There is a certain lineage from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin does notably use the idea of the monad. There is a section on Monadology in his Origin of German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel) fairly universally hailed as Benjamin’s most sustained and original work. Further in the Passagenwerk he treated the arcades as a monad to the extent that they were closed, and to which there were no windows or doors for anything to get in (Gunn 2003). The monad for Benjamin is the idea, the pure idea, or ideas that form what he calls ‘constellations’. Here ideas are purely mental, purely geistlich, they are totally immaterial. They cannot be communicated to, nor can they communicate. Ideas and God for Benjamin are pure intensity. But whereas the monad is at centre stage for Leibniz, for Benjamin at centre stage is language.

What Benjamin gives us is less a theory of the pure intensity of the monad than a theory of the medium. Whereas pure intensity cannot communicate, cannot receive or give communication, language and the medium does just this. Language and media do this because they are in an important sense open. An open medium permits communication, literally imparting (mitteilen). Yet communication is for Benjamin an imparting of not material but mental being, of intensive being. Benjamin’s media are first and foremost not means. These media are both intensive and extensive, both geistlich and material. They are like language; though only in certain cases does this language comprise words. Benjamin develops this idea of medium/language in his ‘Uber Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’. But it will apply this idea of medium to his subsequent work: thus photography, cinema and the city are media as is German mourning plays. In 'Uber Sprache' there is an implicit epistemology, a metaphysics and a notion of experience. The essay was written by the author at the age of 24 in 1916 three years before the PhD thesis on the Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik. The later Benjamin came to balance his metaphysics with an increasingly strong dimension of materialism. In the Kunstkritik book Benjamin, though still in his ‘metaphysical period’, drew on the notion of 'reflection' in German idealist critics, especially Schlegel and Novalis. Here the idea was ‘reflected’ in a medium, poetry. Schlegel and Novalis were contemporaries of Hegel and Schelling and hence effectively ‘post-critical’. In ‘Uber die Sprache’ the major influence was Johann Georg Hamann, who was a contemporary of Kant. Hamann was a cabbalist like Leibniz; He did not make the move to critique, as did the older Kant. He stayed instead with metaphysics. Yet whereas Leibniz’s metaphysics was one really of pure intensities, or featured intensity, Benjamin’s metaphysics like Hamann’s focussed on what mediated between intensity and extensity, between things and man. Contemporary cultural theory, and especially the tradition associated with Gilles Deleuze is also very much based on a philosophy of pure intensity. Benjamin differs from them in his focus on the medium. Further their vitalist philosophy of plenitude and affirmation stands in contrast to Benjamin’s cabbalistic philosophy of melancholy. Benjamin’s great influence, Hamann was a Sprachphilosoph or language-philosoper. At stake in Benjamin thus are a metaphysics of language and more generally a metaphysics of the medium.

What is this ‘language in general’? What does all language have in common? All language communicates in the first instance. Here Benjamin uses not the more contemporary verb ‘kommunikieren’ but instead ‘mitteilen’, literally to impart. A Teil is a part. Teilen is to share. But what is imparted: what is ‘shared with’? What is communicated? What is communicated for Benjamin is always ‘mental being’. It is ‘geistliches Wesen’: as opposed to material being or physical or bodily being, it is spiritual or mental being.. It is metaphysical, as distinct from physical, being. ‘Wesen’ means being or substance or essence. Beings have essences or being. Wesen can mean either being or beings. Benjamin uses in both ways. Beings have being. Wesen have Wesen. For Benjamin beings are most importantly metaphysical.

Language in general for Benjamin has three characteristics: 1) languages all communicate, thus 2) they are not closed like monads but somehow open; and 3) they crucially communicate intensive being. Language in general comprises three languages in specific: the language of 1) things, of 2) God and of 3) man. There are gradations: there is a continuum of languages on the scale from things to God. Yet all three types of language communicate intensities. But are the languages themselves intensive? God’s language is purely intensive. God’s signifier might have material consequences. Indeed it does. He creates. But God’s signifier has no materiality. Even His voice has no grain. God does not deal in the more material signs (Zeichen), but only in the Word. God has language (Sprache) and His word is creative (schaffend, ‘schöpferisch’) (p. 150). Animals and other things deal in signs. They communicate via signs (Zeichen) and/or images (Bilder). Animals and other things communicate (mitteilen) their spiritual essence (Wesen) via signs and images. Things (including animals) are mute (stumm). Their language of signs and images is mute. Thing-language (Dingsprache) is mute. In contrast man-language has sounds. It has words and sounds. Signs and images can convey intensive being, but they themselves for Benjamin are largely physical or material. Man-language of words/sounds is intensive/extensive at the same time. God-language is purely intensive. Man translates into sound (Laute) and words the mute sign/images of things. In this it is the things rather than man that are active. The things impart or communicate sign-images to man who translates (übersetzt) them as words/sounds. Benjamin gives primacy to the ‘middle’, the mediation, the medium. The things ‘speak’ the image\signs. And man renders them as word/sounds. This given of things to man is also a gift (Duttmann).

If we spoke in the logic of semiotics, then langue would be medium and the gift giving would be through parole. But Benjamin despises the logic of semiotics. As Menninghaus insisted, Benjamin’s cabbalistic language stands opposite to semiotics. Semiotics gives us a language of abstract extensity. Cabbalistic language is intensive. Semiotic language is extensive. In semiotics there is communication through language (durch die Sprache). (144) ‘Geistiges Wesen cannot be communicated through language, but only in language. It is man’s language Benjamin is primarily addressing. Things don’t communicate semiotically or kabbalisitally but through sign/images. Man does. Most importantly man names things in language. In semiotics language become means: the medium become Mittel. Semiotic language is, not a medium but a means of communication, not a medium of communication. Semiotic language communicates not
mental being but a particular ‘case’ (Sache). This is a ‘bourgeois conception’ |(Auffassung) of language (144). Here medium becomes means; its object (Gegenstand) is no longer the thing but the Sache; its addressee is a man’. The communication is reduced, as Fenves notes, to an instrumental speech-act. Naming language addresses the singularity of the thing. Semiotic language denotes (bezeichnet) the particular case under the universal. In Adamic language the spiritual being of the thing and of man is communicated to God. God is not an addressee (Adressat), because he is pure intensity. Naming language flows towards pure intensity, which is not an addressee and cannot be denoted.

Fenves notes that Benjamin along with Gerschom Scholem say there are two ways to truth, i.e. metaphysical truth. One of these ways is mathematical. The other is linguistic. The question is are ideas given mathematically, or are they given in language. Mathematics divests itself of the extensity of historical languages, whereas philosophy ‘can invest itself with the inner intentions of language’. Indeed its intentionality does stand in contradistinction to ‘extensionality’. The question is whether ontological structure is mathematical or linguistic. For Kant’s first critique of course knowledge including mathematical knowledge was physical. In The Fold, Deleuze notes that for Newton the differential calculus was physical, for Leibniz it is metaphysical. Benjamin notes that Leibniz’s doctrine of the monad was based on the discontinuity of whole numbers. Yet Benjamin’s metaphysics is not mathematical but linguistic: instead of the number we have the name.

INTENSIVE REPRESENTATION: TRUTH AND METHOD
The most sustained treatment of the monad in Benjamin is in the Erkenntniskritische introduction to The Origins of the German Mourning Play. This is usually translated as ‘epistemo-critical’ but epistemology is Erkkentnisstheorie, not Erkenntnis. Erkenntnis is cognition. And the introduction is critical of cognition as a mode of knowing. Benjamin begins with a quote from Goethe’s Materials on the History of the Doctrine of Colour. Here Goethe speaks of art and science (Wissenschaft), in the sense perhaps that Wissenschaft embraces also philosophy and the Geisteswissenschaften. Goethe states that knowledge (Wissen), on the one hand, and reflection (Reflexion) on the other are insufficient in their own in order to constitute a whole (Ganz). In knowledge, on the model of science, the internal (Das Innere) is missing, in art the external (das Aüßere). He says we need to think of science as art to derive such a wholeness. Inasmuch as art is wholly represented (darstellt) in every work of art, so should science reveal itself (sich erweisen) completely in every individual object (Behandelten) it deals with. Thus for Goethe neither extensive, science nor intensive, art is adequate. Art is ‘monadological’ because all of art is present in every work of art. He is advocating that science be so too.

In the Prologue (Vorrede) Benjamin himself wants to give a method to what for him is Kunstphilosophie (arts-philosophy). This is what he sees his own work as being about. He thinks that the Romantic Kunstphilosophie of Friedrich von Schlegel and (Georg Friedrich Phillipp von Hardenburg) Novalis are too bound up in systems thinking. Benjamin extols the virtues of a number of mediaeval forms such as the doctrine (Lehre), the esoteric essay, the propadeutic and the treatise in contrast to the nineteenth century fondness for the philosophic system. The system reaches for Universalism (Universalismus), which has more to do with knowledge than truth. Mediaeval science forms such as the treatise do not feature intention and the accumulation of knowledge as does systems philosophy. Instead of activist intention, it features contemplation (Kontemplation). This works not through the ‘uninterrupted’ ‘coercive proof’. It works instead through representation, which is not purposive, which lacks intention. Such a Wissenschaft, more like art, works through ‘digression’. It makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object’. The treatise is like a mediaeval mosaic: a ‘fragmentation into capricious particles’, that are ‘distinct (Einzelnem) and disparate’. This bears ‘testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred image (Heiligenbildes) and the truth itself’. Systems philosophy lacks the didactic authority of ‘doctrine’. Goethe writings on colour were a Lehre: Benjamin prefers the treatise. The treatise has less didactic authority; further, it ‘refers implicitly to those objects (Gegenstände) of theology without which the truth is inconceivable.’ The Origins of the German Mourning Play is a sort of Trakat thus in the philosophy of the arts. Centre-stage among the arts, here and in Benjamin’s PhD thesis on The Concept of Arts Criticism in German Romanticism, is literature: poetry and theatre. It is as much the arts-philosophy as empirical arts-history. It deals as much in method as with literature itself. Thus Benjamin’s idea of the treatise 1) deals with representation rather than eliminates it 2) is concerned with truth rather than cognition 3) it works like a mosaic through fragments 4) comes through historically calcified language 5) works through contemplation rather than intention.

Truth and Representation
‘Truth’ is ‘actualised (vergegenwartigt) in the ‘round-dance of represented ideas’. (209) This stands in full counterposition to ‘knowledge’, which is instead a question of possession (ein Haben, Besitz). Consciousness takes possession of the object in science. In Benjamin’s proposed representational-philosophy towards the reader is forced into reflection. Art for Goethe, unlike science works via reflection. What we have is a contrast of knowledge-method and truth-method. Knowledge-method is possessive of its objects, even when it addresses the metaphysical. Truth-method, less intentionally and more passively, contemplatively, lets the object represent itself. Knowledge gives us a method as a way of acquiring objects. Truth presumes a prior existence of something that is representing itself. Knowledge establishes unities only as a coherence between the intellect (Verstand), which develops concepts (Begriffe) that give coherence (Zusammenhange) and the extensive world of empirical objects. That is, knowledge intentionally acquires objects through concepts of the intellect bringing those objects into their coherence under the grasp of the intellect. Truth-method lets an object represent itself. When an object does this, it does so through its spiritual being: that is, its form. Unity in truth comes from this form or essence. The essence of truth is unity. The activist concepts of the intellect are set in contrast to the contemplative ideas presupposed by truth. These ideas are not formed by the intellect, but are pre-existent and given to be reflected upon. Thus the significance of Plato’s metaphysics says Benjamin and especially the treatment of beauty in the Symposium.

Benjamin’s Monadologie section is close to the end of the Vorrede. Some one-half of the sixteen sections of the Vorrede are dense with theory. The others either are criticisms of classificatory knowledge or address the baroque and Trauerspiel more directly. The Monadology section is the last of the meta-theoretical sections. Benjamin introduces the Leibnizian monad to develop a notion of the ‘idea’. Indeed the major figures of the Prologue are ‘truth’, ‘the idea’ and ‘representation’, and the ‘phenomenon’. Two of its previous sections, indeed two of its most important sections are entitled ‘Die Idee als Konfiguration’ and ‘Das Wort als Idee’. Benjamin introduces the monad to try to think about the idea in general and Trauerspiel in particular. Benjamin says the idea is a monad. He is aware that the monad is purely intensive. He also draws on the monad to develop his thinking on origin, i.e. Ursprung, the title of the previous section. This is mainly about the origins of a phenomenon (Phänomen).

Throughout the Prologue Benjamin insists that every idea is a totality. With Leibniz he thinks that every single monad (idea) contains, in an indistinct way, all the other monads. Benjamin says the structure (Bau) thus of the idea is monadological (228). The structure of the monad is a world, but an ideal world, not an empirical world. The structure of the idea is the idea-world. Benjamin talks about these two different worlds of facts or phenomena, on the one hand, and ideas, on the other. The monad is a more or less distinct idea. For Leibniz there are, as we saw, various levels of distinctness in a sort of continuum. God as singularity is the monad that contains in a perfectly distinct way all the other monads. Man contains these less distinctly. Man when asleep or unconscious still less distinctly Animals even less distinctly. Inorganic substance – in Leibniz’s sense of substance (i.e. ideal), we would add, least distinctly. Trauerspiel itself is a quite low-level idea or monad.

Benjamin will take Leibniz a step further. For Leibniz the monad is its world from the point of view in its perception or apperception. Benjamin extends this to representation. Benjamin writes, in ihr (the Monade) ruht prästabilisiert die Repräsentation der Phänomene als in deren objektiver Interpretation’ (p. 228). Thus the perception of the monad is at the same time a representation. The implication is that the interpreting monad is historical philosophy or more accurately philosophical history (philosophische Geschichte), which is what Benjamin is pursuing in the Trauerspiel book. What he is doing is kunstphilosophische Geschichte. Thus Benjamin’s monad is representing the intensive being of the phenomenon as perceived from the idea. His point is that the idea must ‘penetrate into’ historical phenomena Ideas must penetrate into the real world. This ‘real world’ is a ‘task’ which one must ‘penetrate’ (dringen) in order to ‘open up’ (erschlosse) an objective interpretation. This task is also the task of the translator, which Benjamin cites in this section. Benjamin’s Leibniz was such a translator, who ‘immersed’ (Versenkung) himself in this real world and founded ‘infinitesmal calculus’ (228). The calculus is a translation, the capturing of the metaphysical kernel of nature. This task (Aufgabe) is also says Benjamin to show this image of the world in its ‘abbreviation’ (Verkürzung). The infinitesimal calculus is thus an ideal Verkürzung of the phenomenal world. What are the words Benjamin uses for the material world? ‘Facts’, ‘real world’, ‘nature’, ‘world of phenomena’, ‘things’, ‘objects’. Benjamin is most interested in that part of nature that is history. For Benjamin ‘natural history’, is ‘inauthentic’ (uneigentlich) history. Benjamin’s studies are mostly historical: the work on Baudelaire and Paris, Goethe’s affinities, Romantic Kunstkritik, Trauerspiel. Or they are ‘contemporary historical. In contrast to such ‘natural history’ stands of course ‘messianic time’. Spatially in the idea-world, the monad perceives, represents, abbreviates and indeed redeems. Yet of course the monad also has a temporality. Thus Leibniz discusses Caeser or Alexander as monads: as subjects (substance) that have internal, temporal predicates. Such internal predicates stand in contrast to the external predicates of nominalism. Thus for Leibniz your predicates do not modify you: instead you are your predicates. These predicates are temporal, are events such as battles. A monad can comprise all the other monads in a relationality, which for Benjamin is a ‘configuration’ or a ‘constellation’.
It is not just language but history that is at the heart of Benjaminian intensity. The idea is a monad: ‘the being that enters into it (the monad) has a past and subsequent history’. ‘Das Sein, das mit Vor- und Nachgeschichte in sie geht’. The monad and the idea then contains, not only a spatial world, but a temporality, a past and future. This is not natural, instead pure history (‘reine Geschichte’). This is at the centre of the notion of origin (Ursprung), which is historical. It harks back to an older philosophy whose task is ‘das Werden des Phänomens festzustellen in ihrem Sein’ (to grasp the becoming of the phenomenon in its being) And in which the idea or the monad must not only penetrate or immerse, but via the Seinsbegriff (concept of being) of philosophische Wissenschaft also to ‘absorb’ (Aufzehrung), literally to ‘swallow up’ the history of the phenomenon. This swallowing-up becomes a ‘tearing-into’ in Benjamin’s contrast of Ursprung (origin) and Entstehung (emergence). Benjamin wants a method of the former as distinct from the latter. Ensteheung (beginning, development, upshot, growth out of) is a mode of historical endeavour promoted by Benedetto Croce. Croce counterposes emergence to abstract classifications – that are most guilty of the abstract knowledge with which Benjamin wants to break. Benjamin contrasts abstract with historical classifications. He argues that historical classifications are not abstract but instead ‘genetic’. In their genetic and embedded nature they indeed cease to be classifications. Yet in contrast to ‘origins’, the historicity of ‘emergence’ (Ensteheung) is still inscribed in a naked facticity. When phenomena are original (ursprunglich) ‘there is a determination of the form in which the idea will confront the historical world’. Entstehung is in contrast a question of the material. The Urpsrung is in this sense ‘ an eddy in the stream of becoming: its current (Rythmik) tears into (hineinreßen) history’s genetic material’ (Entsteheungsmaterial’ (226). The ‘original is never revealed in the naked existence of the factual. Genetic historiography does not see ‘facts with an innermost structure of origin and idea’. Thus in history the same individual can stand under the sign of Entstehung or Ursprung. In the first the individual (Einzelnen) comes under a concept, and comes under it unchanged’. In the latter the individual ‘stands under an idea, it becomes something other than itself, a totality. This is Platonic salvation/redemption (Rettung).’ Thus in genetic history like in abstract classification the individual comes under the concept, it stands as if particular to universal. When it comes under the idea, it comes to comprise a totality, a world of ideas (227).

Idea and Phenomenon
The concept and knowledge presume a method of classification. The idea (and truth), notes Benjamin is ‘nicht klassifizierend’: it ‘defines no class’. Trauerspiel and for example tragedy are not classes. They are not empty classes: as ideas they instead comprise ‘metaphysical substance’. Trauerspiel and tragedy are not concepts to be defined across a range inductively. This is how systems of classification work. Benjamin opposes this sort of ‘continuous’ and ‘systemic’ mode of thinking. It is only when systems in, for example, Hegel and Plato cross over into the intensive and the singular that they start to address truth. Benjamin attacks classificatory modes of cultural criticism, which look inductively across a ‘’range’ for commonalities and differences, and whose result is often ‘an average’. The concept, working though inductive classification yields what
Heidegger ridiculed as Das man, with the average, with Kierkegaardian ‘chatter’ (Geschwätz). Classificatory systems grasp ‘the word’ only as concepts, embracing a span of ‘particulars’. They remove the word from the sphere of the idea. Ursprung and the idea are to be looked for, not in the mean, mode and median of classification but in ‘the extreme and in excess’. We look not into the average, in which particular stands under universal as in Weber’s ideal type or Durkheim’s social fact. Instead Benjamin’s particular is so extreme that it gets out from under the grasp of the universal and transforms itself from ‘unchanged’ particular into changeable singular, itself monadologically comprising the totality of a world. It is this extreme particular that will make its appearance later as Benjamin’s Shockerlebnis. It is this ‘extreme and excess’ that will be the Benjaminian event.

‘The Word as Idea’ (Das Wort als Idee) is at the heart of the Prologue. For Benjamin the being of ideas is given in the word (and indeed naming). In the Prologue he starts by disagreeing with thinkers for whom the being of ideas is given instead directly in phenomena. These thinkers - are mainly the Romantic Kunstkritiker, such as Schlegel and Novalis – espouse a method that is a process of intuition (Anschauung), of ‘intellectual intuition’. For Benjamin this word in which the idea is given is comprised of representations (Darstellungen, Räpresenationen). Representations are not intellectual intuitions: they are media that stand between intuition and phenomenon. Intellectual intuition foregrounds intention or intentionality, while monadological perception (and representation) is intentionless. In such intentionality the Kunstkritiker are working via the concept and not the idea. For the Kritiker the type of phenomena that incorporate the being of such ideas are intellectual ‘archetypes’ or ‘prototypes’. For Benjamin these too entail intention, while ‘truth’ is ‘intentionless’. These notions of intuition betray the ‘neo-Platonist paganism’ (Heidentum) of such ‘esoteric philosophy’. This is also an implicit parting of ways with of Benjamin with phenomenology. The in-itself is displaced for Benjamin from the thing to language .

The being of the phenomena is for Benjamin, irreducibly representational (or ‘linguistic’, naming). The being of the idea is given through the process or event of naming. It is given in representation and language. That it is ‘given’ (gegeben) means that it is not ‘taken’ through activist intentionality. This is Benjamin’s departure not just from phenomenology but also from vitalism: with Bergsonian intuition, Buber’s ecstasy and Nietzschean paganism. The Trauerspiel book is specifically conceived in contraposition to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Benjamin’s word is from the singular, but the Singular as the One. What Nietzsche found in Dionysian polytheism Benjamin finds in the word of the One. For Nietzsche tragedy is born from Dionysian dithyrambs. For Benjamin tragedy has a prophetic past. We are back to Greeks and Jews. For Nietzsche the Ubermensch will resemble the tragic hero. For Benjamin, the tragic hero of fulfilled language (Fenves p ) must die, must be sacrificed because of the impossibility of fulfilled language after the Fall (Sündenfall). For Nietzsche, who is neither cabbalist nor historical, the spirit of tragedy and art of revalued values is possible in for example Wagner. For Benjamin historical, and cabbalist, a rebirth of intensive language in Germany is not possible. The best that is possible is Trauer (mourning) and flashes of the idea in ‘the extreme’, in the event. If for phenomenology and the Romantic Critics it is the thing (which is a being) that incorporates the idea, for vitalists Nietzsche and Bergson it is the process or the becoming of life. For Benjamin it is not the thing nor life but language and the medium that is home for the transcendental, both as process (naming) and as form (representation). There is thus a major difference between a vitalist metaphysics and a Benjamin’s metaphysics of the medium.

‘Truth’, Benjamin writes, is not a relation (Relation) and especially not an intentional one. Benjamin means here that truth is like the monad: it is without windows or doors. Material things have windows and doors, both in the sense of undergoing Newtonian causation and undergoing phenomenological reduction by the rays of intentionality. Benjamin’s kunstphilosophische method dispenses with intention (Meinen) and Erkennen, and instead advocates an ‘Eingehen und Verschwinden’: that is, an ‘entering in’ and ‘disappearance’. The rays of intentionality impossibly aim at truth from the outside. While ‘die Wahrheit ist die Tod der Intention’. We enter in, and we disappear in its fabric. ‘The structure of truth ‘demands a mode of being’, which – apart from its greater permanence (Bestandhaftigkeit) - in its ‘intentionlessness’, resembles the simple existence of things. We humans have the passivity of things. We do not take truth from the phenomenon, but are give truth in the name: in the passive process of naming. This passive process is at the same time violent. The name stamps truth on the phenomenon with violence. Thus Benjamin writes ‘Nicht als Meienen, welche durch die Empirie seine Bestimmung fände, sondern als das Wesen dieser Empirie erst prägende Gewalt bestehet die Wahrheit’ (216). ‘Truth does not consist of an intention through which the empirical finds a determination. Instead truth consists of ‘the embossing violence of the being of this empirical’. The idea not only penetrates the phenomena of the empirical: it stamps or embosses violently its character, its emblem on it.

What is this violent Being of truth? What is this being ‘from which all phenomenality is withdrawn’? It is the name. “Das aller Phänomenalität entrückte Sein, in dem allein diese Gewalt eignet, is das des Namens’ (216). The violence of the name is the word as idea. The word is normally also phenomenal when it is also a question of the empirical language of man or the language of things. But the word without phenomenon can only be the word of God. The word of God is primarily creative. It is the basis of the Genesis. More precisely the idea as it works in God is primarily creative. It is only in man that the idea stands primarily in a relation, not to creation, but to truth. The idea is a creative function of God and a truth-function of man. Yet there is neither creation nor truth without the word. God’s word as idea is creation. Man’s word as idea is truth. At issue here is not empirical, post-paradaisal man but ‘Adam, Vater des Menschen als Vater der Philosophie’. We Menschen, we that are human, are meant to be less creators than philosophers. We are to be not philosophers in the Socratic sense of endless discourse, but instead art-philosophers or thing-namers. Ours is as much the task of the philosopher than the task of the translator. It is, Benjamin says, the name that determines the givenness of ideas. These ideas are given not so much in primordial language (Ursprache) as in primordial perception’ (Urvernehmens). In primordial perception words possess their denominational (benennende) nobility, undiluted by cognitive meaning (erkennende Bedeutung). Primordial perception is through the name. It is through the word as idea, undisturbed by the extensive, cognitive word. Primordial perception of course is not empirical perception. It is man’s monadological perception. And as such it is man himself. Man is his monadological perception. Plato’s idea cannot be given without the word. Plato’s’ doctrine of ideas is possible because the ‘Wortsinn (word-meaning)’ of the solely mother-tongue speaking philosopher, did not have links with the Vergottlichung des Wortes. Indeed ‘Plato’s ideas are basically - from this standpoint - nothing other than deified words and word-concepts’. Thus if words have both material and symbolic moments, the ‘idea is the symbolic moment of the word’. The task of the philosopher – and Benjamin obsesses endlessly with tasks (Aufgabe) – is to restore this state of affairs, in which ‘die Idee zur Selbstverständigung kommt’. Hence the name is symbol. And it is already a self-actualization of the idea. Philosophy however does not speak in the tones of revelation (offenbarend), so philosophy must perhaps recall this Urvernehmen in memory (Erinnern). This nearly Platonic anamnesis is a matter of philosophical contemplation. ‘Then the idea is released from the Innersten der Wirklichkeit (innermost reality) as the word…claiming its name-giving rights’. The innermost reality is idea. And a slightly more outer reality is the name-giving word. Benjamin’s Hebrew prophet is behind Nietzsche’s Dionysian dithyrambs in the origins of tragedy: the theological is prior to the aesthetic . So is Benjamin’s Jew prior to Nietzsche’s Greek (Fenves ). And the Platonic idea is worthless without the Adamic word. Finally, primordial perception is not just or even mainly the primordial perception of things. It is primarily the primordial mode of perceiving the word.

Philosophy has always been a struggle for the representation of ideas: about whether they be represented in the concept or something like the word. With concept philosophy needs intention. With word contemplation. At stake is ‘ a few, always the same, ideas’ (einigen, immer wieder denselben Wörter). Against the continuous concept of systems philosophy he thinks that disciplines like logic, aesthetics, and ethics are significant instead as ‘monuments in the discontinuous structure of the world of ideas’. (213) Philosophy is a question of ‘reflection’, to be understood versus intention. Philosophy reflects on phenomena to remember their being, and gives to their readers to reflect. Intentionality is impossible towards essences that have no doors or windows. The arrowed causality or ray involved essences (Wesenheiten) that have no relation to either phenomena or to each other. Ideas do not touch each other. Benjamin writes ‘every idea is a sun, and ideas ‘verhält sich’ to one another as do suns (i.e. untouching). This sort of harmony of spheres involves no contact of stars with each other. The harmonious relationship of such essences is truth. ‘tönende Verhältnis (der) Wesenheiten ist Wahrheit’. Such ideas are ‘discontinuous’, unlike the range of continuities in the concept and classification. Thus Benjamin’s ‘monadology’ is a treatise on the Idea as configuration: on the configuration of ideas. In the section on the idea as configuration he is speaking, less of words than of ideas, concepts and phenomena. Here he sees ideas less as suns than as constellations (Sternbilder). This is more towards the outer, away from the inner reality of ideas. Here the ideas themselves are sort of totalities that give sense to phenomena. The configuration is of an idea surrounded by concepts. The idea is to things as Sternbilder is to stars. These things are not exactly things, but are the elements of things. The concept that here mediates (Vermittlerrolle) between ideas and things resolves the thing or phenomenon into elements. This is to avoid a false coherence of the thing. These elements - if the concept is relating only outwards and looking at continuous ranges, averages and classifications - are only classificatory. But if the concept is looking into its own spiritual being it is otherwise. The element Benjamin notes that concepts elicit from phenomena are at sharpest not as an average but at their extremes. Here the things as ideal essences, mediated by concepts gather around the idea. The ideas are obscure until visited by this gathering. But in the presence of the gathering the ideas come to life, like ‘the mother who is only in her ‘fullness’ in the ‘circle of her children’. As for the things, the phenomena, for their part they are redeemed (gerettet). When the concept claims its own supremacy as universal, it enters the pitfalls of classification. But the concept can also come also under the spell of the idea and the name. Then the idea relates to the phenomenon in terms of its objective interpretation. The idea thus seizes (erfassen) phenomena and via the concept transports them to a different world: the world of the idea as constellation. Thus the concept, when it is released from the egotism of cognition is the salvation of phenomena and the representation of ideas. And the concept thus as representation (Darstellung) has its own extensity too. Ideas are virtuals, Benjamin says. They actualise (vergegenwärtigt) themselves in concepts. Concepts at the same time as they represent ideas they actualise them. Equally for phenomena ideas are ‘their virtual ordering (virtual Anordung) and their objective interpretation’.

A few last words on representation. We just saw that concepts gather elements from phenomena and represent ideas. And philosophers have no choice but to deal in concepts. Concepts are the media for example of criticism. Poets deal in other sorts of representations. Truth in Plato’s Symposium is the essential content (Gehalt) of beauty. Beauty, for its part, is indispensable to the definition of truth. No truth without representation. The Symposium dresses beauty as Eros, which has longings for truth. Here truth is not beauty in itself but for Eros who is the seeker of truth. This in the same sense as the person an-sich is not beauty, but is beauty for the lover. In this was ‘; every representational moment of truth is the refuge of beauty’ (211, my trans) . It is this palpability that ‘provokes the pursuit of the Verdstand’, ‘from which beauty flees’. Here we have the Kunstkritiker in the pursuit of the poet. Yet the intellect – when operating in the realm of truth and representation – ‘bears witness that truth is not the exposure (Enthüllung) of beauty’s secret’, but is the revelation (Offenbarung) that does justice to this secret’. (211) Thus revelation preserves in each case the mystery. This is what great philosophy does. Thus for Benjamin the great philosophers see the world in terms of the order of ideas: Plato’s ideas, Leibniz’s monad, and Hegel’s dialectic. – In each case describing the ‘unfolding of idea into the empirical world.’ Here the artist and scientist (Forscher) stand in contrast. The artist sketches a Bildchen of the Ideenwelt, whereas the Forscher arranges the empirical world in order to disperse (zerstreuen) it. Yet it is in the Ideenwelt in which the Forscher divides the empirical world into concepts. To divide the idea-world from within in to concepts is to represent it. The philosopher and artist are thus both engaged in representation. This is unlike the Forscher. The Forscher’s ‘shallow universalism’ stands in contrast to philosophy’s and art’s representations and their repetition of themes. The Forscher’s chain of deduction stands opposite to the philosopher’s and artist’s art of interruption (Absetzens). (OGTD 32)

LANGUAGE: THINGS, MAN AND GOD
Language: Things and Man
The second piece of work that is pivotal to the idea of intensive language and intensive media in Benjamin is his ‘On Language in General and the Languages of Man’ (Uber die Sprache überhaupt und die Sprache des Menschen’. What the Prologue does for knowledge, Uber die Sprache does for language. There are three main divisions of Uber die Sprache address first language, things and man; second, God, creation and man; and third the Fall. In between Benjamin presents his theory of the proper name, the idea of translation and gives us some directions for the arts. But this essay written a decade before the Trauerspiel book does not address truth per se, nor the notion of the idea. Yet knowledge plays a role in the two pieces. Knowing and naming are the bridge between them.

Benjamin begins the essay already by contrasting semiotic or extensive language with cabbalistic (intensive) language. He starts to address intensive language in speaking of the language of law, and of technology. He immediately insists that such language is not a question of how judges or engineers speak. The discourse of lawyers and engineers, indeed discursive language more generally is instead extensive language. In intensive language there must be the imparting of a spiritual content (‘Mitteilung’ of a ‘geistige Inhalt’) (p.141). This spiritual content comes from the being of law, from the being of technology. At stake is law and technology not for-another but in-itself. Yet Benjamin also insists from the start – and in this sense Uber die Sprache also reverberates with the Trauerspiel Prologue - that language is different than the idea. This is because ‘even God’s idea cannot bear fruit’ (fruchtbar). God creates not through the idea but through the word. Does God actualise his ideas through the word? Are God’s ideas virtuals that he actualises through the word? In part but it is not as simple as this. Through the word God creates a great number of other ‘virtuals’. At the heart of his argument is that, unlike the trees in the Garden of Eden, the idea does not bear fruit. The essay hangs on the contraposition of, on the one hand, communication through language (durch die Sprache) and communication in language (in der Sprache). His initial example is that the German language is what is communicated, not through it but in it. While communication through language has to do with interests, strategy, instrumentalism, what is communicated in language is language itself. What can the communication of language itself mean? Communication in der Sprache, as we saw above, is communication of a ‘geistige Wesen’, i.e. a spiritual being. Thus language communicates not just itself in der Sprache, but also the metaphysical being of things. What is communicated though language must then be a physical or corporeal being. For the part of language, in communication durch die Sprache, language is a mere means (Mittel). In communication in der Sprache, language is a Medium (das Medium). To say language communicates itself means that it communicates itself as a medium. This is not say German grammar or German as a linguistic system or the rules of discourse in German. What is communicated is not the extensive totality, but the intensive being of the German language. Yet the being of the thing communicated and the medium are not as different from each other as might appear. Thus the content of German in der Sprache consists of the spiritual being of the things and persons that are named through it. In contrast German as extensive language (durch die Sprache) consists of the physical beings that are classified through it. Here Benjamin speaks of the ‘signs’ of extensive language and the ‘symbols’ of intensive language. Hence extensive language is indeed semiotic. The symbols of intensive language for their part span the range from poetry to everyday life. Thus Demetz is right to characterise the work of Walter Benjamin as a ‘metaphysics of language’.

Benjamin’s contrast of language durch die Sprache and in der Sprache is similar to the classical Kantian distinction of means and Zweckmäßigkeit or finality. In the first critique, nature is a means. In the third critique nature and art are finalities (Lyotard 19 ). Benjamin’s mediums are such finalities. Like Kant’s work of art that neither has to do with interest nor with its content, Benjamin’s intensive language has no verbal content (Inhalt). Verbal, like pictorial, content is clearly extensive. Benjamin takes this a step further. Communication through a means is mediated. Where communication through a medium is unmediated. As unmediated it is immediate. In what sense is it immediate? Benjamin develops his notion of intensive language largely via the Adamic language of naming. And this is immediate, we will see below, in that God endows things with the powers to appear to man immediately in their spiritual being. It is the spiritual, the metaphysical that is unmediated while the physical is mediated. The thing as an appearance for us, as we see it in physics or mathematics or markets is in this sense mediated But the experience of the thing-itself, the noumenon, is immediate. For Benjamin this immediacy is ‘magic’. This is what is at stake in what Winfried Menninghaus has called Walter Benjamin’s Sprachmagie. How is it ‘magic’? Benjamin suggests it is first magic in its ‘infinity’. All metaphysical entities are infinite. Yet Benjaminian magic goes beyond the accepted idea of the infinity of the thing-itself. It connects as well to the mystical aspects of cabbalism and Franz Kafka’s mystical Judaism. It refers to the metaphysical nature of animist magic in primitive societies. It refers to the magic of all Sprache, not just the word-language of humans, but the non-word language of images and signs of things. It also seems to connote a magical materiality as well as an immateriality. So it is infinite but at the same time more than infinite. Or peculiarly infinite. Yet it is not the infinity of man or things or even God that is at stake here. So it is not spiritual being as such, but something to do with the medium and with communication (Mitteilen), as much sharing with and gift-giving as communication that is magic. Neither man not God not thinks not any of the above’s spiritual essence is magic. Only language is.

Language is magic insofar as it contains the ‘infinity’ of beings. This is not the extensive infinity of beings as particulars. Language is magical insofar as it contains the ‘unique’ infinity of each being. Insofar as it contains God’s, man’s or things’ unique infinity, language is magic. But what is this unique infinity? Let us think of this through the categories of the Vorrede. The uniqueness must come from something like each being’s point of view. This point of view, which is the being’s (monad’s) identity as well as its perception, is also its representation. Benjamin’s monads are only magical insofar as their perception is representation. Such representational perception is only possible in beings that are linguistically endowed. That is insofar as they are ever already communicating with other singularities. To communicate monads – which are formerly closed (‘no windows, no doors’) have to open up in some way. They have to be no longer monads. Ideas – which are Benjaminian monads - do not communicate. They cannot thus be fruitful. When communication starts, something fruchtbar (fruitful) is happening. As linguistic beings, the monads open up. No communication, no magic. More generally, as medium-endowed beings whether that medium is the urban fabric, photography, cinema, conceptual art poetry or everyday language, the monads, though still in the register of intensity, open up.

In this context how can we understand, on the one hand, things and, on the other, man? First, things, indeed all beings, have a greater or lesser degree of consciousness. Second the linguistic being of things is not equal to their entire spiritual being. This is different to man, whose linguistic essence is his spiritual being. Things have language. Things communicate to man their linguistic being, but not their entire spiritual being. Things also communicate with each other. Man is different to things in that he has higher levels of consciousness and clearer perception. This entails that the translations man carries out through his experience of things is in a higher language. Third man uses word language and things do not. Fourth this word language names. Finally man names things. Things for their part do not name man or one another. Man cannot name things unless things share their spiritual essence with him. All this entails from Benjamin an initial introduction of God. Now God crates man and nature from material. God created Adam from earth, Adam means ‘red earth’ as Christ means ‘messiah’. And kabbalists can be very Christian. God other hand does not create light from material, but only from the word: ‘Let there be light’. Then again light is not a thing. Neither is colour.

Things, God and man are of course infinites. But what kind of infinities? Or, more precisely, what sort of linguistic infinities are at stake? Benjamin’s answer is that the infinity of God’s word is ‘unlimited and creative’ (schöpferisch), while the infinity of human language is ‘limited’ and ‘analytic’ (p. 143). Again we have man’s role, which is to do with knowing, whether that knowing is epistemological or ontological. But of course it is ontological or metaphysical knowing – or should we say thinking – that is most important to Benjamin, and embraces both poets and Kunstkritiker in the narrower sense of the German Romantics and in the broader sense of himself. Man is for Benjamin the truth-representing being. What about things? Their infinity must be even more limited than man’s. And it must be neither creative nor analytic but something else. The linguistic infinity of things thus lies neither in creating (God) nor in representing (man), but in their giving. They give themselves to be named. In the sort of phenomenological sense that we encounter in Paul Ricoeur, things open up in their giving as man closes off (operationally) in his naming. Things are giving and open infinities. In their metaphysical dimension, things, man and God are monads. And monads as we saw in Chapter 2 are distinguished inter alia by their point of view: by the different worlds that each monads unique point of view comprises. Things and man are limited infinities insofar as each has its point of view. Only God’s point view is unlimited. Human and thing-infinities are not limited temporally. As infinities they are – like Leibniz’s monads – unendlich and eternal. As infinities man, things and God are virtuals. All virtuals are infinities, partly insofar as they can be actualised in an infinite number of ways. God actualises his ideas – through the word - in an infinite number of infinities. Thus God is a very special infinity indeed: the One whose actualisation creates an infinity of infinities.

Genesis 2 After Creation
002:007 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
002: 019 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
002:020 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field;

What then is man’s differentia specifica? First, men, and not things, are beings that communicate themselves to God in the name. Man communicates himself to God through not physical but metaphysical language. Through the name man must be communicating the God, 1) the spiritual essence of the thing, 2) his own self and 3) the spiritual essence of language. Yet in a sense all three of these are the same. And this is because first as we saw above language (intensively) consists of the spiritual essence of things, and second, man’s own spiritual being is entirely linguistic. The spiritual essence of things is not linguistic. Man’s essence is his linguistic being; man’s spiritual infinity is his linguistic infinity. For their part the things of nature communicate their spiritual being only through man’s name. This stands in contrast to the ‘community of things’, which communicates differently. Through man’s naming the thing’s spiritual essence is communicated to God. The communicating possibility of the community of things is different to this and not necessarily to God. Man, as the representing being, represents the truth through the name. The name is thus the linguistic essence of language; it is the language of language. This would be different than the language of technology or law with which Benjamin introduces the essay. And it would presumably in a sense govern the latter. The name, as the language of language, is of a higher density (Dichte) than the language of law or technology. Benjamin approaches the name, not through art or through philosophy but through religion. At stake is a Religionsphilosophie. For Hegel, we recall, philosophy’s representations partake to a greater extent of metaphysical truth than those of religion or art. For Nietzsche it is the representations of art (tragedy, Wagner) that are the key to truth. Benjamin, though his God may be a bit more arbitrary and less rational than Leibniz’s (Chapter two) leads us back to religion.

‘So gipfeln in Namen die intensive Totalität der Sprache als des absolut mitteilbaren geistigen Wesens und die extensive Totalität der Sprache als des universell mitteilended (bennenden) Wesens’ (145). In this sentence Benjamin is saying that the language of the name (i.e. Adamic language) is not only intensive, but also extensive. It is intensive in its absolutely communicable spiritual being. It is extensive in its universally communicating (naming) essence. First, we see that Adamic language has both an intensive and extensive essence. On the face of it extensity seems to have nothing to do with being or essence. But Benjamin seems to see not just the phenomenon of language but its essence as being intensive and extensive at the same time. This is often the case in phenomenology. Second, its intensive essence is communicable and extensive essence is communicating. It is in its extensity that language is universal. In its intensity it may be singular. But its extensity is such that it can name everything. Third, only man’s language has both such full (volkommene) intensity and (extensive) universality. ‘Der Mensch allein hat die nach Universalität und Intensität volkommene Sprache’. (Italics in original)

At stake in Benjamin’s implicit Religionsphilosophie is the trio of creation (Schöpfung), revelation (Offenbarung) and redemption (Erlösung, Rettung). We have addressed creation. What about revelation? Benjamin writes that the consideration of man as naming being beings us to Religionsphilosphie. He says that the ‘Inbegriff ser Sprachgeistes’ leads us to Religionsphilosophie and to revelation. Here he brings us to the eighteenth century pre-Critical language-philosophers (Sprachphilosophen) Johann Georg Hamann and Müller. Let us remember that art is in a different and lower register here than language and religion (Fenves, p. ). Hence the famous quote from Hamann where ‘Sprache is die Mutter der Vernunft und Offenbarung’. God creates, that is clear. God creates the beasts and man from earth, and the fish from water. But who reveals? Surely the Bible reveals. The representations of the Bible yield revelatory knowledge. God creates through the Word: God creates man through matter. Man perceives creation through its manifestation in the Bible. Man, at his most fully human (his most inner self) works through the name, which comprises heightened perception and sufficient reason. But how about matter in this context? Things are more material than man: as man is more material than God. Man has a voice and communicates through sounds (Laute), while matter - and the beasts - are ‘stumm’ (dumb). In his sounds and words man is crated in God’s image. Compared to religion, art has more in common with the linguistic being of things (‘dinglichem Sprachgeist’). (147) Like art, the community of things is material, a ‘stoffliche Gemeinschaft’. Man’s community with things is immaterial and like in religion is a community of spiritual beings. Yet both communities are magical. There is also a ‘Magie der Materie’. What art does in its representations is to enable this magical and material community of things to speak.

Thus God creates through the word, through a very particular medium and man knows things also through the word as a medium of knowledge and truth. Also God makes things knowable in names (he provides a virtual) while man actualizes through naming-knowledge. The godly and the human approach one another even more closely thotigh the proper name (Eigenname). When man names beasts and other things it is not clear that he is naming singularities rather than species. It is not yet clear that there is process of individuation that is at stake. In the proper name this is indubitable. The proper is where man most closely approaches göttliche creative infinity . There is something thus more finite about the normal naming of things than proper naming. God may have created things as namable. But the proper naming of another man directly partakes of the word of God. To name in the Eigenname ‘is the word of God in human sounds’. We have seen above that thing-naming language is intensive and extensive. But the normal naming of things goes on mostly in the realm of finitude, while the Eigenname – like the symbol - forms on the border of infinite and finite language. The Eigenname is man’s community (communion) with God’s creative word. Note that things commune with each other and with man’s naming word, but not with God’s creative word. For Adam to name his son Cain is an Eigenname. ‘A man’s name is his fate’. And this is singular. We recall that Leibniz’s monads such as Alexander and Caeser were also names. They were thus substances or subjects that contained their own predicates and hence their fates. Their predicates were not as in nominalism external to their subjects. They are internal and constitute their being. They are not contingent qualities. In the proper name man is pairing knowledge with creation. This is especially true in naming the material progeny of his loins. In doing so he is also assigning fate to substance. This is permissible. But Erkenntnis and judgment is not. In judgment we sink into Geschwatz. We are put here to name and to create. We are not put here to judge.

Now Benjamin moves onto translation and addresses the properties of things and how things communicate. If things are dumb and silent in their communication then how do they communicate? How do entities that are much more ‘spontaneous’ then man communicate? In Genesis 1 God makes only man, and not things, from earth. For things, whether animal or vegetable God says ‘let the earth bring forth (Gen 1:12, 1:24,) beasts and grass. As the earth brings them forth they are much less fulfilled with spiritual being than man, who is 1) made directly by God from earth and 2) ‘breathed life’ into by the Lord and thus becomes a ‘living soul’. Man as extensive being is made of earth: God’s breath of life is what make man an intensive being. If not God but earth brings forth animals and vegetable nature, then both their material and their maker are extensive. These things, whose creator and own matter are material, communicate to man through ‘images and signs’. But they must communicate to one another in the magic materiality of their own community differently. Although without man’s intervention there will be neither poetry nor art, God puts into things the kernel of the naming name (‘Keim ernennendn Namens’). This kernel, once present, speaks silently ro man in signs and images (note: not in symbols). There is something much more contingent about the community of matter that is the community of things. Man translates these images/signs into sounds and words. To do so he translates the restful (selig) Geristy of the things. The painter and poet Muller sees this a double process once man is summoned to name. First man gazes, i.e. Anschauuen he works through intuition in regard to the images and signs. Man intuits the images/signs of things. Man thus receives (empfangen). Then man conceives, he knows (erkennen ) through the name. Man receives/perceives and then man conceives. He translates signs/images to words. In Paradise as Hamann notes this is easy. Because ‘ all that man heard, saw, felt, i.e. all sense perception was living word. And for man to name was as “easy as a Kinderspiel”’. (151) In doing so man takes language to a higher level of density. Language becomes denser with being.

The Fall: Judgment
001:031 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
002:008 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
002:009 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
002:016 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
002:017 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

If Genesis 2 addressed the Garden of Eden, Adam, naming and unashamed nakedness, then Genesis 3 concerns the serpent and the Fall. The fall of man is due to a shift in language from the truth language of the name to the language of judgment. Yet judgment itself and experience is purely empirical and physical. It is the tree of knowledge that brings this about. After God creates Adam from earth and breathes life into him, He places him in the Garden of Eden. Previously in Genesis 1, there were men and women and nature, but not Paradise. There was no naming language or even discussion of language. God made Adam for the Garden of Eden to name and to eat of all the trees, including the tree of life. But He warned not to eat of the tree of knowledge because it ‘is the tree of knowledge of good and evil’. If it has been a tree of naming knowledge there would have been no problem. But indeed the serpent ‘seduces into the nameless knowledge of good and evil’ (Sprache 152, italics added). The tree of knowledge was placed in the Garden in order to judge man, Benjamin notes. Yet man thinks the apples will impart the faculty of judgment of good and evil. The mimetic faculty will later displace this. Benjamin thus contrasts the nennende Wort and the richtenede Wort. Daß gericht comes before judgment. Gericht is court, it is tribunal. This is not just Kantian abstract judgement: it is law itself. ‘ Diese ungeheure Ironie ist das Kennzeichen des mythischen Ursprungs des Rechtes’. (154) In Paradise, in the Garden of Eden there was no law. There was no need for law. There was no need for judgment. Because God saw what he created at the end of the sixth day and said ‘it was very good’. The Tree of Knowledge was the presence of evil in the Garden, notes Benjamin. This is the origin of law, of abstraction, of empty, judging knowledge, of empty experience. It is the origin of Geschwatz. This is ‘knowledge from the outside: ‘the uncreated imitation of the created word’. The created word here is man’s naming-word. Man’s judging-words are uncreated. They are also knowledge of the outside of things. The judging word is the ‘birth of the human word in which the name no longer lives intact’. Yet language is still magical. There is a shift from the immanent magic of the naming word, and indeed the immanent magic of the language of the community of things mentioned above. There is a shift from this to an ‘ausdrückliche Magie’. This is an externalized magic. Audsrucklich also means literally ‘squeezed out’. Now language communicates something other than itself. And man communicates something other than himself. Previously man’s qualities, his predicates were included in the subject as jis substance. Now they are squeezed out as external qualities to be mobilized instrumentally. They become possessions.

There is an identity between the serpent’s promise (Verheißung) and the becoming ‘äußerlich’ of the ‘communicating word’. The superficiality of this communicating word of judgment leads to Kierkegaard’s Geschwatz. Now at the same time the Schwatzer, the sinner, is submitted to judgment. Geschwatz is also Heidegger’s das Man and the rumor mongering judgments of the tabloid press. The judging word means the Verknechtung (enserfment) of language in Geschwatz and the enserfment of things in the Narretei and the Tower of Babel. God of course is angry and expels man from the Garden. In post-paradaisal language, language became a mere means, a mere sign. What happens to nature for its part in the Fall? The Garden of Eden is a state of bliss. Experience is blissful (selig). Even nature is blissful. In the Fall from paradise’s unity to post-Adamic multiplicity (Vielheit), God curses nature too: He curses the soil. Now nature too must be redeemed (Erlösung). There are four processes here: creation, revelation, judgment and redemption. No redemption of course until after the Fall. Is there redemption through poetry, through philosophy, through man rediscovering naming language? Who is doing the revealing in revelation? The Bible? Man? Does man reveal when he names? Or does he revel only part way? Creation is doing. Revelation is a matter of knowledge. Redemption is a doing. In any event, after the Fall nature ‘laments (klagen)’. There is a sadness (Traurigkeit) in nature.’ Nature laments language itself’. Nature mourns (trauert) because it is now known by the ‘unknowable’, i.e. it is known not by the knowable naming language but the unknowable ‘hundred’ judging languages of man.

The essay concludes with a brief section on the arts. There Benjamin speculates that while poetry is perhaps founded in the naming-language of men, painting and sculpture are possibly closer to the language of things. Though surely translated into a higher density of thing-language this would still be mainly in the realm of materiality. Of a material Gemeinsamkeit: a nameless nonacoustic language in the plastic arts. In Paradise Benjamin notes this material community of things did grasp (befaßt) the world as a unity, as an undivided whole. Thus we have a collection of things as sort of collective monad with a point of view on the whole. Benjamin suggests that to understand the language of things we may usefully look to songs and bird-songs (Sprache der Vögel). But art - in contrast to everyday things - will stand only in the deepest relation to the doctrine of signs (tiefster Beziehung zur Lehre von den Zeichen). He points to the relation between man-language and material script. He finishes where this chapter started, with a brief discussion of the ‘symbolic function’ and the symbol of the non-communicable. Thus we are back to the name language of poetry.