Loss of Experience and Experience of Loss: Remarks on the Problem of the Lost Revolution in

the Work of Benjamin and His Fellow Combatants

Author(s): Wolfgang Fietkau and Benjamin
Source: New German Critique, No. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn,
1986), pp. 169-178
Published by: New German Critique
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Lossof Experienceand Experienceof Loss:
Remarkson theProblemof theLostRevolution
in the Workof Benjaminand
His FellowCombatants

by Wolfgang Fietkau

That the fame Benjamin so fatefully and (un)successfully ran away

from all his life has finally caught up with him post mortem predis-
poses his work, in the wake of the complete edition of his collected
writings, not only to a perspective that should eventually be freer from
preconceptions, but also to a neutralization that would seem to be the
shadow side of every academic consecration. Its sunny side, however,
is the opportunity to recognize on the basis of its now unchallenged
greatness certain inherent limitations as well. The latter are the con-
cern of the following sketches, which place certain aspects of his oeuvre
in a context that links Benjamin's thinking to that of his fellow com-
batants on the left and the conservative-revolutionary right.
If it is true that, in however sublimated a manner, the best minds of a
given era end up wrestling with the same problems, it would be worth
investigating to what extent Benjamin belongs - by not belonging -
to the groupings of the left and the right. However evident or dubious
his participation might appear, his non-participation is in fact no less
striking. To define this non-participation anew would involve relating
Benjamin's intellectual paths to the positions of that bourgeois social
philosopher who was neither his opposite number nor his model, who
was neither the bNtenoirenor the bNteblancheof the German intelligentsia
and yet remained its challenging inspiration even where his name
remained unspoken: I am speaking of the "Myth of Heidelberg,"
Max Weber.

II.
When Max Weber raised his voice in warning against the revolution-
ary posturing in Munich in 1918, he linked his denunciation of the
"bloody carnival" to a sociological analysis of present and future
169
170 Loss of Experience

trends under the headings of mass democracy and bureaucratization.

In contrast to left-wing critical theories that postulate a polarization of
extremes and a breakdown of social structures, Weber registers a con-
vergence of social forces toward the center, one which coincides with a
complication of the structures at that center.
If the military defeat of the Reichseemed to furnish the preconditions
for a political revolution, Weber nonetheless felt it necessary to warn
against a belief that, however capable of "moving mountains," was
unable to cope with ruined finances and a lack of capital. The socialist
revolution appears obsolete to the bourgeois sociologist because he no
longer discerns its objective conditions of possibility. The revolution
nevertheless develops a peculiar afterlife of its own, one that in several
respects clarifies prevalent states of mind in the 1920s. Bereft of its
objective possibilities, lacking any prospect of seizing the masses, who
have long since taken a different turn, it leads a posthumous existence
in the realm of the philosophical daydream. While intellectuals still
dream of revolution, its conditions have quietly slipped away. From
this perspective, as Rene K6nig observed, the 1920s were already over
before they had begun.
The posthumous existence of the socialist revolution evaporates in
Ernst Bloch's hands into a theology- an "endangered journey, a wan-
dering, a going astray, a search for the hidden homeland; full of tragic
disruptions, boiling, bursting with cracks, eruptions, lonely promises,
intermittently charged with the conscience of light" (Thomas Miinzer)
- a utopian daydream, soon to be opposed by a complementary fan-
tasy on the part of revolutionary conservatism.
Hadn't Marx, as a Leninist avant la lettre,in his confrontation with
Proudhon, already let it be known that in case the "natural develop-
ment" of things failed to materialize, violence, that is to say the avant-
garde, would have to create the revolution and impose a dictatorship
upon the proletariat?
When Max Weber died in 1920, he bequeathed to the bourgeois
social sciences a set of epistemological equipmentwhich, limited alpari
to the everyday of the demystified world, nevertheless kept track of
actual historical reality. Academic social philosophy, on the other
hand, from Sombart to Heidegger, is at this very moment beginning to
assimilate Marxism and bears witness in its artificial distortion (Ver-
fremdung)of the original text ("fallen state" [Verfallenheit], "inauthen-
ticity"[Uneigentlichkeit] instead of"self-alienation" to
[Selbstentfremdung])
the deep sense of shock with which the post-Wilhelminian establish-
ment of the German universities plopped out of the coziness of its bay-
window seatwhen confronted with inflation, post-war restlessness and
social disorders.
 WolfgangFietkau 171

In 1922, Maller van den Bruck announces the redemptive formula

of a "revolution of nihilism"; in 1921, however, Walter Benjamin had
likewise espoused the nihilism of a proletarian general strike "which
sets itself the sole task of annihalating the power of the state."
While the left's idea of revolution, whether it refers to Thomas Miin-
zer or to Georges Sorel, knows no alternative to violence, the revolu-
tionary conservatism of a Moller van den Bruck, ErnstJiinger or Carl
Schmitt draws in turn upon the catholic traditionalism - whether in
left-wing(Sorel)or right-wing(Maurras)guise - which had also reached
Germanyin the aftermathof the Dreyfusaffair.Thus, the newly imported
French notion of a conservative revolution replaces the intellectual
task which Max Weber's death bequeathed to German sociology as a
kind of school assignment: that of a conceptually adequate elaboration
of the developing capitalist structures in everyday life.
Since this French import, in contrast to the original French provin-
cial aristocracy of de Maistre and Bonald, does not in any way corre-
spond to the everydayrealityof post-Wilhelminian Germany, it derives
its existence as a backward-turned utopia from a polemic against the
values of the cultural import of yesteryear: the three holy maxims of
the French revolution.
The thinner the surface of the theory, the greater the temptation to
make up for its lack of historical humus by way of complementary Ger-
man fictions: the enlightened Prussia, for example, of an Oswald
Spengler. If the revolutionary eschatology of the young Bloch, Ben-
jamin and Lukaicslooks eastward, the same pattern repeats itself in the
revolutionary conservatism of the Dostoevsky editor Mdller van den
Bruck as well as in the national Bolshevist dreams of an Ernst Niekisch,
who develops the terrifying visions of a Barres or a Maurrasas left Ger-
man fantasies of a nation extending from Vladivostok to the Rhein,
under German rule of course.
If the left-wing revolution fails as a result of the structural transfor-
mation of its preconditions, which Weber summarizes under the
headings bureaucracy and mass-democracy, the right-wing revolution
is left equally in the lurch by the illusoriness of its premises: the dream
of a "people's revolution" as the counter-force to the powers of indus-
trial alienation blossoms here under the impact of a new wave of indus-
trialization in 1923.
While the ideological struggles of the revolutionary left and right
take the ritual form of earnest intellectual duels, national socialism
begins to insinuate itself into the historical vacuum by gaining the ear
of the middle classes (which were in no way "proletarianized," as
Kracauer or Lederer mistakenly believed). Though both revolutions
may well have lived out their after-lives as intellectual phantasms by
172 Lossof Experience

the end of the 1920s, they had nevertheless supplied images to repub-
lican society with which it could sleep-walk its way past its problems
and end up in the arms of the Nazis.
It is perhaps instructive, and by no means accidental, that two of the
most significant political manifestoes from the perspective of the com-
plementary nature of theoretical developments - Benjamin's essay
"Critique ofViolence" and CarlSchmitt's "Sociology of the Concept of
Sovereignty and Political Theology" - appeared in publications that
bear tribute, in more than one respect, to the name of Max Weber.
Originally inspired by Emil Lederer and intended for publication in
WeisseBldtter,Benjamin's "Critique ofViolence" finally appears (1921)
in Vol. 47 of that Archivfiir Sozialwissenschaftenund Sozialpolitikto which
Max Weber's studies on contemporary society and especially his essays
on the economic ethics of world religion had lent a special aura.
Schmitt's "Sociology of the Concept of Sovereignty .. ." was in turn
published in the second volume of a memorial edition by Melchior
Palyi dedicated to Max Weber in 1923 by a large number of his former
colleagues from the archive.

IlL
If one surveysthe various positions that emerge, by way of a homage,
from the critique of Max Weber, it soon becomes apparent that the
arguments scarcely have anything to do with Weber's findings, but are
concerned ratherwith their implicit axiomatic; hence, no doubt, their
theological cast both on the left and the right.Just as the afterlife of the
revolution acquires a certain ghostliness in the medium of the day-
dream, so the intellectual controversies that dramatize the implicit
problematics of a hermeneutical sociology (verstehende Soziologie)into
the opposite fronts of a religious war turn out to be entirely artifical.

A.
Since norms and empirical truths are - from a scientific per-
spective - validated on heteronomous levels, and since, further-
more, values cannot, according to Weber, be validated but only
believedin, Weber's empirical typology assigns the modes of orien-
tation of social action as well as the modes of validation of the
categories of legitimacy - not without some equivocation - to
the subjective sphere of modes of beliefThe beginnings of Weber's
hermeneutical sociology turn out, in fact, to be rooted in his prot-
estant ethic inasmuch as the notorious nominalism of his con-
cepts and ideal types presupposes that thoroughgoing demystifi-
cation of the world under the aegis of a rationalization which forces
the individual, in his objective loneliness or "transcendental
 Fietkau 173
Wolfgang

homelessness" (Lukics), to derive all objective meaning and

coherence out of himself. To this extent, the presuppositions of
the world-view of "protestant ethics" actually reach in fact into
the subtlest ramifications of Weber's method - namely, the
individualistic structure of his definitions of social formations:
thisdeterminesbothhisunderstandingof the"institutional charac-
ter"(Anstaltscharakter)of the statederivedfrom"chance"aswell as
the theory of the varioustypes of domination.
It is characteristicof the debatearoundMaxWeber,conducted
by Lukics, Bloch and Benjamin, on the one hand, and Carl
Schmitt,on the other,thattheydo not presentthis implicittheol-
ogy of his methodological (wissenschaftlich) procedure as a subject
for public debate, but instead, with the artfulness of philosophi-
cal sublimation, set out from it in ways that do more to obscure
than to enlighten. What results is a fundamental re-theologizing
of the issues, as if it really were a matter of re-enacting the reli-
gious wars that succeeded the Reformation. If Weber had seen
one of the consequences of the Reformation in the transformation
of every form of religious ethics into a personal ethics which, with
the loss of all transcendental anchorage and a reorientation of the
interest in salvation from the next world to this one, promotes the
secularization of the modern world, the young of the
Theory oftheNoveltakes the Weberian topos ofa "godless,
Luk.cs
prophet-
less" time as the occasion for a negative theology - a charac-
terization of the period as the era of "complete sinfulness."

B.
Weber had contested the absolute claims of an ethics of con-
science (Gesinnungsethik) by pointing, among other things, to the
irrationality of the world. Such an ethics was, he argued, incap-
able of recognizing how a politics of violence could generate
good from evil. Weber criticized such an ethics, which demanded
the sacrifice either of the intellect or of experience, for its inability
to tolerate any kind of modern science based on empirical ex-
perience (Erfahrungswissenschaft). He had, as is well known, finally
seen the advantage of an ethics of responsibility in the fact that, by
taking the irrationality of the world into account from the very
outset, it relies consciously and without any illusions on violence
as a last resort, even if this involves making a pact with "dia-
bolical powers."
The theologically well-versed Ernst Bloch recognizes in this
divorce of conscience from responsibility a new version of Luther's
doctrine of the two kingdoms, in which, through the separation
174 Lossof Experience

of belief and justification, an inwardness is created whereby it

becomes possible to make oneself at home in an unchristian
world and leave it to the powers that be to pursue their fallen,
diabolical ways. Thus, where Bloch means the politically re-
signed (not the calvinist economist) Weber, he says Luther,and
invokes the memory of his revolutionary counterpart against the
"soft living flesh of Wittenburg." For hadn't Thomas Miinzer
opposed this doctrine of the two kingdoms, this emasculation of
the Christian protest against the world, with the argument that
the world wasn't simply to be accepted as God's creation, as
Luther thought, or left to the devil as corrupt, or forgivingly
loved, but rather to be changed, so that the kindgom of God
might be realized on earth? The transformation Bloch/Miinzer
proclaims against Luther/Weber occurs as a taborite reshaping of
the world through the active overthrow of the system, through
violence. Luther/Weber's renunciation of all forms of Christian
revolutionary violence is for Bloch only that "cleverness of the
meek" who sanction injustice in the name of brotherly love. The
demonstrability of belief, and the concomitant ability to recog-
nize the elect, legitimates the circle of those who are to exercise
violence in the name of truth and thereby also justifies "the right
to violence of the good." The other side of the revolutionary
Blochian coin is the offensive Holy War, the extermination of the
godless, the establishment of a dictatorship of the chosen, in
other words of an intellectual avant-garde destined to annihilate
the many pagan altarsof a liberalpluralismof values and restorethe
one (the oneGod or the anabaptistKing)in the place of the many.

C.
Max Weber had based the connection between the sociology of
law and that of the state on the observation that "today" the
relationship between the state and violence is so "intimate" that
the state "may"be directly defined by its "monopoly of legitimate
violence." If law is thereby understood in sociological terms as
the prevailing legitimized order whose existence is guaranteed by
outside force, the notion of such organized force already signifies
a historical relativization of this kind of law - that is, a sociologi-
cal limitation of its sphere of legitimacy - insofar as it necessarily
presupposes the "organizationalunity" (Verbandseinheit) and hence
the institutional character (Anstaltscharakter) of the modern state.
By contrast, Benjamin theologizes Weber's sociological descrip-
tion by abolutizing as "mythical" the equation of right and might
in the implicitly relativized sphere of validity ofWeber's sociolog-
 WolfgangFietkau 175

ical deduction of law, in order then to proceed to the theological-

anarchistic program of abolishing the law. Since Benjamin grants
the same quality of originary immediacy to the legal violence he
calls "mythical" - qua "manifestation" - as he does to the
violence of the revelation he calls "divine," and nevertheless dis-
tinguishes the former from the latter as "ungodly" (justice as the
principle of all divine, power as the principle of all mythical pur-
poses), he implicitly bases his distinctions on an opposition be-
tween "polytheism," that is to say the pluralism/liberalism of the
Weberian division of power, and the monotheism of revealed
religion without, however, developing its underlying philosophy
of religion.
Thus appear the mythical godheads, in other words the penates
and house altarsof a pluralisticallydisintegratedcosmos of values,
which corresponds to Schelling's and Franz Rosenzweig's con-
ception of a "negative philosophy" as the historical counterpart
to the spiritual process by which man commits the original sin of
asserting his will: like the grandiloquent word Weber himself
wants to be, but cannot be, the creator. Thus, like Bloch in Miin-
zer's clothing, Benjamin repeats the polemic against modern
pluralism and Weber's nominalistic idiom, a polemic sublimated
here too into the language of theology and the philosophy of his-
tory. And he too proclaims unity against multiplicity: for as the
historical equivalent of this ungodly usurpation, polytheism (lib-
eralism/pluralism) appears, it is true, as a real process, yet only as
the impotent repetition in human consciousness of the process of
creation. This state of affairs, which is no more than hinted at in
the context of Benjamin's critique of violence, is confirmed in
Franz Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption," which was written
almost simultaneously: Here one finds the constructive counter-
part of a "rational philosophy" which articulates a philosophy of
history based on the late Schelling, one capable of situating its
various elements. To such rational philosophy - the spiritual
consciousness represented by, say, the procedures of Weberian
methodology - corresponds the negative philosophy Rosen-
zweig terms heathenism. Both are posited in the second part of
Rosenzweig's system as "creation."
D.
If Benjamin mythologizes the presuppositions ofWeber's soci-
ology of law by making the hypostatization of law as violence,
right as might, the pretext for demanding its historical destruc-
tion, Carl Schmitt confronts the Weberian position with a reverse
176 Lossof Experience

objection of equal cogency. Since the problem of a Weberian

(verstehend)sociology of law consists in dissolving the empirical
validityof norms - from the perspectiveof a science of experience
- into the modes of belief of the oppressed, it succumbs -
Schmitt fears - to the dissolution of law and order in the abitrari-
ness of an individualistic ethic.
In this sense, the spirit of Weber's sociology of law was, from
Schmitt's perspective, born neither in Israel nor in Rome. Carl
Schmitt grounds his critique of the dead model to whom he
dedicates his memorial essay by invoking Weber's theological
model - the church historian Sohm - when in fact it is Max
Weber himself he has in mind: IfJesus' church stems, according
to Sohm's teachings, from the beyond, it is a spiritual entity
beyond earthly norms, without visible contact with the world and
its laws: "For this reason there is no visible community which
would be the Church of Christ as such." Communal life under
the conditions of this world is unthinkable without legal organiza-
tion. If the church is, however, essentially unworldly, it also
neither needs nor is capable of worldly organization, but rather
transcends any and all order of law. If the church as Corpus
Christi signifies the existence of an other-worldly community in
the midst of this world, it would nevertheless remain separate
from it insofar as the earthly worldiness of the world is equated
with what is visible or outwardly manifest. For the only organiza-
tional principle of the church is one charisma, that word of God
which was in the widest sense the church's sole organizational
principle.
Since spritual power (Gewalt),in the form of pneumatocracy
which realizes itself through charisma, is of a different order than
worldly power, which alwaysrepresentslegal authority,the essence
of the law, insofar as it demands enforcement, does not reside in
such power but rather in the formal structure of its acquisition.
Legal power always points, on the basis of certain facts, to the
past. If, however, formal legitimation is the mark of worldly-legal
power, it cannot, by the same token, be the hallmark of other-
worldly, divine power. Thus, charismatic directives claim no
enduring validity; the spirit decrees this one day and that the next.
Sohm too had been obliged to recognize that the founding of the
course of history on charisma was disavowed by history itself.
Because charismatic organization lacks any outward organizing
power, it must, as he had to concede to his opponents, finally
entrust the life of the church to a "pneumatic anarchism."
Thus, Carl Schmitt can invoke Sohm, who "established the
 WolfgangFietkau 177

important proposition" that the law depends fundamentally on

form (summumjus, summa injuria) and must necessarily do so,
insofar as it does not explicitly demand enforcement but never-
theless seeks its forceful realization. For upon entering empirical
reality,the concept of law undergoes modifications thatare marked
by an abdication of timeless justice and a certain degree of in-
determinacy - a necessary sacrifice, inasmuch as a pact must be
sealed with the powers that be. Since the form of the law under-
goes certain modifications in the act of realizing itself through its
entry into the world, the problem now arises as to who is to be the
carrierof the form: the problem - in the language of the "politi-
cal theology" which Weber's approach to the sociology of law
both undermines and suspends - of competence.
Since a legal definition, as a norm for making decisions, only
says how - but not by whom - something is to be decided
(insofar as anyone can lay claim to being substantively in the
right, there can be no last instance), the question of competence is
synonymous with that of the last instance - a question that can
neither be raised nor answered by the substantive quality of a
legal stipulation. Schmitt's solution to this problem is, however,
the form of Catholic law, the postulate of the visibility of the
Catholic church. For the Catholic church and its teachings offer
an example of typical purity: as the idea of a visible church and
thus of aJus divinum constitutionally established on earth by an
order of law that is true Jus and not an ethic, Schmitt argues, it
needed concrete provisions for questionable cases. Thus, there
finally emerges for Schmitt a clear-cut alternative between recog-
nizing Catholic doctrine, and with it the formal character of the
law, as legitimate or adopting Luther's (i.e. Weber's) position, in
terms of Sohm's assumption that all law is to be considered
incompatible with a charismatic community. Weber's sociology
of law, especially his doctrine of its charismatic origins, threatens
its very foundation. For if the substance of the law resides in its
form, the latter in turn lies in the concrete decision arrived at by a
specific authority. In view of the autonomous significance of the
decision, the decision-making subject, according to Schmitt,
acquires an autonomous significance independent from its con-
tent; the life of the law depends in reality on whodecides. In this
distinction between the subject and the content of the decision, in
the autonomous significance of the subject, resides a problem of
juridical form that is elided when norms are dissolved into mere
modes of belief. Thus, for Schmitt as for Benjamin, the connection
between defacto power and the highest legal power emerges as the
178 Lossof Experience

fundamental problem of a theory thatjettisons all the premises of

Weber's sociology as a science of experience in order to under-
stand the law or its powerlessness as power on the basis of excep-
tions to it.
As these sketches show, Weber's critics, whether politically to the left
or the right, stand on the same street; it makes no difference whether
the rallying cries are "theology of the revolution" (Ernst Bloch) or
"political theology." The fact that the street will soon divide hardly
changes the fact that they share the same ground for the respective
mustering of their troops. In this respect, the theological after-life of a
socialist revolution that never materialized contains dangerous ex-
plosive matter. The experience of loss led to a loss of experience
because any disciplined (wissenschaftlich)attempt to come to terms with
this loss had become obsolete in the eyes of both supporters and
opponents of the "posthumous" revolution. For the social sciences
were after all a "bourgeois" affair.

TranslatedbyJonathan Monroeand Irving Wohlfarth

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