by Roy Scranton
To describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework of reference, one would have to make a great many negative statements, such as: his erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian and he was not particularly interested in the Bible; he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations . . . he reviewed books and wrote a number of essays on living and dead writers, but he was no literary critic . . . he thought poetically, but he was neither a poet nor a philosopher.4
Benjamin was, and remains, sui generis: while he is usually grouped among the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, with whom he associated in the 1920s and ’30s, he never quite fit in with their rigorous sociological Marxism, and when the members of the Institute fled Europe for the United States, Benjamin stayed behind. Benjamin founded no school of thought, he cannot be emulated or followed, and yet he endures as a model of intellectual life in the modern world.
Part of Benjamin’s appeal, no doubt, is in the literary quality of his work, which is breathtaking, but I believe a more important aspect of his appeal lies in the seriousness of his situation, not only in the sense of his historical moment—the rise of fascism and end of nineteenth-century Europe—but also in his sensitivity and vulnerability to that moment, his lifelong struggle against pessimism and despair, his fatal courtship with total failure. In a few figures in every age, biography and history merge, and as a shadow fell across Europe in 1940, Benjamin wrote his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” offering the indelible image of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as the angel of history, wings spread and mouth agape, being blown backward into the future:
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them . . . This storm is what we call progress.5
A few months after writing this, Benjamin killed himself. He was buried where he died, in Portbou, Spain.
Following the trail Benjamin took when he had finally decided he could no longer stay in France, I started out before dawn in the sleepy beach town of Banyuls-sur-Mer, winding up through the vineyards in the hills around town then turning steeply into the mountains. I hiked all morning, up, up, up a rocky, winding path, which Benjamin had labored up in clunky shoes, with a bad heart, carrying a suitcase full of manuscript pages, wheezing and stopping often to catch his breath. At the summit, on the border between France and Spain, I tried to imagine myself in Benjamin’s place, fleeing the Nazis and what would become the Holocaust, one refugee in a stream of them, one refugee among thousands, millions, there on the border between two worlds, the fading, ghostly Europe of Baudelaire and Proust, and the new world of America and fascism.
It’s a tragic, romantic image: the historian pursued by history, on the verge of self-destruction. I struggled to understand Benjamin’s suicide, to think my way into it as I descended to Portbou then hiked back up to the cemetery on the cliffs above the town where Benjamin is buried, as I contemplated the memorial that artist Dani Karavan had created there to honor him: stairs going down a steel passage piercing the cliff, ending in a glass wall suspended, dizzyingly, above the crashing waves of the Mediterranean. Into the glass are etched these words:
It is a more arduous task to honour the memory of anonymous beings than that of famous persons. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of those who have no name.
I strove to make sense of Benjamin’s decision, when he found out that the group of refugees he’d come with would be turned back across the border, to take a killing dose of morphine. I worked to imagine myself in the position of someone with no exit, no feeling that the future had anything to offer but more catastrophe, no sense of a chance for ease or relief or safety, no hope. I tried to imagine the moment of now or never.
The sun flared over the blue waters of the Mediterranean and far below, late season beachgoers swam and played in the waves. Teenagers flirted and teased each other. Children chased one another up and down the sand. I tried to concentrate, but my thoughts kept returning to lunch.
The moment passed. I had a sandwich. Life went on and I went back to Banyuls-sur-Mer, then Paris, then New York, and so on, but in a very important sense I’m still there in Portbou with Benjamin, because we’re all in Portbou with Benjamin. We are each of us the incarnation of the angel of history, our faces turned toward the catastrophe of the past, being blown backward into a future we didn’t choose.
I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not a Benjamin scholar. I’m not a professional philosopher. I’m a novelist and sometime journalist and an essayist. My scholarly training is in twentieth-century American literature, poetics, and intellectual history. My tools are historicism and close reading and dialectics and narrative, images and rhetoric and concepts. So what do I do? What do we do? What can mere words do for a doomed civilization?
The range of action seems narrow, and mostly ineffectual. Alerting people to the problem and educating broad audiences has proven ineffective against deliberately sown confusion, deep scientific ignorance, widespread apathy, and outright hostility. Naomi Klein makes a very important point in her book This Changes Everything, that those who are invested materially in fossil-fueled capitalism will also be invested ideologically in opposing public recognition of the scope of global climate change, since the threat, properly understood, would demand an immediate dismantling of the global economy and the overthrow of those who rule it. Warning people of the danger we face only seems to sow anxiety and fear, much like the jolt of the latest “Fox News Terror Alert,” and to provoke not restraint, but scapegoating and aggression.
Within the humanities (or at least my corner of it), among serious work being done to think through our impasse, I also see critics who keep repeating the same moves again and again, theorists turning from empiricism and reasoned discourse to specious metaphysics and giddying gibberish; thinkers arguing against the idea of “humanity” as a category of thought, as if we were not in fact a species among other species, a species that happens to be killing off other species in a planet-wide mass extinction event; and literature scholars using the Anthropocene as a new way to talk about trees in Milton. I love trees. I love Milton. But is this the best we can do?
Almost nowhere is anybody grappling seriously with the implications of the catastrophe that is already happening, in which we already live, while everywhere people are trying to find ways to move forward. How do we move forward? We just need to keep moving forward. But where, where are we going? If we thought clearly about our situation for one moment, we would see the end of the passage down which we’re so intently “moving forward.” Here in our daily speech we find again the notion of progress to which our form of civilization remains addicted, the storm blowing us into the future, without which our conquering ideologies would be meaningless.
In my book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, I rely on Peter Sloterdijk for the concept of interruption. The idea, as Sloterdijk frames it, is to suspend our participation in stress-semantic chains. We are inescapably social animals: we rush along with our mass protests and our memes and our nationalism, moving forward, feeling it all together. The idea of interruption is not to resist this impulse or to react against it, but to sit with it. Meditate on it. Ponder it. Suspend our progress until we see where we’re going. Suspend our process until something else happens. In the moment of suspension, new possibility opens. This, I argue, is what we might learn in learning to die. By sitting with and meditating on and thinking deeply the idea of our de
ath, as individuals and as a civilization, we open ourselves to the life we lead right now.
In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin writes, “The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts we are developing here originate from similar considerations.” Part of Benjamin’s appeal, I think, is that his thoughts are so vividly conceived—Jetztzeit (now-time), the tiger’s leap, the angel of history, brushing history against the grain—that we think we know what they mean, we think we know what Benjamin means, at least roughly, at least in some sense. He’s talking about revolution and Messianism and how to think about the work we do as humanities scholars and litterateurs and essayists and thinkers and artists so that we might remain connected to some salvific impulse even while recognizing that history is made by the victors, that, in his famous phrase, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
But I wonder if we have not misconstrued the thrust of the “Theses” and thus missed Benjamin’s deeper point. Recalling the feelings of isolation and pessimism with which he wrote these thoughts, hunted and harried and ill, thinking of him poised on the summit in the mountains between France and Spain, caught between two worlds, the “Theses” appear in a new light: they seem to argue that the work of the thinker is to stop time.
“A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition,” Benjamin writes, “but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.” Many have recognized, of course, the import of Benjamin’s argument here in historiographic terms, as methodology, for Benjamin is explicit about what that means. The historian, or properly speaking “the historical materialist,” seeks to free from the grip of the victorious enemy, who has subsumed all history into a universal history, the memory of anonymous beings, those who have no name, and even the dead, and does so by defying the forward momentum implicit in all teleology, even and especially those historical narratives that bring us to the present. “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts,” he writes, “but their arrest as well.” It is through that arrest, that interruption, that a historical moment can become, in Benjamin’s view, “time filled by the presence of the now,” Jetztzeit.
But Benjamin is writing not only as a historical materialist, not only as a historian, but as a scholar, critic, philosopher, and litterateur, deeply concerned with justice yet also struggling, always, against a miasma of pessimism and despair, watching with horror the rise of fascism and the dissolution of everything he loved. He is writing as a humanist, a humanist witnessing the end of his world. It is only with this in mind, it seems to me, that we can begin to recognize the other way in which Benjamin understood the import of stopping time, which is as a form of resistance to the demand that we keep moving forward, and indeed perhaps the only ethical thought available to a thinker whose future is foreclosed, as is ours, by doom.
Benjamin’s theses thus suggest at once a model and a method for the work of the humanities in the Anthropocene, while still leaving open important practical questions yet to be addressed. For even if Benjamin’s historical materialism offers a kind of methodological analogue to the philosophical practice of learning to die, we remain nonetheless within the sequence of historical causality as much as we remain within the stress-semantic chains of daily life, and while the practice of thought or meditation might work to suspend or interrupt the latter, the practices by which we might suspend history itself have yet to be adequately articulated.
As we tumble over the precipice into the darkness, we realize that the light coming up from below is the sea rising to meet us. There is nothing between us and the abyss but a moment of suspended time, like a sheet of glass on which is etched an image drawn in words, a moment, a remembrance. [2018]
II.
War
& Memory
War and the City
1.
In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I put on my desert camo top and took the train in to Bryant Park. I was painfully self-conscious: everyone was staring at me, I knew it, at my combat patch, my black T-shirt reading iraq veterans against the war.
I came up out of the subway station almost shaking from nerves. It was a beautiful, cold New York spring morning—the sky was blue, the light on the skyscrapers full and golden. I had come to walk with the Iraq Veterans Against the War, the IVAW, at the head of a protest march; I planned to put my four years on the line as a testimony for peace.
I’d gotten out of the Army almost a year before. I was finishing my BA at the New School in New York, taking the L train in every day from Brooklyn for classes in experimental fiction and continental philosophy, and working as a dog runner on the Upper West Side. Life was good, I was doing just what I wanted, but something was wrong. Every morning I’d go into the city, anxiety prickling my neck, feeling helpless, edgy, and weird. I’d come home and drink, restlessly sleep, then get up and do it again.
New York addled me: I struggled against the streets’ sensory assault, the adrenaline surge so close to what it felt like driving through Baghdad. I got into arguments with strangers, walked into traffic, muttered obscenities through clenched teeth. I wanted to punch people who stopped on the stairs in the subway. I missed my rifle.
I seethed with scorn at the hedonistic excesses around me. Walking home through Williamsburg in Brooklyn offered such an astounding parade of self-absorbed, prolonged adolescence and fatuous faddishness, I found myself driven insensible with contempt. One night a gaggle of hipsters playing kickball in McCarren Park provoked me to a burst of vitriol on how kickball was a grade-school kids’ game, how hipster culture fetishized immaturity, and how their vapid, petty lives were being dissipated in bankrupt idiocy—from wearing mantyhose and Members Only jackets to spending their lame, wastrel days planning nothing more serious than pretentious and quirkily-themed dinner parties.
“Chill out. They’re just having fun,” my girlfriend said, and she was right. But I had a point, too. These weren’t kids—they were adults, citizens, in their twenties and thirties. They were older than the men I’d ridden with on patrol in al-Dora.
Fiala, for example, a ruddy-cheeked nineteen, one of our SAW (squad automatic weapon) gunners. He was a goofy, chubby Minnesotan, who before joining the army had never left his hometown. He liked The Simpsons and Friends, and it was his job to ride in the roof of the Humvee with a machine gun and provide cover fire, especially watching for snipers, IEDs, and those guys who liked to drop grenades on us from overpasses. He was just a kid and he risked his life for what? Kickball?
The shift from war to peace, which was supposed to have been so difficult, had been easy compared to the shift from military to civilian. When I’d come back from Iraq, I was still a soldier. The combat patch I wore marked me as tested, experienced, someone who’d been there. When I was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for the last eighteen months of my service, I took what I’d learned in Iraq and put it to work training young soldiers how to run traffic control points, search prisoners, and clear rooms.
Now I read Spinoza and Lautréamont. Now I flew into rages for no reason. My combat patch didn’t mark me because I didn’t wear it, and if I did, no one knew what it meant. Every day was like a dream where you show up to school and don’t know anybody, don’t know the teacher, don’t even know your own friends.
And I couldn’t get past it because the army still clung to me, ingrained in the way I held my hands and how I walked, in my very words, in the story of how I got here. At every party, every dinner, every new room demanding introductions, I’d inevitably have to explain how I’d moved to New York after getting out of the army, I’d been in Iraq, and yeah, it was pretty intense. Then I’d watch them shift their eyes, as if searching for something appropriately respectful to say, and I’d hate them for it. I’d have to hear
how they couldn’t imagine, or they wanted to thank me, or they wanted to know why I joined. Every time it came up, I had to relive the whole question of why we were in Iraq and what it all meant.
The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream—“my time in the army”—and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the army in my head.
So I called up the IVAW. I was against the war, sure: who wasn’t, by this point? Iraq was a mess and everyone knew it. But I wasn’t looking just to speak out, to testify and proclaim—I was looking for other vets, some kind of relation, some way to fit the army back into my life.
As I walked past the cameras and Vietnam-era peace activists that spring morning in 2007, I saw a tall man with a shaved head and a black goatee, wearing an IVAW sweatshirt. This was José, head of IVAW’s New York chapter. We’d spoken on the phone and still I didn’t know what to think of him: a self-described “war resister,” he’d never actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan. When his time had come, after several years in the National Guard, he’d applied for conscientious-objector status and refused to deploy.
We shook hands and he thanked me for coming. He introduced me to his second-in-command, a girl named Jen in a green camo BDU top. She, too, was a “war resister.” She, too, had never been to the desert. Zero for two now. I was beginning to worry, but José said he expected more vets soon. He told me how excited he was about all the press and how Tim Robbins was going to speak with us.
The news crews set up their cameras, and more people showed up to march. Not one of them was an Iraq War vet; none had come for the IVAW. I kept looking for a flash of desert camo, a combat patch, something familiar, someone I could look in the eye and ask where they’d been and share a moment with, remembering.
