Exile and Translatability, Going Beyond Cultural Borders

María Zambrano and Walter Benjamin did not know each other, and there is no evidence that they ever knew of each other or read each other’s works. They were contemporaries however, belonging to the same Second World War exile generation, and they drew, in part, on the same Neo-Kantian sources (Soto Carrasco Reference Soto Carrasco2010; Vilarós Reference Vilarós2010). Focusing on exile as a context (Enquist Källgren Reference Enquist Källgren2017) will allow me to analyse the combination of concepts in the works of Zambrano and Benjamin – exile and figura, flanêur and dialektisches Bild – as two versions of aesthetic epistemology, developed in response to the problem of translation across cultural borders, in particular with what global history refers to as the problem of translatability (Apter Reference Apter2013). That is, how and whether, knowledge can be translated between languages, geographical locations and historical situations. In the following, I argue that the turn to aesthetic theory and interpretations of history in the projects of Benjamin and Zambrano should be seen as a response to the experience of exile, and in particular the acute translatability problem that exile produces. As opposed to travellers from previous centuries, travelling for their own enjoyment and reporting home, the economic and material conditions of Benjamin’s and Zambrano’s exiles forced them to try to adapt or translate the contents of their thinking into concepts and languages that could be understood in the new location, not always with a successful outcome in terms of having things published, for example. I argue that Benjamin’s concept of dialektisches Bild and Zambrano’s concept of figura should be understood as two solutions to the problem of what remains when ideas are translated in ways that transcend cultural boundaries and contexts.

Emily Apter has written extensively about the translatability problem in world literature. She claims that methods focusing on the circulation of knowledge and global- or world history tend to presuppose translation as a given movement between cultural and linguistic registers, without questioning the possibilities of substituting or replacing certain concepts. But, as she also notes, there is nothing that specifies that translation is always a possibility (Apter Reference Apter2013, 157). Following Apter, translatability and untranslatability is a conceptual pair that can be used methodologically and which demands a specific kind of reading. In exile, translatability and untranslatability can entail the very practical problem of being able to continue writing something relevant enough, which can be published in a new intellectual milieu, while maintaining regular contact with the original intellectual background. Translatability and its opposite thus investigate processes of transgressing cultural borders, by the empirical analysis of texts, actions and practices brought into thinking in the light of dislocation. In translation studies these actions are often referred to as constructions of equivalence beyond linguistic or cultural/contextual borders, and decoding and recoding of underlying meaning (Bassnet Reference Bassnet1980, 21–42). As I have argued elsewhere, and using the concepts of Reinhardt Koselleck, the dislocation of exile entails a dislocation of the room of experience and the horizon of expectations, which frequently produce at least two things, (a) the necessity to give meaning to thought in a new context, entailing actions of recoding as well as the construction of equivalences; and (b) a new kind of relationship to history and memory which draws upon a universal history capable of uniting the different locations of exile in a meaningful way (Enquist Källgren Reference Enquist Källgren2017).

Exile as Context

María Zambrano was born in southern Spain in 1904. She was one of the first female students educated in philosophy at the Universidad Central de Madrid, under the professorship of José Ortega y Gasset. The latter had been a student of Hermann Cohen in Marburg and was busy overcoming Neo-Kantian influences during the time when Zambrano was studying (Marías Reference Marías1960). She became a prominent political figure during the Second Spanish Republic, engaged in political debates about the formation of a new Spanish state during the Second Republic (1931–1936/1939). She was openly critical of the traditional values defended by the fascists, including, among other things, their use of history and their belief in the essential inequality between men and women. In fact, she advocated a model that combined civic liberties for all, and economic redistribution (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Morenos Sanz2015a). Zambrano went into exile in 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, fleeing over the Pyrenees on foot, and arriving in Perpignan. Curiously enough, her exile route was the opposite to that of Walter Benjamin’s, who would flee France for Spain only a few months later in 1940, arriving at Port Bou on the other side of the border from Perpignan. Zambrano spent 45 years in exile, not returning to Spain until 1984. During this time she lived in France, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Italy and then France again. Her major works on exile were written from around 1955 and afterward, with her main text on exile, Los Bienaventurados, unpublished until 1991, when she finally returned from exile (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Moreno Sanz2019b).

Walter Benjamin was born to an academic and intellectual family in 1892. He studied in Berlin and Freiburg, receiving early Neo-Kantian inspiration through a seminar by Heinrich Rickert, as well as at lectures given by Hermann Cohen. His initial interest and publications focused on German Romanticism, but in the mid-1920s and drawing upon his reading of George Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (as well as a love-affair with Latvian Marxist Asja Lacis) Benjamin turned towards Marxism and cultural criticism. Benjamin rapidly became one of Weimar Germany’s most important cultural critics following the publication of a number of his essays and feuilletons (Jennings Reference Jennings, Gordon and McCormick2013). The critical task undertaken by Benjamin at the time connected a Marxist analysis to the expressions of popular culture, by envisioning the latter as a starting point for disclosing the relations and mechanisms through which masses and conditions of production interact. In 1933, after the Reichstag fire, Benjamin left Germany for exile in Paris. He had begun writing his last and now best-known work, the Passagen-Werk in 1927, but the manuscript remained unfinished at his death in 1940 (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1982a).

Both Zambrano and Benjamin left for exile after seeing the growth of fascist and Nazi ideologies. These ideologies imposed an authoritarian regime first in Germany and then in Spain on what had been two short periods of Republican rule (The Second Republic in Spain, the Weimar Republic in Germany). For Zambrano, the Spanish Civil War was the premonition of the Second World War; in fact she saw the latter as the continuation of the former, and the crises in Spain and Germany as a common European crisis (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Moreno Sanz2016). Benjamin similarly conceived of the crisis of the late 1930s as a crisis which could awaken the European exile tradition, a project which he carried out in the collection and commentary on German exile letters from the French Revolution onward (Hutton Reference Hutton2008). In addition, exile meant that both authors’ fundamental way of thinking had to relate to several locations and cultural spheres at the same time. Benjamin wrote extensively about French poets and authors – such as Baudelaire and Proust – as well as on German exile in Paris at the same time as he wrote commissioned investigations for the Inztitut für Sozialforschung, which was located in the United States. Similarly, Zambrano wrote extensively about Spanish authors and painters for publications in Italy and Latin America at the same time that she did commissioned work for the Ministry of Education in Puerto Rico (Eiland and Jennings Reference Eiland and Jennings2014; Fenoy Gutiérrez Reference Fenoy Gutiérrez2008). The logistics of publishing in various locations, in several languages at a time, while combining commissioned works with the possibility of writing as a free intellectual, motivated these authors to focus on the problem of translatability.

Translation and Conceptual Shifts in Benjamin’s Works

Zambrano and Benjamin engaged explicitly in the issues of translatability and history in their works. I will first provide an outline of the conceptual shifts and translations in Benjamin’s works and relate these to his exile. Under the next heading, I will do the same with the concepts in Zambrano’s works. The aim is to show how exile produced a shift in their respective ways of thinking, which can be interpreted through the lens of translatability.

As Julia Abel convincingly shows, in Benjamin’s early works translation was a form of perception alongside other forms of perception – such as philosophy, art and critique – directly related to the concept of representation or Darstellung (Abel Reference Abel2014, 186; Benjamin Reference Benjamin1923).Footnote ¹ In ‘The Storyteller,’ written in 1936 when he was already in exile, he instead speaks of the possibility of communicating experiences, and distinguishes between storytelling and what he understands as a capitalist way of conveying information (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and In Arendt1968a; Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1991a). While information must be immediately empirically confirmed, it carries no validity outside of the present moment. The story instead preserves its concentration and can be actualized anew in the circumstance of repeated representation (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and In Arendt1968a, 60). The story and information thus carry different kinds of truth-claims, but both have a specific relationship with historic time. Information is connected to communication in the now, whereas the story is connected to the act of transference between different historical nows.

The citation makes explicit the connection between a certain mode of communication, storytelling, which can actualize experience beyond the individual, into a common collective experience that transcends even death.

Benjamin’s early discussion of experience was tainted by Neo-Kantianism. In ‘Über das Programm dem Kommenden Philosophie,’ from 1917, he discusses epistemology from the starting-point of two major Neo-Kantian problems: that of the certainty of knowledge, and that of the safeguarding of experience (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1991b, 160, 164). Benjamin differed from Neo-Kantians, seeing the epistemological problem as not primarily in regards to the certainty of knowledge, but in the foundation of contingent experience. As Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky points out, in his early texts Benjamin does not want to ontologize experience – a critique he turns against Heidegger for example – but to determine a new relationship between thought and experience. For Benjamin this new relationship between thought and experience lies in the fundamentally linguistic form of experience (Deuber-Mankowsky Reference Deuber-Mankowsky and Munk2005, 180–185; Benjamin 1985, 34–37). That is, experience is centred on an object of expression, as it is with an image or a piece of art.

In Benjamin’s later texts, such as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ from 1936, the distinction is no longer made between thought and experience, but between forms of expression, or forms of production, carrying with it a specific perspective. Whereas the objects of mass production, towards which Benjamin turns his critique, carry with them a perspective based on transitoriness and reproduction, the images that are seen with the naked eye – without technical mediation – carry with them a combination of uniqueness and permanence (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Arendt1968b, 223; Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1982b, 432–508). It is important for the analysis to recognize the distinction between different modes of relation between thought and its means of production, and the kind of experience that it enables.

Because of Benjamin’s shift in 1924 towards a more Marxist conceptual framework, interpreters tend to either emphasize the influence of Marxist theory on his thought by focusing on the late writings, or to focus on the influence of German romanticism and Neo-Kantianism by concentrating on the early texts.Footnote ³ By focusing on the idea of the different modes of relationships between experience and thought, however, it is possible to see at least a parallel between the Neo-Kantian conceptual framework in which Benjamin began discussing epistemology, and the decidedly more materialist concepts he used in later works. Cohen’s works pulled Benjamin towards the problem of experience and its possibilities by emphasizing the linguistic contingency (that is, the necessity of taking expressive form) of experience. This allowed him to differentiate between literary forms, entailing or relating to distinct modes of alienated experience; some because they could not be translated (The Task of Translation), and others because they could not be communicated (The Storyteller). In his late texts, the distinction is instead made between modes of production and experience. This is the case in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ as well as in the very late ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (completed in 1940, published in 1950) (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1982c, 691–704). Similarly, in Susan Buck-Morss’ interpretation of the Passagen-Werk, the flaneûr is a mode of being within capitalist society to which belongs a form of experience that is different than what can be perceived within the order of capitalist work. Here, the object perceived by the flaneûr – the dialektisches Bild – is the beginning of a cognitive process which discloses the way in which human beings are trapped in a false commodified representation of reality in capitalist society (Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss and Hansen2006, 38–41). This is to say that, even though the conceptual shift brings with it a different analysis and landscape of criticism – experience is no longer criticized systematically as in the Neo-Kantian tradition, but from the point of view of material cultural expressions – the continuity lies in Benjamin’s concern with experience and perception. In the Passagen-Werk, concepts such as imagination and perception which clearly belong to Erkennthnistheorie, are mixed with Marxist concepts such as the commodity-form.

Benjamin’s conceptual shift brings with it content changes, such as the understanding of the concept of totality. Benjamin’s early writings were influenced by Kant’s conception of totality, where totality means the totality of experience through all spheres of human reason, namely understanding, reason and aesthetics, and hence the need to discuss different forms of perception. In the Passagen-Werk totality instead seems to be the totality of a historic situation, composed of individual as well as structural moments. Writing about the aim of materialist history, Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999, 461; Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1982a, 575) writes that it is ‘indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’.Footnote ⁴ In fact, it is in the relationship between what Benjamin calls a primal history and the now, in which totality is actualized in the tension between alienated perception – the commodity form – and a perception which allows criticism – the dialectical image, dialektisches Bild (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999, 462–463).

The distinction between thought and experience in the early works, can thus be said to have shifted into a distinction between modes of perception and experience as they relate to the totality of capitalist productive forces. It is clear that as soon as one shifts from founding experience in the sphere of pure thought (as both Kant and Cohen ultimately did), to instead posit experience as different modes of perception developed in relationship with the material forms of production throughout history, the problem of translation and translatability can become actualized. Whereas pure thought is a priori and thus universal, historically changeable modes of perception require a theory of translation – that is a theory of how the universal human conditions of perception can be actualized in different historic moments. Translation thus becomes a key context parallel to the shift into a conceptual framework of materialist history in Benjamin’s work. But before we go any further, it is necessary to show how Zambrano works with related themes.

Modes of Being and Perception in Zambrano’s Works

Zambrano had no direct contact with the German milieu, and she could only passably read German, but her entire philosophical education was coloured by Neo-Kantian problems, as well as the contestations offered by historicism and phenomenology, passed down to her by her teachers. Zambrano’s early writings were informed by the social and political problems which surrounded her, but she interpreted them as the ultimate consequence of a faulty conception of subjectivity, originating from German idealism (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Morenos Sanz2015a). Much like Benjamin’s, Zambrano’s political thinking was intrinsically linked to the debate about the knowing subject and the possibility of experience. In an early article on Spinoza, Zambrano (Reference Zambrano1936) states that the human being exists in two different modes. Using a Spanish play on words, Zambrano differentiates between two kinds of being: the undetermined and substantive expressed in the term ser (being, or to be) and the by temporal determination individualized expressed in the term estar (to be in a location, or to be in a condition that is temporally limited). In the early texts, Zambrano equates ser to nothingness, most probably inspired by Heidegger, and draws the conclusion that individual being, estar, is the appearance in time of being, ser (Zambrano Reference Zambrano1936). Paradoxically that means that individual being is the temporally limited appearance of nothingness, something that can be explained by Zambrano also discussing nothingness as potentiality. But appearing in time also always means to appear in a social totality, Zambrano writes in a review essay from the same period:

Zambrano differentiates between an individual relationship to life, and a more objective relationship that goes beyond the individual and the historic moment. The objective relationship is structured by what we call different modes of perception, such as necessity in labour, faith, law and piety. It is through piety that the kind of communication occurs which allows for the objective reality to form the basis of common action (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Morenos Sanz2015b, 271). Necessity, faith, law and piety are also what constitute the development of history, which is the actualization of the individual being, estar, in time and in social reality. These four modes of perceiving constitute Zambrano’s conception of totality, which is expressed using ser. The combination of them gives form to the human being in time. In her 1955 book on the historical development of the relationship between the human being and the divine, Zambrano describes the development of historic totality as an ‘ascension on the scale of forms, gaining higher modes of being (ser)’ (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Morenos Sanz2011a, 277). This idea is eventually developed into the concept of figura in her very late writings.

Zambrano’s early texts are driven by two parallel problems. On the one hand, the political question of how common action can be made possible without sacrificing the individual to something like an absolute ‘will of the people’ or the working class. On the other hand, how the objective reality – often expressed in the overarching term ‘life’ – can be related to thought in the individual subject. For Zambrano these issues relate to each other, since they both centre on the question of how individual experiences can be communicated based on a structure that transcends each individual experience. That is, the possibility of collective experience which transgresses even the absolute limit of individuality. Death, as Benjamin would have it.

After going into exile, the political problems informing Zambrano’s early work slowly vanished. In her 1955 Persona y democracia, the major focus is on how to construct society so as to be able to receive and include the ‘other’ in the social consensus without engulfing it. Nevertheless, the question of modes of perception prevailed in her works, although now it was discussed as either active and passive subjectivity, or as different kinds of temporality. Like Benjamin, Zambrano investigated dreams, and where Benjamin analysed the mode of perception under intoxication, Zambrano instead analysed the religious ecstatic experience (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999; Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Morenos Sanz2011b, Reference Zambrano2018, Reference Zambrano and Moreno Sanz2019c). She also continued developing the notion of piety, as the means by which communication between historically situated and individual experiences can occur.

In El Hombre y lo divino, she defines piety as ‘knowing how to adequately deal with the other’ (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Morenos Sanz2011a, 227).Footnote ⁶ The statement carries more weight than one might assume, since it encompasses an epistemological as well as an ethical claim. To be able to adequately deal with the other, a mode of perception that does not reduce otherness to one’s own self is necessary; hence it holds the claim that piety includes an attention to, or mode of sense-perception that allows room for the experience of the other. In relation to the Neo-Kantian debates, this would suggest a mode of perception that does not immediately reduce the other to an object constructed by concepts in the mind of the perceiver. Rather than a mind which constructs, Zambrano suggests a mode of perception focused on the ability to recognize similarity in otherness. In such an experience, perception is the perception of what can be translated from the singular otherness of the external object to something recognizable in the perceiver, translation rather than construction. The normative criteria implied by ‘adequately dealing with the other’ is thus to translate the other into becoming recognizable as similar. But this also suggests that there is something in the other being conveyed in the translation as similar. In Benjamin’s as well as Zambrano’s works the bridging of the gap between thought and experience with the help of material history (Benjamin) or the development of historic forms (Zambrano) has led them to discuss precisely how this similarity – which pertains to translatability – can be communicated and recognized.

Dialektisches Bild and Figura, a Comparison and Conclusion

I believe that the terms dialektisches Bild and figura in the respective authors’ works can be understood from the point of view of exile. Benjamin described exile as absolutely definitive, and as the singular event which separated the inter-war period of his life into two distinct parts (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Jennings and Eiland2003, 382). Zambrano likewise wrote extensively on exile, something which encompassed the better part of her intellectual and adult life. Her very last major philosophical project, which was long entitled ‘Ser y Tiempo’ (Being and Time), but which was eventually published as four books – Claros de Bosque, Notas de un método, De la Aurora and Los Bienaventurados – in the early 1990s, analysed exile as a limit-concept through which forms of perception can appear throughout history (Zambrano Reference Zambrano2018, Reference Zambrano2019a).

In Los Bienaventurados, Zambrano describes the exile as lacking a figura, that is, a being that cannot be comprehended within the order of objects and things. The exile stands outside of the patria, the homeland, and functions as a negation by which the multiple possibilities of social order can be seen. In this text, figura is equated to ordering – she calls it a form or a category of being – and places it in a historical succession of different figuras. In such a historical development, exile becomes the negation of the patria (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Moreno Sanz2019c, 404, 409, 427). Similarly, in the contemporary Algunos lugares de la pintura, Zambrano writes about the figura and its relationship to history: ‘Every epoch gains figura in a different light in the measure that the perception of them as established actuality is broken and obscured by the revelations of a hidden history, the true history of the human being that suffers […]’ (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Moreno Sanz2019b, 276).Footnote ⁷ For Zambrano, the critical opportunity connected to exile can be understood as the chance to interrupt a certain historic actualization or figura, understood as a social and perceptive order. The exile interrupts the historical figura of the patria. The privileged gaze of the exile allows an envisioning of mirages as well as of the fundamental logic of the patria (Zambrano Reference Zambrano and Moreno Sanz2019d, 402–412). Because of the force of this gaze, the exile is capable of disclosing the cultural borders by which a certain social order constructs reality. And the figuras, the objects that he or she sees, are representations of the very liminality by which social orders are constructed, of the necessity of cultural borders.

Comparable to Zambrano’s notion of figura, Benjamin writes about the dialektisches Bild in the Passagen-Werk:

This citation is one of Benjamin’s better-known ones, mainly because of its definition of the image as dialectics at a standstill. As Benjamin writes, image is the constellation of what has been into something recognizable in the now. Since it is a constellation that can be recognized in a flash, a moment’s suspension of the development of forms in the dialectical historical movement, it hinges on the concept of recognizability by somebody who is capable of seeing this image, the reader. The dialektisches Bild is as much a historical object as it is an object for a certain kind of perception, which becomes historic because it relates to the notion of time as stretched out between past and present, as an interruption. And this mode of perception is based on being ‘bound to a nucleus of time in the knower and the known alike,’ writes Benjamin (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1982a, 579; Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999, 463).Footnote ⁹ As with Zambrano, this is accomplished by counterbalancing different ways of perceiving so that the critical stance of the materialist historian, or of the exile in Zambrano’s case, can be made possible. And the kind of perception that allows for critique is fundamentally connected to a hidden history (Zambrano) or a flash in which a constellation between the present and the past can be seen (Benjamin), conveying something that can be recognized in a new historic actuality. For both authors, the critical potential of thinking modes or perception organized around visual – or figural – objects lies in the possibility of translation between historical contexts and modes of perception.

But someone who perceives belongs with an object of perception, with perception itself. Passagen-Werk discusses at length a figure whose main task is the act of perception, what Benjamin refers to and represents as a flaneur (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999, 472). And like Zambrano’s exile, the flaneûr is a subject who can offer a different kind of gaze because of a certain degree of rootlessness in the city-scape of capitalist society. ‘To the flaneur,’ writes Benjamin, ‘his city is – even if he, like Baudelaire, happened to be born there – no longer native ground. It represents for him a theatrical display, an arena’ (Benjamin Reference Benjamin and Tiedemann1982a, 437; Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999, 347).Footnote ¹⁰ And as Benjamin notes, rootlessness is a state connected to the proletariat and the immigrant.

As we saw above, the privileged gaze in Zambrano’s works allows us to see, on the one hand, the construction of cultural borders – ego and other – in any social order, as well as the recognition of the necessity of liminality as well as similarity. Benjamin, when speaking of the experiential effects of intoxication and relating to the flaneûr, emphasizes the experience of similitude. In fact, Benjamin sees the flaneûr and the historian as sharing a methodological approach, a way of reading, which is the colportage (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Eiland and Jennings1999, 347, 418–419). The colportage should be understood as a method by which one can capture dialektische Bilder, a crucial part of which is the recognition of similitude in seemingly scattered materials.

In this sense, both the dialektisches Bild and the figura are concepts that draw on the possibility and impossibility of translation, and that presuppose a subject that, tragically but also luckily, is located at a distance from the order and representation of a totalitarian and or capitalist society. For both authors, the problem of translatability across the borders of cultural, historical and linguistic social orders is pivotal to the understanding of their conceptual frameworks and draws explicitly upon the exilic experience. What can be concluded as well as posed as a hypothesis for further investigation is that the aesthetic theory developed between several Second World War exiles (including Erich Auerbach and Erwin Panofsky, for example) can be studied as one philosophical movement, based on the reception of Neo-Kantianism as well as a common exile context. In the case of Zambrano and Benjamin, further research is needed to understand the hidden or forgotten history by which the exile and the flaneûr can see something that endures beneath the shifting forms of a fascist (Benjamin) and sacrificial (Zambrano) society. For both, it presupposes a notion of an enduring or universal sameness, which is constantly being translated and represented in a new historic or cultural setting, an idea that we are able to see in the works of several other exiles from the same period. In our contemporary society, where refugees and migrants are increasingly receiving the blame, we would do well to remember that while cultural borders may be necessary, they should allow us to focus on the task of translation, not lead us to reject the possibility of communication.