Gillian Rose, interpreter of Walter Benjamin: the ‘unintended consequences’ of asceticism

One of the most interesting aspects of Gillian Rose’s reflections is her attempt to bridge the gap between existential eros and philosophical logos through the ‘work of love’, as she masterfully showed in her final work.¹ This relates to what she calls the ‘life affair’, in which love is curiously connected to reason not only as the transparent and logical faculty of knowledge, but also, and essentially, as a matter of risk.

According to Rose, the separation between love and reason was expanded after Auschwitz as an internal trauma of reason, making it difficult to process mourning. Rose explores this trauma, as well as the trauma of Auschwitz itself, in relation to the self-elaboration of postmodernity. This analysis is particularly illuminating because it sheds light on the dangerous postmodern tendency to render both modernity and Judaism mutually incomprehensible. I believe this is a key issue that remains at the heart of our challenging present, a time still suspended between promise and perdition.

Rose’s approach of developing a new, comprehensive and critical reflection on Judaism and modernity by intertwining eros and logos, Jerusalem and Athens, is crucial for reactivating the fruitful potential of our cultural and political history.

According to Rose, postmodernism coincides with the dis­illusionment with rationalism – that is, with the disappearance of rationalism without reason, as she says.² In the wake of the crisis of Marxism in postmodern time, Athens, which had long been arid and crumbling, became a deserted city, haunted by departed spirits. On the other hand, a pilgrimage to an imaginary Jerusalem has developed in search of difference, otherness, love or community, in an attempt to escape the imperium of reason. In Rose’s analysis, the most exemplary authors in this regard are Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.³

In her book Mourning Becomes the Law, published posthumously in 1996, just three years after Derrida’s Specters of Marx⁴ and five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the effects of neoliberal globalization were still emerging, Rose wrote:

To oppose new ethics to the old city, Jerusalem to Athens, is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn, to cover persisting anxiety with the violence of a New Jerusalem masquerading as love. The possibility of structural analysis and of political action are equally undermined by the evasion of the anxiety and ambivalence inherent in power and knowledge. Why, I asked myself, did the large audience applaud so vigorously at the conference to celebrate the Centenary of Walter Benjamin’s birth, held at University College London … when told by a speaker that the masses have been anaesthetized by mass culture and mass media? What satisfaction, intellectual and political, is there in hearing the affirmation of total control? The active investment in power and anxious projection of it are exhibited in the response of that angry, anarchic audience to the proclamation of their own ineluctable disempowerment. This is to exhibit the same phantasized desire for political community without boundary walls at which to mourn; and without a soul, with its vulnerable and renegotiable boundaries, to bring to wail at those walls.⁵

I find this passage shockingly relevant today, when the masses continue to be anaesthetized by mass culture and the media, despite the violent images of wars they witness every day. Consequently, a profound lack emerges: a lack of debate about the affirmation of total control, which fails to pay attention to the need to develop the political and cultural means to negotiate with the fragile and vulnerable aspects of human life, with its limits and the differences which characterized it.

I really like the way Rose’s work focuses on the possibilities for negotiation that the human condition can offer in relation to its fragilities. It is from this perspective that she develops her analysis of Benjamin’s work. Her interpretation of Benjamin is embedded in her analysis of philosophy after Auschwitz.

The theological-political sources of Benjamin’s thinking

In her essay written to celebrate the centenary of Benjamin’s birth, published in Judaism and Modernity, Rose develops a personal approach to assessing Benjamin’s thought ‘out of the sources of modern Judaism’.⁶ Here it will not be a question of referring to Judaism, whether traditional or modern, in order to demonstrate the patterning of Benjamin’s complex work; on the contrary, Rose proposes a way of understanding the complexity of Benjamin’s work which yields itself the difficulty of his relation to Judaism. This approach to Benjamin’s thinking aims to make it possible to derive the meaning that Judaic categories exhibit within it.

Rose’s idea is that Benjamin’s work, as well as the modern era he analyses, features an intrinsically religious dimension. This dimension is never neutralized by the process of secularization. This religious, spiritual dimension is represented by the concept of the ‘beautiful soul’, a notion taken up by authors such as Goethe, Hegel and Kierkegaard, all of whom Rose references in this regard, and whom she also sees present in Benjamin’s work.

However, unexpectedly, Rose emphasizes the importance of Max Weber in Benjamin’s work, more than anyone else. Why is this aspect unexpected from my point of view? Not only is Max Weber one of the authors least mentioned by Benjamin; he is also rarely mentioned in the most important analyses of the relationship between religion and politics in Benjamin’s work.⁷ Carl Schmitt is the author who is generally mentioned in this regard.

In an important footnote to ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, Rose clearly states that the method she employed aims to

construe the continuity, first, between Max Weber and Benjamin, and, equally, between Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’s theories of sovereignty and emergency, which are crucial to understand the Benjaminian analysis of modernity.⁸

The issue at stake here is political theology. It is notable, however, that she prioritizes the continuity between Weber and Benjamin over that between Schmitt and Benjamin.

The bibliographical reference that Rose made in this footnote is very interesting. She mentions Norbert Bolz’s essay ‘Charisma und Souveranität: Carl Schmitt und Walter Benjamin im Schatten Max Webers’, published in 1993 in the first volume of the series Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, edited by Jacob Taubes.⁹ This volume focuses entirely on Carl Schmitt. Rose’s intention is clearly to engage with the German debate on political theology and on the possibility of affirming or not a complete separation of modernity from religion.

A look at Gillian Rose’s and Jacob Taubes’ interpretations

One of the most interesting contributors to this debate is Jacob Taubes himself, who is indirectly mentioned by Rose in the footnote in the text on Benjamin. He was one of the first figures in Germany to address the controversial relationship between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. In addition to being a heretical rabbi known for his theological–political interpretation of Paul of Tarsus’s Letter to the Romans, Taubes is also renowned for his personal relationship with Schmitt, as well as for his comparative analysis of Benjamin and Schmitt.¹⁰ This earned him severe criticism from enlightened post-World War II German culture, which was not accustomed to linking the exiled Marxist intellectual of Jewish origin with the Nazi jurist.

The correspondence between Taubes and Schmitt includes the minutes from a 1978–9 seminar on political theology entitled ‘Politische Theologie als Theorie von Revolution und Gegenrevolution am Beispiel von Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt’ (Political Theology as a Theory of Revolution and Counter Revolution in the Example of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt).¹¹ In this section Taubes references a letter that Benjamin wrote to Schmitt in 1930. The letter acknowledges the influence of Schmitt’s approach on Benjamin’s own work. Regarding this aspect, Taubes writes:

In the Correspondence, Adorno and Scholem wanted to suppress this letter from Benjamin, just as they also removed all traces leading from Benjamin to Schmitt. Therefore, … it will be necessary to safeguard these traces against the intentions of the editors of Benjamin’s Nachlass, in order to compare the theological–political reflections of Carl Schmitt with those of Walter Benjamin.¹²

For Taubes, the fact that Adorno and Scholem obscured this connection is problematic. In his view, the strength and relevance of Benjamin’s political approach is at stake here. Benjamin did not hesitate to engage with the culture that nurtured National Socialism. He recognized a fundamental theoretical core in it. This was not only for criticizing progressive and liberal ideology. He also wanted to face the events he was witnessing with clarity. For me, the question now is whether Rose’s interpretation is motivated by a similar intention to Taubes’, albeit with different conclusions.

Both criticize the separation between modern reason and the existential experience of religion, a view that is characteristic of a simplified understanding of the modern and postmodern processes of secularization. Furthermore, both authors argue that the relationship between religion and politics in the modern era is more complex than analyses emphasizing complete dis­connection suggest. This explains Taubes’ interest in the relationship between Benjamin and Schmitt. Benjamin was interested in the structural link between religion and politics as investigated by Schmitt, as well as Schmitt’s criticism of progressive and liberal ideology.

On the other hand, unlike Taubes, Rose does not follow the thread that leads from Benjamin to Schmitt. For her, the more important issue is the role of Max Weber in defining the ‘spirit of fascism’, which is central to Benjamin’s work. Moreover, it is interesting how Rose analyses this ‘spirit’ in philosophical terms. She claims:

In philosophical terms the spirit of Fascism does not mean that spiritual value is accorded to Fascism, but that Benjamin derives the meaning of ‘Fascism’ from the violence of its relation to actuality – and this is spirit in Hegel’s sense of misrecognition of otherness. Fascist violence is itself derived from the change in the structure of experience – the subjectivity which issues from and responds to the atrophy of substance.¹³

In order to define practices that can cultivate this spirit, Rose refers to Weber’s investigation of the unintended effects of worldly asceticism in relation to the origins of capitalism. While Weber explored the connection between the Protestant ethic and ‘the spirit of capitalism’, the worldly asceticism which establishes the preconditions for the development of rational capitalist accumulation and investment, according to Rose, Benjamin explored further the unintended psychological and political consequences of Protestant Innerlichkeit (inwardness) and worldly asceticism on fascism. From this point of view, in Benjamin’s analysis, what is at stake is the way in which the Protestant doctrine of salvation creates hypertrophy of the inner life because of dismissing good works.¹⁴ According to Rose, the hypertrophy of the inner life is correlated with the atrophy of political participation that characterizes the fascist way of life homogenized in the masses. Eventually, the interest in salvation itself (the promise) atrophies, but the inner anxiety of salvation persists and is combined with worldly opportunism and ruthlessness (the perdition). The point, for Rose, is this separation – and combination – of anxiety and ruthlessness; promise and perdition.

The ‘spirit of fascism’ and ‘capitalism as religion’

I have addressed the issue of the role that Weber played in Benjamin’s research in my work on debt, with reference to the 1921 fragment ‘Capitalism as a Religion’, which, as far as I am aware, Rose does not mention.¹⁵ This fragment is part of Benjamin’s unfinished youthful project dedicated to politics, which also includes other famous texts, such as ‘Critique of Violence’ and the ‘Theological-Political Fragment’.¹⁶ These works are examined by Rose, but as singular autonomous texts. This a problem. In the fragment ‘Capitalism as a Religion’¹⁷ Benjamin clearly highlights the mechanism of indebtedness that lies behind the capitalist economy. The link between ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’, implicit in the German word Schuld/Schulden, which encompasses both meanings, is central to his reasoning.

When Benjamin defines capitalism as a religion, he is considering a link between the two domains that is not concerned with the historical development of secularizations. For Benjamin, it is part of the ‘structure’ of capitalism itself to possess a religious configuration. But, most importantly, this structure does not belong to the domain of dogma and theology. It has nothing to do with the truth of a state of affairs to which it has to adapt, recognizing or legitimizing an authority; rather, it fulfils merely practical tasks. It is a praxis that does not need a theoretical apparatus; although it decides over the state of exception, it does not presuppose a transcendental order that legitimizes its work, as in the case of state sovereignty determined in theological–political terms.

It is indicative in this regard that, in defining capitalism as an essentially religious phenomenon in this fragment, Benjamin refers to Max Weber and to the thesis on the origin of capitalist economy from Protestant inner-worldly asceticism.¹⁸ The reference to Weber is articulated here as a criticism. According to Benjamin, capitalism is not simply ‘a formation conditioned by religion’, as one might think using the category of secularization employed by Weber to explain the origin of the capitalist economy. Protestant religiosity in its most extreme forms, such as Calvinism and Puritanism, according to Weber, made the process of ‘disenchantment’ of the world possible, which constitutes the premiss of modern rationality and the consequent development of capitalist economy. However, Weber’s discourse will appear more complex if one considers that he does not define the religious conditioning of economic power over capitalism from a theological point of view, but rather defines it starting from the very ‘ascetic’ conduct of life consistent with the development of capitalist economy. The fulcrum of capitalist dominion – its ‘spirit’ in Weber’s terms – is thus identified in those conducts which, as in the case of inner-worldly asceticism, are ‘elected’ to adapt to the modes of capitalist production. In this sense, in the fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’, it may be said that Benjamin, while criticizing Weber, does not actually do anything else than radicalize Weber’s own approach: what is crucial in the development of capitalism as a religion is not, in his opinion, the elaboration of a theological apparatus, but the effectiveness of the religious practices that operate in it.

In Weber’s perspective, the dominance of capitalist economy is based on the intimate bond that economic power establishes with individual forms of life. He was, indeed, one of the first to emphasize the centrality of the enterprise and the figure of the entrepreneur in the dominion of capitalist economy, anticipating in a sense the developments that have been witnessed with the hegemony of the figure of the ‘entrepreneur of oneself’ in neoliberal forms of capitalist production.¹⁹

At stake is a sacred value of the excess in capitalism, on which even fascism has fed and which cannot be measured in the linear self-reproduction of capital, because it goes beyond any form of rational domination, yet is decisive for its existence. This is also what Rose defines as the ‘spirit of fascism’ examined by Benjamin. But, against the dangerous and unintended consequences of ascetic practices that make capitalism a religion and fascism its political form, against any form of ‘left-wing melancholy’, Benjamin does not shy away from the need to reactivate the emancipatory forces of reason in the class struggle of the oppressed. As he wrote in The Arcades Project, it is a matter of ‘reclaiming territories on which madness has grown. … To penetrate it with the sharp axe of reason’.²⁰ This makes it possible to open up an imaginative space able to ‘organize pessimism’.²¹

On the contrary, in her text written to celebrate the centenary of Benjamin’s birth, Rose argues that Benjamin is the taxonomist of sadness, who adds figures of melancholy to the philosophical repertoire of modern experience; the repertoire which includes resignation and ressentiment. According to her, the messianism he calls into question is also coherent with the Jewish idea of a promised life lived in view of a deferment. It is a stake in a mourning not completed, which remains aberrated not inaugurated. In her battle with any form of ‘left-wing melancholy’, Rose rather rashly attributes this state also to Benjamin.²² In this sense, Rose’s interpretation of Benjamin seems reductive, in so far as it risks placing the analysis within a static opposition between the violence (of capitalism and fascism) and its abolition. Such a reading, in reducing his view to alternative versions of apocalypse (destructive or redemptive), elides the centrality Benjamin accords the modern subject in negotiating the possibility of individual and collective experiences of life.

Or Derrida?

Roses’s interpretation of Benjamin is illuminating in relation to her focus on Weber as Benjamin’s key author in the analysis of the ‘spirit of fascism’. But the critique she elaborated in her text written to celebrate the centenary of Benjamin’s birth seems excessively influenced by Derrida’s use of Benjamin.²³ Instead, in her essay on ‘Derrida’s Spirit’, she explicitly distances herself from Derrida’s interpretation of Benjamin and, implicitly, from her own interpretation of Benjamin as taxonomist of sadness. There she clearly states:

Benjamin’s political reflections presuppose a social theory of capitalist institutions, and amount to the search for a theory of revolutionary practice which will be neither reformist nor justify force as a means of right-making … comparable to Rosa Luxemburg, Benjamin is exploring the relation of theory and practice for a truly democratic revolution which will inaugurate radical democracy at every moment and not postpone it to a post-revolutionary future.²⁴

In conclusion, it seems to me that Rose takes two approaches to Benjamin: one based on Derrida’s interpretation and the other in opposition to it. Both are important. The former is particularly interesting when it comes to exploring the critical issues of postmodern analyses, which encounter many difficulties when it comes to accepting and elaborating on the potential and limits of modernity. If, as Rose argues, postmodernism identifies itself as a process of endless mourning by renouncing reason, power and truth – lamenting the loss of securities that were never real – then this everlasting melancholia reflects an impossibility: a refusal to let go. Rose eloquently captures this idea in the phrase ‘despairing rationalism without reason,²⁵ which aptly describes certain postmodernist attitudes. Instead, a reassessment of reason, as Rose is interested in doing, but Benjamin too, can gradually rediscover its moveable boundaries, the moveable boundaries of reason as it explores the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred. This process can help us confront mourning without separating promise from perdition, but rather recognizing promise even in perdition. This is a decisive step that we still need today. Reading Rose can help us take it.

Footnotes

1. 1. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (1995), Penguin, London, 2024. ↩

2. 2. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 7. ↩

3. 3. Gillian Rose, ‘Of Derrida’s Spirit’, in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Verso, London and New York, 2017, pp. 65–87; ‘Angry Angels – Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas’, in ibid., pp. 211–23. ↩

4. 4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), Routledge, London, 1994. ↩

5. 5. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 36. ↩

6. 6. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, in Judaism and Modernity, p. 12. ↩

7. 7. See Michael Löwy, ‘Le capitalisme comme religion: Walter Benjamin et Max Weber’, in Raisons Politiques 23, 2006, pp. 203–19; and Elettra Stimilli, ‘Die ökonomische Macht: Die Gewalt eines ‘verschuldenden Kultus’, in Mauro Ponzi, Sarah Scheibenberger, Dario Gentili and Elettra Stimilli, eds, Der Kult des Kapitals: Kapitalismus uns Religion bei Walter Benjamin, Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg, 2017, pp. 55–70. ↩

8. 8. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, note 19. ↩

9. 9. See Norbert Bolz, ‘Charisma and Soveränität: Carl Schmitt und Walter Benjamin im Schatten Max Webers’, in Jacob Taubes, ed., Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, Volume 1: Der Furst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 1993, pp. 249–62. ↩

10. 10. See Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander, Stanford University Press, Redwood City CA, 2003; and To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, trans. Keith Tribe with an introduction by Mike Grimshaw, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013. ↩

11. 11. Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit Materialen, ed. Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Thorsten Palzhoff, Martin Treml, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 2012, p. 211. ↩

12. 12. Ibid. ↩

13. 13. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, p. 181. ↩

14. 14. For an interesting analysis of the influence of Lutheranism on Benjamin’s view of the Baroque drama as a ‘drama of fate’, of a history that repeats itself eternally, see Miguel Vatter, ‘Sovereignity and Revolutionary Astropolitics: Benjamin, Baroque Trauerspiel and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream’, in Brando Moran and Paula Schwebel, eds, Benjamin and Political Theology, Bloomsbury, London, 2024, pp. 50–72. In the same volume, see also the essay by Paula Schwebel, ‘Melancholy Sovereignty and the Politics of Sin’. ↩

15. 15. See Elettra Stimilli, The Debt of the Living: Asceticism and Capitalism, trans. Arianna Bove with an introduction by Roberto Esposito, SUNY Press, New York, 2017, pp. 114–17; and Debt and Guilt, trans. Stefania Porcelli, Bloomsbury, London 2018, pp. 94–101. ↩

16. 16. See Benjamin’s letters to Gershom Scholem (1 December 1920) and to Gottfried Salomn-Delatour (24 December 1925) in W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, Band III (1925–1930), ed. C. Gödde and H. Lonitz, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1997. ↩

17. 17. Walter Benjamin, Kapitalismus als Religion, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band VI, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1985, pp. 100–103. ↩

18. 18. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon W. Wells, Penguin, London, 2011. ↩

19. 19. Stimilli, Debt and Guilt, p. 41 ff. ↩

20. 20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaghlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, N,1,4. ↩

21. 21. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. and with an Introduction by Peter Demetz, Schocken Books, New York, 1978, p. 191. ↩

22. 22. On this issue more generally, see Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, in Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 19–27; and Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, New York 2017. ↩

23. 23. Jacques Derrida, Force de loi: Le Fondement mystique de l’autorité, Editions Galilée, Paris, 1994. ↩

24. 24. Rose, ‘Of Derrida’s Spirit’, pp. 85–6. ↩

25. 25. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 7. ↩