Grounded in the work of Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió’s Politically Red consistently answers its own guiding question—what does it mean to read in a leftist and even revolutionary way?—in remarkably novel ways, bringing together incongruous materials: star-gazing and revolution, planetariums and genocides, libraries and mobilization, fetishes and textuality, comets and a theory of history. But if each of its chapters introduces a new topic—strike, messianism, resistance, communal mourning, to name a few—there is nonetheless a theme that persists throughout the book. A concern with making the unrepresentable visible, saying the unsaid, and even reading what was never written—a concern that also orients Benjamin’s own reading and writing strategies—haunts Politically Red, guiding some of the fascinating readings it advances.

Cadava and Nadal-Melsió offer examples illustrating how Benjamin directs his language into the inexpressible to investigate its silence. For instance, in A Berlin Chronicle (1932), Benjamin relates the 1914 suicide of his friend, the poet Fritz Heinle, “in an account that retreats from the event as much as it mentions it.” Because the account functions as a sort of tablet that “works to preserve…[the] memory” of the dead friend while also rendering him nameless, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió suggest, following Shoshana Felman, that it is one of Benjamin’s “most emblematic silence[s]” (74), a crypt at whose core resides an “empty, silent center” (Felman qtd. in Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 75). Benjamin’s text is a tombstone on which no name is written, a casket in which no body is to be found but in which it nevertheless resides. Heinle is even “more discreetly” evoked in an unpublished essay on Friedrich Hölderlin (1914–15), where Benjamin’s discussion of Hölderlin’s poetry constitutes in its entirety an “implicit dialogue with Heinle’s work” (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 75). This concealment only confirms, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió write, again quoting Felman, that “all of Benjamin’s writings…can ‘be read as…structured by a mute address to the dead face’” (75). However, the most remarkable instance of this dynamic of silencing and voicing is Benjamin’s treatment of Rosa Luxemburg’s writing. In a series of insightful readings, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió detect a presence of Luxemburg in “Toward the Critique of Violence” analogous to Heinle’s presence in A Berlin Chronicle in that, like Heinle, Luxemburg functions as a silent, empty center of the essay. They find it strange that Luxemburg is not referenced in “Toward the Critique” not only because Benjamin read her work but also because her stance against the war and her theory of a politics of pure means and mass strike as the “method of motion of the proletarian mass” (78) were very close to Benjamin’s own thinking. And, “since she is not named in the essay,” Cadava and Nadal-Melsió “are compelled, in the words of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘to read what was never written’” in it (72). In their reading, Luxemburg remains unnamed and unidentified in “Toward the Critique of Violence” because Benjamin didn’t wish “to instrumentalize her. At a moment in which she has been entirely instrumentalized—by the left as an iconic martyr and by the right as an extremist and terrorist—Benjamin abstains from mentioning her to minimize the risk of his contributing to her further instrumentalization” (72–73). Nameless, Luxemburg assumes a spectral presence in the essay. As Cadava and Nadal-Melsió convincingly demonstrate, her thoughts and arguments are ventriloquized through a cluster of figures that do appear in the essay: “minimally, she appears in the guise of the ‘great criminal,’ Sorel, Niobe, and, in another kind of plurality, the company of Korah and as a counterpoint to Kurt Hiller” (77). Thus “massified” and “multiplied”—detectable only by being “incorporated in shifting traces” of many voices—Luxemburg is present in Benjamin’s essay in a counterintuitive way. She is “fragmented and decomposed,” dispersed into the voices of others, rendered “indeterminate” (73), a remnant strangely present in a “modality of silent survival” (74). But this manner of being “an inexpressible and unpresentable force” is precisely what then enables the free circulation of Luxemburg’s ideas through the voices of others, while keeping them inappropriable; it is when their source is silenced that the ideas are emancipated, since “the silent one,” according to Benjamin’s dictum, “is the unappropriated source of meaning” (qtd. in Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 74).

Despite the categorical differences between these three instances of muting and concealing—not being able to talk about a dead friend is a different thing from silencing a revolutionary philosopher who wanted to be heard regardless of any danger or possible instrumentalization of her voice—in Benjamin’s work silences are thus multiplied everywhere, presences are fragmented and dispersed, names erased, and language directed toward the inexpressible, all in the service of keeping meanings inappropriable, free to circulate in a fuzzy and barely accessible domain of thought that is always characterized by “a plasticity which is…burred and in which form becomes identical with the formless” (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 75). To the reasonable question of what happens to a meaning once it is made inappropriable (for whom does it mean if it is not apprehended?) or of what happens to a form once it becomes indistinguishable from the formless (doesn’t it become traceless once swallowed by the formless?), Benjamin would respond by pointing to the task of the historical materialist. This task is to follow these freely circulating, elusive, and muted meanings—to read what has been erased. The historical materialist performs such a reading by walking a fine line between speculation (for how will we ever know that Luxemburg is evoked in the essay if the evocation is silent?) and the “forensic act of readerly interpretation” that Cadava and Nadal-Melsió practice so well (76). But even if Benjamin decomposed Luxemburg to save her from instrumentalization while enabling the free circulation of her ideas in the domain of pure thought, his act—identified by Cadava and Nadal-Melsió as one of “militant negativity” (73)—also comes disconcertingly close to the type of violence identified in “Toward the Critique of Violence” as “divine.” Divine violence always “runs counter to mythic violence” (qtd. in Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 101), preoccupied, like most of the violence history records—which is why it could be called “ordinary”—with retribution, with changing borders, positing laws, and appropriating territories and establishing boundaries in a bloody way, blood being for Benjamin “the symbol of mere life.” In contrast to bloody violence, divine violence is, as Benjamin has it, “lethal in a bloodless manner”; bloodless, it leaves no trace (it “does not stop short of annihilation” [101]); or, as Cadava and Nadal-Melsió put it, it can’t be “disclosed,” “manifested,” or “represented” (100). In the very essay that theorizes such divine violence, Luxemburg is scattered in a way that is neither manifested nor disclosed; unnamed and bloodlessly dispersed into traces of other voices, she is annihilated while her ideas are rendered free of appropriation.Footnote ¹

But these distinctions and the question they raise about the possibility of a violence whose annihilating force can’t be disclosed or manifested are turned upside down in the analysis Bartolomé de las Casas performs in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), where he relates the violence the Spanish conquistadors committed against the Amerindian peoples in what was to become Latin America. That analysis is discussed in the last chapter of Politically Red, in which Cadava and Nadal-Melsió interpret the early capitalist accumulation of wealth. Karl Marx quoted Las Casas’s text more than once, and Benjamin was also interested in his work—in 1929 he reviewed Marçel Brion’s biography of Las Casas. For Marx, Las Casas’s accounts confirmed that “the nonoriginary origin of capitalism that is primitive accumulation is ‘written in the annals of humankind in letters of blood and fire’” (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 289). In his review of Las Casas’s biography, Benjamin too points to the violence of primitive capitalist accumulation, while also being interested in the seemingly paradoxical fact that “in the name of Catholicism, a Priest confronts the atrocities committed in the name of Catholicism” (qtd. in Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 294). This remark leads Cadava and Nadal-Melsió to argue that the “transformative power” of Las Casas’s “denunciation” of the Spanish genocidal violence against the Amerindians is “diminished by its commitment to Christian conversion, since this commitment remains consonant with the expansion of Spain’s imperial aspirations” (294).

Yet, what interests Cadava and Nadal-Melsió most in Las Casas’s account is the question of violence that can’t be presented or disclosed.Footnote ² In their argument, the Spanish violence can’t be thought or imagined: “The total violence of colonialism…is unimaginable, because the human mind cannot account for it without becoming undone in the process.” That Las Casas himself must have experienced such an undoing is signaled by his language, the “often…convoluted cadences” of his sentences “swollen to the point of bursting…because what these sentences seek to describe [is] a violence that is indescribable” (292). The unraveling of Las Casas’s mind, his effort to think the unpresentable—the indescribable—causes his language to unravel, and we witness a “linguistic movement whose grammar breaks down in the face of what it is asked to convey” (293), just as Benjamin’s language verges on the obscure when he faces his dead friend. Las Casas’s book is, for Cadava and Nadal-Melsió, “an impossible one. A failed translation, it is unable to contain the memory of the vastness of this genocide and destruction…it exists as a record of this impossibility—of the unspeakable truth at the heart of empire.” Hence, by an almost cynical reversal, the Spanish violence against Indigenous peoples becomes inexpressible and unpresentable, as were the effects of divine violence in “Toward the Critique of Violence.” Las Casas’s book would be yet another empty casket from which the body of the victim is missing, and the Conquistadors’ acts—somehow bizarrely divine—would leave a void in the heart of the empire, a vacancy carved by silence slowly erasing the memory of the enormity of this genocide.

But why would the annihilation of the Amerindians be unrepresentable and unspeakable? It might be vast and even infinite, but the human mind, despite its finitude, thinks the infinite (it precisely thinks infinite divinity). And however porous Benjamin’s distinctions between divine and mythological violence are, and whatever they might mean in their elusive and cryptic definitions—they would be especially illegible to the Indigenous peoples themselves for whom the distinction between divine and mythic would, correctly, be nonsensical—the atrocities described by Las Casas would clearly fall into Benjamin’s category of “mythic violence,” for they were manifest (“disclosed to human beings” by human beings [Benjamin qtd. in Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 100]) and lethal in a bloody way (they did nothing but spill blood, that “symbol of mere life,” writing the spill, as Marx had it, “in letters of blood and fire”).

Indeed, Las Casas repeatedly refers to the violence he describes as unimaginable. The archive of this violence is always incomplete and thus always fragmentary: “there is no way the written word can convey the full horror of the atrocities committed throughout this region” (73); “it would be impossible to compile a detailed and accurate record of every instance of injustice, insult, harassment and outrage suffered by the people of the coast” (86); “no pen can begin to do justice to the boundless cruelty of this enemy of Good” (122). But, even though he often says that a complete list of these atrocities can’t be provided, he also insists that each one of them “could and should be recorded,” thus implying that the fragmentary archive of the acts of violence is part of the violence he describes (7). However partial, his own written account of that violence is the result of its initial accomplishments. For Las Casas writes his record of “atrocities and insults” encouraged by the initial success of his oral testimonies at the Spanish court. When he “came to the Spanish court…to give…the Emperor, an eye-witness account of these enormities, not a whisper of [them] had at that time reached the ears of people here” (3). During that visit he “related these same events to several people he met…and they were deeply shocked by what he had to say and listened open-mouthed to his every word; they later begged him and pressed him to set down in writing a short account of some of them.” At the Spanish Court—at the heart of the empire—Las Casas’s oral account breaks the silence, shocking and appalling his listeners. However vast the violence he describes, and however fragmentary his account, the little that he did relate was enough to shock, move, and agitate. A mere sliver of something vast and unimaginable was enough to set the imagination to work.

Even as he refers to the Spanish atrocities as indescribable, Las Casas mobilizes various strategies to make his account both trustworthy and imaginable. For instance, he gives his narrative the form of testimony; based on the oral testimony he gave at the court, his written account now continues in the mode of juridically binding eyewitnessing, such that its withdrawal or untruthfulness would amount to a criminal act: “it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life as well as the infinite number of human souls dispatched to Hell” (6). As an account of the events he witnessed, Las Casas’s testimony functions as the presentation of the empirical, of something concrete, even if unimaginable, which must be believable since it is real (“and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset” [13]; “It once happened that I myself witnessed their grilling of four or five local leaders in this fashion” [15]; “The Christians…butchered, before my eyes, some three thousand souls” [29]; “and I saw many other horrors also” [30]).Footnote ³ This insistence on the concreteness of the reported atrocities aims to counteract—even if it doesn’t altogether cancel—the excessiveness of its content, its hard-to-present nature. The avouchment of accuracy is reinforced by the rationalistic and even arithmetic nature of many of Las Casas’s statements. Las Casas often gives numerical estimates to represent the enormity of the violence he reports. While the “numbers of natives killed” is “incalculable” (55), he nevertheless calculates: “When the Spanish first journeyed there, the indigenous population of the island of Hispaniola stood at some three million; today only two hundred survive” (11); “the native population, which once numbered some five hundred thousand, was wiped out by forcible expatriation to the island of Hispaniola” (11); “at a conservative estimate, the despotic…behavior of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust…deaths of more than twelve million souls…and there are grounds for believing my own estimate of more than fifteen million to be nearer the mark” (12). But while these estimates bring a tone of precision to his testimony, they are also abstract, especially in cases where numbers are supposed to calculate infinite measures, as when Las Casas estimates that the Spanish killed “a thousand million” Indigenous inhabitants of the “marvelous kingdoms” of the Americas (7). Numbers speak to reason but are not felt. To make what they stand for felt, Las Casas turns to singularization. “A thousand million” is best represented by the description of one of them. That is why Las Casas systematically turns to examples, to detailed images and narratives of particular instances of cruelty inflicted on the Indigenous peoples by the “ingenious methods of torture” that the Spanish practiced (11).Footnote ⁴

Why, then, does this presentable violence, clearly written in letters of blood, remain as if invisible? And why is it that, as Benjamin put it in his review of Las Casas’s biography, his work remained desolately solitary? “Nichts trüber und staunenswerter” (“Nothing is more gloomy and astonishing”), Benjamin writes, “als daß der Mann, von dessen Wirken die vorliegende Schrift Zeugnis ablegt, durchaus ein Einzelner, ein heroisher Streiter auf dem verlorensten Posten gewesen ist” (“than that the man to whose work this writing [Brion’s book] bears witness was a lone, heroic fighter on the most forsaken post”; 180; my trans.). Why was Las Casas a loner, and why was his post forsaken? Benjamin implies that it is because when he died, “war das Werk der Zerstörung vollbracht” (“the destruction had been consummated”; 181; my trans.).Footnote ⁵ But Las Casas’s own understanding of the nature of violence is somewhat different, since, in his account, it can never be consummated but can only be intercepted by more intense forces.Footnote ⁶ In Las Casas’s understanding, the “general rule” of violence is that once enacted it never exhausts itself but is perpetually intensified: “There is one…general rule in all this, and it is that, the longer they [the Spaniards] spent in the region the more ingenious were the torments, each crueller than the last” (25). The whole Short Account works in the service of documenting this rule. After Hispaniola, there were in Jamaica and Puerto Rico “further refinements of cruelty” (26); in Cuba, all the atrocities “already described” happened, “only even more cruelly” (27). In Guatemala, the “abominations…outdid, in number and in kind, everything that had been seen before in the New World” (55); in Peru the “appalling record…was such as to put all…previous exploits in the shade” (116), and the account of the Florida expedition “underlines the general principle that the longer men have operated in the New World…the more brutal…have been the crimes they committed” (103). Violence is infinite in the sense that it is continuous. Violence has no self-regulation; it has no autoimmunity. It never keeps itself in check. There is always more life to kill, more death to come. There is no ruin that can’t be ruined still more, no trace of demolition that doesn’t invite more erasure.

Violence can intensify continuously—and the “moving and heart-rending spectacles” it affords proliferate as if what they displayed were not moving at all (30)—because of the grasp it has on the psychic sensorium. A premise of Las Casas’s general principle of the incessant increase in violence is that “the longer men have operated in the New World…the more they have become accustomed to the carnage and butchery” (103). This principle holds for those who perpetrate atrocious acts as well as for those who witness them. In both cases, the same ratio applies: the more violence there is, the less it bothers the mind; the more heart-rending the spectacles, the less the heart is rent. The actors Las Casas knew in the Indies have been subjected to that principle, so that “not a few of the people involved in this story had become so anaesthetized [insensibles] to human suffering…that they had ceased to be men in any meaningful sense” (3). Senses in the grip of spectacles of violence become insensitive to what they witness. There is, then, no distinction between visible and invisible violence in Las Casas; all violence is visible and “could and should be recorded.” But its visibility renders it quotidian, ordinary to the point of invisibility. That Las Casas was positioned in the middle of this aporia—he can and must make the violence he witnessed visible, but the more he does so the more his readers become insensitive to it—might be the reason Benjamin called his position gloomy, and his post forsaken. In his review, though, Benjamin didn’t ask this question. Yet it is worth asking: How does one ensure that the gloom over this aporia doesn’t turn into melancholy resignation?