On Some Motifs in Benjamin: Historiography as an Ethical Mode Keith Leslie Johnson I) One or Several Kafkas The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God. – Spinoza, The Ethics 1 In his recent book on Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek writes, “One of the unwritten rules of today’s academia, from France to America, is the injunction to love Spinoza.” 2 Perhaps no other philosopher cuts so sympathetic a figure, appealing to quite so broad a range of typically opposed camps. Everyone it would seem has nice things to say about Spinoza. Even some Christian and Jewish pietists, ironically, smile upon him nowadays, though they call him by different names. Whether Benedict or Baruch, Spinoza is the philosopher one can’t help but love; or can one? Žižek himself hints at the thorny nature of Spinoza’s amenability in the very act of touting it: tellingly, the injunction – and why is it an injunction, a fiat, and by whom is it levied? – extends only “from France to America.” Žižek seems unaware of this equivocation, though he is later explicit about another. But first we must consider those who have apparently escaped the injunction to love Spinoza (not least of whom are the Slovenians!). Isn’t the partitioning almost too simple, too straightforwardly political: post-Marxian states east of the Rhine with a soft spot for Hegel versus liberal democracies west of it with a predilection for Spinoza? That is to say, aren’t we talking about two opposed ideological dispensations that condition ethical allegiances and not about ethical allegiances per se? Žižek quickly bypasses this (perhaps too obvious) point, contextualizing the issue within the decidedly more rarefied field of Cultural Studies. But this is only a feint, for while Žižek maintains that Spinoza is by all lights “totally incompatible with what is arguably the hegemonic stance of Cultural Studies, that of the ethico- theological ‘Judaic’ turn of deconstruction best exemplified by the couple Derrida/Levinas,” yet both Spinozans and deconstructionists alike are enthusiastically united against Hegel. This intriguing point of apposition is implicit in the first equivocation mentioned above, though here almost entirely stripped of its (geo-) political valence, an uncharacteristic, un-Žižekian reification (of the depoliticizing gesture necessary and prior to the formation of the signifier ‘Cultural Studies’), but one nonetheless symptomatic of a deep inconsistency in Cultural Studies itself, what Tom Cohen has called a “‘bewitched’ spot.” 3 For couldn’t we also say of Benjamin what we say of Spinoza, only with all of the political valences inverted? Is not one of the unwritten rules of today’s academia – not only from France to America, but the whole world round – the injunction to love Benjamin? And what’s more, enjoying the affections of Spinozans, Hegelians, and deconstructionists alike (not to mention new historicists, urban theorists, Marxists, mystics, marijuana-activists), Benjamin would appear to be even more loveable than Spinoza. And more problematic as well. 4 True, those who love Benjamin tend to focus on a particular phase of his career to the exclusion of the other “abortive” or “misguided” phases; and true, Benjamin had more phases than most, sometimes more than one at a given time; but must we not conclude that something is pathologically wrong – if not with Benjamin himself, then with the history of his reception – if so many conflicting political agendas claim him for their own? One should hope not! Perhaps a different and less polemical way to put this dilemma is to think of it as a history of “productive misprisions,” mistakes accomplished with varying degrees of consciousness in the name of some theoretical or political agenda bound up with the stakes of history itself. 5 The competing 116