A Weak Messianic Power

The times to come that Michael Levine describes in his book, A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan, do not prefigure a messianic arrival, nor do they present any potential future that could be anticipated, dismissed, or conclusively figured out. Instead, the times at issue in this book are those “long-forgotten moments” whose futures already “nest eloquently” within them, as Walter Benjamin, with whom Levine begins his readings (4), would write. At issue are those instants, in other words, of the future anterior that scan the texts Levine brings together in a most brilliant constellation, without ever having belonged properly to them; the times that will have been articulated differently by others, and through others, in the very midst of these texts; those times, which were never present, never spoken properly, and which therefore come between any stable configuration of presents, be it cyclical or linear. At stake, then, is the temporality of belated addresses with most uncertain sources and destinations, missives that were destined to miss, and only then may resonate here and now. With this structure, difficulties necessarily come up when it comes to indicating any such passage or following the “hidden index” (2) that would gesture toward its future. For, Levine points out, the addresses of which he writes are rendered in the intervals that open not only within writing, but also within reading, where another may come to be legible—and which therefore must be, if it were to be at all, elusive to any gestures that would locate or define it. Thus, through his readings Levine draws out the ways in which texts by Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida would have been crossed by other voices, such as those of Georg Büchner and Franz Kafka, as well as those of their most careful readers today, from Shoshana Felman to Werner Hamacher, Carol Jacobs, and Rainer Nägele. And each time, he opens each text to further readings by others to come, rather than offering a single, decisive message. As other texts from his corpus may also suggest, Levine's work operates along the lines where philology and psychoanalysis intersect—two approaches to language that each, with different accents, demand the most attentive reading—while circumventing any programmatic or reductive remarks that would prevent him or his readers from responding to the singular demands of the texts he approaches—in all their plurality. When he takes up a poem or prose piece by Celan or Benjamin, then, Levine interprets, not with the aim of providing hermeneutic closure, but in the sense of taking up those other words and other voices which might be read between the lines, words, and even syllables and letters.The times to come are, thus, less times of advent than they are of intervention. But insofar as such times—should they truly be times to come—could not have been presupposed or prescribed before their coming, each critical intervention in a text that would respond to its address may only precariously be said to take place. In his second chapter, Levine illustrates this precariousness—in both the sense of a danger and a call for intercession—in his reading of Paul Celan's Meridian speech and the dramas of Georg Büchner. There, the fatal repetition of “coming again” (Wiederkommen), would, in its circular closure, preclude the possibility of a future as well as a past. But rather than coming full circle, this rhythm is scanned by an anterior “coming between” (Dazwischenkommen) of what cannot be properly named or located (51 f.), but only read through the slightest displacements in articulation. For instance, the first editor of Büchner's œuvre, Karl Emil Franzos, misreads the phrase “a comfortable [commode] religion,” as “a coming [kommende] religion” at the close of Leonce and Lena (53). This lapsus, however, is no mere mistake, but turns out to be a time lapse that testifies belatedly to the most unsettling dis-position of Büchner's writing, wrought through as it is by citations and instances of parapraxis. Franzos therefore does precisely what Büchner's writing calls for, and thereby opens Büchner's text “again at the very point and with the very last words on which it was supposed to close” (59). After retracing these traits of Büchner's writing, Levine then shows how, in turn, Celan's insistence upon this moment within Büchner's writing opens it further, along with Celan's own text.More precisely, reading for a time to come is about reading in and through such imprevisible moments where what at first appears to be said and done fails its apparent proper intention—where something comes between—to reorient reader and text alike, and to allow what would have come full circle to cut another figure. This is why moments of misspeaking and misreading may themselves occur with striking precision, in the sense Levine outlines, with Celan: [I]t should be recalled how the term ‘precision’ (Präzision) in Celan's work implies not just exactness or even a way of tracing the contours of a future (zukünftigen) reality. Its ‘pre-’ is not merely preparatory in this sense. Its timing is instead, as we have seen, associated with various modes of intervention and intercession, with the Zwischenkunft of that which comes between and in the meantime, with the tropicality and uncanny otherness of that which never ‘comes’ as itself. (81) It is with such precision that Levine comes to texts that include, among others, Walter Benjamin's “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Jacques Derrida's Schibboleth: pour Paul Celan, as well as three poems by Paul Celan from 1968 addressed to his son Eric. Each time, he opens these texts to disclose those other moments and voices that will have been inscribed in their midst, as other than any author or self which could be so called. And all the while—“in the meantime”—Levine demonstrates a most sensitive attunement to what, as Benjamin would put it in the second of his theses on “The Concept of History,” resonates “with- [mit-]” each word, each trope, while at the same time remaining withheld, at every turn, from any fixed formulation.In the composition of his book, Levine rigorously writes this “with” further, and therefore also furthers his earlier work on the problems of transmission, testimony, and translation—all of which are concerns that are shared and imparted differently by Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan in their writings. As he reads, Levine draws attention to their articulations of these concerns—and their nigh inconspicuous, significant ruptures—discerning the ways in which these writers also address each other, many times, in ways they would not have known. Thus, in his closing chapter on Paul Celan's poems to his son, Levine exposes how the signature last lines, “Ton père / t'épaule,” not only articulate a promise of support—“your father / shoulders you” (112)—but also split into a double signature, in which the homonymic patronym might be hearkened: “Your father / your pauls [tes paules].” In thus rendering the proper name of the father indeterminately plural, these words hark back to “those translator doubles, Hölderlin and Benjamin, who were for him [Celan] also in their way pauls” (121). Furthermore, as this most intimate moment of address and autobiography splits off from its destination, the poem comes to recall, at the same time, the autobiographical text of Benjamin that Levine had addressed in his second chapter—the Berlin Chronicle, which also most turns out to revolve around another, his friend and “alter ego” Fritz Heinle (29), who had committed suicide upon the outbreak of the First World War, and whose death uncannily seems to prelude to Benjamin's own and recall it before it has happened. Such resonances testify at once to the uncanny intersections of these writings from disparate times, to the cuts that interrelate the parts of Levine's book, from beginning to end—as well as to the care Levine takes to circumvent closure. For the coordination of moments Levine suggests in passages such as Celan's last poem for his son also exposes the exemption of language and reading from any foreseeable temporal order, so that the text at hand may come to speak to and for yet another time, in the most radical sense of the phrase. When, in Levine's book, two or more disparate texts and voices nearly touch, they do so only by those contingencies of writing which disrupt the notion of a continuum, so that a historical moment might, for a moment, come to appear—as Benjamin had once written, in his theses on the concept of history.Each time for the only time—above all, when they return—the figures of times to come that Levine retraces in and through his book alter with each new configuration of texts and remain open in the end. A Weak Messianic Force is exceptional in the care with which Levine takes up and analyzes passages from Benjamin, Derrida, Celan, to expose those hitherto barely legible moments that open their œuvres anew, to each other, and to others to come—including the readers of his book. Coming to Levine's exquisite readings, and reading with him, one is solicited not to subsume any given text within a framework of historical categories and dates that, as such, foreclose the possibility of history, but to attend the possibilities of and in language to depart from such prescriptions. This is why the connections Levine draws, the reflections on history he offers, also cannot be taken as elaborations of a theory or philosophy of times to come, but can only take place in and through reading each text in its singularity and in the openness that is given with it. This is what Levine mindfully does, reminding his readers: of times that may have come, but only to the extent that other voices will have solicited and attended us, and to the extent that we are able to attend their calls

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