This is going to be a very strange “essay” by any standards, and especially mine. It is—functionally speaking—something closer to a personal set of notes which I have chosen to publish as-is because their context is sufficiently self-contained. The subject is primarily a set of letters exchanged between the anti-Marxist left-Zionist Gershom Scholem (Gerhard in German) and the Marxist cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. If one had to choose either label, Benjamin was an anti-Zionist. But overall he was squishy-yet-sympathetic on the subject. Regardless, Zionism is not the topic of these letters; it is simply an important context for Scholem, whose entire political outlook exists in the frame of his Zionism.
The subject of the letters and my own commentary is more broad—and yet immediate: Or rather, personal. I doubt anyone too vividly falls into this box, but if someone were to pay close attention to my political rhetoric over the past few years, they would no doubt notice a drastic shift in style and vocabulary with little parallel shift in actual positions. Benjamin himself was the proximate cause for this. Benjamin’s political style convinced me that the language of class politics—that is, a Marxist vocabulary—is important for post-Marxists like myself who have run against the limits of such an ideology and thereby abandoned it in part. In these letters, Scholem attacks Benjamin for exactly this tendency, and Benjamin lightly defends himself.
I will reproduce these letters in full. But if you do not wish to read them, I will also quote the relevant excerpts as part of my commentary. The commentary will essentially be an exercise in thinking aloud about the merits and problems with my own attachment to Benjamin’s posture. As such, expect it to bounce back and forth with the quotes in a conversational rather than argumentative style.
The letters
The commentary
When Scholem says:
Since my first acquaintance with more or less extensive samples from your pen of those reflections on literary matters in the spirit of dialectical materialism, I have realized ever more clearly and distinctly that with this production you are engaging in a singularly intensive kind of self-deception.
It seems that he means deception less in the sense of being unconscious of the problem and more in the sense of being deluded or naive about the full scope and nature of it. While it might not seem obvious that one can be self-deceptive and yet conscious of a problem, the point is expanded and reiterated in his final conclusion:
I maintain that although one can live in this tension of ambiguity (this is, in fact, the cause of my concern), one is ruined by it (to use a very blunt expression for once)—because (and this is a point that matters most to me in your case) the morality of one’s insights is bound to become corrupted in such an existence, and this morality simply is essential to life and in no case can be neutralized.
For Scholem, this is not a problem of external or political responsibility, but purely one of spiritual sanctity. That is, that the greatest level of honesty is required for its own sake as a moral proposition. This makes for an interesting contrast for the normal lodestar of political discourses about honesty; which is obviously George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language: without even concerning himself with the argument that euphemism or double-speak is corrosive to politics at the social level, Scholem problematises it at the level of thought and belief. The chief question here is the possibility of a serious and moral politics that plays with ideology in an almost ironic sense. Can one speak indirectly—or, if I might venture, dialectically? Or does this always degrade into an empty, manipulative rhetorical style? Is there a place for a radical or revolutionary style atop independent or ‘counterrevolutionary’ politics? Or does the natural end course of Marxism always find itself with John Dewey and Richard Rorty, and thereby relativise all concepts of speaking truth in favour of consequentialist loyalty to the ‘Party’ and the regime of one’s chosen ends? That is, the question of whether we can avoid Rorty’s ironism as the only coherent logic that follows from Benjamin’s irony. I believe these are the chief problems that arise from this dispute.
To say that I do not have an answer would be understating things. Before I had even read these letters, I found myself quietly won over to Benjamin’s side in practice; I saw his style as both admirable and achievable in terms of a political balancing act; a place of rhetorical refuge for a long-disillusioned Trot. But Trotsky himself—so beloved by Dewey—was always cursed by relativism and consequentialism exactly. That Trotsky could become anything to anyone (a terrorist, an opportunist, or even a pacifist) depended so precisely on his weakness for a politics of pure-ends. For me, this came to symbolise the hidden utopianism lurking within all scientific socialisms: It presents itself as constrained to a vision of imagining the ‘scientifically’ possible limits of society. But so long as the destination is its sole purpose, it lacks the moral clarity to be anything but a slave to its own vision. As Marx and Engels defined it:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
The destination emerges imminently from what is possible within the present state of things, but the moral landscape of that journey is itself solely justified by this contingent end. In other words, scientific socialism addresses the problem of utopia by simply refusing to imagine that utopia, but does not justify its politics in anything prior to that utopia. Well, perhaps Fredric Jameson can convince me of a different kind of articulation in his book on utopia, but I doubt that the broad contours will change all that much.
Regardless, while I still must pay respect of how much Trotskyist concrete lays down below, carrying the burden at the foundation of my politics; I inevitably came to a realisation that everyone must reach past a certain level of political maturity: Marxism in a post-1989 context must register not as scientific, but as Adventist. Or in Jewish terms, it is Messianic. And when the hermeneutics of prophecy are applied to politics, the natural result is a total system of thought—a domineering and inescapable path to barbarism. That Benjamin recognised this deeply theological truth prior to even the Show Trials, and yet chose to remain an ambiguous semi-fellow-traveller with Moscow is a fascinating fact. And his manner on this issue in turn revived a new rhetorical synthesis in my mind, even as my conclusions remained steadfast.
Yet what Scholem seems to suggest here is that the same problem remains intrinsic to any attempt to adopt a posture of class conflict. That, despite Benjamin’s genius, the apple is rotten to the core. The problem is that despite all of the sophistication and nuance attempted by Benjamin:
It seems to me it is clear to any objective reader of your writings that though in recent years you have tried—frantically, if you will pardon the expression—to present your insights, some of them very far-reaching, in a phraseology that is as close as can be to the Communist kind, there is (and this is what seems to me to matter) an astonishing incompatibility and unconnectedness between your real and your pretended modes of thought. You gain your insights not through strict application of a materialistic method but quite independently of it (at best) or (at worst, as in some writings of the last two years) by playing with the ambiguities and dissonances of this method.
I could, if I were feeling self-loathing, imagine these words directed straight at me with not a single revision. But much like Benjamin, it is less that I see this criticism as something I want to reject vehemently, and more that I want to communicate a resigned hope that I can navigate this stormy sea:
From the tone of these lines you will notice that your logical expectation that your letter will provoke a polemical statement from me cannot materialize. Nor can your letter elicit any expansive or emotional reaction on my part, the reason being that my situation is much too precarious for me to be able to afford this sort of thing. After all, I would not dream of claiming that my situation is infallible or even correct in a different sense—that of being necessarily, symptomatically, productively false. … This means that I am determined to stand by my case under all circumstances, but this case is not the same under every circumstance; it is, rather, a corresponding one. It is not given to me to respond to false circumstances correctly, i.e., with the “correct thing.” Nor is this desirable for as long as one exists, and is minded to exist, as an individual.
… But do you really want to impede me with my little writing factory located right in the middle of Berlin West quite simply because of my imperious need to distinguish myself from a neighborhood that for certain reasons I must accept—do you want to prevent me from hanging a red flag out of my window, saying that it is only a little piece of cloth? If someone produces “counterrevolutionary” writings, as you quite correctly characterize mine from the Party’s point of view, should he also expressly place them at the disposal of the counterrevolution? Should he not, rather, denature them, like ethyl alcohol, and make them definitely and reliably unusable for the counterrevolution at the risk that no one will be able to use them? Can one ever be too clearly distinguished from the pronouncements and the language of people whom one learns more and more to avoid in life? Is not this clear distinction, if anything, understated in my writings, and should it be increased in a direction other than the Communist one?
I feel inclined to accept the limits of a ‘correct’ politics in much the same way. I do not believe there is any problem with waving my red flag when circumstances demand it, even if making honest and straightforward distinctions beyond that point is a constant fight; one where I recognise this as an effort that I will fail at in my individual fallibility. Yet, I also cannot help but register the echo of the same consequentialist relativism that already stained Marxism altogether in my mind. Is Benjamin not engaging in the same shady question-dodging which I saw as Trotsky’s doom? In other words, for all of my efforts, there is a part of me that feels as though it is the same place we started.
Furthermore, can I really justify my insistence on not wagging that flag in certain cases—such as the issue of Palestine? Why do I feel the need to stand above it all in one case, and to indulge my ‘fallibility’ in another? Certainly, I can make many well-supported arguments as to why I drew the line where I did. I have in the past articulated why Zionism makes me feel equivocal in ways that are not true of imperialism in Hong Kong or Latin America. And yet, is this all anything other than the self-deception articulated by Scholem?
Scholem, in turn, quiets some of my concerns by insisting that:
I disputed neither the special nature of your situation in a bourgeois world nor one’s (obvious) right to take the side of the revolution in historical decisions nor the existence of the sad phenomenon of vicinity or weakness or whatever you want to call it. And you rightly say that your letter is as yet no answer to the matter I am bringing up: namely, not that you are fighting but that you are fighting in a disguise, that in your writings you are to an ever-increasing extent making out a materialistic draft that you simply are incapable of cashing, incapable precisely because of the most genuine, most substantial elements of what you have or are. I do not deny that it is possible to write like Lenin; I simply attack the fiction that one is doing so while one does something entirely different. I maintain that although one can live in this tension of ambiguity (this is, in fact, the cause of my concern), one is ruined by it (to use a very blunt expression for once)—because (and this is a point that matters most to me in your case) the morality of one’s insights is bound to become corrupted in such an existence, and this morality simply is essential to life and in no case can be neutralized.
But this is exactly the practical problem presented by this whole exchange: How does one “take the side of the revolution in historical decisions” whilst being forbidden from writing “like Lenin” altogether? Scholem offers this advice as though it is morally simple. And perhaps it is in some ways. But it is not at all obvious to me how this is anything but another exercise in line-drawing. Does Scholem mean that Benjamin’s ambiguity is only a problem because it is expressly dishonest—as opposed to merely being circumstantial or opportunist? Perhaps. Indeed, I think “do not lie” is a political maxim I can fully agree with: If you are resolved to not lie, there is a limit to the temptations inherent in Marxism—and one can still wave their red flag insomuch as it is sincere in the current historical circumstances. And I would feel comfortable defending myself as someone who lives up to this requirement for intellectual honesty. But where is the line by which we define this deception? Is it a lie to pen a polemic that defends Trotskyism vis-à-vis mainstream Marxism-Leninism if I do not make my own post-Marxism a subject within the argument? Am I obligated to make endless disclosures that cripple the efficacy of my own rhetoric in favour of an appeal to some higher spiritual morality? It seems to me that it is challenging to call it a lie to put forward arguments that I actually believe. But it is no doubt deceptive to avoid certain confrontations by way of omission—in some fundamental sense. Is this sense the same as that advanced in Scholem’s polemic? I find myself unable to come to an absolute answer.
In the final analysis, I am inclined to see Benjamin’s attempt at ambiguity as unavoidable. And more to the point, Scholem is just as guilty of the same crime: His Zionism constituted an overall alliance with a failed historical force, even as he attempted to draw distinctions on the finer points in much the same way as Benjamin. This is an exercise in line-drawing with no perfect answer—lacking in correctness, as referenced by Benjamin. However, Scholem’s final warning does leave me feeling trepidatious:
You are endangered more by your desire for community, even if it be the apocalyptic community of the revolution, than by the horror of loneliness that speaks from so many of your writings.
In his The Phenomenology of Terror, the post-Marxist thinker Kiyoshi Kasai does persuasively warn that a “Partisan Instinct” lies at the foundation of all ideological rhetoric. This is an exercise in line-drawing. But it seems unavoidable that any attempt at politics at the level of the broad and underdifferentiated will find itself inadvertently defined by a general instinct for the community that one wants—versus the community that one rejects. That is, that the act of flag-waving advocated by Benjamin is in and of itself a concession to an instinct that is tribal and barbaric, not rational. It seems to me that the only defence against this is the kind of rigid honesty that Scholem calls for, even as no one can actually live up to it. But in that case, we have reached a place where the only defence against the totalitarian communal impulses of relativised utopianism is a kind of utopian appeal to the rational and the liberal. And, in world-historical terms, there is something grim about that: To see that the absolutely necessary force of radicalism is forever walking on a tightrope, and to know that there is something shoddy and rotten to the core about the ropes that are there to catch us should we stumble.
