You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In my uncertain and anxious reply to Torberg Foss’s offer to comment on Dag T. Andersson’s – as was to become apparent – very remarkable text on Benjamin’s Salvaging images, I described with some concern my limited knowledge of this thinker and how, when reading Benjamin, I have found that he is often “above my horizon”. Worse than that, Andersson’s points of view, which open up to a wider perspective, show, furthermore that at the same time Benjamin is below my horizon, and hardly only mine, and this in a fruitful way.
He does this by emphasizing how Benjamin uncovers dimensions in memory’s way of working of which we do not often make others aware, even though psychoanalysts, both in their own eyes and in those of others, stand out as a sort of “athletes of memory”. In this perspective of the very foundation stones and starting points of memory in concrete images, we are reminded of how Benjamin also points out that Proust’s great novel, far from only answering to the usual stereotype conception of “a cathedral of memory”, at the same time has as its true prerequisite forgetfulness, so enormously important – the mother and origin of living memory. In that, Benjamin and Proust, like Andersson, follow Freud’s motto of “Traumdeutung”: “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions”.
By emphasizing the connections between the concrete-material and the abstract-referring elements in memory, Andersson calls attention to a feature in Benjamin that is central for all the contemporary German-Jewish thinkers who together formed the picked troops in the impressive German-Jewish Renaissance close to the European Holocaust: Freud, Einstein, Kafka, Buber, Rosenzweig, Fromm, Scholem, Adorno, Horkheimer …, and that is the return to the emphasizing, in Jewish tradition, of the paradoxical, dialectical feature in our “true”, that is to say, our original thinking. Of course, this archaistic quality, true to its origin, is not a Jewish “monopoly”, but can be found