Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

Feminine passages in Walter Benjamin^[1]

Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes
Psychoanalyst 
Analyst Member of the School (AME)
by the Brazilian School of Psychoanalysis (EBP)
and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP)
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Rolf Tiedemann, the German editor of Das Passagen-Werk, clarifies that the theoretical and interpretative reflections that the work mobilizes pale in comparison to the monumental quantity of quotations, comments and materials from the collection that the author carried out in Paris, “the Capital of the 19th century” . The editor's decision was to keep the material as fragments of a work under construction and never finished, without an order that would give readability and clarity to the text, in order to “keep theory and interpretation in an ascetic manner in the background” (TIEDMANN, 2018, p. 15).

Thus, the architecture of the Passages itself keeps the pieces disorganized without semantic linearity or univocity of thought, composing a mosaic of diverse experiences. The work results in a “new, unprecedented constellation, compared to any form of common presentation” (TIEDMANN, 2018, p. 15) – at least in the philosophical scope, since the non-linear aesthetics, that of fragments, ruptures and Incomprehension was already a practice in the poetic and pictorial space (ROSA, 2009) which, in fact, was the source of inspiration for the Frankfurt philosopher in the social critique of modernity inaugurated with Baudelaire, to which he also subscribed.

The Benjaminian passages invite the reader to wander aimlessly through the city's devious paths, in incoherence and wandering like the poet in état de surprise, seizing materials at random, whose connections require the reader himself to make an effort to construct a precarious, inconsistent and unfinished mosaic. The reader himself is drawn through the endless pages that cover streets, passages, arcades, labyrinths and the game of mirrors in the Parisian metropolis that do not return the promise of unity of the Self, but its lost image.

Wouldn't it be required of Benjamin's reader to perform the same task as the translator of Baudelaire's poems into German, to which he had dedicated himself with “love and minuteness”? “The essential thing in a poem is not communication, nor its message” – writes Benjamin (1923/2010, p. 18). The translator's task requires the renunciation of the desire to preserve the original meaning that is never exhausted in the language. Always changing, instantaneous and precarious, it is therefore necessary to free the weight of the fixed meaning and maintain fidelity only to the literality of the word to recreate, in another language, an intentio of meaning. Between fidelity and freedom, the translation should thus only “slightly brush the meaning”, making it resonate in the other language “like the wind plays an Aeolian harp” (BENJAMIN, 1923/2010, p. 22).

For Benjamim, translation would not be the connection between what two dead languages communicate, but it would reveal the living and political reach of poetic creation that destabilizes the fixed meaning of linguistic and social conventions, keeping the “doors of the word widened” in the permanent exercise of translation that human language demands. Therefore, it is also a “symbol of the non-communicable” (BENJAMIN, 1923/2010, p. 108), of what remains unnameable in language, of the silence that gives life to the word. When learning a foreign language, the essential thing is not the language that is being learned, but the abandonment of the one considered as one's own – which requires the expropriation of cultural identities to accommodate the foreign that inhabits the familiar in each language.

Thus, based on a philosophical conception of language, Benjamin gives translation and the poetic character inherent to language a subversive scope, breaking with the unity of the linguistic sign and its complement in communication. To this end, he finds in the feminine (MATOS, 2006) the criticism of the philosophies that asserted themselves dogmatically and totally at the expense of the illusion of the virile logos of reason that annihilates it. Contrary to the way in which women were systematically defamed by the same philosophers who laid the foundations of Western thought throughout history, Benjamin found in them the political, epistemic and affective strength necessary.

Therefore, he criticizes the Socratic method that forces the answer by imposing it as the only truth, as if words were weapons at the service of the logos of reason: “convincing is sterile”, writes Benjamim (1928/1992, p. 40), “for men". While men dialogue, Benjamin is interested in female conversation, rescuing the figure of classical Sappho and her colloquia (as in the fragment “Socrates” from 1916), where silence – the place of the feminine “at the confines of language” –, the inexpressible, is the creative condition of the word. Among women, says Benjamin (apud MATOS, 2006, p. 105), “silence rises, majestically, over their speech. Language does not confine women's souls [...]: it revolves around them, touching them. The language of women was not created.”

But if he prefers to talk about the masculine and the feminine (and not the opposition between the sexes), it is because “one and the other are both assimilated in human beings, and thus I consider the types of man and woman to be something very primitive in the thinking of civilized humanity. ” (BENJAMIN apud MATOS, 2006, p. 183).[2] In this way, contrary to dogmatic essences, he finds in the feminine the presence of alterity as a creative power, the essential rupture of dualisms that are sedimented at the expense of the rejection of heteros as such.

In the love of the feminine adrift in modernity, of a woman named in the singular, the philosopher also finds the necessary criticism of Weber's disenchanted world, which was born, for Benjamin, with the spectacle of technique at the universal exhibitions of 1855 – the advent of the fetish of commodity and the univocity of science at the service of mass society and capitalist consumption.

Awakening in the city f dreams

Benjamin, a reader of Freud, was also inspired by Surrealism to transport the dream perspective to the waking world, conceiving the city as the materialization of the unconscious in the form of a dream to be read and interpreted. Not to promote the dreamed reality, as in the surrealist project, but to wake up from it. Capitalism in the 19th century was already that world of things that had been dreamed of for a time, the nightmare from which, following the Marxist path, it was necessary to wake up. Thus, the “genuine detachment of an era” (TIEDMANN, 2018, p. 23) would be achieved with the “dialectical turnaround, the irruption of an awakening consciousness” (BENJAMIN, 1927-40/2018, p. 660).

Here the historian assumes the role of interpreter of the dream that struck Europe, seeking, in the immediate experience lived in the city, the enigmatic images of the dream to be deciphered in the forgotten past. The city calls on the historian to remember the historical fabric and adopt the same Freudian procedure for deciphering the unconscious. To recover it – as Hanna Arendt (2007, p. 61) comments –, Benjamin uses countless quotations, because “to quote is to name, and the name, more than the speech, the word, more than the phrase , is what illuminates the truth”, this being an acoustic phenomenon. Thus, Benjamin, himself unclassifiable according to Arendt (2007, p. 61), exercises “ thinking poetically ” and acts like the “pearl fisherman” who extracts from the bottom of the sea what is strange and valuable, convinced of “marine changes, of open eyes into pearls and living bones into coral.”

The poet's Paris, says Benjamin (1927-40/2018, p. 65), is that of his melancholic gaze cast over the city of funeral idyll, the gaze of someone who feels like a stranger there. As spleen, it shatters the ideal of modernity, submerging itself in the “underwater city” to discover its geography. In his lost steps, he “abandons himself”, “invites himself to absence” (BENJAMIN, 1927-40/2018, p. 341), he himself shatters. There, “the images of women and death interpenetrate with a third image, that of Paris” (BENJAMIN, 1927-40/2018, p. 65). The prostitutes, the fetish, the fashion, the arcades, the advertisements, the quotes, the traces don't stop. The passer-by “takes refuge in the crowd”. 

In effect, as Laurent (2007) proposes, when one takes the city as a place for reading modernity, it is the unconscious text that is updated there. Freud had already opened this path and there is no shortage of examples of cities, ruins, palaces, temples, evoked in his work as “psychic entities”, home to the “material of the unconscious”. Lacan (1966/2017, p. 13) inserted himself into this same tradition when he said, poetically, that “the unconscious is Baltimore at dawn”, the place where thoughts do not stop and the structure of the unconscious is updated in the formula of fantasy that provides the framework of reality.

However, a decisive crossing was made by Lacan in the 1970s. First, with his trip to Japan, he revisited the “instance of the letter” and conceived a “littoral unconscious”, locating in the void of the letter the place of acceptance of the jouissance that remains outside of meaning, distinct from the knowledge produced in the significant articulation of the “unconscious structured by language”. The littoral metaphor elucidates the function of the letter of articulation between heterogeneous fields (void, knowledge and jouissance outside of meaning), different from a border that would separate the territory of the Self from a distant dark continent. On the littoral, the traces of the sea in the sand are continually recreated, undoing the walls of identifications and certainties of the Self.

In effect, Lacan had to “wrest something from himself” – as Jacques-Alain Miller (2021, p. 34) says –, take a further step in relation to his passages into female sexuality: “What he glimpsed, from the perspective of female jouissance, he generalized until he made it the regime of jouissance as such.” Neither the essence nor the property of Woman who does not exist, the not-whole, infinite and non-symbolizable jouissance, remains as an irreducible real “in the phallocentric dialectic”. Thus, the feminine as the place of alterity – of difference, not a relative difference between opposites, but that of the absolute Other – is also a mode of jouissance that cannot be eliminated, not even with the most enlightened “dialectical twists” of the enlightened interpreter. And, if at the end of his teaching, Lacan (1977-78, s/p) goes so far as to state that the “unconscious is exactly the hypothesis that one does not dream only when one sleeps”, it is because we do not free ourselves from this real in the face of which, effectively, any theory or interpretation pale. The pas-tout par tout (MILLER, 2005, p. 109) that spreads everywhere, drags the subject, without quilting point, to where he no longer finds himself.

Thus, not every city allows itself to be read by remembering the history of pearls extracted from the “submerged city” (BENJAMIN, 1927-40/2018, p. 66). And when this discursive bond is lost, it is the functioning of the letter that imposes itself, updating the regime of the not-whole. Torn apart by the “refractions of the signifier” (LAURENT, 2007) in the perpetual translation of what never ceases to be written, the city becomes the “empire of the void” (LAURENT, 2007) under the modality of thoughts to be read that they never cease to impose themselves, but whose reading is never achieved. “On the street it is necessary to read what has never been written” (HOFMANNSTHAL apud BENJAMIN, 1927-40/2018, p. 701), evokes Benjamin.

However, in this thrust towards the illegible, it was Lacan who knew how to read the incalculable effects of the feminine, where Woman Who Doesn't Exist can present herself in the real of infinite jouissance, not always desirable.

Asja Lascis, “reenchantment” of the world

It is not surprising that it was precisely in this field that Benjamin finds a function for love, bringing together the erotic and epistemic experience of the modern philosopher. The beloved woman is the named woman, concludes Olgária Matos (2002, p. 119), because, for Benjamin, “you love the beloved in her name”. It is love of the word that creates the reality of the name, creates the aura around a woman that condenses the experience of a carnal love without being fetishistic, divine without being a Goddess, through which another way of living is glimpsed and fulfills its paradoxical function: “communicates the incommunicable” (MATOS, 2006, p. 199). There, differences come closer.

In 1928, Benjamin published the book One Way Street. He reveals the name of this street in the dedication: “This street is called/ Rua Asja Lascis,/ in honor of the one who,/as an engineer,/ tore it apart from within the author” (BENJAMIN, 1928/1992, p. 35 ). Asja Lascis, the Russian revolutionary for whom he had a passion, walks as a guide in front of him, making the experience in the city legible, giving “a meaning to this street and a political meaning to the crisis of the Weimar Republic” (MATOS, 2006, p . 191).

A woman who provides a direction, inspiration for love and cause of desire, in line with a unique way of enjoying the unconscious, will be the one who will fulfill her function of giving the stray letter a new destiny: that of making a knot of the lost links that the wandering passages in the not-whole city trigger: “Just as birds seek protection in the hiding places of the tree's foliage, sensations also take refuge in the shadowy wrinkles, in the inelegant gestures and in the unnoticed stains of the beloved body, in whose hiding place they take refuge in safety” (BENJAMIN, 1928/1992, p. 46).

Uma mulher que aloje um rumo, inspiração para o amor e causa do desejo, em consonância com um modo singular de gozar do inconsciente, será aquela que cumprirá sua função de dar à letra desgarrada um novo destino: o de aninhar com um nó os elos perdidos que as passagens errantes na cidade não-toda desencadeiam: “Assim como os pássaros buscam proteção nos esconderijos da folhagem da árvore, também as sensações se refugiam nas rugas sombrias, nos gestos deselegantes e nas manchas despercebidas do corpo amado, em cujo esconderijo se refugiam em segurança” (BENJAMIN, 1928/1992, p. 46).

References

ARENDT, H. Introducción a Walter Bejamin. In: BENJAMIN, W. Conceptos de filosofía de la historia. Buenos Aires: Terramar, 2007, p. 7-63.

BENJAMIN, W. Rua de sentido único. Lisboa: Relógio d’água. 1992. (Trabalho original publicado em 1928).

BENJAMIN, W. La tarea del traductor. In: Obras. Vol. 1, Livro IV. Madrid: Abada, 2010. (Trabalho original publicado em 1923). 

BENJAMIN, W. Passagens. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2018. (Trabalho original redigido em 1927-40).

LAURENT, É. “Cidades analíticas”. A sociedade do sintoma: a psicanálise, hoje. Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa. 2007, p. 91-110.

LACAN, J. Acerca da estrutura como imisção de uma alteridade prévia a um sujeito qualquer (Conferência em Baltimore). Opção Lacaniana: Revista Brasileira Internacional de Psicanálise, n. 77, p. 9-22, ago. 2017. (Trabalho original proferido em 1966).

LACAN, J. Le séminaire, livre 25: Le moment de conclure. Paris, 1977-78. (Trabalho inédito).

MATOS, O. Benjamin e o feminino: um nome, o nome. In: As mulheres e a filosofia. São Leopoldo: Unisinos, 2002.

MATOS, O. Discretas esperanças: reflexões filosóficas sobre o mundo contemporâneo. São Paulo: Nova Alexandria, 2006.

MILLER, J.-A. L’être et l’un. La cause du désir. Revue de Psychanalyse, n. 107, 2021.

MILLER, J.-A. El Otro que no existe y sus comités de ética. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2005.

ROSA, M. Da cadeia significante à constelação de letras: os signos do gozo. Àgora, v. 12, n. 1, p. 53-73, 2009.

TIEDMANN, R. Introdução à edição alemã. In: BENJAMIN, W. Passagens. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2018.

 Notas

[1] Reduced version of the complete text published in: Passages féminins chez Walter Benjamin. La cause du désir. Revue de Psychanalyse, n. 103, p. 73-78, nov. 2019.

[2] Benjamin’s Letter to Herbert Blumenthal (06/23/1913).