To Speak of Walter BenjaminGeorge Steiner

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It is a very great honour, to me deeply moving, to be invited to address youtonight. It is also a feeling, a very genuine simple feeling, of inadequacy. Thisroom is filled with those better qualified than myself, Stakhanovites in the field ofBenjamin Studies, masters of deconstruction and postmodernism, the postcoloniallyric. Im very worried lest these remarks may seem to you, and I mean this, tooelementary.

I hope many of you have been, or are going to be, visiting Port Bou. It is one ofthe saddest places on earth. The graveyard is of infinite desolation. The guide,sensing the tourist, shows you Walter Benjamins alleged grave. We do not knowanything about where that grave is. That is tourist food. There is a grim littleplaque consigned to the Filsofo Alemn those words are wrong, of course.And there is the contrasting immensity of the Benjamin industry of this occasiontonight, of the Journal, of the academic voracity around his work. The ironies are deep.

In the winter of 1972/73 I had the privilege of sharing the guesthouse of theUniversity of Zrich with Gershom Scholem. Gershom Scholem also loved to havehis meals at the Schweizerhof Hotel in Bern. He took me to the very table wherehe and Walter were always together and where, at the end of World War I, theydrew up the statutes, examination programme, seminar programme, of an imagi-nary satiric, comical university called Muri, its a suburb of Bern, the UniversittMuri. And one night Scholem said, lets sit down and do the prerequisites for any student wanting to enter a seminar on Benjamin. What are the prerequisitesbefore we admit him to our imaginary seminar? The game turned very serious,

as such games do, and we decided together on twelve areas before you can read aword of Walter Benjamin, and the figure 12 is of course not innocent for a Judaicthinker and kabbalist. It is almost a predestined number.

Number one, the emancipation of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie afterNapoleon and Heine, the emergence from the ghetto. The profound ambiguity ofthis situation: on the one hand, the explosive deployment of commercial, fiscal,intellectual talent, on the other hand, the implosive containment of the ghettobehind it. Their complex coexistence still into the time of Benjamins parents. Thecreation of our modernity in the secularisation of Judaism through Marx, throughFreud, through Einstein. The Goethe-cult of that Jewish emancipated communityfor whom Goethe was a talismanic, commanding presence of European humanis-tic hope, a cult which will be reflected in the great 192324 Wahlverwandtschaftenessay of Benjamin. And then, in a very complex and peculiar way, in this long, encyclopaedic essay for the Moscow Encyclopaedia, never used, on Goethe of192526. And then also, peculiar to this German-Jewish emancipated bour-geoisie, a vision of France, a largely idealised vision of an emancipated VoltaireanFrance of the Lumires, a vision put under extreme pressure and crisis by theDreyfus affair and all its consequences, not only in France but throughout Europe.So prerequisite one: an understanding of that very intricate piece of European history.

Prerequisite two, says Scholem: a study of the German youth movements, notonly of Gustav Wyneken, the first master of Benjamin, but across the horizon, thesearch in Germany at that time for discipleship, most dramatically in the StefanGeorge circle, but in so many other groups too. And the very history of the termFhrer which Benjamin will use a great deal at the beginning , as did so manyothers. Fhrer, with its ethical, mystical resonance: the teacher, the master, theparadigmatic exemplar, modulating into the politics of the pragmatic. At the coreof this construct, there are the tensions for the young German Jew, between assi-miliationist nationalism and nascent Zionism. There are the ever more straineddebates around figures such as Buber and somewhat later, Rosenzweig. And theimpact of this debate and of these tensions and dialectics on Benjamin, summedup in Herzls famous ambiguous title Altneuland, the ancient new land.Altneuland which is to be Zionist Israel, and yet formed, as we know, accordingto Bismarckian ideals of a nation-state, so that the tragic fausse situation was therefrom the start.

A third chapter would be the as yet very little understood history of Germanpacifism. German pacifism was very rare. Walter Benjamins self-isolation fromthe Freideutsche Jugend was the first tragedy of his life. He split from theFreideutsche Jugend which adopted a militant, pro-war attitude and a militantpatriotism. Among Jews this meant an almost ludicrous overcompensation,

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of being more patriotic than the Germans around them. The moral psychologicalcomplications of Scholems and Benjamins, and I use a vulgar word, draft-dodging and their refuge in Switzerland. On this I found it impossible howcould one ever to query Scholem. Scholem used to recount, and he has done it in writing , the fantastic pride he took in feigning madness, as you remember, infeigning epilepsy, in faking his way through three revision boards. Benjamin hadcompletely fraudulent medical certificates, obtained through the pressure of priv-ileged family. And when one reads the Scholem letters and the Scholem-Benjaminletters above all, in the two volumes already available, there are less than half adozen references to the World War raging around them, and to the death of manywho were very close to them and who would not have wanted to evade their dutyin any way. There is a problem here, that I do not have any insight into, but I knowit is a very deep and important one, and that until we can tackle and grasp thisissue, there is a great deal we are missing.

Fourth, of course, the development of the German language out of the LutherBible translations, out of the mystical-illuminated lineage of Bhme, AngelusSilesius, Novalis, and above all of the parataxic techniques of Hlderlin and theSophocles translations and commentaries on Oedipus and Antigone, as these becomeavailable, immediately prior to and after the First World War, through the pioneering work of Norbert Hellingrath. He himself of course falls heroically inthe front lines. Dramatic hermeticism, as I would call it, and dialectical expres-sionism, as we will find them in the first of the two great Rmerbriefe of Karl Barth,in Ernst Blochs Geist der Utopie, in Heidegger above all, leading ultimately to theSprache im Norden der Zukunft (the language in the North of the future), the famous line of Paul Celan. This peculiar and particular German grows out of a dual legacy of the Lutheran pietist strain and of the great Romantic prose with which Benjamin deals in his early writing s and thesis. Without a close awareness of this semantic history, the famous, or dare I say, notorious texture of the opening section of the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels remains inacces-sible. And even if one is plunged at first hand and so many now in theBenjamin industry are not, forgive me, capable of handling German at any such level into the immediacy of that richest, most complex chapter in the history of the German language, that section is finally so much more difficultthan anything in Kant (Adorno). Or, much more simply, I regard the whole thing as totally incomprehensible (Scholem). This is very important, becauseScholems German is preternaturally lucid, almost uncannily like Freuds. Freudand Scholem are the two great masters of clarity, of an ultimate clarity. And Scholemfound Benjamins choice of the esoteric very, very important and in need of study.

Fifth, and wonderfully ironic after the generous welcome we have received here, the inaccessibility to the academic which is such a commanding part of

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Benjamins tragedy and life. The inability to gain a foothold in the academic. Thefailure climaxing in the withdrawal of the Habilitationsgesuch of 1925. It is this failure which will compel Walter Benjamin towards the fitful bohemia andnecessities of freelance cultural journalism, towards a lifelong dependence on theinterest and/or goodwill of newspapers, of radio and publishing ventures, andthen, almost fatefully, on the Institute of Social Research and maecenasship ofHorkheimer and Adorno. Deeply defining of Benjamins sensibility is the nostal-gia for an ironic ressentiment towards the academic. Never was there a professormore manqu, never. How true was he a obituary, the only obituary, one obituary.How true was he the obituary in the New York Yiddish and refugee newspaperAufbau, which reports 11th October 1940 The tragic suicide of Professor WalterBenjamin, the well-known academic psychologist. One would have had to beKafka to write that one. And yet Benjamin hungered for that acceptance, andagain and again stated that it might have saved his life, the point being thatAdornos academic status, parlous as it was, marginal as it was, nevertheless whenpapers and visas were issued, was of immense importance.

Six, the mentality of the collector, an enormously rich and difficult chapter.Benjamin, the expert bibliophile, the marvellously skilled and passionate booktrader, the renowned collector and exegete of 19th century childrens books andtoys, the famous and magnificent collection. The word, Ill come back to it, whichLvi-Strauss will launch, but which is just as right for Benjamin, the bricolage-ethos and bricolage-ethics which will underlie the entire Passagen-Werk, which is conceivable only to a collector. Or the famous boutade, but it was more than a witticism, I dream of writing a book made up only of quotations entirely acollectors remark, the remark of a virtuoso of book catalogues, of a virtuoso of catalogues resonns.

The emblematics of Benjamins fascination with allegory and the baroque, thecollection of figuri and configurations. Benjamin, as Shakespeare, guides us. He isa supreme picker-up of unconsidered trifles, has a fantastic eye for the tiny, forwhom the rag-picker in the Paris streets is a prime witness to the nature of latemercantile civilisation. Hence, one of the most haunting , totally inexplicable, and totally convincing of his aphorisms, there will be mythology so long as thereare beggars.

The seventh chapter, which Scholem again emphasised in conversation, istotally closed to me, Benjamin the graphologist. He said if you dont understandthat, then nichts anfangen, no use. Why? There is biographical detail, en passant,he earned very hard needed money from graphological analysis. Thats a detail. Hedid it professionally. But there are manifest links, I imagine, with his concept ofimage and trace, with Spur, Bild, Annherung, and Bildannherung, with his medi-tations on the act of scripture and writing with enigmas of similitude, which is

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not analogy or equation. A similitude is not an equation, its not an analogy.Apparently, in graphology these can be delicately and exactly distinguished, andyou have to, if youre going to do a serious graphological analysis. I repeat, Ive nocompetence whatever in what may be indeed this vital synaptic domain relatingmany areas of Benjamins work.

The eighth zone, again closed to me, the repeated and, it would appear theres much still to be learned , fairly massive experiments with narcotics, withhashish in particular. These go back, we now know, to at least 1927 but probablyearlier. They relate of course, he does the relating himself to Benjaminsincessant preoccupation with Baudelaire, but also to his immersion in the counter-logic of dreams, of surrealism, of the hallucinatory in art and of poetics in general.He explored deeply the drug world, experienced it at a time when its status wasdifferent from ours, and that difference is one of the most fascinating transitionsinto modernity. It was not our status. Cocteaus drug-taking is not our drug taking, and so on. The sociology was deeply different.

And I ask, does the drug complex relate also to the visionary readings of theAngelus Novus, that iconic presence dates back as you know to 1921, and to thevery peculiar imaging of abstract discourse, even in the late theses. As I under-stood Scholem, the addict and the mystic are able to make concrete, bilden, toimage, ausbilden, einbilden, durchbilden, relations of extreme abstraction, even formal logic. Remember, Scholem was a mathematician, and a very formidable formal logician. And he says these are the two roads, the genuine illuminatio andthe drug road, and if you know neither, you cannot get anywhere near the centreof the doctrine of the image and of the concrete.

The ninth chapter, the truly labyrinthine question of Walter Benjaminsinvolvement with rejections of Marxism and Leninist-Marxist Communism. Fartoo little is said of the deep and tragic relation to his brother, who will perish inthis drama, who as you remember, goes back, goes back in to die for the KPD. Weknow of the relations, or we think we know, which begin with Asja Lacis in 1924.We now have the diary of the 192526 Moscow visit, posthumous of course. Wethink we understand the concept of the materiality and technicity of language and the arts in its derivation from Marxist theory. We look, though I do not thinkit is correct, to the famous chiasmic doctrine of the aestheticization of fascism and nazism against the politicization of the arts in communism. I think this istotally erroneous, one need only look at the Stalinist and East German history of artto know that this utopian distinction doesnt work, but it was a very importantsuggestion.

And theres a darkening role of the meta-marxist involvement in Benjaminsconflicts with Scholem and then, as we know, fatally with Horkheimer andAdorno. It is Benjamins complex integrity in regard to what remained of his very,

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very special Marxist convictions, which made the life-saver contact with New Yorkmore and more difficult on the one hand, and the utterly indispensable intimacywith Scholem almost impossible on the other.

And we want to know a lot more about the Brecht chapters in Benjamins lifeand labours which begin in 1929, and particularly the extent to which Brechtsvirtuoso genius as a writer of metaphor, of aphorism, of laconic brief parable andfable will influence a late Benjamins ambition in regard also to the aphorismicand didactic. I dont think we can understand those incredible last theses, theo-logical, historical theses, in form, formally without going back to Brechts KleinesOrganon and the way Brecht tries to make (in a time when theres no time, saysBrecht) for the long passage, to contract into the crystalline totality of brevity to save meaning.

A tenth chapter would be the unique instrumentalities of translation in the his-tory of the German language, in German-speaking consciousness and in Germanliterature. German grows out of the Luther Bible translation and out of Goethestranslations, of course often at second hand, but not always, at all, out of no lessthan 37 languages. Ive already mentioned that the German of Benjamin or hisdoctrines is inconceivable without Hlderlins Sophocles translations, translationsof Dante, Baudelaire, Verlaine, by George, and he kept a very close eye on a figurelargely forgotten, an unattractive figure, an irritating figure, but as it happens aman of genius, who was Rudolf Borchardt, a great Dante translator, Valery trans-lator. Benjamin himself, of course, was a translator of Baudelaire, of Balzac, now atlast becoming available in a properly edited form, of Baudelaire and Proust etc.Fundamental to his ontology was the notion of the Adamic tongue which under-lies all seemingly separate articulations and the methodology of decipherment, the enmetamorphic recursion to a lost or concealed authenticity in the Urtext. Theuniversal semiology of the correspondence, out of Baudelaire, between Wort und Bild,between gesture and emblem. A semiology of translatability, of inter- and intra-textuality. As Ive tried to show it in After Babel, Walter Benjamin, like Paul Celanafter him, translates himself into German. Benjamins language and Celans are translations, also in German, out of a semantic set of intuitions prior to thelimiting resources of any one language and of the formal lexical and grammaticalconstraints of natural language.

The eleventh chapter, to which again Scholem attached very great if somewhatsardonic importance, was Benjamin and eros. (A footnote: there has just appeared anovel there will be a hundred a Benjamin novel in New York. A very poornovel thats not its fault, most novels are but which simply throws as a self-evident motif Benjamins resort to brothels. I do not know of a single shred of evidence, either way. But this novel treats it as bien connu. End of footnote.)Benjamin and eros, the ardent failure of lasting relationships. Over and over, the

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passionate incapacity of a lasting relationship, be it with Dora Kellner, Jula Cohn,Asja Lacis, perhaps at one point, it is thought, Lisa Fittko, and so many others.The incomparable finesse of Benjamins analysis of eros and sexuality in GoethesWahlverwandtschaften. Unmatched in the delicacy of his reading of every nuance of the gamut across Eros, Liebe, Leidenschaft, sexuality. The singular mixture of shyness, of reserve and of brutality reported of Benjamins pronouncements on sexuality on the need of and equally necessary fear of women.

And finally to the twelfth chapter of the imaginary prerequisites, the whollydecisive matter of theology, and I quote (you know it all, its a quote with whichevery Benjamin study must begin), the blotter of theology that underlies everyline I write. That is its inverse mirroring , Spiegelbild. Benjamin and modernHeidegger are the two parodist theologians, where the word parodist is of theutmost gravity, of our age. There is scarcely a node, or constellation of argumentand terminology in Benjamin that is not akin to, or derived from, the theological.If one picks just at random words such as aura, the messianic, the angel of his-tory, the Adamic tongue, the famous discrimination between the tragic andthe suffering, the iconic, the decay of the sacred, the numinous, where wouldthe list stop? Where Walter Benjamin is at the highest pitch of his revealingreceptions, in the writings on Kafka, on the interlinear nature of textuality, in thelate theological, historical theses, he is working within and against the grain oftheology precisely as did Novalis, Hlderlin and Hegel, and in a crucially trans-vestite mode as did Karl Marx. Without the theological recourse and idioms sooften explicit, Walter Benjamins work would scarcely exist.

Twelve, shall we call them spaces, in an imaginary seminar, in an imaginaryuniversity, each of which solicits study and evaluation. No single scholar, nohermeneutic reader can master them all, of course. And since Scholem himself, andHannah Arendt, and Karl Lwith and Adorno, I know of no one left with theimmediacy of trained insight into Walter Benjamins appalling ly destroyed world,into the matrix of his thought. Four fellow exiles in the tragic era of modernJudaism, with lives and sensibilities kindred to Benjamins own haunted anddishevelled condition. That condition is the absolutely determinant fact of everyaspect and facet of his being and thought. This is the whole point. BenjaminsJewish identity and fate is the one single axis around which turns the bewilderingrange of his interests, the kaleidoscope of his writings, as well as their fragmentedincomplete and provisional form.

The context of Walter Benjamin is that of a fundamentally Jewish moto spirit-uale, a motion, an Energie of spirit or Sprachkrise, which takes modernity fromSigmund Freud and Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus to the Frankfurt School,

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to Lvi-Straussian semiotic structuralism, to Roman Jakobson, and from that struc-turalism to the direction set by Husserl and Lvinas. A direction whose logicalafterword is that of current derridean deconstruction. Already it should be clearthat this language turn, as it is called in American philosophy, arises intimatelyout of the Jewish revolt, both self-lacerating and parodistic, against a millenniallogocracy, against a sacrilisation of the revealed text as law and truth. This revoltis as visible in the Sprachkritik of Wittgenstein and of Karl Kraus as it is in the playwith indeterminacy and emptiness of deconstruction in postmodernism. But a revolt paradoxically, no, inevitably, charged with the dialectics of the sacrilisa-tion of language. We do not need Freud to teach us that where there is thatonslaught there is the counter-motion, in the dialectic of worry force conscience anddespair. The great Sprachmystik in the desperate rearguard actions of Rosenzweig,of Scholem himself, of a Lvinas, of a Paul Celan, and a Walter Benjamin, it is precisely this counter-motion of deeply Talmudic, or if you will, Kabbalistic language sacrilisation, which makes current attempts to incorporate Benjamininto the deconstructive, let alone lacanian or postmodern carnival so misguidedand so exploitative. Benjamin was in unremitting search for, and I quote the greatcry at the end of Moses and Aaron: du Wort, du Wort das mir fehlt, a cry whichsums up the great Jewish language drama, you word, you word that I lack, or thatfails me. For the transgression into essential meanings of meaning at the barriersof speech in Wittgensteins Tractatus, for the fatal silence of the Sirens in Kafka each of which cardinal moments is rooted in tragic Judaism. The never to beaccomplished, yet always imminent homecoming to where we have never beenbefore. That is how I imagine the messianic. You come home to where you havenever been is, in Benjamin and his contemporaries in suffering, ineluctably knitto the Rettung, the Errettung, the salvation, the salus of the word. It has, I believe,nothing to do with the glittering array of sociologic, psychoanalytic, deconstruct-ive issues and attitudes so prodigal at this Congress. To overlook, be it for amoment, the defining, embracing, now so largely unrecapturable we cant recap-ture it, no scholar can Judentum that is the life and work of Walter Benjamin, isto add to the desolation, to the injustice, to the falsification of his memory andlegacy. Thus for me, and forgive my frankness, to speak of Walter Benjamin is tosay kaddish at Port Bou.

The current plethora, the explosion of secondary material it begins terriblyambiguously with a special number of the magazine Benjamin zum Gedchtnisissued by the repentant Institute for Social Study Research in New York in 1942,though repentant is the wrong word, I know, and the very slow resurrection of the works, first in the DDR where I was and saw them beginning to come,

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lets never forget it, in 49, that early, and then with the Suhrkampkultur, as I triedto call it and define it, in 1950, it makes it very precarious, I know that Ill get itwrong, to attempt any balance-sheet. Any Bilanz is immensely difficult to try andarrive at, particularly among specialists. But I do want to ask what in the thoughtand writing s of Walter Benjamin will survive. What is his presence, or, to useKierkegaards great phrase, his present past, seine Gegenwart-Vergangenheit, the pastthat is present, which is what matters to us we are not archaeologists? Whatwill, in his work, be a source for future argument and application, enactment? Any answers can only be tentative and, I repeat, almost assuredly turn out to beerroneous. I know that, and I ask you to bear with what is clearly a personal intuition.

I think that in a configuration which would include the Annales historians suchas Marc Bloch, and the Abi WarburgPanowski school of art history and icon-ology, and Lvi-Strausss concept of bricolage to which Ive referred already. WalterBenjamin has made highly communicative what William Blake in that wonderfulphrase called the holiness of the minute particular. His anti-systematic vision ofspecific objects, artefacts, grammatical tropes, urban locales, generates a material-ism which is dialectical, though only very partly in any classic Marxist way. Textureand textuality, the thingness of things, Dinglichkeit which of course goes backto Kant of even the abstract concatination and reticulation in Benjamin so as togenerate a very rare particularized universality, I cannot put it more intelligently,out of the tiny detail he does afford abstract and general theses, or callings, againwhat Shakespeare called a local habitation and a name. Like Aby Warburg heknows that God lies in the detail, and that Gods immensity lies in the detail,both. This visionary dare I call it hyper-realism is surely fruitful in todayssocial history, in todays sociology of art.

Secondly, much in the famous essay on the Task of the Translator is, theGerman word is the only right one, berpointiert, surpoint the English remark isvery crude, too clever by half, but it is a good strong remark. It is a precious paradoxicality of expression, for example in the famous assertion: the non-direction of translation towards any actual reader or reading . But this vituoso textand Benjamins praxis as a translator, now being very much studied, will surelycontinue to exercise a seminal role in the hermeneutics and poetics of translation.Im arrogant enough to hope that After Babel is a tiny footnote to Benjamins essay.

Thirdly, current media studies can enlist Walter Benjamin as one of theirbegetters. There is his pioneering aesthetic of photography; his brief but vividlysuggestive consideration of the iconographic reproducability and mass dissem-ination of art from which without acknowledgement Andr Malraux in theMuse Imaginaire draws and draws without ever mentioning his source. Benjaminwas among the very first intellectuals and cultural critics to master, to evaluate at

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its true measure, the role of the radio-talk. Today, questions of authenticity andfac-similitude implicit in the new multi-media, an internet world of image andtext, do represent some kind of fulfilment of Benjamins inspired premonitionsand I cannot suppress the hunch, only a hunch, that he will still give us instru-ments to approach the enormously difficult epistimological problems posed by thenew world of Virtual Reality.

Fourth, the thesis whereby it is the ethical and cognitive duty of history, ofenacted remembrance, to rescue from oblivion the oppressed, the enslaved, the victims of successful injustice, to bring them back to protesting life out of thestrategic amnesia imposed by the history-writing of the victors. This is not ori-ginal to Benjamin. We find it in the radical remembrancers who are the Prophets in Israel. It is in every line of the book of Amos. We find it in the humanitarianrages of Victor Hugo, throughout the dix-neuvime sicle and her miserables, whichhe knew so well. We find it in the outcry of Blanqui: Do not let our despots lie by writing our history. It is an integral element of the retrospective utopias ofMarxism in revolutionary socialism. But Benjamin gives it undoubtedly a singularintensity and urgency and dignity. His is the explicit doctrine of what we call inHebrew tikun olam. Probably again the key sentence to Benjamin, tikun olam,which means roughly, the reparation, the making good, the rescuing to makegood of what is left of this smashed world. Against the dread winds thrusting the Angulus Novus into blind futurity, Benjamins plea for justice is at work intodays recuperative histories of colonialism, of feminity, of the child, and mostevidently, in the increasing ly despairing attempts to recuperate the Shoah from falsification and oblivion.

Last, large heading. It may be that Benjamins most important insight related to the above is his development of Nietzsches fragmentary proposals as to the elective affinities, Wahlverwandtschaften, between culture and barbarism, betweenthe humanities and the inhuman. The commanding document here is Benjaminsown life. But there is scarcely a significant Benjamin text, from the Trauerspielmonograph to the posthumous theological, historical theses which does not touch on, or is not touched by, his absolutely central paradox or antinomy. Itsentailments are in part social. Benjamin points to the mass suffering, to the fre-quent enslavement which underlie the resplendent monuments of high culture.But the crux lies much deeper. It comports for Benjamin those opaque inter-relations between language and physical reality, between fiction and responsibleimagining , Einbildung, which may insinuate the germ of falsehood, of evasion, ofcorruption and cruelty in the aesthetic act itself. It is this intimation, I venture to believe, which underlies the meshing, of the great critic, theologian, socialthinker. At the climax of the summit we each have something perhaps we love most in Benjamin. For me it is the long letters on Kafka exchanged with

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Scholem in 1938 and which I think bring the craft of literary criticism, of reading ,to an unmatched height.

These and numerous other facets of Walter Benjamins presence, Gegenwart remember, long before Hegel, one knew that Gegenwart has in it the wordagainst. Presence in German is adversity. That is crucial, it is always dual anddialectic Walter Benjamins Gegenwart will busy this Congress over the nextdays. These topics cannot easily be circumscribed or compacted into any singlefigura. Yet it is precisely this figura which makes the sum greater than the parts,however fascinating to the specialist. Such was Benjamins depth of spirit, suchwas his articulate genius for sadness, that this one man, in so many ways let usnot fool ourselves pathetic, a beggar, and defeated, so terribly defeated, hascome to stand, in his person, for a limitless immensity of waste and desolation.The waste, none of us can conceive of it, none of us can begin to conceive the waste of the Shoah, of what could have been. He stands for that. Together withKafka, before the midnight hours, and together with Paul Celan after the mid-night hours. Those three. Walter Benjamin carries on his bent shoulders theinconceivable load of a world made ash, of a civilisation annihilated, of a bestialityand injustice forever irreparable, totally irreparable. He bears immemorial witness. And he would not, I think, wish us to do otherwise. I thank you.

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