Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic ExperienceAuthor(s): Hans Robert JaussReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 375-388Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431108 .Accessed: 15/10/2012 00:18

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HANS ROBERT JAUSS

Tradition, Innovation, and

Aesthetic Experience

I.

"THE CONFLICr over the dissociation of future developments and past origins may become the deadly prolegomenon of every metaphysics that seeks to develop in the future. "1 With this bold prognosis Odo Marquard ushered postwar Ger- many into a new phase of the timeless quarel of the ancients and the moderns. This time the debate drew representatives of the new aca- demic trends in history and literary criticism in addition to those schooled in progressive or conservative philosophy. In fact, the General Philosophical Society of Germany devoted its 1962 congress to the topic, focussing on the philosopher and the question of progress. There theorists representing opposing views in the history of philosophy and in social theory (Karl hiwith and Theodor W. Adorno, Helmut Schelsky and Jurgen Habermas, Arnold Gehlen and Hans Blumenberg) hammered out positions that have since dominated the discussion. Even that society's most recent meeting in 1984 on the topic of "tradition and innovation" did little but retrace their positions. I have spoken to this issue from the standpoint of literary theory and criticism: My initial contribution was a history of the "Querelle des Anciens et des Mod- ernes." This was followed with a history of the concept of "moderne/modernite," which I traced to its preliminary end in so-called postmodernism.2 In this essay I want to respond to a series of questions: Will the fine arts be able to overcome what will be an even sharper dissociation between past origins and future developments at the beginning of the next century? Can the conflict between a progressive and a conservative philosophy be settled HANS ROBERT JAUSS is professor of literary criticism

and romance philology at the University of Konstanz.

through the aesthetic preference for the new? And finally, will aesthetic experience be able to compensate for the damage done by moderniza- tion in the victorious wake of technology? By way of answer, I would like to suggest that the separation of future developments from past origins is not a deadly aporia for literature and art. Their mediation is much more a task which has repeatedly confronted the arts, which the arts have overcome in their own way-that is without force-and which they also hope to solve again today. The royal road of aesthetic experience is thus not the alleged aesthetic preference for the new, but the mediation of the new through the old!

As my leading witness I would like to cite Paul Valery, who in an essay on Leonardo da Vinci, described aesthetic experience's mediat- ing function: "Ii imite, il innove; il ne rejette pas l'ancien, ni le nouveau, pour etre nouveau; mais il consulte en lui quelque chose d'eternellement actuel."3 Imitation and cre- ation, preservation and discovery, tradition and innovation have always determined the history of art. Failure to understand this symbiotic unity has plunged both traditionalism and mod- ernism into ahistorical dogmatism: Traditional- ism is blind to the role of innovation and modernism can see only the new. They fail to grasp that the history of art consists of a creative interplay between the two. While tradition in the life-world can be directly and freely handed down from generation to generation,4 artistic tradition cannot. In the arts, the old can only be preserved through ever newer realizations- through selection, forgetting, and reappro- priation. This is true even when the epistemo- logical preeminence of the old over the new, of recognition over knowledge, of tradition over all innovation has gone unquestioned.5 Even the Modern Age's aesthetic privileging of the new

? 1988 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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necessarily presupposes the old as a horizon of understanding. And movements like the avant- garde which disclaim the heritage of the past and deny all past origins are no exception.6 In fact if we can even make a gross distinction between antiquity and modernity according to the epistemological priority of the old over the new as well as the new over the old, it is only because we implicitly agree with Valery that mediation is always involved in both the past- oriented older arts as well as in the future- oriented newer arts. This notion of the mediat- ing function of art manifests itself in the poetic license of the new that sidesteps traditionalism when traditionalism fails to take notice of it. On the other hand, it also characterizes the classical cannon from which even the most rigorous modernism cannot escape (as the phrase "mod- em classics" reveals). Where everything devel- ops only regularly or irregularly, there arises (as Valery once again observed) no real thought.7 Where art slavishly follows past origins as a norm, all that develops is imitative. Where it depends solely on what is new and newest, and believes itself capable of anticipating the future, there is only diletantism (or the tedium of science fiction). In the realm of the arts tradition realizes itself neither in epic continuity nor in a creatio perpetua, but in a process of mutual production and reception, determining and redetermining canons, selecting the old and integrating the new. It is out of this interplay, this constant mediation between past origins and future developments, that the communica- tive function of aesthetic experience develops.

I would like to call as my second witness an author who lived during the transition from the Midde Ages to the early Modem Age, Dante Alighieri. At first glance Dante still remains totally indebted to the old-the rigor of legal metaphysics in scholastic theology. And yet at the same time, if one looks at the response to his Divina Comedia, he paved the way for the new-the justification of individual and histor- ical existence.8 With poetic license Dante es- tablished his own hermeneutic realm of ques- tion and response by letting his wanderer through the netherworld question the dead about their earthly fate, their guilt or merit. In the timeless realms of perdition, penitence, and blessedness, Dante thus reinstated the freedom of human speech. He gave expression to some-

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thing which had remained silent in the dogmatic hierarchy of hell, purgatory, and heaven: the historical existence of individual persons. In his unforgettable interpretation, Erich Auerbach claimed that a duplex sententia mediates here between the old and the new. This double sense allows us on the one hand to read the Divinia Comedia allegorically and canonically as an authoritative answer to the question of the hidden justice of God's wordly plan, and on the other hand to read it literally and historically as a mirror of the earthly world. The final fate of the dead is the motif though which individual destinies are clarified and given concrete ex- pression.

Although Dante unquestiongly presupposed the doxological background of scholastic theol- ogy, he depicted the netherworld in such a way as to develop a highly personal canon: He conceived a series of exempla that provide a paradigmatic and unique conception of the whole of classical, Christian, and contemporary history. And he did not shy away from quietly assisting the divine election of grace in the process. Instead of peopling Limbo, that Elysium-like oasis in hell, with the Old Testa- ment patriarchs the Scholastics had supposed, he filled it with the poets, sages, and heroes of heathen angiquity (all good nonchristians). Later he even situated Ripheus, a minor char- acter in Virgil's Aeneid, in paradise. He passes over Augustine in the canon of saints, but places Siger of Brabant, the guiding spirit of the Latin Averroism, at the side of Thomas Aquinas. He bans the contemporary Pope Boniface VIII among the Simonists, judges many prominent contemporaries cum ira et studio, and casts his political support for Em- peror Henry VII in the guise of a prophecy about a future saviour of Italy. He respected and at the same time poetically transgressed the strongest barrier of theological dogmatism, the requirement that the damned be denied all sympathy. Indeed, at the sight of Francesca and Paolo, he collapsed in a deathlike faint, though he softened the scene by adding a rebuke from Virgil. And he allowed Odysseus, who embod- ies the ancients' spirit of adventure, to journey beyond the pillars of Hercules, and thus beyond the boundary of the Old World. Of course in the end, he punished Odyssesus' willful transgres- sion-as the hubris of an inordinate curiosity

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about the world-with the shipwreck on the dark mountain of the great ocean (the earthly paradise denied him?). And yet he seemed to sense that this hubris prefigured a new form of self-consciousness, one that would discover the drive for knowledge and experience to be the noblest passions in man's nature. We are re- minded of Odysseus' oft- quoted warning to his comrades:

"O brothers," I said, "who through a hundred thou- sand dangers have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains to us, choose not to deny experience, following the sun, of the world that has no people. Consider your origin: you were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge. "9

If great poetry has repeatedly succeeded in mediating between the horizon of past experi- ence and that of present expectations, if it has wedded the normative nature of past origins with future possibilities, then we are justified in saying with Odo Marquard that the function of aesthetic experience is a "culimination point in the problem of alienation." As such, it presents a way to solve that same problem today. And the exemption of aesthetic reflection from the antinomy between conservative and progressive philosophy certainly makes such a solution easier. Aesthetic theory can assert the prefer- ence for the new without discrediting the old per se. Without falling under the sway of the hypertrophic law of progress, it can simulta- neously promote the process of emancipation and preserve the canon of the past. At this point the history of the art is neither a history of progress nor a growing heritage. Even, when in the latter stages of the modern age, new art is created as a provocative reaction against the old, the new does not push the old-as in the paradigm shifts in the history of science-back into the museum of history forever. No, often the new is the only thing giving aesthetic consciousness access again to the old. For this reason I would like to cite as my third witness an author on the threshold between the histori- cism of the romantic period and the aestheti- cism of modernism.

Baudelaire, generally considered to be one of the most radical proponents of an aesthetics of "nouveaute," was one of the first critics who diagnosed the shift from historicism to aesthet- icism. He noted it in his report on the 1855

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international exhibition as well as in Le peintre de la vie moderne (1859). In these articles he did justice to the modernity of the much ma- ligned "imaginary museum" in a way that probably could have given a tolerant "Ancien" something to think about.'0 The worldwide pluralism of the exhibited products of the indus- trial and mechanical arts with their often strange, inexplicably fascinating beauty, re- quired a "modem Winckelmann." Confronted with objects that defy the "timeless" canon of the beautiful, the critical observer has to learn to recognize the quintessence of the beautg universelle in the strange, the bizarre, and the individual: He has to learn to accept the new as the beautiful that cannot be derived from a rule. Thus in answer to classical art's loss of aura, a new aesthetic experience restored it to art in exhibitions and museums!

The accusation that this modem aesthetics is a mere abstraction of aesthetic consciousness is unjustified. This is so for several reasons: First of all, the imaginary museum, which contains a collection of treasures from remote places or past ages, frees things (as Walter Benjamin said so well) "from the necessity of being useful." It overcomes "the complete irrationality of (their) mere presence by including them in the collection, a new system created especially for this purpose, in this way establishing their presence in our space and hence making them again experiencable. '11 Secondly, in this mu- seum, novelty as an aesthetic quality can be- come the key to decoding the strangeness of whatever is distant and old. And thirdly, even Baudelaire has already opposed aesthetic con- sciousness to empathy, i.e. the false conscious- ness of historicism which-I would like to add-the aesthetic experience of modernity in- herited at the same time. In the future, aesthetic experience will be able to deal freely with the temporally distant and the spatially unusual because the study of history will have filled the treasure house of memory. Moreover the his- torical understanding will have investigated the works of all eras in the diachronic continuum of history to such an extent that aesthetic under- standing will be able to reach out toward synchronic view of human art. This will enable it to determine its own position in a new way. To echo a question Hans-Georg Gadamer once raised: Why should the "aesthetic distinction,"

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which "chooses solely on the basis of aesthetic distinctions as such," necessarily end in ab- straction and be harmful if it is apparently also capable of fulfilling a hermeneutic function that is indispensable to our age?"2

It would be tempting to recount the history of aesthetic experience and to explain how time after time it has been precisely the aesthetic preference for the new that has made the old understandable in a fresh way. Be it through the interpretation of the critique, the quote, or the parody; be it through the nineteenth-century's imaginary museum or finally through this century's principle of intertextuality, the old has been made new. But I do not have space to rehearse that here. Instead I would like to explore two problems that straddle the border- line both between aesthetics and philosophy and between aesthetic and historical experience: first, the role aesthetic preference plays, during transition periods, in the perception of the new (with respect to Hans Blumenberg), and sec- ondly, the role it has in the "salvation of the past" (with respect to Walter Benjamin).13

II.

"Il faut commencer par le commencement!" The irony in this saying raises some intricate questions such as, why does the beginning become a problem, in everyday behavior as well as in historical actions, as soon as the habitual is supposed to be transcended, the new begun, or even the state of the world changed? Even the eyewitness to an event has this prob- lem because he is not yet able to forsee what can develop when something new begins, if indeed it is a new beginning. The well-known quote from Wilhelm Meister, "All beginnings are happy, the threshold is the place of expecta- tion," masks the problem in optimism. Its promise presupposes that the apprentice has already recognized the threshold he is standing before: the beginning of middle-class existence that is also the end of his aesthetic education. In Goethe's case the threshold was marked by the right question at the right time ("Is Felix my son?"). Today historians of all persuasions are concerned with these questions: Is it possible to identify actual beginnings or the division of epochs? Can contemporaries really experience them or can they only be understood retrospec-

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tively? To say that they can appears to be a privilege of art history that the rigor of historical pragmatism denies: "There are no witnesses to the radical disruption of epochs. The transi- tional phase between epochs is an imperceptible boundary that is not clearly connected to any particular date or event. But viewed differen- tially a threshold becomes visible that can be identified as either not yet reached or as already crossed. "4

This thesis should be completely rejected. Its author, Hans Blumenberg, however, illumi- nated the structures of period shifts by introduc- ing the categories "threshold of periods" and "reception" in his article "Epochenschwelle und Rezeption" (1958). Since then he has written literature on the beginning of the Mod- em Age that uncovers the hitherto impercepti- ble boundary that runs under the surface of the chronology. Not even such pivotal figures as Nicolas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno testify with certainty about this even though it is the transitional period par excellence. But granting that, one can still ask whether Blumenberg's criticism of the "rhetorical hyperbole about epoch-making events" (p. 458) is a bit exces- sive. One could be less vehement and still cast doubt on the extent to which we can demon- strate and experience the new in history. Blumenberg's new view is of the self- development of the Modem Age which "in contrast to the Middle Ages is not present in advance of its self-interpretation" (p. 468) or, in the earlier version, of the "singular situation of challenge and self-assertion from which springs the incomparable energy at the begin- ning of the Modem Age."15 The crucial ques- tion, however, is whether this view has itself become subject to the "erosion inflicted by historical diligence." Is its fate any different from that of transitional periods that lose their explanatory power when viewed from different perspectives; or from that of the founding fig- ures who are swept away by the progress of historical knowledge (p. 470)? Is it not also true precisely for the self-conception of the begin- ning modem age that an awareness of the transition from the old to the new had to precede the initial boundary between the "not yet" and the "no longer," a boundary whose shifts can only be charted ex eventu? If this transition could not be recognized and situated as a

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threshold, then it could at least enter conscious- ness as a shift of horizon through the rupture between expectation and experience.

For Reinhard Koselleck"6 the asymmetry of expectation and experience has always been the hermeneutical condition for reconstructing his- torical experience. Even when we are missing explicit documentation of epochal disruptions, the discrepancy between the closed space of experience and the open horizon of expectation allows us to determine the threshold between old and new. New expectations that are no longer derivable from the sediment of experi- ence can be produced through the "initiating force of events" as well as through anticipation (in the form of prognoses, utopias, or imaginary omens). Thus the threshold of an epoch as an "absolute metaphor" does not become super- fluous. It describes the consciousness of a period that expresses itself at first hesitantly or already emphatically, prematurely or belatedly, in terms of the simultaneity of the temporally disparate. It gives a special indexical value to the groups of images that articulate the initial consciousness of the beginning of something new. In the case of the period shift from the middle ages to the modem age, one should recall not only the metaphors of awakening and new light, of rebirth and resurrection, of renovatio and reformation, but also the Pauline paradigm of the conversio. This last paradigm was particularly important in the early literature of the modem age. It was used especially for picking out the leading minds of periods and for delineating their contrasting conceptions of old and new. But its importance has not been sufficiently recognized by later scholars. My thesis, however, is that this paradigm best explains the reversal in the meaning of "epoche": Classically, it meant the point at which something comes to rest or a reversal takes place, but with the beginning of the modem age it acquired a new meaning, that of a beginning event which irrevocably changes things.

Although as a metaphor, "the threshold of an epoch," seems so sensible, so difficult for historiography to do without, it involves a dilemma. We immediately notice it if we use the word literally rather than metaphorically: What spaces does the threshold divide? When we cross the threshold, where did we come

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from and where are we going? Every history book (at least up to the high point of the Nouvelle Histoire) parcels the past into periods as if the dividing line was as real and noticable as the metaphor of the threshold suggests. The metaphor's power arises from its mythical anal- ogies in rituals of purity or rebirth: the holy gateway that changes him who walks beneath it, or the porta triumphalis which, as the general and his army pass through it, takes away all the defilement and guilt of murderous war.17 If the assertion of absolute beginnings in history lives off of such a mythical force, then the need to experience the meaningfulness of one's own life as well as history in terms of the prevailing period has outlived its demythologi- zation. Even when one grants the insight of historical criticism that "man does indeed make history, but he does not make the epoch" (p. 31), the metaphor still retains a hermeneutic privilege. This shows that, at least with respect to the experience of historical change, the transition from old to new occurs gradually, piece by piece. And those involved in the development of a new age are the first to carry old baggage over the threshold. It also reveals that contemporaries cannot all govern the same threshold in the same way. Some shy away from it at first; some cross over while casting a look backwards; some never cross it at all.

Even when there is a significant beginning event the transition is incremental. Take for instance the birth of Christ: considered in terms of its consequences, it placed Westen history in an irreversible process and at the same time divided it radically into a before and after. According to Blumenberg,

Christianity laid claim only very late to having initiated a new phase of history. Initially this claim was totally out of question for it because of Christianity's eschatological opposition to history and the unhistorical quality that was (at least) implied by it. (p. 468)

We will leave it to the theologians to evaluate this assertion. But we do need to consider whether the set of Christian images involving the old and the new nonetheless persisted dur- ing the experience of period shifts, especially during the "renaissances" such as the Carolingian, the twelfth century's, or that of the early Modem Age: humanism. An instance of this continuity is seen in the imminent

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eschatological expectation of Christ's coming evidenced in John's apocalypse: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more" (Rev. 21:1).

Of course in answer to gnosticism's tendency to turn the new into the 'strange', the church fathers soon asserted the identity of the Deus creator et salvator as well as the one creation of the world. They "domesticated the new with the help of the category 're' and hope with the help of the anamnesis of holy origins."'18 And yet their theological neutering of the new con- cerned only the period of final judgment and salvation. It must have scarcely affected the inner-historical caesure of Christ's birth. That prototypical, revolutionary division of world time into a before and an after must have remained unscathed. After all the paradigm of Christian chronology could legitimately arise from the rational belief that the succeeding periods stood at the beginning of a new era that broke away decisively from the exhausted old one. Moreover, it could find grounds in a second Christian paradigm that was unaffected by the suspension of eschatology-the Pauline concept of the Christian as a "new creature": "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17). This is the Christian concept of the qualitatively new, the newness which breaks out of the crisis of the past and rejects forever what has become old. Was it not this concept that informed the ep- ochal consciousness at the beginning of the Modem Age? Do we not see it there expressed in Christian terms such as "renovatio" or in profane terms like "rinascita"? Is it not true that in order to legitimize the expectation of the new against the normative horizon of the old, the Modem Age still had to rely on the category "re" to show that the new was a reappro- priation of an original, outdated, or forgotten truth? Hans Blumenberg argues that prior to its self interpretation, the self-conception of the modem age with its claim of inauguerating history ab ovo did not exist, and that it in fact made "the concept of an epoch itself a signifi- cant element of the epoch" (p. 19). If Blumenberg is correct, does it not stand to reason that the Christian paradigm of the conversio (of the new in eschatological form)

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also determined this shift in which the meaning of epoche in antiquity is practically reversed? In other words, does it not stand to reason that the reinterpretation or "provocative secularization" of that paradigm produced the shift? In order to answer this question we need to look at the way the field of images concerning the advent of the new shifted in the early Modem Age.

We should turn first to Petrarch, an almost proverbial witness to the period shift from the Middle Ages to the Modem Age. Of course, like other transitional figures, he was unaware that his own writing as a militant humanist was contributing to epoch-making changes and that he would one day be considered the initiating force behind the Renaissance. Still his letters reveal that he was thoroughly conscious of standing at the beginning of a new age, with which the Dark Ages met their end. In the letter he wrote Giovanni Colonna remembering his stay in Rome in 1341, he suggests using the victory of Christianity over Rome as a historical line of demarcation to divide history into two great periods-the classical and the modern. As a result the decline of the Roman Empire and culture aquired a significance analagous to that held by the birth of Christ in the conception of history characteristic of the Middle Ages. Thus the paradigm of Christian chronology legiti- mized not only a new conception of history but also the repudiation of the recent "dark ages" as something that now had to be left behind. According to Petrarch, just as Christ once brought the light of belief into the darkness in which the heathen lived, now the light of classical culture would cast its rays on the Middle Ages' barbaric darkness.'9

It was only because the Modem Age rigor- ously renounced the recent past that it could describe it as dark and barbaric. But legitimiz- ing this rejection and with it the self-conception of modernity (which at this point still claimed no autonomy) required a return to a more remote past, an ideal past, an antiquity brought back from the depths of time. This necessity then accounts for the emergence of the cyclical view of rebirth (rinascita) among the early Modems. But from the beginning that image had to compete with other metaphors such as "return from exile" or "resurrection." (The latter especially makes the paradigm of the Pauline conversio comprehensible by portray-

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ing the advent of the new as an irreversible process.) This lies behind Ulrich von Hutten's joyous exclamation at living here and now in a newly created world. That familiar quotation, "O saeculum! 0 litterae! iuvat vivere, etsi quiescere nondum iuvat"20 has become a pro- totype of the emphatic conception of epochs in the Modem Age. It presupposes not only the resurrection to new life but also the death of the old (Romans 6:4)-a rejection of the past that outdoes the classical gesture of triumph: "Heus tu, accipe laquium, exilium prospice. "21 Thus the Reformation began with an ostentatious destruction of the old that sanctioned the new message: On the morning of December 10th, 1520 Luther burned along with the bill of excommunication the Decretum Gratiani and the papal decretals-the books of canon law among Catholic Christianity; "Tradition had been executed."22

As I previously suggested, we can distin- guish antiquity and modernity according to the epistemological precedence of the old over the new and the new over the old respectively. This holds at least if we count the Modem Age as beginning with Descartes, who by providing the categories of methodical doubt and necessary existence (the concept of an absolute beginning whose origins lie in its own nature) helped the Modem Age achieve self-understanding .23 If my suggestion holds, then the Christian para- digm of the new, which changes everything both in the world-through Christ's incarna- tion-as well as in the individual-through his conversion-would have predetermined the ep- ochal shift to the Modem Age. Moreover, as a latent pattern, it even anticipated the priority of the new in the subsequent political and aesthetic revolutions which rejected all tradition, espe- cially the Christian. In this process involving a continuing and accelerating development of ever shorter periods, aesthetic expectation has repeatedly gone ahead of the historical experi- ence of the new. Reinhart Koselleck has shown this to be the case with the great period concepts of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation; Poetik und Hermeneutik XII has done the same for the nineteenth-century period concepts which, as it turns out, were also derived from the history of literature, art, and style. In what was often a long process of acceptance, these period concepts were at first

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more or less literarily or aesthetically con- ceived, then accepted historically, and finally pragmatically applied. One might want to speak here of a historical avant-gardism in aesthetic experience, a point that is underlined by the very history of avant-garde: This military met- aphor, which became very fashionable around the middle of the nineteenth century,24 itself had literary and aesthetic origins. Etienne Pasquier used it first to describe the develop- ment of French poetry in the Renaissance: "Ce fut une belle guerre que l'on entreprit alors contre l'ignorance, dont j'attribue l'avantgarde a Sceve, Beze et Pelletier; ou si vous voulez autrement, ce furent les avant-coureurs des autres Poetes. "25

Even when one looks at how the definition of epoch has changed from the old chronological concept to the modem historical one, one sees that the shift in meaning, which occured during the transition from the eighteenth to the nine- teenth century (Koselleck: "Sattelzeit"), was actually anticipated in literary documents of the Enlightenment. Since the sixteenth century, epoch has become an increasingly significant concept for reckoning time, because it allows one to structure the series temporum around important dates. In Bossuet's universal history, announced with the new subtitle Les epoques ou la suite des temps, epoch acquires the signifi- cance of a great event: "ainsi, dans l'ordre des siecles, il faut avoir certains temps marques par quelque grand evenement auquel on rapporte tout le reste." Yet having noted how great events mark off the new, Bossuet immediately ties this into the classical meaning of epoch as a stopping or resting point. He claims that from the vantage point of a great event, the historian can survey both what comes before and after without being misled by anachronisms:

c'est ce qui s'appelle 6poque, d'un mot grec qui signifie s'arrqter, parce qu'on s'arrqte la pour considerer comme d'un lieu de repos tout ce qui est arrive devant ou apres, et eviter par ce moyen les anachronismes, c'est-a- dir, cette sorte d'erreur qui fait confondre les temps.26

The article in D'Alembert's encyclopedia adopts this definition almost verbatim, and mentions the rule, so useful for the historical chronology, of using the concept of epoch properly-neither too much nor too little. Moreover, noting that the division of epochs is

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purely arbitrary and that there is no astronomi- cal reason for choosing one epoch over another, the article expresses little surprise that nations disagree about how to distinguish the differ- ent epochs. However, this understanding of "epoch" is not the end of the story. We need to look at how two other writers use the word in order to grasp something of its still hidden character: Thus far "epoch" has been defined by the point in time that allows one to demar- cate periods, but from now on it will be fixed by the initial event which ushers in the new through an irreversible "revolution"!

"Epoch" is first used this way not in Kant (in the "conflict of [academic] faculties" over the "epoch-making influence" of the revolution of 1789) but in Diderot ("Sur la princesse d'Ashkow"): "ce projet fera 6poque."27 It includes the meaning of "epoch" as an event that produces something new: something that cannot be derived from the old and traced back to what "has always been there." Likewise Rousseau, in his "Discours sur l'inegalite parmi les hommes" (1755), called the crisis that brought the state of nature to an end, and thus had a decisive influence on the course of all future events, an epoch-making event par ex- cellence: "Ce fut 'a l'epoque d'une premiere revolution qui forma l'etablissement et la dis- tinction des familles, et qui introduisit une sorte de propriete; d'ou peut-9tre naquirent deja bien des querelles et des combats."28 Epoch and revolution enter here into a new relationship: the cyclical-astronomical understanding of "ep- och" as a point of rest and reversible movement is itself reversed so that an epoch begins with an initial and unique revolution which irreversibly decides the further fate of mankind.29 This historicized conception informs the specifically modem consciousness of time and epochs that we find at the beginning of the transition period. Later, there is a further shift in meaning: the German idealists, in their philosophies of his- tory, expand the new consciousness of epochs through the transcendental construction of the "Epochs of Consciousness." According to this conception, epochs no longer succeed one an- other but diverge. The historical school subse- quently conceived of them as self-contained periods; since then they have formed the foun- dation for the periodization of history.30 By extending the mere point in time to an initiating

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event, the modem concept of epoch allows one to conceive the split between the new and the old in dialectical terms. This can be seen in Hegel's concept of "objective spirit," which explains the history of mankind in terms of one unifying principle expressing itself in manifold political and cultural manifestations.

In the wake of the increasingly rapid devel- opment of industrial and democratic society that came with the nineteenth century, this idealistic concept of objective spirit lost its persuasive power. The concept proved to be retrospective, and as such well suited for understanding the past as successive phases in the development of consciousness toward emancipation, but not for understanding the rapidly changing present. At the end of the Romantic period, historicism was joined by an aesthetic consciousness that could deal freely with the whole of the past (Benjamin's mus e imaginaire). The succession of self-contained periods devolves into the co- existence of competing movements that rise and fall in rapid succession. The primacy of the new is posited as absolute; the modernity of the period since Baudelaire is conceived of as an experience in which the new sets itself off not from the old but only from itself, in which every modernity brings forth its own antiquit,.

III.

In the period of modernity since Baudelaire, no critic of culture has questioned the aesthetic (and epistemological) preference for the new more decisively than Walter Benjamin.3' The new and the never-changing are for Benjamin disguised categories of historical illusion and the task of a marxist philosophy of history is to uncover their unrecognized correlation: "The destruction of historical illusion must result in the same process as the construction of the dialectical picture" (WA V. 2, 1251). Here, in this early note, Benjamin expressed an idea he hoped to develop in the Passagenwerk: he would use Nietzsche's idea of an eternal repe- tition of the same (in which the historicism of the nineteenth century overturns itself [8a, 3]), to oppose both the moral Amor fati and the modern aesthetics of the Nouveaute. Under- stood in this way, Baudelaire would have all at once revealed the false consciousness of a modernity enamored of progress, as Benjamin's

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience

materialist reading of Fleurs du Mal would prove:

Modernity, the period of hell. The punishments of hell are in each case the newest thing that exists in this sphere. The concern is not with the fact that 'again and again the same' occurs (a fortiori the eternal return is not what is meant here). It is rather that the face of the earth, precisely in what is new, never changes, that what is newest always remains the same in all of its parts. That constitutes the eternity of hell. To determine the totality of the traces by which modernity reveals itself would mean representing hell (p. 1.5; PP I, G 17).

Now, of course, the contemporary reception already demonstrated that Baudelaire's friends took measures to oppose the charge of immo- rality by trying to vindicate the writer of Fleurs du Mal as the "Dante of the decadent era": "c'est du Dante athee et moderne, du Dante venu apres Voltaire" (J 3a, 1). And in his newly seen "landscape of ennui" there definitely appears a "death-like Idylle" of the city in many facets" (WA V. 2, 55). Yet the aspect of hell by no means does justice to all of the traces of modernism in Baudelaire's major work. Fleurs du Mal also leads the reader-if I may retain the Dantesque frame of reference- through a modern purgatory32 and opens up for him in the contrasting "landscape of ec- stasy,"33 unhoped for resting places of remem- brance and artistic paradise. The experience of the new and the newest (which is by no means permanent and necessary) thereby suddenly changes again into the same and never-changing or into the oldest (the "pre-history" Benjamin sought for). Baudelaire's aesthetics of Nou- veaute maintains its moral claim with the atti- tude of an exploratory curiositas, which al- though sometimes disappointed is nevertheless indomitable. For Benjamin the closing verse of the poem in Fleurs du Mal, "Au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver de nouveau," reveals the new as the "origin of illusion" and the "quintessence of false consciousness" (V 1, 55). But against this, one can argue that Baudelaire renewed here a famous Dantesque paradigm: the last journey that leads Odysseus, unconcerned with heaven and hell, beyond the limits imposed on man, the antipodes of the ancient world. Thus Baudelaire provocatively quotes: "Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous bruile le cerveau, / Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?" It is precisely the new

383

that makes the old quotable again for Baudelaire. The new revives a dead past. This is what his fashion paradigm shows (Ed. PI. 837ff.) and it is this basic impulse that Benjamin failed to see. The hermeneutic func- tion of the aesthetics of Nouveaute allows Baudelaire to complete the shift from histori- cism to aestheticism. It thus contradicts Ben- jamin's concept of the regression of modernity back to its "pre-history," but by the same token it corresponds to his theory of the present moment of recognizability. But to his own loss, Benjamin failed to use it to buttress his position.

Benjamin's approach to a "pre-history of the nineteenth century" provoked a serious objec- tion from Adorno: "The phrase that 'the new immerses itself in the old' is to me highly suspect from the point of view of my critique of the dialectical image as a regression. In this phrase one does not reach back for the old; instead, the new is, as illusion and phantasma- goria, itself the old" (WA V. 2, 1132). This criticism has a kernel of truth. After all, at one point, Benjamin himself offers a reformulation of his main thesis in which he rejects the idea of an archeology of the nineteenth century. He repudiates the search for prime historical forms, the archetypes of collective unconscious, as methodologically inappropriate for producing a pre-history. Instead he suggests that "the con- cept of a pre-history of the nineteenth century has meaning only where it is to be presented as an original form of that pre-history, that is a form in which all of pre-history groups itself anew in images peculiar to the last century" (N 3a, 2). His point-at least on my reading-is that our modern age has its specific pre-history in the preceding century. In other words, the nineteenth century, with its initial appearance of uncontrollable technology, is the pre-history of what is to come; it is the "clasical antiquity" of modernity! On this reading then, the naive belief in progress, the new as mere sensation, would be nothing more than the dream form of the event found in the collective consciousness: "The dreaming collective knows no history. The course of events, always the same and always the newest, flows by it. The newest, the most modern as mere sensation, is just as much a mode of dreaming the event as the eternal return of the same" (S 2, 1; PP I, M14). The moment when one awakens from the collective

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dream and the historical illusion dissolves would then be characterized as Baudelaire's "moment of waking." This is identical to Benjamin's "present moment" of recognizabil- ity (N 18, 3) "in which things put on their true-surrealistic-mask" (N 3a, 3). From this it follows that in the dialectical images of Fleurs du Mal "the past unites with the present to become immediately a constellation" (N 2a, 3), and moreover, that Fleurs du Mal allows one to see the present already as an anticipation of the future-the present Paris already as the ruin of middle-class society and capitalist culture.

If one accepts this reading, then the forced attempts to show that Fleurs du Mal portrays modernity as permeated by (classical) antiquity become superfluous, and the charge that the absence of a conflict with classical antiquity weakened Baudelaire's theory of modernity falls by the wayside.34 If only Benjamin had grasped this, his Passagenwerk could have then embodied Maxime Du Camp's overwhelming idea: "d'ecrire sur Paris ce livre que les historiens de l'antiquite n'ont pas ecrit sur leur villes." But although the Passagenwerk, with its "mythological topography" postulating Paris' decline, did not do justice to Du Camp's great insight, Benjamin nonetheless placed great emphasis on it. In the chapter "Antikisches Paris, Katakomben, demolitions, Untergang von Paris," Benjamin recounts how Du Camp was thus inspired to write his great factual account Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIXe si'cle (1st ed. 1868). While waiting for his glasses to be repaired, Du Camp suddenly realized he had grown old. It was then, while meditating on the Pont Neuf about "cette loi de l'inevitable de- struction qui gouverne toute chose humaine," that he had a sudden inspiration. As the crown- ing achievement of his mature years he would write the book about Paris that could have been written about the fallen cities of antiquity: the book that during the age of Pericles could have been written about Athens or during Ceasar's lifetime could have been written about Rome.35 This is not simply "the highly characteristic classical inspiration," because, more than that, it anticipates the decline of the modern interna- tional city. Benjamin returns to this in a later entry: "The fantasies about the decline of Paris are an indication that technology was not being

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responded to. Through these fantasies blind consciousness exclaims that with the develop- ment of large cities, the means increased of razing them to the ground" (C7a, 4). The modem reader would have been better served, if Benjamin, with his gift for diagnosing the preconscious, repressed, or forgotten knowl- edge buried in the mythic realm of tradition, had taken this insight into the underlying pathos and made it the main focus of his pre-history of coming modernity! This insight, fully devel- oped, could have been the test of his theory of the dialectical image. He could have demon- strated- or rather tried to demonstrate-how a historian practicing the new dialectical method is able to "go through the past with the intensity of a dream in order to reach the present as the waking world the dream refers to" (PP I; F, 7).

This dialectical method of history Benjamin proposes is supposed to be the "Copernican revolution" that puts "contemplation on trial." The theory behind it presupposes that in the "present moment of recognizability" we con- ceive the past in terms of what it determines in the present. However-and here is the dialecti- cal move-the moment of waking dispells the illusion of epic continuity (the tradition of the victor [PP I, 081]), thus enabling us to recog- nize the constellation of present time and his- tory (N 18, 4). It is this that makes possible the dialectical shift to political action (PP I, 056).

Benjamin's understanding of the present mo- ment of recognizability anticipates the aesthet- ics of reception by thirty years. According to Benjamin a dialectical image "is that in which the past suddenly unites with the present mo- ment to become a constellation" (N 2a, 3). He subsequently explains this definition in this way: "The historical index of images, namely, says not only that they belong to a particular period, more than anything else it says that they only become readable in a particular period." (N 3, 1). He does not just incidentally under- stand "recognizability" as "readability" here; he goes on to say, "Every historical moment conceived of as possibility frees possibilities in history. Every possibility of history that is freed comes to the aid of possibilities in the present."36 This expectation is realized most clearly in literary texts; every extensive history of reception reveals that not every question can be put to every text at all times: These questions

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience

can only be determined progressively. The wealth of significance a text has can only be recognized over time. After all, with the pas- sage of time, the horizon of experience shifts- often against tradition. And that shift in turn changes the way the text's possible meanings are read and understood. What Benjamin says here is clearly analogous to the subsequent aesthetics of reception. In fact in his essay on Fuchs, Benjamin writes:

a posthistory, by means of which its (art's) prehistory as if in constant change is also recognizable. They teach him how art's function of outliving its creator enables it to leave his intentions behind; how the response from his contemporaries is part of the effect that the work of art has on us today, and how this effect rests on the encounter not only with him, but also with history which has allowed it to progress up to the present day (WA 11.2, 467).

As a result of this, Benjamin demands that the historical dialectician "be aware of the critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past occurs at precisely this present moment in time."

This demand, understood in terms of the dialectic of aura and trace, could be articulated in such a way that it would indeed be a "Copernican shift"-and would be fully con- sonant with reception theory: contemplating the past gives way to reappropriating it in the present. The contemplative attitude would thus be understood as directed towards the appear- ance of something distant, in which the aura gains control over us. The dialectical attitude, on the other hand, would be understood as directed towards the productive reappropriation in the present of the distant in which "rememberance" (Eingedenken) attempts to gain control of an object (in the critical constel- lation that a conscious appropriation of the past requires, but where it is not enough that "the present casts its light on the past" [N 2a, 3]). Benjamin nevertheless did not draw this con- clusion. Instead, he apparently attempted to preserve an auratic moment in the "present moment of recognizability". The definition- "image is that in which the past suddenly unites with the present moment to become a constel- lation" -is explained abruptly and at first unclearly: "Image is dialectic at rest" (Bild ist Dialektik im Stillstand: N 2a, 3). But this is puzzling-especially given his anticipation of

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reception theory. In the productive response to art works the dialectic does not come to rest: the present moment of readability implies other future moments of readability. Why should history be any different? Apparently because here, where the shift occurs from the aesthetic to the political, a theological paradigm was called on for assistance: the messianic freezing of the event (WA 1.2, 703). But why should history be frozen, with what hope, to what ends?

Perhaps the answer to this puzzle lies in the fact that the "present moment of recognizabil- ity" has aesthetic origins, and the "moment of waking" theological ones. In both concepts the opposition between trace and aura returns with- out finding a final dialectical solution: "The trace is the appearance of proximity, as distant as what it left behind may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, as near as what produces it may be. In the trace we are in control of the matter; in the aura it takes control over us" (M 36,4). For this reason Gerhard Kaiser has correctly remarked with respect to the Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen and the essay on Fuchs that Benjamin's "conception of heliotropism was taken from art and cultural history, namely the response to works and texts. "37 In fact the expectation latent in the past corresponds to the meaning hidden in the work, which waits to become evident in the light of later works; or as Benjamin put it: "As flowers turn their head to follow the sun, so the past by means of a secret type of heliotropism turns to face the sun that is rising in the heavens of history" (1.2, 694). Thus Benjamin could also say that "The response to great and much admired art works is an ad plures ire"' (N 7a, 4), equating aesthetic experience with a reli- gious conception (in Rome the phrase meant the dead!) that speaks for itself. Moreover, Benjamin's previously mentioned demand on the historical dialectician also has aesthetic origins. Benjamin makes the demand in the Fuchs essay after discussing works of art as examples that integrate their prehistory with the history of their reception.

Now as for the moment of waking, the "Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen" make the reliance on messianic theology quite visible: "The past carries a temporal index with it that refers to it to redemption. . . . We were

386

expected on earth. With every race that pre- ceded us we were given a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim" (II). Here Benjamin short-circuited the paradigm of an aesthetics of reception with that of theology: the redemption of the past takes the place of the work from which the interpreter derives its hitherto unnoticed significance for the present. The messianic power nevertheless provides more than just the interpreter. It should not stop with freeing a work from the work of a lifetime or its era, or with liberating a particular epoch from the homogeneous course of history; it should continue "until the whole past in an historical apokatastasis is brought into the present" (N la, 3). This hope, however, has a stipulation: "Admittedly, redeemed mankind at first receives the brunt of his past. That means that it is only for redeemed mankind that the past becomes quotable in each of its moments" (III). In the end, however, this stipulation is withdrawn again in a heightened determination of the coincidence between present moment and history. Not just a final state in the future, every lived and frozen moment can already be the final judgement for the salvation of mankind (III) or-as in the case of the Jews to whom it is forbidden to peer into the future- "the small gate through which the messiah can enter" (XVIII B).

If here-as Gerhard Kaiser remarked-the resurrection of history should fulfill a hope that Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Bloch set in a resurrection of fallen nature, then Benjamin's solution is purchased with a final contradiction: the "present moment of recog- nizability" and the "moment of waking" can no longer be mediated dialectically. The present moment of recognizability presupposes con- scious access, even the seizure of the trace, in order to gain control of the object-the lost, repressed experience. The present moment of waking, on the other hand, is not accessible to the historical subject. It presupposes a decisive moment (Kairos), the intangible opening up of the gate through which the messiah can enter, thus "the appearance of a distance, so near what causes it may be." This contradiction runs through the whole Passagenwerk as well as the "Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen." Ben- jamin cannot decide whether to use active or passive images to explicate "the present mo-

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ment of recognizability": "Blasting out a piece of the past" (XVII) is opposed to "receiving the past as a gift" (III), the violent "tiger's leap into the past" (XIV) to the nonviolent "remem- brance" (XVIII B), the critically destructive quoting (N 11, 3) to the redeeming quotability (III), the freed fragment to the monadological structure of the historical object (N1O,3), and this in its singularity in turn to the apokatastasis of the whole past (N1A,3), finally the messi- anic, though weak, power given to us (II) is opposed to waiting for the coming of a greater force. But when all the historian (or any agent) can do is kindle the sparks of hope in the past, not in the future (VI), what can waiting achieve?

We cannot expect a solution to this contra- diction either in the incomplete Passagenwerk or in the extensive essays. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the text-and along with it the plan Walter Benjamin spent his life pursuing- never achieved the auratic form of a 'work' and-in accordance with his insight into the dialectic between trace and aura-could never have achieved it. Nevertheless, it is a unique commentary on a period of calamity which may well be the prehistory of the present fin de sie- cle. It is a document of a "search for time past," that was a search for the lost future.,"38 Moreover, it gives a clear-sighted prognosis: "The concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That it continues 'in this way,' is the catastrophe" (N 9a, 1). As such, it leaves behind a large trace that we should respond to when it is once again necessary for us to determine the relationship between tradi- tion and innovation in the "present moment of recognizability."

IV.

"Ii faut commencer par le commencement!" I have shown elsewhere what hopes and disap- pointments, what happy expectations and pain- ful experiences this motto has produced in recent history.39 Today the privilege of the new is questioned more decisively than ever before. It is burdened with the unrealizable duty of justifying not the preservation of tradition but its change. "Saving the past" now counts as the ultimate in wisdom. Nonetheless, the indispens- able role of aesthetic experience has always

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience 387

been, and should continue to be, creating ex- pectations-creating them in order to reveal and test what is thinkable or desirable, if not quite recognizable or readily justifiable. The literary historian should remember this. Creating expec- tations is, in my opinion, the obligation of the contemporary arts. Only those who confuse this obligation's necessarily provisional moral char- acter with aesthetic indifference can contest it. To put faith in this privilege of aesthetic expe- rience, precisely under the fatal conditions of a new Fin de Siecle at the end of the second millennium post Christum natum, seems to me more promising than a return to the old, ante Christum natum concept of epoche. Indeed, such countermovements involve us in aporias. Both Heidegger's history of being and Ben- jamin's theology of history make this clear. According to Heidegger one should consider that every epoch in history "is one that involves the 'Ansichhalten' (withholding / epoche) of the truth of being." 40 According to Benjamin, on the other hand, every epoch needs a "messianic stopping of the event." Only then can it over- come progress or the period of decline, which are two sides of the same coin-or in his words, "the past completely devolves upon the re- deemed mankind. "41 Prophets on the right, prophets on the left-who will blame the child of the world who, finding himself in the middle, mistrusts the pausing of truth as well as the stopping of history and instead sets his hope in the quiet power of what are, if no longer absolute, then perhaps modest beginnings?

'O. Marquard, Skeptische Methode im Blick auf Kant, 3rd ed. (Freiburg: 1982), p. 47.

2Cf. "Ursprung und Bedeutung der Fortschrittsidee in der 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes"' in Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt, VIII Deutscher Kongre fur Philosophie (Munchen 1962), ed. H. Kuhn and F. Wiedmann (Munich: 1964), pp. 51-72; "Literarische Tradition und gegenwartiges Bewultsein der Modernitat," in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, (Frankfurt: 1970), pp. 11-66; "Der literarischer Prozel des Modernismus von Rousseau bis Adorno," in Adorno- Konferenz 1983, ed. K. v. Friedburg and J. Habermas (Frankfurt: 1983 [stw 460]), pp. 95-130.

3 This quote is from the second of his essays on Leonardo da Vinci. See Paul Valery, edition de la Pleiade, vol. I (Paris 1957), p. 1210.

4 According to Th. W. Adorno, "U ber Tradition," in Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. (Frankfurt: 1967), pp. 29-41.

5 In Plato's "Symposium" (207a-208b) Diotima's comparison between the reproduction of animal and of

spiritual life demonstrates this. Thus Hans- Georg Gadamer comments: "Just as there it is always a new creature that continues the preservation of the species, so it is also apparently with human knowledge that it must always acquire new relevance if it should exist at all." H.-G. Gadamer, "Unterwegs zur Schrift?" in Schrift und Gedachtnis, ed. Aleida Assman, Jan Assmann and Chr. Hardmeier (Munich: 1983), p. 16.

6 See in this context my interpretation of Apollinaire's programmatic poem "Zone" in "Die Epochenschwelle von 1912" in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse, vol I, 1986.

7 Op. cit. (fn. 4), I, 1172. 8 See Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular

World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: 196 1)-Dante als Dichterder irdischen Welt, (Berlin/Leipzig: 1929)-as well as the passages on Dante in my A sthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, (Frankfurt: 1982).

9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol I: Inferno, trans. with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: 1970), p. 279. The Italian original is as follows: "'0 frati,'dissi, 'che per cento milia / pergli siete giunte a l'occidente, / a questa tanto picciola vigilia / di nostri sensi ch'e del rimanente / non vogliate negar l'esperienza, / di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente. / Considerate la vostra semenza: / fatti non foste a viver come bruti,/ ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza."'

'0 Oeuvres, ed. de la Pleiade (Paris: 1951), pp. 680ff. " Das Passagenwerk (see fn. 33), vol. 1, pp. 1135,

271, 273. 12 With reference to his critique on the abstraction of

aesthetic consciousness in Wahrheit und Methode (libingen: 1980), p. 81.

13 The text of the following section was originally written for the colloquium 'Epochenschwelle und Epochen- bewultsein". For further treatment of this topic see vol. XII of Poetik und Hermeneutik, ed. R. Herzog and R. Koselleck (Munchen: 1987), esp. pp. 563ff. The text of the subsequent section III has been taken from a work "Spur und aura-Bemerkungen zu Walter Benjamins Passagen- werk" in Art social und Art industriel, ed. H. Pfeiffer et. al. (Munchen: 1987).

14 H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: 1983), p. 469. Aspekte der Epochenschwelle-Cusaner und Nolaner (Frankfurt: 1976), p. 20. References to page numbers will be made in the text. I have made slight changes in some of the English quotations (STG). See also "Epochenschwelle und Rezeption," in Philosophische Rundschau 6 (1958), pp. 94-120.

15 In English, p. 148. For the quotation in German see Sakularisierung und Selbstbehauptung (Frankfurt: 1974), p. 170.

16 Vergangne Zukunft-Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, (Frankfurt: 1979), pp. 355ff.

17 F. Noack, Triumph und Triumphbogen, Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg V (Leipzig: 1928), pp. 150ff.

18 J. Moltman, Artikel, "Neu, das Neue" in Histori- cal Worterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6, ed. J. Ritter and K. Grunder (BasellStuttgart: 1984).

19 For a more extensive discussion with references see JauI, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, pp. 23-29, here p. 25.

388 J A U S S

20 Oh, this century! Oh, the cultivation of literature. It is a pleasure to live and no longer to rest.

21 Hark thou, accept the yoke and look forward to your exile.

22 According to M. Fuhrmann, "Die Falschung im Mittelalter," in Historische Zeitschrift 197 no. 3 (1963): 549.

23 See H. Blumenberg (fn. 15), p. 145 (Engl.) and p. 164 (Germ.).

24 Especially through the followers of Saint-Simon. See H. B6hringer, "Avantgarde-Geschichte einer Meta- pher" in Archivfiur Begriffsgeschichte 22 (1978): 90-114.

25 Tresor de la langue francaise, vol. 3, ed. P. Imbs (Paris: 1974), p. 1057.

26 "Discours sur l'histoire universelle" in Oeuvres completes de Bossuet, vol. 24 (Paris: 1875), p. 262.

27 See the P. Robert's Dicionaire alphabetique et analogique de la langue francaise (Paris: 1963), epoque (no. 6).

28 Oeuvres Completes, vol. 3, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: 1964), 167.

29 Blumenberg (see fn. 1, p. 165, fn. 6) comments on an analagous passage in Voltaire: "I' s'est fait depuis environ quinze ans une revolution dans les esprits qui sera une grande 6poque."

30 See M. Riedel's article "Epoche, Epochen- bewuptsein" in Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3, ed. J. Ritter, p. 598.

31 Quoted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Werkausgabe = 3) in vol. V. 1-2: Das Passagen- werk (Frankfurt: 1982), (from the "Aufzeichnungen und Materialien" with abbreviation and page number, from "Ersten Entwurfe" with the abbreviation PP I and page number); Baudelaire, Oeuvre, ed. de la Pleiade, Paris 1951.

32 Baudelaire himself defended his book with the argument that in its "terrible moralite" it would be mis- judged if one did not take his principle of composition into account: "A un blaspheme, j'opposerai des elancement vers le ciel; a une obscenite, des fleur platoniques . . . Livre destine a representer l'agitation de l'esprit dans le mal." See my A sthetische Erfahrung, p. 848.

33 See G. Hess, Die Landschaft in Baudelaires Fleurs du Mal, (Heidelberg: 1953).

I A glance at the themes in Fleurs du Mal contradicts Benjamin's assertion that "Classical antiquity in Baudelaire is Roman. Only at one point does classical Greece stand out in his world" (WA I. 2, 593). The poem "Le Cygne," for Benjamin a prototype for the merging of modernity with classical antiquity, quotes Andromache, Lesbos, and the Femmes damnees Sappho, Delphine and Hippolyte. What- ever else may seem to belong to classical antiquity refers to a mythical preworld: "j'aime le souvenir de ces 6poques nues, La vie anterieure, La Geante." With this the cata- logue is already at an end. The dandy as "last gleam of the heroic in times of decadence" (WA 1.2, 599) may only compensate for this with difficulty. This negative conclu- sion could not have been expected any differently if one takes the provocative phrase from the Salut publique more seriously than Benjamin did, although he places him at the end of Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire: "No more tragedies! Enough of the old history of ancient Rome! Do we not stand larger today than Brutus did?" (Ibid., p. 604).

35 The inspiration of the anticipated decline of the world city does not yet occur in the preface, but only much later at the end of the Du Camp's work. See Karlheinz Stierle's revealing comments in his latest book Die Lesbarkeit der Stadt, (Munich: 1988).

36 G. Kaiser, "Benjamin's 'Geschichtsphilosop- hischen Thesen".' inAntithesen-Zwischenbilanz eines German- isten (Frankfurt: 1973), pp. 241-42. See also Peter Szondi, "Hoffnung im Vergangenen. Uber Walter Benjamin" (1961), in Satz und Gegensatz (Frankfurt: 1964).

37 Kaiser noted this in the context of some remarks on the Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen and the essay on Fuchs. See G. Kaiser, ibid. 217/8.

38 Szondi, "Hoffnung im Vergangenen" (see fn. 36), p. 40.

39 In Der literarische Prozed der Modernismus (see fn. 1).

4 See M. Riedel (fn. 30), p. 599. 41 "Geschichtphilosophische Thesen," II/III. See also

Das Passagenwerk (fn. 33), V. 1, p. 575: "Overcoming the concept of 'progress' and the concept of 'decadent age' (Verfallszeit) are only two sides of one and the same matter" (N2,5).