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Sami Khatib

sami.khatib@fu-berlin.de

Fantasy, Phantasmagoria, and Image-Space. Walter Benjamin's Politics of Pure Means


Paper presented at the conference series Die Politik des Phantasmas, Vol. 5: Phantasma und Politik, at Hebbel am Ufer Theatre, Berlin, Nov. 23, 2013.

This paper is interested in Walter Benjamins anarcho-nihilist politics and Marxist aesthetics. The point of convergence of these contradictory strands of thought can be found in his essay on Surrealism (1929). In this essay, he introduced the term image-space (Bildraum), which relates to a conjunction of sobriety and ecstasy, individuality and collectivity, time and space. The imagespace stages an immediate presentation of collective political action without formal political representation (be it party politics or representative democracy). In this talk I will suggest that it is here where we can find grounds for a Benjaminian politics of phantasma, reaching back from his early theological to his later Marxist writings. Benjamins politics of Phantasie Speaking of a politics of phantasma, though, in the case of Benjamin we have to start with a slight modification of this formula a seemingly terminological subtlety, a differentiation between imagination, fantasy and phantasma and their respective translations from the Freuds German term Phantasie and Lacans French fantasme. As my point of departure, I rely on an early, fragment by Benjamin, titled Phantasie, which he wrote around the same time as his anarchist essay on the Critique of Violence (1921) and other messianic-nihilist fragments. In the Phantasiefragment, though, he seems to be concerned with more profane issues. Talking about fantasy, he puts forward a crucial distinction between Phantasie and the fantastic, the realm of das Phantastische. we might describe the phenomena of Phantasie as the de-formation [Entstaltung] of what has been formed [Gestalteten]. It is characteristic of all Phantasie that it plays a game of dissolution with its forms. The world of new phenomena that thus comes into being as the result of this dissolution of what has been formed has its own laws, which are those of the Phantasie. Its supreme law is that, while the Phantasie de-forms, it never destroys. Instead the phenomena of the Phantasie arise in that region of the form in which the latter dissolves itself. That is to say, the Phantasie does not itself dissolve, for where it attempts this, it becomes fantastic. All fantastic objects [Phantastische Gebilde] possess an element of the constructive or (seen from the standpoint of the subject) of spontaneity. Genuine Phantasie, in contrast, is unconstructive, purely de-formative or (from the standpoint of the subject) purely negative. [] The exact opposite of Phantasie is prophetic vision. Pure prophetic vision cannot form the basis of a work, yet such vision enters into every great work of art. Prophetic vision is the ability to perceive the forms of the future; Phantasie is the awareness of the de-formations of the future. (Benjamin: Imagination (Phantasie), fragment ca.1921, GS VI, 115f. I have modified the English trans. from Selected Writings, Vol. 1) To paraphrase this dense passage we might say: In the realm of the imaginary, Benjamin distinguishes between two types: one is a form, Gestalt, the other its dissolution or de-formation, Entstaltung. The latter type is called Phantasie (and not, as the English translation has it, imagination, which always implies an active and creative process). On the contrary, Phantasie is not spontaneous or constructive; it is, in Benjamins words, purely negative and in rather nonHegelian fashion non productive and non determinate. In contradistinction, the former type, that is, fantasy, fantastic forms or phantastische Gebilde, is constructive. In Kantian terms, it stems from 1

Sami Khatib

sami.khatib@fu-berlin.de

the faculty of imagination, Einbildungskraft and its results are stable images. The unworking work of de-formation is conceived as the dissolving of fantastic forms. De-formation does not designate a different sphere or an object, an image or a figure; rather, de-formation is the pure movement of undoing all forms of fantasy yet in the medium of fantasy. De-formation thus is an immanent movement without a final goal, without a stable form or structure; it is a purely negative movement, which cannot be sublated into something positive. Yet this a-teleological movement has a direction, a trajectory; that is why Benjamin can speak of Phantasie as the awareness of the deformation of the future an awareness without vision, be it prophetic or utopian. To give us an idea of this deforming form, Benjamin refers to concrete phenomena of nature. Within the visual world, the mode of de-formation finds its paradigmatic example in the cloud and its ever dissolving forms. De-formation occurs also, as he adds, in the sonic realm; he mentions the example of noises during the night, which depotentialize themselves to a single great humming. The scope and relevance of Phantasie and deformation, however, is not limited to these examples. Rather, deformation, Entstaltung articulates the basic method of Benjamins early messianic nihilism. Its central idea consists in a short-circuit of profane transience and finitude on the one hand and messianic redemption and eternal restitution on the other. As a result, the messianicity of profane life resides in eternal transience, ewige Vergngnis, leading into the eternity of a downfall the inexhaustible deformation and dissolution of everything worldly. This quasi-messianic structure of entropy is strictly nihilist, it has no goal but designates the way, the nihilist Umweg, detour, through which profane life can undo, deactivate, and deform the forms of domination and violence. In this way, deformation is inherently political; it interrupts all teleological projects of creative destruction, that is, the fatefully-compulsive guilt-nexus of capitalism in its cyclical crises of valorization and de-valorization. As Benjamin defines: First, [de-formation] is without compulsion; it comes from within, is free and therefore painless, and indeed gently induces feelings of delight. Second, it never leads to death, but eternalizes the Untergang, downfall that it brings about in an infinite series of transitions. (Benjamin, GS VI, 115) Deformation is infinite transition released from the inside. It designates a continuous yet rhythmically interpunctuated process of the dissolution of profane life and nature. Its noncreative, non-constructive negativity is not destructive or lethal and cannot be employed by teleological chains of power, production and self-valorization. The messianic method of deformation also puts forth a new concept of non-creative fantasy. In light of the minimal, yet crucial distinction between the realm of the Fantastic and Phantasie, Gestalt and Entstaltung, form and deformation, we can locate the place of phantasma within Benjamins thought. Phantasma belongs to the realm of fantasy and yet it is not separated from reality. With regard to Benjamins later psychoanalytically informed Marxist writings, we can add that there is no clear distinction between fantasy and reality, dream and the conscious world. If according to Freud fantasy and reality cannot be opposed as though they were originating from distinct spheres1, our perception and cognition of reality is structured in a fantastic or, more precisely, phantasmatic way. Yet in this fantastic structure, there is a process of decomposition, deforming already at work, which can be repressed but never be eliminated. In this context, it is worth mentioning that the term phantasma as derived from the Freudian notion of Phantasie has a longer history than its famous use in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Already in the beginning of 20th century, Edmund Husserl introduced the term in his writings on
1

Cf. Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einfhrung in die Psychoanalyse, GW XI, S. 386.

Sami Khatib

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phenomenology. In terms of the perception of phenomena, Husserl discovered an analogy between fantastic consciousness and what he calls original consciousness. Consequently, with regard to the consciousness of fantasy, he speaks of a quasi-perception and its quasi data of perception. The latter, these quasi data of perception within fantasy, he also refers to as phantasms.2 Benjamin was acquainted with Husserls phenomenology; however, especially in his later Marxist writings he criticized the phenomenology of his time for its lack of historical-materialist analysis and blindness vis--vis the socio-political structure of perception in capitalism no matter whether perception was experienced with or without consciousness. Yet his interest in phenomenological inquiries prevailed. Phantasmagoria and Commodity-Fetishism In the course of his unfinished Arcades Project, Benjamin introduced the concept of phantasmagoria, which served him as a theoretical vessel to depart from a traditional Marxist critique of ideology by combining it with fundamental insights of phenomenology and postKantian epistemology. At first glance, the term phantasmagoria is derived from Marxs famous chapter on commodity fetishism from Capital Vol. I. Marx wrote: the commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasmagorical form of a relation between things. (Marx, MEW 23, 86) Benjamins adaption of phantasmagoria radicalizes a feature that is already present in Marxs text. Marxs materialist insight in 1867 was that, despite all sorts of Romantic anti-capitalist ressentiment, in capitalism there is no other human relation behind the relation of things. Within the value form, social relations are expressed by things because social relations cannot appear as such. In other words, in capitalism there is no other form than the commodity form to express a social relation without antagonism. Therefore, commodity fetishism is not an epistemic illusion of the subject of cognition but the result of the split nature of capitalist reality itself. Commodities appear as the necessarily phenomenal form of a social relation (value). It is not that ideologically produced illusions veil material relations but, rather on the contrary, socially produced things commodities in their graphic materialness veil social relations. That is why Marxs definition of the commodity as a sinnlich-bersinnlich sensuous supra-sensuous thing has to be taken most literally. Behind the phantasmagorical form of a relation between things there is no sensuous world of real human relations but the sensuous-supra-sensuous sphere of a purely social relation, which is expressed in a non-naturalist, that is, allegorical way as social hieroglyphs endowed with a certain meaning or value. Benjamins analysis, however, slightly shifts Marxs perspective: He is interested in how the phantasmagorical reality of a relation of things is perceived and, furthermore, how the distorted traces of the social relation, which is performed by these things, are immediately imprinted in the process of perception. In his 1939 expos of the Arcades-Project he writes: Our investigation proposes to show how, as a consequence of this reifying representation of civilization, the new forms of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. These creations undergo this Verklrung, transfiguration not only in
Cf. Husserl, Edmund: Aufstze und Vortrge (1911-1921), ed. Thomas Nenon; Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XXV, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publ., 1987, p. 199 and 171. Husserl introduced the term phantasma already in 1901, cf. Husserl, Edmund: Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Theil: Untersuchungen zur Phnomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1901, pp. 160ff.
2

Sami Khatib

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a theoretical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias.3 (GS V, 1255f.) Phantasmagorias are not mere illusions but designate a certain type of phenomena, which have acquired a material density and stability in capitalist everyday life. Benjamin mentions phantasmagorias of the bourgeois interior, urban places, sociological types and architecture. Referring to the urban re-development of the Paris of the Second Empire, he states: With the Haussmannization of Paris, the phantasmagoria was rendered in stone (Arc, 24). And indeed, as Irving Wohlfarth commented: Phantasmagoria is thus not merely the false consciousness of ideological discourse. It is materialized in space, objects, and practices. To interiorize it by confining it to some disembodied realm of ideas is thus itself a phantasmagoric operation.4 Phantasmagorical phenomena are not limited to a subject of ideology but designate an objective content in its relation to a commodified mode of perception. This immediacy cannot be bypassed by means of an enlightened consciousness but only through a polarization in the inside of the phantasmagorical universe of capitalist perception itself. In this way, Benjamins concept of phantasmagoria, which originally referred to a late 18th century apparatus of optical illusion produced through the projection of a laterna magica, can be regarded as a Marxist adaption of Husserls phantasms. Phantasmagorias are not representations but immediate images, that is to say, data of quasi-perceptions within the reality of the commodity form.

Robertson's Phantasmagoria in the Cour des Capucines (La Fantasmagorie de Robertson dans Ia Cour des Capucines).5
3 Cf. Die Untersuchung macht sich zur Aufgabe, darzustellen, wie die Bezugnahme auf die verdinglichte Vorstellung von Kultur die neuen, vor allem die Warenproduktion bedingten Schpfungen und Lebensformen, welche dem vorigen Jahrhundert zu danken sind, dem Ensemble einer Phantasmagorie einbeziehen. Es soll gezeigt werden, wie diese Kreationen nicht erst in theoretischer Verarbeitung ideologisch sondern in ummittelbarer Prsenz sinnlich verklrt werden. Sie stellen sich als Phantasmagorien dar. (GS V, 1255f.) 4 Wohlfarth, Irving: Smashing the Kaleidoscope: Walter Benjamin's Critique of Cultural History, in Michael P. Steinberg: Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, Ithaca; London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996, pp. 190-205, here p. 199. 5 Illustration taken from Cohen, Margaret: Profane Illumination. Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley u.a.: University of California Press, 1993, p. 216. Margaret Cohen also informs us about the origin of this

Sami Khatib

sami.khatib@fu-berlin.de

In his earlier expos of the Arcades-project, Benjamin expanded his concept of phantasmagoria also to collective fantasies and dream images, exceeding the boundaries of the bourgeois subject and its consciousness. Borrowing from C. G Jung, he speaks of a collective unconscious, in which phantasmagorias intersect with utopian dream images.6 The proximity if not indifference of emancipatory dialectical images and phantasmagorical images, imprinted by commodity fetishism, was fiercely criticized by Benjamins friend Adorno. Benjamin, however, was interested in the indifference of phantasmagorical images and images that could penetrate the immanence of phantasmagorical perception within the realm of the imaginary. Therefore, he introduced a complication into the otherwise binary alternative of awaken consciousness Wachbewusstsein, and dream consciousness, Traumbewusstsein, which gives rise to a dialectical theory of awakening, Erwachen, from the capitalist dream-filled sleep: Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the now of recognizability, in which things put on their true surrealist face. (Benjamin, Arcades Project, cf. GS V, N 3 a,3) The temporal entrance into this now of recognizability, where things put on their true face, leads to a third domain, which is neither bare reality-as-such nor a fantastic dream-filled sleep but a sur-reality a reality more real than reality that corresponds, as we shall see, with capitalisms own sur-realist, that is, sensuous-supra-sensuous face. Profane Illumination and Image-Space In his essay on surrealism from 1929, Benjamin introduced a series of experimental concepts, among them image-space (Bildraum), body-space (Leibraum), and profane illumination. Although he later dropped them in favour of the dialectical image and phantasmagoria, in the context of this talk I am particularly interested in his concepts of image-space and profane illumination. With regard to a Benjaminian politics of Phantasie, they designate the political counterpart of a world structured by capitalist phantasmagoria. To give you a handy, others might find vulgar, definition of profane illumination, we can understand it as a materialist epiphany inaccessible to contemplative thinking and intentional acting, which ushers in the immediacy of an image-space. This space is not miraculously emergent but can only be formed through and within political action. The collective subjectivity that inhabits and literally incorporates this space emerges neither through the traditional structures of disciplined cadres in party politics nor through the spontaneous anarchy of amorphous masses. In other words, there is no authentic political community that precedes the revolutionary action of the image-space. For Benjamin, thus, community, image-space, and political action mutually presuppose each other; there is no solid ground on which revolution can be predetermined. Due to its immediate, nonrepresentational emergence and indeterminacy, the political collective, which inhabits this space, has no stabile essence in itself. Rather, it points in the direction of an unworking or inoperative community that French thinkers like Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy have later conceptualised. For the moment, though, I will return to Benjamins paradoxical idea of profane illumination as key to a politics of Phantasie a revolutionary politics of the deformation of phantasmagorical forms.
optical device: The phantasmagoria was invented in the late 1790s by the Belgian doctor-aeronaut, Etienne Gaspard Robertson. It enjoyed the greatest vogue in the hands of its creator, with accounts of Robertson's popular performances proliferating in newspapers of the time (fig. 17 [see above, S.K.]) (ibid., p. 232). 6 Cf. the 1935 expos: Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. (GS V, 55).

Sami Khatib

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If profane illumination designates a moment of indifference between the polarity of enlightened consciousness and mythical or religious fantasy, we first have to distinguish it from revolutionary myth. The Surrealism-essay reads: [A]s we know an ecstatic component lives in every revolutionary act. This component is identical with the anarchic. But to place the accent exclusively on it would be to subordinate the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebration in advance. (Benjamin, GS II, 307) It goes without saying that Benjamin here refers to the classic opposition between libertarian anarchism and hierarchical structures of Leninist parties. His surrealistically inspired suggestion to overcome this non-dialectical duality leads to a materialist theory of perception and a revision of the commonplace dichotomy of sober ratio and enthusiast affect. As Benjamin's essay proceeds: Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind [romantischer Kopf] is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. (Benjamin, GS II, 307) Although Benjamin is commenting here on the difference between (French) surrealism and (German) romanticism, we might read this quote in light of the actually existing surrealism of the capitalist everyday. Benjamin's dialectical optic aims to perceive the everyday as impenetrable in the same spirit as Marx, when he conceives of the capitalist world of positive factuality commodified things and facts as the objective cover, sachliche Hlle, of social relations. The objective impenetrability of the everyday resides, as Marx put it, in the mystical character of commodities. Reading Marx through Benjamin's dialectical optic, we perceive the most trivial occurrences and facts of the everyday precisely as a real-sur-real, or, as Marx put it, sensuous-supra-sensuous (MEW 23, 85) sphere in which the occult character7 of capital as a purely social relation is expressed by things. From this perspective, the exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagorical phenomena is not about an inner experience, but about the perception of the world of commodities as literally sur-real in its over- or hyper-real shape. Hence, a materialist inquiry into the social metaphysics of physical things must rid itself of all naturalistic and positivist attitudes, to strip capitalist phantasmagorias off its thing-ish semblance. The task of traversing the world of phantasmagorias cannot simply exit it or do away with the constitutive intertwinement of reality and fantasy; however, it can bring the sur-real, that is, the sensuoussupra-sensuous face of things to the fore. In other words, the critical side of Benjamin's dialectical optics takes issue with a falsely romantic attitude an attitude that hypostatises the mysterious side of the mysterious instead of soberly recognizing phantasmagorical phenomena as an integral part of reality as sur-reality. In the same way, the political struggle is not about tarrying with the ecstatic intoxication inherent to authentic revolutionary action but about letting its sober, profane face come to the fore. This is what is meant when a profane illumination opens up a sphere, a bodily image-space in the midst of political action. Benjamins formula of win[ning] the energies of intoxication for the revolution (GS II, 307) does not mean the total immersion of the self in a collective communion of transgressive ecstasy but to traverse these threshold-experiences, to oscillate between reality and sur-reality, in order to enter the image-space of politics. The image-space of politics is neither a representative image of political action nor the imaginary
7

Cf. Marx: The value's occult quality of being able to add value to itself like golden eggs (MEW 23, p. 169).

Sami Khatib

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space of politics but, quite on the contrary, a space immediately formed through political action. In other words, an image-space is not a metaphor for something else it only stands for itself without forming a stable, self-identical image. Referring to Louis Aragon, Benjamin draws a parallel of style and politics. Just as style requires a distinction between metaphor and image, so does politics. While the metaphor, meta-phorein, that is, transferring meaning to an image, always employs an image to designate something else a meaning , Aragon's image can only stand for itself. The same goes for politics as Benjamin claims: the task for materialist politics hence is to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover within the space of political action the one hundred per cent image-space. This image-space, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation (GS II, 308f.). This stance against representation and moralism aims at setting free political action from all instrumental ideologies; political action is no longer the bearer of something else a higher morale, a programme, or an embodiment of history's progress towards socialism but an opening that presents itself as an immediate image, an image-space where all petty bourgeois moralism becomes inoperative, where all external meaning is extinguished. Nothing else is meant when Benjamin defines the task of authentic politics as the organisation of pessimism a pessimism of the belief that politics can stand for something else, that is, historical progress, moral teleologies today we might add: representative post-democracy and the fiction of a sustainable and green capitalism. For if this dismantled, reduced image-space, devoid of all moral and trans-historical meaning, becomes ideologically inoperative, it cannot anymore be measured contemplatively; it can only be directly performed, staged, or embodied by political action itself. But how are we to conceive of this space and how can political action enter it? In short, Benjamin's answer remains pessimistic and anti-utopian: the entrance into the image-space can not be intentionally found but only unintentionally opened up by threshold-experiences, Freudian slips, and other unexpected deviations of collective political action itself: For in the joke [], in invective, in misunderstanding, in all cases where an action puts forth its own image and exists, absorbing and consuming it, where nearness looks with its own eyes, the long-sought image-space is opened, the world of universal and integral actuality []. (GS II, 309) The image-space is the immediate presentation of collective political action without formal political representation. Where nearness looks with its own eyes, where ultimate proximity and auratic distance enter a stage of mutual indifference, the image-space becomes real. This reality is not stable, it is fully charged with dialectical tensions; nevertheless, it contains a higher degree of actuality, more actual reality than reality can contain. This higher degree of actuality is called the world of universal and integral actuality, a term that Benjamin will later define as the messianic world.8 Conclusion With regard to the concepts of image space and profane illumination, Benjamins politics of Phantasie, a politics of immanent deforming of phantasmagorical forms, acquires a singular position within the discourse of post-Lukcsian critical Marxism: His departure from deterministic 'vulgar Marxism' does not take an epistemological turn to arrive at a classic critique of ideology; instead of conceiving of ideological fantasy as an obstacle for revolution he takes it as its very source. To borrow from Benjamins Phantasie-fragment and his later theses On the Concept of History, one might say: Just as the deforming forms of clouds operate within the fantastic forms of cloudy skies, the image-space is made of phantasmagorias, fantasies, and collective dream-images. The latter, the foggy substance of fantasy, can be both limiting ideology and medium for revolutionary action. Consequently, the lumen, the light of the profane il8

Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, in GS I, p. 1239.

Sami Khatib

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lumination is not 'made' of a correct or adequate consciousness, a knowledge about certain things, but is an immediate medium in which things and words, individuality and collectivity, sober consciousness and dream-like fantasies collide. The image-space thus is the immediate presentation of the medium of politics a politics, as Werner Hamacher put it, of pure mediacy that no longer relies on instrumental media of its politics but has become its own means, a pure means without end. To this extent, I am also tempted to agree with a comment by Slavoj Zizek, which he made in his first book published in German language. Discussing the intertwinement of politics, ideology and phantasma, he surprisingly turned to Benjamin and stated: The reason why Benjamin takes such an extraordinary position resides in the fact that he is probably the only one who detected the driving force of revolution in the real of phantasmatic Trgheit, idleness. Within the entire Marxist tradition, even within Critical Theory, phantasmatic idleness has always been regarded as an obstacle as something that blocks the revolutionary becoming of the masses and penetrates their behavior and, thereby, makes them act against their true interests (the fascist mass community), in other words, as something that should be abolished.9 What Zizek calls here phantasmatic Trgheit, idleness, worklessness or inoperativity might be read with my introductory remarks on a Benjaminian politics of Phantasie. It is not so much phantasmatic inertia but the non-creative deformation of the forms of fantasy, the quasimessianic entropy of profane life, dissolving itself in eternal transience, that give rise to a revolutionary politics, which could interrupt, derail and deactivate the productive functionality of todays phantasmagorical discourses of capital and the state. The first measure of a politics of Phantasie hence is to resist todays calls for critically constructive activism, visionary proposals for future forms of social inclusion and sustainable productivity. Rather, if we want to use our Phantasie, we are to test our awareness of the de-formations of the future.

Abbreviations: Benjamin, GS: Benjamin, Walter: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Schweppenhuser; Rolf Tiedemann, 7 Vols., Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1972ff. Marx, MEW: Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich: Werke (MEW), 43 Vols., ed. Institut fr MarxismusLeninismus beim ZK der SED, Berlin: Dietz, 1956ff.

9 Cf. Da Benjamin einen so auerordentlichen Platz einnimmt, liegt daran, da er wohl als einziger die Triebfeder der Revolution im Realen der phantasmatischen Trgheit sucht. In der ganzen marxistischen Tradition, also auch in der Kritischen Theorie, hat man nmlich die phantasmatische Trgheit immer wieder als ein Hindernis empfunden, das das Revolutionr-Werden der Massen blockiert, das als irrationales Verhalten eindringt, wodurch die Massen gegen ihre wahren Interessen handeln (die faschistische Volksmasse usw.), also als etwas, das beseitigt werden mu. (Slavoj !i"ek: Der erhabenste aller Hysteriker: Psychoanalyse und die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, Wien; Berlin 1992, S. 159f.)

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