Die Briefe Walter Benjamins

By Way of Resemblance: On Benjamin’s Daoist Renewal of Dialectics

“…This revisioning of translation, which accentuates resemblance while declining assimilation, is taken up in these pages as a plane of refraction through which to read his formative yet understudied engagement with Chinese thought. While Benjamin’s work is routinely parsed in terms of the generative tension between Jewish mysticism and Western Marxism, this essay considers differently how Benjamin (1991 [1914]) moves toward an unorthodox affinity with Daoism, beginning with his ‘Metaphysics of Youth’ and continuing through his 1940 reflections on the technological reproduction of likeness.…”

“…This dialogue sets into motion a series of Umkehren [reversals] that do not synthesize so much as they discompose teaching as practicable knowledge. Writing of the line ‘If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables’, Benjamin (1977) makes a leap, suggesting that the pivotal sentence ‘may be most accurately elucidated from the worldview of the Chinese’ (p. 1261). His reading of Kafka’s parable drops open onto another parable, as he recites the story of Wu Daozi in full.…”

“…His reading of Kafka’s parable drops open onto another parable, as he recites the story of Wu Daozi in full. Shuttling the resemblance back, Benjamin (1977) concludes that the painter, ‘in Kafka’s words, became Gleichnis ’ – a word that holds the sense not only of ‘parable’ but also of ‘similitude’ (p. 1261).…”

“…Would the monkey feel that way?’; Zhuangzi, 2008: 49); and the irruption of knowing with humor (‘When a worthless scholar hears the Dao, / He laughs boisterously at it / But if such a one does not laugh at it, / The Dao would not be the Dao’; Laozi, 1997: 85). The ‘definition of the Dao as “that which, by being ‘nothing’, makes something ‘useful’” strikes the tone’ of many of Kafka’s messages, Benjamin (1977: 1198) suggests. This ‘nothing’ is not one of annihilation.…”