Love and Related Matters

(A European Problem)

(On marriage, see pp. 68ff. in the other notebook.) This age is participating in one of the
greatest revolutions ever to take place in the relations between the sexes. Only someone
who is aware of this development is entitled to speak about sexuality and the erotic in our
day. An essential precondition is the realization that centuries-old forms, and along with
them an equally ancient knowledge about relations between the sexes, are ceasing to be
valid. Nothing forms a greater obstacle to realizing this than the conviction that those
relations are immutable at their deeper levels—the mistaken belief that only the more
ephemeral forms of erotic fashion are subject to change and to history, because the deeper
and supposedly unalterable ground beneath is the domain of the eternal laws of nature. But
how can anyone sense the scope of these questions and not know that What history shows
most powerfully are the revolutions in nature? It may well be that every preapocalyptic
world contains a residue of immutable existence, but if so, this residue lies at an in
infinitely deeper stratum than is implied by the trite assertions of those accustomed to
writing about the eternal war between the sexes. Even if this war does belong among the
eternal verities, the forms it assumes certainly do not. But if it constantly flares up anew,
and continues to do so, the cause lies in the unity of the erotic and the sexual in woman. A
most unfortunate act of concealment contrives to make this unity appear natural, except
when men are enabled by an incomparable act of creative love to recognize it as
supernatural. Again and again this conflict flares up because of man’s inability to perceive
this, particularly when, as at the present time, yet again, the historical forms of such
creativity have withered and died. Today European man is as incapable as ever of
confronting that unity in woman which induces a feeling of something close to horror in the
more alert and the superior members of his sex, since even they remain blind to its exalted
origins. Failing to perceive it to be supernatural and blindly imagining it to be natural, they
flee from it. Oppressed by the blindness of men, the supernatural life of women atrophies
and declines into the merely natural, and thereby into the unnatural. This alone explains the
strange process of dissolution brought about in our day by the primitive instincts of men, as
the result of which women can be understood only in terms of the simultaneous images of
the whore and the untouchable beloved. This untouchable purity, however, is no more a
part of the immediate spiritual definition of woman than is base desire; it, too, is profoundly
instinctual and coerced. The great, authentic symbol for the permanence of earthly love
has always been the single night of love before death. Only now it is not the night of love,
as it was earlier, but the night of impotence and renunciation. This is the classic experience
of love of the younger generation. And who knows for how many future generations it will
remain the primary experience? Both, however, impotence and desire alike, represent a
new, unprecedented path for the man who finds the old path blocked: to arrive at
knowledge through possession of a woman. He now seeks the new path: to arrive at
possession through his knowledge. But like recognizes like. So man tries to make himself
similar to woman, indeed like her. And this is the starting point for the vast and, in a deeper
sense, almost planned metamorphosis of masculine sexuality into feminine sexuality
through the medium of the mind. Now it is Adam who picks the apple, but he is equal to
Eve. The old serpent can vanish, and in the repurified Garden of Eden nothing remains but
the question whether it is paradise or hell. As we peer into the darkness of the
transformations taking place in that great flowing stream of human physicality, our sight
fails as we contemplate a future for which it has perhaps been determined that though no
prophet shall pierce its veil, it may be won by the most patient man. Here flows the dark
stream that for the most noble may prove to be their predestined grave.
The only bridge that spans that stream is the spirit. Life will pass over it in a triumphal
chariot, but perhaps only slaves will remain to be harnessed to it.

Fragment written in 1920; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Translated by Rodney

Livingstone

The opaque knowledge of the secret feminism which always renews duality and therefore
reinitiates indeterminacy. The senseless unfolding of the ceremonial: everything is a
protruding face which participates in inter-facial fields; everything is a sacred, circular
space, everything is eyes. This secret must not be solved, rather its elan should be stretched
out into our Relation. One can neither enslave eros or be its slave, mandar obedeciendo se
trata de un Munay, el poder activo del amor que engloba y fomenta species activity. The
will to truth within the discursive, and the perverted collection of texts which can come of
it; the belief that knowledge of self is what allows one to free themselves from themselves,
could such a belief be done away with through act and deed, if not through discourse? Our
extensive web of truth telling and discovery fill in the vacuum where any "universal" power
of unique origen might claim to be. Our extensive web of self-care is tied to this know
thyself, specifically its "minor" or indeterminant elements: the creative and tender,

The only bridge that spans this stream is the spirit,

Socrcates
I
What is most barbaric about the figure of Socrates is that this unartistic [unmusisck] human
being constitutes the erotic center of the relationships of the circle around Plato. If,
however, his love of the general capacity to communicate dispenses with art, then by what
means does he render it so effective? By means of will. Socrates makes Eros a slave to his
purposes. This sacrilege is reflected in the castratedness of his person. For in the last
analysis, this is What the Athenians abhor; their feeling, even if subjectively base, is
historically in the right. Socrates poisons the young; he leads them astray. His love for them
is neither “end” not pure eidos, but rather a means. This is the magician, the maieutician
who interchanges the sexes, the innocently condemned one who dies out of irony and in
defiance of his opponents. His irony is nourished by the horror, yet he nevertheless still
remains the suppressed, the ostracized, the despised one. He is even something of a clown.
—The Socratic dialogue needs to be studied in relation to myth. What did Plato intend with
it? Socrates: with this figure ,Plato annihilates the old myth while adopting it. Socrates: this
is the offering of philosophy to the gods of myth who demand human sacrifice. In the midst
of the terrible struggle, the young philosophy attempts to assert itself in Plato.‘
II
Griinewald painted the saints with such grandeur that their halos emerged from the greenest
black. The radiant is true only where it is refracted in the nocturnal; only there is it great,
only there is it expressionless, only there is it asexual and yet of supramundane sexuality.
The Thus Radiant One is the genius, the witness to every truly spiritual creation. He
confirms, he guarantees its asexuality. In a society of males, there would be no genius;
genius lives through the existence of the feminine. It is true: the existence of the feminine
guarantees the asexuality of the spiritual in the world. Wherever a work, an action, a
thought arises without knowledge of this existence, there arises something evil, dead.
Wherever it develops out of this feminine itself, it is flat and weak and does not break
through the night. But wherever this knowledge concerning the feminine prevails in the
world, that which belongs to genius is born. Every extremely profound relation between
man and woman rests on the ground of this true creativity and stands under the sign of
genius. For it is false to designate the innermost contact between man and woman as
covetous love, since of all the stages of such love, including male—female love, the most
profound, the most splendid, and the most erotically and mythically perfect, indeed even
the most radiant (if it were not so totally of the night), is the love of the female for the
female. How the mere existence of the female guarantees the asexuality of the spiritual
remains the greatest secret. Human beings have not been able to solve it. For them genius
still remains not the expressionless one who breaks out of the night, but rather an
expressive, explicit one who vibrates in the light.

In the Symposium, Socrates praises the love between men and youths and lands it as the
medium of the creative spirit. According to his teaching, the knower is pregnant with
knowledge, and in general Socrates interprets the spiritual only as knowledge and virtue.
The spiritual one, however, while perhaps not the procreator, is certainly the one who
conceives without becoming pregnant. Just as immaculate conception is, for the woman,
the rapturous notion of purity, so conception without pregnancy is most profoundly the
spiritual mark of the male genius. It is radiance in its own way. Socrates annihilates this. In
Socrates the spiritual was sexual through and through. His notion of spiritual conception is
pregnancy; his notion of spiritual procreation is discharge of desire. This is revealed by the
Socratic method, which is entirely different from the Platonic. The Socratic inquiry is not
the holy question which awaits an answer and whose echo resounds in the response: it does
not, as does the purely erotic or scienti cquestion,already contain the metbodos of the
answer. Rather, a mere means to compel Conversation, it forcibly, even impudently,
dissimulates, ironizes—for it already knows the answer all too precisely. The Socratic
question hounds the answer, it corners it as dogs would a noble stag. The Socratic question
is neither tender nor so much creative as it is conceptive; it is not genius-like. Like the
Socratic irony which lies hidden in it—if one allows a terrible image for a terrible thing—it
is an erection of knowledge. Through hatred and desire, Socrates pursues the eidos and
attempts to make it objective because f the display is denied him. (And ought Platonic love
to mean un-Socratic? in love?) To this terrible domination of sexual views in the spiritual
corresponds—precisely as a consequence of this—the impure mixture of these‘ concepts in
the natural. Socrates’ talk in the Symposium refers to seed and fruit, procreation and birth,
in daemonic indistinguishability and presents, in the speaker himself the terrible mixture of
castrato and faun. In truth, Socrates is a nonhuman, and his discussion of eros is inhumane,
like the discussion of someone who hasn’t the faintest idea of things human. For‘ this is
how Socrates and his eros stand in the hierarchy of the erotic: the ' female—female, the
male—male, the male—female, specter, daemon, genius. Socrates was served ironic justice
with Xanthippe.

Written in 1916; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Translated by Thomas Levin