory is perhaps most concretely this emphatic yes. But you had to come to us to ask it: you could not merely read, or merely think. Indeed, and

this is the heart of the matter, we may answer these questions you come to us to ask because we are you already.

You can't believe this. In fact, you protest against this almost every day. You come to us and ask these questions and then go behind our backs and say that you answered them yourself. You say, you can illustrate this thought merely as a philosopher, or read this text merely as a literary critic. But what remains undeniable is that you have retained a trace of us. You are us when you think or when you read. So to wish us to go away is to wish yourself to go away, to renounce reading if you are a literary critic or reader, to renounce thinking if you are a philosopher or thinker. Thinking needs to be done by thinkers, reading by readers, you say. But if you say this more than just to protest, if you actually enact it and think or read according to its rule, you have given up on your respective task.

Space, time and gambling in Benjamin

I'm looking into gambling in Benjamin and its relation to touch and shock, and from there to the eye and the image, as a way to see how the field of action of the gambler--space--becomes linked up with the time of an image.

If this line of thought seems odd, it's because we are less likely to think of the image within the sphere of fate and chance than in terms of time and history. But Benjamin thinks the second terms primarily in relationship to the first ones. Gambling is one site where this happens in his work. It becomes a sort of way he can pursue all the complicated relationships of man to fate that he articulated in the early essays "Character and Fate" and the "Critique of Violence" as they interact with technology and modernity in his later work.

Other figures like the flâneur serve this purpose too in Benjamin. But the gambler retains a link to touch that is perhaps more pronounced, and thus a link to space that is very different.

The gambler uses his hands for Benjamin. In his little fragment "Notes on a Theory of Gambling" he says that a gambler has more discernment in his approach to the table "the more emancipated" his motor skills are "from optical perception," that is, the more his hands and not his eyes are at the ready. In this, Benjamin sees not a sort of simple resistance to the forms of the visuality of modern day, however, but a process that has its capabilities for a "renewal of mankind" ("Work of Art...") because it is imbricated in this modern, optical development. For the resistance to the visual does not make the gambler have a clearer relationship to the future, to time (whether his number will come up or not), but one that is more dispersed and distracted.

This is due to the repetitive nature of gambling. The gambler is always ready to begin again with his hands, to take up the space around him, his room for action, and put it in service of yet another spin of the roulette, and to await the appearance of the time of his fortune. Thus Benjamin sees the gambler in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" as similar to the worker on the assembly line featured in Capital, whose labor, as Marx describes it, always takes up anew the fragmented labor of another and performs his own "partial task" on it (Capital, 464).

This is because the repetition of the worker and the appearance of the future in the present (that is, the appearance of time) on the gambling table that the hands anticipate manifests itself in a shock. Touch and the actions of the hands in space becomes the infinite anticipation of a blow to one's self from another point in space. Gambling is what happens when experience has already become shock, or in other words, when the experience of time has, due to changes in how movements in space by hands anticipate themselves, become a non-experience.

Benjamin describes this shock experience in the gambler in the following formula: "gambling converts [verwandelt sich] time into a narcotic" ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century;" Cf. also a footnote to "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"). It is a narcotic because it attempts to "alleviate" ("On Some Motifs") the lack of a harmony of space and time that is introduced by the anticipation of shock.

If the time of the image also manifests itself in a non-experience, as we (I am writing this for my class with Eduardo Cadava) have been saying, if the experience of history in the photo is a non-experience, we can now see that this is not because the image simply foregoes any relationship to history or time, but because its experience is the experience of the gambler. The image is penetrated with touch and space, the touch in the repetitive motion of a gambling hand that awaits time as its fate.

Benjamin on fate, character, and law

For Benjamin, "fate" signifies what befalls man beyond the commandment of religion (thus as irreligious) when he has submitted himself to the law of the state. This submission entails that man renounces his life as a man and assume the complex relationship to legal determination which only considers him in terms of his bare life, his actions as a legal subject. Thus Benjamin says,

It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable... it is never man but only the life in him that it [fate] strikes.
-"Fate and Character" in Selected Writings, Volume 1

The subject of fate then is actually void. This does not mean he is free in a Sartre-like way, however. The subject of fate is complex and always already guilty or unfree, because he must always assume this voided legal subjectivity and annul his rich and complex bond as a man to the religious. To put it another way, the annulment of man by the assumption of law invests the subject with bonds to comport himself towards law in a legal way--this is why he is complex and not free (in a Sartre-like way) in his being void. When the subject does comport (or submit) himself this way, most notably when the law bears upon him, fate strikes on the subject.
"Character" takes up this void subject of fate and law and "gives this mystical enslavement... the answer of genius." In other words character takes up the void subject and develops him into an irreducible comic (that is, playful, supplemental) signifier. The bond to the religious, beyond the law, is thus restored. But this does not occur by any retrieval of the man that originally held a bond to the religious and not to the law: this man is not a reserve of plenitude outside of the law which can always be reinstated, for instance, through religious worship. Rather, character reinstates a bond to the religious, beyond the law, by creating a new bond to religion as this void subject of the law, as a subject that has transgressed religion: we see how Benjamin thinks dialectically about this. However, this is not a positive dialectic of determinate negation: the point is to arrest and interrupt the development of the legal subjectivity, not conserve it, in the assumption of character (cf. "Derridian dialectic," and "Benjamin, German Idealism, and dialectic" below). All this means that the character is not a plenitude but a void which resists the void: in short, he is a performative subject, "an individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead of by his person on the stage, we would call a scoundrel," because he went beyond the "authentic" and infinitely empty legal subjectivity. Then, as Benjamin says, "complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom."
The relationship to religion also changes: as much as the man before he voided his subjectivity and became mere life under the law, religion is not a plenitude to be returned to by this development of character. Religion too must be void, that is, must be messianic and waited for indefinitely. It is only in this way that it could be present to a subject that has renounced it: one must wait for divine recompense for the transgression that was submitting to the law instead of holding fast to the commandments (this is the meaning of the messianic that we find in the "Critique of Violence" and, modified, in "Theses on the Concept of History").