European Romantic ReviewVol. 20, No. 2, April 2009, 247–260

ISSN 1050-9585 print/ISSN 1740-4657 online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10509580902840533http://www.informaworld.com

The burning library: Benjamin, Hugo, and the critique of violence

Deborah Elise White*

Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USATaylor and FrancisGERR_A_384223.sgm10.1080/10509580902840533European Romantic Review1050-9585 (print)/1740-4657 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis202000000April 2009Deborah EliseWhitedwhite2@emory.edu

This article explores the relation between violence and literature as it informsBenjamin’s essay “Towards a Critique of Violence” read in conjunction with twopoems by Hugo on the Paris Commune: “Whose Fault?” and “Paris Gutted byFire.” It further considers how Benjamin’s citation of “Paris Gutted by Fire” in theArcades Project underlines the articulation of violence and literature that informsthe Arcades Project’s account of the dialectical image. “Towards a Critique ofViolence” opposes the revolutionary force of “divine” violence to the oscillatingrhythms of law in which law posits itself in lawmaking violence and maintainsitself in law-preserving violence. As an interruptive force that suspends thenormative operations of law, divine violence disrupts normative language in a waythat corresponds to the modern function of “literature.” Hugo often seems to offeran analogous pairing of revolutionary and literary violence, but his poems on thecommune show how the commune disturbs the coherence between revolution andromanticism that he elsewhere locates within a larger history of progress. At thesame time, these poems point to the more radical relation between the violence ofthe revolution and the violence of the letter that literature foregrounds – a literalviolence that cannot be assimilated to progress. In particular, the passageBenjamin cites from “Paris Gutted By Fire” figures reading as an encounter with“an unfathomable abc” (Hugo’s phrase) amidst the ruins of the commune. For bothwriters, reading testifies to a divine violence that confounds legal and historicalnormativity, and Hugo’s lines find verbal echoes in Benjamin’s reflections on theArcades Project itself and the literary and literal violence that haunts its accountof the dialectical image as an image to be read.

To what degree does the critique of violence call for the critique of literature?1 WalterBenjamin’s essay “Towards a Critique of Violence” responds to a different impera-tive. Its opening sentence declares that “the task of a critique of violence can besummarized as that of presenting its relation to law and justice. For a cause, howevereffective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it enters intomoral relations. The sphere of these relations is defined by the concepts of law andjustice” (236).2 Language features directly in the essay’s account of nonviolent meansas verbal technique (“the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language” [245]) andobliquely in its account of mythic-legal violence as performative (arising in a verbal“challenge” that “calls down” fate [248]), but literature per se seems to remain justoutside its purview.3 Yet Benjamin’s concluding evocation of a revolutionary ordivine violence that exceeds all legal normativity may well entail the critique of liter-ature or at least the critique of a certain concept of literature or literariness. In whatfollows I explore that possibility, and I do so in part through a consideration of two of

*Email: dwhite2@emory.edu

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Victor Hugo’s poems on the final days of the Paris Commune, “Paris Incendié”(“Paris Gutted by Fire”) and “À Qui La Faute?” (“Whose Fault?”). Benjamin quotesa passage from Hugo’s “Paris Incendié” on the burning of the Bibliothèque Nationale,the French national library, in his notes for Convolute N of the Arcades Project “Onthe Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” In the context of Benjamin’s reflec-tions on methodology and historiography, the lines serve to allegorize the imbricationsof violence and literature that inform the Arcades Project itself. Taking the allusion toHugo as a cue, one finds a critique of literature that has implications not only forthinking divine violence but also for thinking the relation between divine violence andthe “now of recognizability” (Arcades Project 867) that flashes for an instant in thedialectical image. What is at stake is the convergence of divine violence with linguis-tic violence – including the violence of the letter that literature foregrounds and thatthe dialectical image cannot elude, for “the place where one encounters [dialecticalimages] is language”(N2a, 3).4

“Towards a Critique of Violence” (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt”) argues that law orig-inates in a revolutionary act of lawmaking violence which consolidates itself as statepower (Staatsgewalt) and reiterates itself in acts of law-preserving violence: “Allviolence as a means is either lawmaking [rechtsetsend] or law-preserving [rechtserh-altend]” (243). The necessary lawlessness involved in the act that founds or makes lawis justified retrospectively through its law-preserving iteration – even as the latter,law-preserving violence (or the legal system), inevitably bears traces of the originallawless imposition of law. But, in Benjamin’s “historico-philosophical” narrative(238), law-preserving violence eventually degenerates from its revolutionary origins,dissipating its violent and performative energies. In doing so, it becomes unstable andmust therefore give way before a new lawmaking violence. As a result, the history ofviolence appears to repeat itself in “a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmakingand law-preserving formations of violence” (251).5 The cycle can only be broken with“the abolition of state power,” an abolition, Entsetzung or deposing, that Benjaminequates with the inauguration of “a new historical epoch.” (252).6

Divine violence is the Entsetzung – the breaking of the cycle. Divine violence inter-rupts the systemic violence of things as they are and initiates the new historical epoch.As Werner Hamacher writes, “deposing is a political event, but one that shatters allthe canonical determinations of the political – and all canonical determinations of theevent” (115). Even as divine violence opposes itself to law, it is not merely opposi-tional, for it does not participate in the dialectic of lawmaking and law-preserving, butbrings it to a halt, disrupting the instrumental relation of means to ends that informsall law and state power. Divine violence is what Benjamin calls a “pure means,” ameans without end. Like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” it has a voice to “repeal / large codesof fraud and woe” but not to assert them. Therefore, its violence is, in a manner ofspeaking, nonviolent. Arguably, this “pure means” is already inherent in the act oflawmaking violence that founds, or will have founded, law, but only as a remainderthat lawmaking can never subdue to its own ends, however often it reiterates itself inacts of law-preserving violence. As a remainder, divine violence haunts law with itsown impossibility.7

For all these reasons, divine violence may also be said to suspend the language orthe relation to language which characterizes everyday symbolic negotiations with theworld. In that suspension, language takes on an immediate relation to its own mediatingor representative powers. Benjamin refers to such powers in “The Task of the Translator”as “the way of meaning,” die Art des Meinens, as opposed to “what is meant” (257).8

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As a way of meaning, language posits itself not so much as its own end, but as a meanswithout end or a reference without guaranteed referents. In doing so, it becomes (orshows itself to be) a pure means – the kind of language for which a privileged modernname is literature.9 As pure means, literature haunts the language of representation andinformation with the power to repeal its claims. It promises access to the divine textualityevoked in “The Task of the Translator”: “Holy Writ … in which meaning has ceasedto be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation. Where the literalquality of the text takes part directly, without any mediating sense, in true language”(262).10 In “Force of Law,” Derrida’s reading of Towards a Critique of Violence under-lines the logic according to which “re-presentative, mediating” language or languagethat is “technological, utilitarian, semiological, informational” becomes, for Benjamin,the site of “lethal power” (259). The revolutionary situation inaugurates a differentlanguage or a different relation to language. For this reason, as Derrida argues, “thereis something … of the revolutionary situation in every reading that founds somethingnew and that remains unreadable in regard to established canons and norms of reading– that is to say the present state of reading or what figures the State (with a capital S),in the state of possible reading” (271).

In any consideration of these claims, romanticism plays a crucial role, for, in adouble gesture that only seems ambiguous, romanticism characteristically addressesitself to the claims of revolutionary violence on the one hand and literary language onthe other. In the context of French Romanticism, in particular, Victor Hugo makesthe most hyperbolic claims for the equation of the political experience of revolutionand the literary experience of romanticism, especially in the later part of his career,after Louis Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état when romanticism would have appeared tomany of his readers as a dead letter.11 For Benjamin, too, Hugo seems to havemissed the date with modernity and he sometimes figures in the Arcades Projects asthe anti-Baudelaire of the nineteenth century (cf. J35, 6; d2, 3). But he is perhaps alsosomething more. The Convolut marked with a small letter “d” is titled “Literaryhistory, Hugo” as if Hugo were the privileged figure of the literary history thathaunts modernity – that is, of the romanticism that is never as much of a dead letteras its readers would like it to be.

The older Hugo defines romanticism as a literary revolution that brings an end tothe diction and the decorum of literature’s ancien regime. “Yes, I am that Danton, thatRobespierre! / Yes, I incited the ignoble valet word / Against his rapiered and noblemaster” (Selected Poems 171). What is at stake is not just the word, but the very alpha-bet of articulation: “I am … the destroyer of the ancient A B C D”; “Je suis … ledévastateur du vieil A B C D” (164/165; translation modified).12 The equation of liter-ary and political revolution in Hugo is something more than a metaphor. In the 1864volume William Shakespeare (the first work in which Hugo directly embraces theepithet “romantic”), he looks back to the generation of 1830 and recalls that criticsattacked its rebellion against neo-classical norms as a form of terror, “a literary 93” or“quatrevingt-treize littéraire.” His point is that the critics were right:

This epithet, a literary 93, was relatively precise in that it indicated in a confused butgenuine way the origin of the literary movement proper to our era even as it attemptedto insult it.

[…] Good news at times require a mouth of bronze. 93 is that mouth.Listen to the tremendous announcement that emerges from it. Lean forward –

alarmed and softened. The first time, God himself said fiat lux,the second time he had it be said.

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By whom?By 93.

So, we men of the nineteenth century, let us seize this insult as an honor:—you are 93.

But don’t stop there. We are 89 as well as 93. The revolution, all of the revolution,– that is the source of the literature of the nineteenth century. (Critique 432f.)13

The Revolution announces the terms according to which the century must be under-stood, for it is the century’s original creative utterance – its divine and divinely violentword. As such, it is an utterance at once literary and political or, rather, as “thesource,” it precedes the distinction between literature and politics. And, thoughwriting from exile, Hugo seems comfortable (as Benjamin would not have been) withthe capacity of this divine fiat to enter into compacts of founding or institutionalizationthat both establish new law and inspire “the literature of the nineteenth century.”

Seizing insult as honor, Hugo also implies the necessity of a revolutionary resto-ration even though, by his own account, the revolutionary source is divided (“89 aswell as 93”). The division prefigures the conflicted character of its return a few yearsafter the publication of William Shakespeare. What happens when the Revolutionreasserts itself – the second empire falls, the republic is restored – and then, in asecond violent eruption, interpreted by many at the time as a second 93, it appearsboth to turn on itself and to turn against literature?14 What happens when the ParisCommune rejects the Third Republic founded at the fall of the second Empire and stillmore catastrophically rejects the “state of reading” that Hugo recognizes as literature?These are the stakes of The Terrible Year, L’Année terrible, Hugo’s month by monthverse chronicle of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune. In confronting them,he ultimately confronts the problem of violence as it once again touches and istouched by the “ancient A B C D.”

The volume is dedicated to Paris “capital of the peoples” (Poésie III, 5) a sobriquetthat captures in condensed fashion Hugo’s peculiar mixture of universalism andprovincialism even as it looks forward to Benjamin’s “Paris: Capital of the NineteenthCentury” (the title of the two exposés for the Arcades Project). For Hugo, it is the capi-tal of peoples precisely because of its historical relation to revolution. As he wrote fora guidebook in 1869, Paris “is the place of the revolutionary revelation … the humanJerusalem” (Politique 20). As the capital of peoples and the place of revolutionaryrevelation, Paris is necessarily the capital of literature, the site of “new language”alongside “new rights, new laws” (Poésie III, 115). Yet throughout his career Hugo’swritings are also haunted by a vision of Paris in ruins and the Commune, especially indefeat, seems to realize his most apocalyptic fantasies.15 Thus in L’Année terribleParis is “The flame at which we warm ourselves,” “La flamme où nous nous réchauf-fons” (115), even as the flame gives way to literal conflagrations. Several poems inthe volume refer specifically to the conflagrations that arose during the final days ofthe Commune when a combination of shelling by the national government and arsonby the communards set the city on fire.16 The burning of Paris and, more particularly,the burning of the national library confronts the poet with the collapse of his literary-revolutionary mythology and its sacred capital.17

One short programmatic poem entitled “À Qui la Faute?” takes the form of animaginary dialogue between the poet-speaker and a (fictive) communard who admitsto having burned down the national library. Hugo is characteristically interested inmythologizing events and drawing the moral; the scenario has little relation to how thefires actually began. Most of the poem is given over to the poet-speaker’s shocked

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insistence that by destroying the library the communard has destroyed his own revo-lutionary inheritance. The burning of the library is a “Crime committed by you againstyourself”:

The book, hostile to the master, has always beenOn your side. It always took up your cause.A library is an act of faith.Generations still caught in shadowWho, amidst the night, bear witness to the dawn.

Le livre, hostile au maître, est à ton avantage.Le livre a toujours pris fait et cause pour toi.Une bibliothêque est un acte de foi.Des générations ténébreuses encoreQui rendent dans la nuit témoignage à l’aurore. (133)

By burning books, the communards reduce literature to its material substratum thebetter to annihilate it. They reject the tradition of knowledge and the self-knowledgethat the library promises. The critique is not unlike that of the staunchly conservativeanti-communard Catulle Mendès reflecting on the Commune’s demolition ofthe Vendôme column (also the subject of one of the poems in L’Année terrible).18 AsKristin Ross summarizes, “for Mendès, the destruction of the column abolisheshistory” (7). For the liberal poet-speaker of Hugo’s poem, the additional frisson is thatthe history being abolished is or should have been the history that the Communeassumes. Instead, at once patricidal and suicidal, the Commune turns against literaturein the name of the revolution and ends by destroying both.

These may well be the historical Hugo’s own views. (They can easily be alignedwith the historicist mythologizing of William Shakespeare.) But in this poem at least,he ventriloquizes them at something of an ironic distance. The last line of the dialogueis just half a line of verse – the communard’s response to the poet-speaker’s speech:“I don’t know how to read” (134). No comment of any kind follows. With this abruptending, the poem suggests that however hostile “the book” is to “the master,” itremains both an instrument and a symbol of mastery. Even the most revolutionaryliterature serves to perpetuate class rule not least because it draws the line betweenthose who know how to read and those who do not. Of course, Hugo’s poem is notintended for the equivalent of his fictive communard – who, if he existed, would notknow how to read it – but for literate middle class readers including many no moresympathetic to the Commune than Catulle Mendès. And its implied polemic is fairlystraightforward. “Whose fault?” the title asks. Whose fault that literature no longerguides the revolution? Whose fault that the library burns? It is the fault of the literatemiddle class, of those who have failed to teach others how to read or who have noteven tried to do so.

In the exchange between arsonist communard and shocked bourgeois poet, “À Quila Faute?” contrasts what [Zcaron]i[zcaron] ek in his recent book on violence calls “directly visible,‘subjective’ violence … performed by an identifiable agent” (1) and “‘systemic’violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of oureconomic and political systems” (2). Such “systemic” violence paradoxically “sustainsour very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance” (1). Following the impli-cations of the paradox, the poem’s polemic may not be as straightforward as it appears.In contrast to the “subjective” violence performed by the communard, the systemicviolence revealed by the poem is not simply the violence of a failed educational system

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but also the violence that sustains the very effort to improve the educational system,an effort always already implicated in class hierarchies. Therefore, despite Hugo’sreiterated conviction that education can solve the problems he decries, the poemtestifies to a residual discomfort with its own pedagogical humanism. The library, likeeducation itself, provides an anchor for the oppression it supposedly helps to over-come. The communard’s “I don’t know how to read” unsupported by any narrativeexplanation or personal pathos registers an opacity or even exteriority within the textthat hollows out its liberal polemics. As a violent rejection of the poet-speaker’s goodintentions, it remains as if unfathomable to its implied author – and its implied readersas well.19

In still another poem, “Paris Incendié,” unfathomable violence erupts within thelibrary itself, a violence that somewhat complicates [Zcaron]i[zcaron] ek’s opposition betweensubjective and systemic violence. “Paris Incendié” allegorizes Paris as the sacred cityof secular inspiration: “a flame that speaks; it fills the blue sky / With the eternaldeparture of its tongues of fire”; “Une flamme qui parle; il remplit le ciel bleu / DeL’éternel départ de ses langues de feu” (113). The Pentecostal imagery functions as ifto prefigure the violence that has overtaken Paris in reality – the literal “fire brand” or“tison” (117) that sets the city alight: a “torch [that is] miserable, abject, blind, andungrateful” (115). Between the two flames, the logic of biblical typology unfolds inreverse: the spirit collapses into the letter.

But the letter itself is also under threat. Almost exactly midway through the poem,Hugo invokes the burning of the national library:

What! Sacrifice everything! …What! The library, arch where dawn arises,Unfathomable ABC of the ideal, where progress,Eternal reader, leans on its elbows and dreams …

Quoi! Tout sacrifier! …Quoi! La Bibliothèque, arche où l’aube se lève,Insondable A B C de l’idéal, où rêveAccoudé, le progrès, ce lecteur éternel … (115–116)20

Benjamin cites these lines in his notes for Convolut N, “On the Theory of Knowl-edge, Theory of Progress,” of the Arcades Project, describing them as “a revealing[verräterisch] vision of progress” (N15a, 2). Verräterish implies a tell-tale sign orinadvertent self-betrayal. Presumably, what betrays itself in Hugo’s lines is the imageof progress as a dreamer, since, for Benjamin, the nineteenth century’s belief inprogress is one of the signs that it has not yet awoken to reality – not yet awoken tothe absence of progress that the dream itself perpetuates. As a dreamer, progress inev-itably withdraws from the historical experience in which alone it might realize itself.Leaning on its elbows (“accoudé”) it recalls Hugo’s description of himself leaning onhis table, “accoudé sur ma table,” in a short verse preface to L’Année terrible (13). Itrecalls, too, the “precursors” who appear later in the volume, geniuses of science,literature, and exploration whom the poet-speaker portrays urgently poised on theirelbows as they search for truth: “O foreheads whence ideas blaze forth! / On the edgeof the abyss, in the depths of the skies, / How many figures leaning on their elbows[accoudées]! (97).21 The latter image reiterates the timeless character of Hugo’s“progress.” Adorno, reading Augustine through the medium of Benjamin’s reflec-tions, comments that “If progress is equated with redemption as sheer transcendentintervention, it forfeits any graspable meaning along with the dimension of time, and

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evaporates into ahistorical theology” (87). Hugo’s dreaming progress betrays justsuch a transcendent, ahistorical vision.

But Hugo’s progress is also a reader who, like himself, must try to determine therelation between the letter and the spirit of the texts it reads. The unfathomability ofthe “ABC of the ideal” suggests the overdetermination of the relation of letter andspirit and the final impossibility of translation between literal and figural interpreta-tions of history. In the immediacy of alphabetical inscription, the mediating powers oflanguage stall. One is riveted to a linguistic means without end that is something otherthan a mere dream. Thus, while the gesture of reading “accoudé” may initially appearas a sign of narcissistic reverie and aesthetic reflexivity, it also serves as a sign of read-ing that remains painfully affected by the materiality of a signifier that cannot be fullysubsumed by self-reflection. In the instant of reading, the events of history can nomore be absorbed into the narrative of progress than the letters of the alphabet into thesymbolization of history. In his book on Shakespeare Hugo had asked “What is thehuman race since the origin of the centuries?” and answered “It is a reader. It has longspelled things out and is still spelling them out; soon it will read” (Critique 291). The“soon it will read” promises something more than a painful sounding out of letters. In“Paris Incendié” Paris initially seems to embody that promise: the great cities of theworld “have created the alphabet” from which Paris “writes the book” (113). But asthe library and Paris burn, the book disintegrates, and progress, the eternal reader, stillspells the alphabet of the ideal, endlessly caught in the mediating passage betweenletter and spirit that is never entirely one or the other.

The library itself is an “unfathomable ABC” and never more so than when it isburning down. Metonymically figuring the books that it contains, the library namesthe place where a spiritual ideal inscribes itself as a literal mark. For that very reasonit becomes an emblem of its own destruction. Progress leans on its elbows to read textsthat, as texts, or as literature, draw attention to the gap between the materiality of theletter and the dreams of the spirit. Therefore, they prefigure the experience of ruin orashes that consumes both letter and spirit in the fires of the commune or, rather, thatconsumes the literary configuration that brings letter and spirit into contact in theidealizing figure of progress. The burning library is the place where tongues of fireand firebrands of insurrection mutually annihilate one another. Therefore, as a readerof the unfathomable ABC, progress does not so much dream away the revolution asdirectly enter into its violence. As Derrida observes, reading participates in the revo-lutionary situation insofar as it “founds something new and that remains unreadable inregard to established canons and norms of reading – that is to say the present state ofreading” (271).

These two poems, “À Qui la Faute?” and “Paris Incendié,” thematize the violenceof literature in two seemingly quite different ways. “À Qui la Faute?” addresses thesystemic social violence of the educational system and its archive. A freer commen-tary might extend its implications beyond the hierarchizing effects of literacy to thoseof literary norms, asking not only who knows how to read, but also who knows howto read in the right way? Who controls the archive and its interpretation? In contrast,“Paris Incendié” foregrounds inscription or the very letter of the literary as an origi-nary archival violence. The latter poem seems, as it were, textual in its presentation ofviolence, the former contextual. But both poems disturb the very opposition of textand context (as they do the opposition of letter and spirit) even as each in some wayimplicates the other. As already suggested, the communard’s “I don’t know how toread” is something of an unfathomable mark. As a literal declaration it can be made

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figuratively meaningful as a polemic on behalf of public education, but as a violentrefusal of the poet’s benign intentions it remains more elusive. And the ABC of read-ing as it occurs both in and as the library is the occasion of a revolutionary violence,the burning of the library, from which it cannot be entirely distinguished. It figuresviolence as an exteriority that literally divides the text from within.

Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables, published a decade before L’Année terrible,confirms a literary or literal relay between the violence of the two poems. In LesMisérables the secret political society with which the young hero Marius becomesinvolved calls itself “Les amis de L’A B C” (“The friends of the A B C”). The novel’snarrator explains that the name encrypts a secret meaning. As “friends of the A B C”the group poses publicly as a club supporting the spread of literacy – a politically andsocially acceptable cause. But in French “Les amis de l’A B C” is a homonym for “thefriends of the abased,” l’abaissé: “The abased – that is the people. They wanted toraise them up. A pun one would be mistaken to laugh at. Puns can be serious inpolitics” (647).22 L’abaissé may also be translated as the “abject” or the “wretched”;in other words, it is a synonym for Les Misérables as if the very title of Hugo’s mostfamous work encrypted a riddling reference to the alphabet.23 “Les amis de L’A B C”testifies at once and undecidably to benign liberal humanism (a campaign for literacy)and revolutionary struggle (a fight for the abased) and in doing so it also testifies tothe violence of inscription in which both projects articulate themselves as if they wereone and the same. Notably, the law cannot read the revolution that reveals itself in thepunning contingencies of the letter. In a different sense than Hugo’s mythical commu-nard, the police do not know how to read – which is why the conspirators of LesMisérables are never arrested (though most are killed during the failed 1832 uprisingagainst the liberal monarchy of Louis Philippe). Puns are serious in politics becausethe violence of the letter ensures that the canons of meaning necessary to sustainlaw cannot even sustain themselves. They are serious because they set to work theEntsetzung or deposing that haunts all acts of lawmaking (rechtsetzend) violence.

I am suggesting that the letter of the literary, the “unfathomable ABC of the ideal,”may be a type of Benjamin’s divine violence or pure means. Benjamin concludes“Towards a Critique of Violence” by underlining the unreadability of divine violence.Whatever revolutionary promise it brings, it can never be known in its immediacy:“But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, isassured, this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestationof unalloyed violence by man is possible, and by what means. Less possible and alsoless urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has beenrealized in particular cases. For only mythical violence [that is, legal violence] notdivine, will be recognizable as such with certainty … because the expiatory power ofviolence is not visible to man” (300). Divine violence suspends all representative andcommunicative norms which means that no norm exists according to which it can bedetermined. The literariness that exposes the relation between letter and spirit as anunreadable alphabetical imposition offers a way to think the operation of this struc-tural undecidability.

Benjamin’s rejection of the discourse of progress embraced by Hugo (howeverironically) makes any relation between them seem equivocal at best. Yet the lines thatBenjamin cites from “Paris Incendié” in Convolut N still generate striking associa-tions within the Arcades Project and suggest possible points of contact between thecritique of violence – which is to say, the critique of literature – and the laterBenjamin’s reflections on the dialectical image. Margaret Cohen has noted that the

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lines on the National library (the Bibliothèque Nationale) in “Paris Incendié” echo inthe conclusion of Benjamin’s evocation of the Bibliothèque Nationale as he describesthe Arcades project itself:

These notes devoted to the Paris arcades were begun under an open sky of cloudless bluethat arched above the foliage; and yet – owing to the millions of leaves that were visitedby the fresh breeze of diligence, the stertorous breath of the researcher, the storm ofyouthful zeal and the idle wind of curiosity – they’ve been covered with the dust ofcenturies. For the painted sky of summer that looks down from the arcades in the readingroom of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has spread out over them its dreamy unlitceiling. (N1, 5; cf. Cohen 218)

Hugo’s lines on progress as an eternal reader, dreamily absorbed in the alphabet of theideal, prefigure Benjamin’s own experience of the Bibliothèque Nationale at a timewhen European ideals of progress were approaching their nihilistic apotheosis.The association between Benjamin’s reading for the Arcades Project and Hugo’s“progress” as it reads in “Paris Incendié” only increases with another allusion to Hugothat Benjamin makes in Convolute N, a quotation from La Fin de Satan (The End ofSatan) which similarly maps the idylls of nature onto the indoor spaces of learning andthe leaves on the trees onto the leaves of a book: “Tradition, errant fable one collects,/ Intermittent as the wind in the leaves” (quoted in N8a, 2). Like the library with itsdreamy painted ceiling of sky above the foliage and the Paris arcades as they cut theopening of the street through a block of buildings, the lines from La Fin de Satan disturbthe opposition of interior to exterior spaces and texts to contexts. In doing so, they recallBenjamin’s concern for establishing a means without end in language’s immediaterelation to its “own” mediating powers, that is, to powers of mediation that cannot beowned at all because they can never be completely internalized: “The interior turnedinside-out marks the movement of medialization in Benjamin” (Weber 50). Letter andspirit configure the time of reading as a Möbius strip.

The allusion to the Satanic is not fortuitous (though one may be doubtful of itstitular “end”). For Benjamin, as for Hugo, the library is on fire. In a 1935 letter toAlfred Cohn, he reports playfully on his success in obtaining permission to work in“the enfer of the library”: “obtaining permission to use it is one of the few successesI can chalk up for myself in this country” (Correspondence 493).24 The enfer of theBibliothèque Nationale is its collection of pornography, but enfer literally means“hell” and hell had long served Benjamin as a privileged name for the worse depreda-tions of modernity.25 Working in the enfer or, for that matter, invoking La Fin deSatan, Benjamin locates himself in the fires of reading. Like Hugo’s progress,Benjamin reads while books burn. He reads the better to fathom the violence thatthreatens reading from inside-out, for “the image that is read, that is, the image at thenow of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, danger-ous impetus that lies at the source of all reading” (N.3, 1; my emphasis).

The image that is read is the dialectical image, which is also to say, the enigmaticmethodological hinge of the Arcades Project. I do not propose to explicate it here, butonly to recall that, like “the ABC of the ideal,” the dialectical image confirms thenecessity of the link between the critique of violence and the critique of literature.26

Like divine violence and like the letter of the literary, the dialectical image suspendsthe powers of representation. It thus suspends the instrumental teleology of historicalinterpretation that moves from prefiguration to fulfillment or from letter to spirit.27

In the dialectical image, letter and spirit collide in the undecidable violence of a

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chiasmus between past and present in which things-as-they-were abruptly enter intothe now of recognizability and become something altogether new in the process: “It isnot that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light onwhat is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash[Blitz] with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at astandstill” (N3,1). As with divine violence one may find that it is “less possible … forhumankind to decide” when exactly the image has been authentically realized. Thenow of recognizability erupts in a Blitz, a lightening flash, and it subsides just asquickly, recognizable no longer. One must catch the revolution on the fly or watch itgo up in flames or, more likely, both at once. For just this reason, “the image at theNow of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, danger-ous impetus that lies at the source of all reading.” For Benjamin, as for Hugo, onemust track the impetus of reading, as far as it can be tracked, to the divinely violentsource of danger – an unfathomable ABC.

Notes1. The following essay is closely based on a paper delivered at the 2008 conference of the

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism on the theme of Romanticism andDiversity and hosted by the University of Toronto. I thank the organizers of the conferencefor their hospitality and David Clark for organizing the special session on the “critique ofviolence” at which I spoke. In preparing the text for European Romantic Review, I havebenefited from the searching questions posed by Rei Terada and Joshua Wilner duringdiscussions in Toronto.

2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Benjamin refer to volume 1 of the HarvardSelected Writings. For the German text of “Towards a Critique of Justice,” see BenjaminZur Kritik der Gewalt. The essay has inspired an extensive literature to which my argumentis indebted. I have especially benefited from Agamben 52–54, Derrida, Düttmann, Fritsch103–39, Hamacher, Lloyd, and McCall. I have also benefited from discussions of Derrida’sreading of Benjamin’s essay in Fritsch 140–56, De Vries 275–87, and from the discussionof Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s essay in Weber 195–208. See, too, the essayscollected in the Cardozo Law Review (13.4) on the topic of “Walter Benjamin: Justice,Right, and the Critique of Violence” – the first section of an issue “On the Necessity ofViolence for Any Possibility of Justice.” (I comment further on several of these texts in thenotes below.)

3. On the illocutionary or performative character of the initial challenge to fate, see Fenves“Testing Right,” 1105f. and McCall 188ff. As Benjamin specifies, the verbal challenge tofate already gives evidence of the power that fate holds over the challenger. He quotesHermann Cohen who “has spoken of the ‘inescapable realization’ that it is ‘fate’s ordersthemselves that seem to cause and bring about this infringement, this offence’” (248).Commentary on Benjamin’s “Towards a Critique of Violence” often discusses it inconjunction with his early essays on language “On Language as Such and the Language ofMan” and “The Task of the Translator” (see below, notes 9 and 10). With this perspectivein mind, I aim to clarify the essay’s relation to an idea of literary language or literarinessthat can be traced through the example of Hugo and the place of that example inBenjamin’s Arcades Project.

4. All quotes from the Arcades Project in English refer to the Arcades Project and those inGerman to Das Passagen Werk. For ease of reference I give Benjamin’s numerical/ alpha-betical markers rather than page numbers.

5. As commentators frequently remark, the semantic complex of Gewalt already implies thedialectical rise and fall that Benjamin describes; Gewalt can mean both violence andits consolidation in forms of power as in Staatsgewalt or state power. See, for example,Derrida 262, 264f.; Fritsch 214, note 1; Havercamp, “How to Take it,” 1159; Lloyd 349.

6. Fritsch usefully underlines the ambiguity of any claim to inaugurate a new historical epochin the context of an argument in which divine violence can only depose not impose law(125ff). On the difficulties of deposing (or depositing) cf. Hamacher 115f. and Düttmann

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(especially 174f.) who reads Benjamin’s entire essay as a commentary on positing anddepositing.

7. For Benjamin’s references to “pure” or “unalloyed” means, both translations of rein, see244 and 245; for a reference to “unalloyed” violence, see 252. Some readers differentiate“divine violence” as invoked in the essay’s final section from the “pure means” that itdescribes earlier and locates in a verbal sphere of human understanding that remainsoutside the law and in the proletarian general strike. See, for example, Gasché 1123: “puremeans, because they are still means, cannot ever hope to untie the binding circle …” of lawas divine violence does. As I read the essay, one cannot absolutely locate divine violenceeither inside or outside the dialectical oscillations of law – an impossibility that preventsthe essay from falling entirely prey to the messianism that it nonetheless solicits. AsGasché argues, the word “means” is precisely the wrong word for divine violence (as is“ends”), but for that very reason one may also read “divine violence” as an (impossible)“pure means.” As a “pure means” divine violence is already implied in Benjamin’s earlierinvocations of “pure means” such as the proletarian strike (to which he alludes again in thefinal discussion of divine violence on page 252) just as it is already implied in the powerof law-making violence to originate what it cannot master. (On “pure means” see, too, note9 below).

8. For the German, see Illuminationen 55.9. “Pure means” sets to work an allusive relation to Kant’s aesthetic formula of “zweck-

mäßigkeit ohne zweck” which confirms the relay between divine violence and modernnotions of literature. On hearing the paper on which this essay is based Rei Teradasuggested that the “pure means” associated with “literature” may always be instrumental-ized to serve the ends of literature itself or (as I understand the implications of hercomments) its construal of itself, even its interest in itself, as self-referential and thus disin-terested. With literature the means to its own ends, a certain version of aestheticizationseemingly subsumes the interruptive force of divine violence that I align with the letter ofthe literary throughout this essay. However, the radicalism of Benjamin’s claim (and, as Ishall argue, Hugo’s) may well open up the possibility of thinking literature and theaesthetic as a means that cannot be entirely subsumed even to self-referential or aestheti-cizing ends. Samuel Weber addresses a related set of issues concerning self-reference in hisdiscussion of Agamben’s equation of divine (or pure) violence and the “pure language” ofBenjamin’s early speculative essays on language. Weber emphasizes that Benjamin’saccount of “communicability” cannot simply be equated with self-referentiality withoutclosing off the opening of language beyond itself. Language is “communicable” or mitteil-bar which Weber translates as “impartable,” and impartability characterizes language’smediality as always moving away from itself rather than turning in on itself (Weber, 197;cf. his earlier discussion of Mitteilbarkeit 40–48). My reading of Hugo – and, more partic-ularly, the Hugo cited by Benjamin – aims to elucidate how literary language stages thepurity of a means without end in such a way that the literary text ceases to be an expressionof “itself,” or a means to its own ends, but, to quote Weber, operates “a movement thatseparates from itself and yet … in so doing establishes a relation to itself as other” (197).Literature cannot entirely instrumentalize its workings on its “own” behalf any more thanthe law can. It always involves an elemental remainder that imparts itself, however unpre-dictably, as and to an other. For a related but differently inflected reading that emphasizesthe temporality of “pure means” as one in which all final purposes “withdraw” or are“suspended,” see Fenves “Out of the Order of Number,” 45ff.

10. Cf. Fritsch 130 (who recalls both Hamacher and Derrida in this context): “Benjamin’s notionof a pure language (reine Sprache), expounded in the essay ‘The Task of the Translator,’might thus be said to correspond to the notion of pure violence.” Cf. Agamben 62f. and DeVries 281ff.

11. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin notes Blanqui’s (premature) “exclamation” at the timeof the 1830 revolution: “‘The Romantics are done for!’” (a19,7) or “‘Enfoncés, lesRomantiques!’” (1003).

12. I am quoting from the Blackmores’ face-à-face translation. The lines appear in “Reply to aBill of Indictment,” “Réponse à un acte d’accusation,” in Les Contemplations. One mayassume that Hugo has not forgotten that early French Romanticism often aligned itself onthe side of reaction not revolution; he retrospectively chooses to situate it within a larger,more encompassing narrative, one that implicitly includes and explains his own political

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development from “ultra” royalist to liberal socialist. Hugo’s increasing identification ofhis poetic project with revolution takes a number of different forms over the course of hiscareer and is discussed throughout the critical literature on his work. For a recent series ofcompelling analyses, see Laforgue. For an overview of Hugo’s understanding of revolutionsee, too, Rosa, “Hugo et la Révolution.”

13. Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Hugo in the remainder of this essay are from theLaffont edition with individual volumes identified by title. I identify passages fromthe poems by page number only. All translations from the French, unless otherwise noted,are my own. For a discussion of the lines concerning 93 as fiat lux see Guerlac 20. Cf.Brombert 208–209.

14. Convolute K of the Arcades Project (“The Commune”) echoes Marx’s criticism of thecommune as too much under the spell of the Jacobin tradition. Cf. k1, 3: “The Communefelt itself to be, in all respects, the heir of 1793.”

15. Cf. Seebacher’s essay on Hugo’s Paris as “Capitale de la Violence.”16. Cf. Jellinek 321 and 332 and Horne, 128–129.17. In The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross

shows how the commune challenged wider cultural assumptions about literature as aspecialized sphere of activity. Although the Hugo of 1870–71 partly participates in suchassumptions, he remains committed to a direct link between the political project of thenew republic, the aspirations of Paris, and the literary heritage that underwrites themboth. Unlike, say, the reactionary Catulle Mendès with whom Ross opens her analysis,Hugo cannot simply reject the commune anymore than he can simply embrace it. Hisimmediate “personal” solution was to retreat to Belgium to wrap up the financial affairsof his son Charles whose funeral had taken place in Paris exactly as the uprising beganon March 18th. For a fuller account of how Hugo figures the commune as an interpretivecrux or “cipher” for historical understanding in L’Année terrible and Quatrevingt-Treize(Ninety-Three), see my essay, “Untimely Revolutions: Victor Hugo and the Spectre ofthe Date.” On Hugo and the commune generally, see Albouy 222–228, Rosa, “Politiquedu Désastre,” and Starr 20–85 as well as Gohin’s preface to the Gallimard edition ofL’Année terrible.

18. “The Two Trophies,” “Les Deux trophées,” balances the damage to the Arc de Triompheby government shells against the destruction of the Vendôme Column by the communardsas examples of the mutually annihilating and self-annihilating madness of the civil war. ForHugo (unlike Mendes) both sides have cut themselves off from the history of the Revolution.

19. “Les Fusillés,” (“The Executed” or, literally, “The Shot”) offers another particularlystriking example within the same volume of a poem in which the speaker voices a progres-sive discourse that the poem (and, in “Les Fusillés,” the speaker himself) at least partlyproblematizes. The poet-speaker of the latter poem reflects on the poor that were executedsummarily on the streets of Paris during the final “bloody week” of the Commune. Heargues that the middle classes must act on their behalf and yet, at the same time, presentsthem as uncanny figures that his words can never fully comprehend or address. One mayread “À Qui la Faute?” and “Les Fusillés” (alongside other poems in L’Année terrible) asoffering a kind of meditation on the problem of social diversity and class struggle. Accord-ing to Hugo’s reiterated political and social program, the gulf that separates the classesshould be superficial, subject to at least partial dissolution with the spread of education onthe one hand and employment on the other. But, at various points in his writing – forexample, in the attempt to articulate misère to the French senate in the 1840s and again inL’Année terrible – he exposes the program to its own contradictions as if in recognition ofa diversity that cannot be universalized.

20. For these lines, I use the English translation that appears in the English edition of theArcades Project.

21. The stanzas of “Les Précurseurs” (“The Precursors”) were originally written for “LesMages,” a visionary tribute to genius that appears in Les Contemplations. (Benjamin quotesa verse from “Les Précurseurs” as the epigraph to Convolute W, “Fourier,” citing abrochure on Fourier by A. Pinloche which uses the same lines for its epigraph.)

22. I am slightly modifying the Fahnestock and MacAfee translations. For the French, seeRoman II 514.

23. The site of one of the novel’s most famous scenes, the labyrinthine sewers of Paris, arethemselves described as “Some grotesque alphabet of the East jumbled together, their

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deformed letters joined to each other” (1260, French 994) as if Jean Valjean’s flightthrough the sewers were another scene of reading. Cf. Benjamin’s references to the descrip-tion of the sewers as an “alphabet of the East” in the Arcades Project L3a, 1.

24. I am indebted to Elissa Marder for drawing my attention to this passage.25. Cf. Benjamin Selected Writings 4.34 in which he quotes from Brecht’s translation of

Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third: “Hell is a city much like London …”26. Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image has inspired an enormous literature. For a still

important introductory account, see Tiedemann and, for a more recent overview, Cohen.For a discussion that specifically emphasizes the “readability” of the image and its locationin language, see Havercamp, “Notes on the ‘Dialectical Image.’”

27. Cf. Marder on the “negative teleology” of the Arcades Project: “[…] the more the projectadvances, the further it recedes from the horizon of an imaginable end. In this figure ofnegative teleology we can already discern the faint traces of Benjamin’s refusal of norma-tive temporal and spatial structures … From its very origin (which is not an origin inthe usual sense), Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk demands to be read through its relentlessresistance to the familiar categories of production and completion” (185). The phrase“negative teleology” suggests another way of thinking or translating “pure means.” Takingup different issues than I do here, Marder also explores the conjunction of reading anddanger in the Arcades Project (190ff.).

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