The Hero and the Magician: Walter Benjamin’s Jean Paul

But from this tumult, marvellous to behold,
The rainbow blooms, changing yet ever still;
Now vanishing and now drawn clear and bold.
How cool the moisture of its scattering spill!1

—Goethe, Faust: Part Two

In 1934, under the pseudonym K. A. Stempflinger, Walter Benjamin published his second and final review in the Frankfurter Zeitung of the literary critic Max Kommerell’s work. The first review, titled “Against a Masterpiece,” was written in 1930 on Kommerell’s 1928 book The Poet as Leader in German Classicism (Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik). The second review, “The Dipped Magic Wand,” concerned Kommerell’s book on the German poet Jean Paul, published in the fateful year 1933.2 While there is much that Benjamin lauds in Kommerell’s work, there is much that he challenges, making true on his claim that “a martial element must live in every critique.”3 Despite the literary concerns of these reviews, they are also a critique of the right-wing conservativism of Kommerell, a fellow traveler in the circle of German symbolist poet and translator Stefan George, and an eventual Nazi Party member. 

What follows is a study of how two thinkers—Kommerell and Benjamin—engage with a single poet, Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825), through contrasting readings that index a deeper conflict. Benjamin’s criticism of Stefan George and Kommerell in the realm of aesthetics echoes his critique of Carl Schmitt in the realm of politics. Benjamin’s main engagement with Schmitt is in his book Origin of the German Trauerspiel, which focuses on the baroque period; the topic of baroque drama pertains directly to Jean Paul, whom Benjamin characterizes as a “baroque poet.” Benjamin’s interpretation of Jean Paul is further abetted by his reading of German-Jewish Kant afficionado and theorist of polarity Salomo Friedlaender.

At stake in the debate between these right-wing thinkers and their German-Jewish counterparts are two distinct modes of subjectivity. The first is heroic and sublime, the second creaturely and profane. If the first aims to embody ideal figures and forms, the second is plastic and deflationary. If the former seeks to reject all limits, the latter embraces them. Yet the emphasis in this study is not on these subject types themselves, but rather on how they differ in confronting contradiction, lack, and privation.

On the one hand, Schmitt’s sovereign is a heroic figure who remediates inconsistencies in a legal order through decisiveness. On the other, Benjamin counters the self-aggrandizing subjectivity of this omnipotent authority—propagated by George and Kommerell in the realm of art, and by Schmitt in the realm of politics—with a mode of weak subjectivity that limits the subject’s capacity for self-realization. In “The Dipped Magic Wand” (published, in my translation, alongside this essay in the present issue of e-flux journal), Benjamin carries out his critique of Kommerell through a careful investigation of color in the work of Jean Paul. Color here corresponds to weakness in that it names a fundamental incapacity—an Achilles’ heel—inherent to any idealized heroic subject, since, according to Benjamin, color is not something humans can produce entirely by themselves. My implicit contention in this essay is that this weak mode of subjectivity corresponds to Benjamin’s definition of politics as “the fulfillment of deflated humanness.”4

Jean Paul, portrait by Heinrich Pfenninger, 1798. License: Public domain.

It is this curious tension between “fulfillment” and “deflation” that will be decisive: the former suggests pleroma, a fullness; the latter suggests a kenosis, an emptying out. How can fullness proceed through emptiness? Put differently: How can infinity proceed by embracing limits rather than continually rejecting them, and thus avoid a form of lousy endlessness? This essay argues that the right-wing thinkers Schmitt, Kommerell, and George appeal to a beyond (in the sovereign, in the sanctity of reified timeless nature) in order to reject or compensate for lack and limitation, whereas their Jewish counterparts Benjamin and Friedlaender incorporate this void as a central component of a profane theology.5 While Kommerell’s literary history seeks to monumentalize Germany’s literary heroes, casting them into eternity, Benjamin will carve out a home for his preferred subject—perhaps something like Mickey Mouse—in the perennial flux of dissolution. This mode of subjectivity—we might call it contortionist—finds its home in the world of color, for, as Benjamin writes, “color is of a fluid nature, is the medium of all changes.”6

The Arbiter of Decision

To understand the heroic model of subjectivity that Benjamin critiques, its political form must first be laid bare: the concept of sovereignty developed by Carl Schmitt. According to the German (and Nazi Party) jurist, every legal order contains the means to determine the legality or illegality of any act taking place within its domain, with one exception: the sovereign’s act is neither legal nor illegal, since the sovereign act founds the domain of legality in the first place. The sovereign is exempt from the law applying to all others, and in this way the universality of any legal order is founded upon an exception. As such, the sovereign is both the origin of and the exception to the law. He may also suspend it, invoking emergency powers to preserve the constitutional order.

By way of example, Schmitt points to insurrections, wars, and revolutions where commissarial dictators were empowered to suspend the law, purge the disorder in question, and restore normalcy.7 As one commentator puts it, “Emergency situations are like X-ray flashes which suddenly reveal the antinomies of legal reason.”8 These antinomies are not accidental; they are structural, unavoidable: paradoxes that cannot be resolved from within the normative order.

When such a gap emerges, Schmitt claims that it is none other than the sovereign who must step in to resolve the ambiguity by deciding. This decision is grounded not in law but in the sovereign’s will. This act follows a strict disjunctive logic that Schmitt finds in the counterrevolutionary thought of Louis de Bonald, which explicitly refutes any point of indifference between extremes as exemplified in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.9 With this, Schmitt resolves the vagueness inherent to the foundation of the legal order by a pure arbitrary act of will on the part of the sovereign. For Schmitt, Macht, not Recht, founds a legal order, as in Hobbes’s Leviathan: authority, not truth, makes law. The fiction of sovereign power is used to smooth over the antinomies of legal order, to patch a hole in the law, concealing the fissured ground upon which it stands.

Yet Benjamin does not counter Schmitt simply with liberal vagueness or procedural forms of compromise. He is equally suspicious of the indirect, managerial power of liberalism—its faith in endless deliberation, neutrality, and administration. Indeed, Schmitt’s sovereign was conceived in direct opposition to the liberal belief that politics could be reduced to economic or bureaucratic process. So if both the liberal deferral of decision and the sovereign assertion of it fail to adequately address structural contradiction, what remains? How else can an objective paradox be resolved than by a subjective show of force? The dilemma requires a way of working with a contradictory object, approaching it not as a threat to be eliminated, but as a structure that can be read and constructed.

It is on the grounds of impotence that Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (play of mourning) takes Schmitt to task by distinguishing between Herrschaftsmacht and Herrschaftsvermögen: the legal power to rule and the capacity to do so effectively.10 Benjamin emphasizes the sovereign’s incapacity—above all, his incapacity to decide. Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” becomes emblematic: this incapacity stems not so much from a failure on the sovereign’s part, but from the structure of sovereignty itself. The signature of the baroque prince is not so much decisiveness as hesitation, and the sovereign is less a sober judge than someone held hostage by the “sudden caprices of a continually changing storm of emotions.”11 Today, Putin insults Trump by calling him “emotional.”

Schmitt accounts for the symbolic (the legislative) and imaginary (menacing) dimensions of the sovereign, but neglects his real aspect: the sovereign’s inability to resolve the structural inconsistencies of a constitutional crisis. These aspects of impotence are patched over in the sovereign just like the gaps in a constitution. Accounting for the latter will allow Benjamin to argue that the sovereign of the baroque Trauerspiel is equal parts martyr and tyrant: his structural position guarantees his failure, and for this failure he is condemned and martyred. In this way, the idea of the prince of the Trauerspiel encapsulates a synthesis of two extremes: omnipotence and impotence. His incapacity to brook this contradiction heralds his demise.  

The Power and the Glory

If Carl Schmitt is the theorist of political sovereignty—the arbiter of decision—then Stefan George and Max Kommerell are its aesthetic complements: mythmakers festooning sovereignty with an endless supply of glory. Where Schmitt justifies the legal exception, George and Kommerell legitimize it in form, casting the violence of sovereignty into heroic, timeless images. Together they comprise a dyad: force and figure, command and cult.

In “Against a Masterpiece,” Benjamin takes aim at the “esoteric history of German poetry” crafted by the George circle. According to his reading, George claims that Germans have inherited the mission to revive the classicism of Ancient Greece in “the birth of the hero.”12 While Kommerell fulfills this mission by granting the poet the role of Führer, or leader, Benjamin will forsake it. Against this monumentalization, Benjamin turns to Jean Paul not as a hero, but as a magician whose power lies in disfiguring ideal form, not embodying it—a tension marked in Benjamin’s contrast between Gestalt (fixed form) and Entstaltung (disfiguration). In “The Dipped Magic Wand,” Benjamin mocks the George circle for honoring literary figures with monuments—stone images which arrest transformation—in the historical canon of “Germanness [Deutschtum].”13 For this mythical guru and his entourage, the canonized literary icon will serve as an ideal image to be endlessly glorified.

This inflationary form of subjectivity is central to the George circle’s aesthetic style. The word “inflationary” is to be taken literally: Hitler’s ascendancy was obviously linked to Germany’s hyperinflation in the 1920s. The less people had, the more they identified with the deranged Kampf that this sketchy warlord propagated. Writing on the economic crisis of the 1970s, the French communist Jacques Camatte once described inflation as a technique used by the ruling class to stave off the effects of a decline in capitalist growth by printing more money. He wrote: “Inflation is the imagination of the system in the sense that it projects an image of itself into the future, an image in which all contradiction is eliminated.”14 The use of credit—what Marx called “fictitious capital”—is a way of escaping the immediate crisis in the global economy, instead anticipating a period of return to a golden age of economic growth. Fictitious capital has allowed the capitalist mode of production to make the fatal leap from what it was to what it ought to be. Inflation in this sense also corresponds to a mode of subjectivity: in both economics and aesthetics, contradictions are covered over by appealing to a future or past in which they simply vanish, as if the ought could simply swallow up the is.

As the crisis-ridden economy of Weimar was pumped full of cash—those trivial marks—so too did George and his acolytes pander to illusions of the greatness of Germanness, perhaps hoping to be the Goethes receiving the approbation of their Napoleon (Hitler). Instead of the role of the leader, who is primarily future oriented, the “authority” Kommerell’s work had earned him, as well as that sought by the George circle, corresponds to the authority of tradition embodied by the great author, heir to the past. Literature has always played a role in the formation of national identity. According to Benjamin, the focus on style in fascist writing—whether it be Ernst Jünger, George, or Kommerell—was a way to project ideal images of a Great German Reich rather than tarry with the reality of its defeat in World War I. Benjamin will argue that George’s effete style “forces itself upon our attention in a way that overwhelms its meaning.”15 In “Against a Masterpiece,” Benjamin points to “the sharp-edged, impenetrable surface” of Kommerell’s writing, its “symmetrical, diamantine certainty” that resembles “the clanking of steel runes, the dangerous anachronism of sectarian language.”16 Kommerell’s certainty forecloses nuance, mirroring Schmitt’s disjunctive, black-and-white logic.

In addition to its sectarian Weltanschauung, Benjamin dismisses the cloying sweetness of Kommerell’s prose, its “florally open, florally flaming gaze [Blick].” Benjamin declares his allegiance instead to “theory, which leaves behind the spell [Bannkreis] of show [Schau]” and takes as its object “the unsightly [unansehnlichen] truth.”17 He critiques the fascist aesthetic by rejecting ideal images: truth cannot be beheld in ideal forms or statues, but can only be seen in what repels sight. Benjamin’s noticeably rebarbative prose in the two Kommerell essays might be read as an attempt to write in such an unsightly (unansehnlichen) style. By contrast, Kommerell is concerned with the production of “images” that are “timeless,” anachronistic fancies yearning for a return to a mythical past. This conception of history corresponds to what Benjamin, in thesis XVI of “On the Concept of History,” calls “the ‘eternal’ image of the past” that monumentalizes rather than historicizes.18 For Benjamin, the literary monuments of George and Kommerell, alongside Schmitt’s sanctification of the sovereign, all serve one aim: the aestheticization of politics.

Benjamin’s answer to this aestheticization is destructive critique. Without ideas, the “unbearably dazzling outline” of Kommerell’s study “lacks the shadowing [Beschattung] that here, above all, theory might have granted.”19 Kommerell is insufficiently dialectical, equipped with only a lucent style without the shadowing that would temper that gaze into critique: “It is this deadly thrust of thought [tödliche Stoßkraft des Gedankens] that is lacking in the work of the George circle.”20 Here Benjamin takes aim at the beautiful facade beneath which the George circle seals itself off from society in its “hatred of the masses.”21 For Benjamin, the work of critique is destructive, aimed at shattering the pristine harmony of beautiful Schein (illusion, semblance); it is a way to politicize aesthetics. We can read this aesthetic function of destruction alongside one of Benjamin’s remarks on politics: “The function of political utopia: to illuminate the domain of what is worth destroying.”22 If criticism must be destructive, utopia shows what must be destroyed. Benjamin’s destructive writing purged tradition of its natural veneer and sacrificed it to the flames of historical materialism.

Creaturely Laughter

When Schmitt decorates the sovereign with attributes formerly reserved for the rulers of the afterlife—for God—he emphasizes the sovereign’s anthropological superiority over the creatures subject to his rule. Where Schmitt is concerned with power, George and Kommerell are concerned with aesthetic glorification. Through literary canonization and the monumentalization of heroic subjectivity, they seek to revive the mythic grandeur of Germanness, not by seizing power but by conferring glory. As Irving Wohlfarth has put it: Kommerell and George’s aesthetic enterprise is “less an alternative to state power than an alternative version of it—a grand alliance between various claims to cultural leadership [Führertum] that are all rooted in the most ancient, mythical exercise of power.”23 Specifically, Benjamin finds Kommerell’s reading of Jean Paul intriguing yet fundamentally misleading because it presents Jean Paul as a witty “enfant terrible” while glossing over the process of breakdown, denaturing, and decomposition that characterized the Biedermeier period (1815–48). Benjamin contends that Kommerell sanitizes this period, euphemizing Weimar classicism’s failed reconciliation of bourgeois society with feudal traditions. He further argues that Biedermeier represents a more dismal metamorphosis of the baroque marked by pessimism and cruelty, and sees Jean Paul’s oeuvre as embodying a literary unmaking—what in “The Dipped Magic Wand” he calls a “process of deformation.”24

Carl Spitzweg, Der Sonntagsspaziergang, 1841. Collection: Museum Carolino Augusteum. License: Public domain.

Against the theatrical sublimity of sovereignty and the haughty esotericism of the George school, Benjamin affirms the creaturely: a comic mode grounded in failure, finitude, and profanation.25 It is precisely in this aspect of the creaturely that Benjamin is perhaps most indebted to a certain Salomo Friedlaender, whose Creative Indifference he read with much gusto. Friedlaender had found in Jean Paul’s impish humor a kindred spirit, an affinity evident in Friedlaender’s essay “The Antichrist and Ernst Bloch,” which lampoons Bloch not only for his mysticism and disdain for the body, but also for his wistful seriousness. “Contrition is much easier,” Friedlaender writes,

than cultivating a jaunty digestion and an elastic self-consciousness. Christianity is easier than Dionysism, despair and lamentation easier than a consummately debonair hubris, the Olympian high spirits [Übermut] in the face of even the most corrosive anguish. In the end, this high spirit [Übermut] goes on to kill death itself.26

For Friedlaender, Dionysian philosophy does not flee into the beyond, as he accuses Bloch’s messianic fanaticism of doing, but confronts contradiction head on, with laughter and play. Humor, for Friedlaender, fosters an elastic self-consciousness capable of metamorphosis rather than paralysis when faced with tragedy. If the tragic hero perishes from internalizing the contradiction he faces, we can say with Freud that the humorist “insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world.”27 If the tragic hero seeks to rise above contradiction by asserting a grandiose will, the humorist accepts their inability to reconcile their own subjectivity with an impossible situation. The humorist accepts being an irrevocably split subject.

Friedlaender mocks Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia as a mystical yearning for the beyond, blind to sobriety, the body, and what he elsewhere calls “the middle between extremes.”28 For Friedlaender, desire arises not from passionate excess but from its suspension: desire corresponds to lawfulness (Gesetzlichkeit); it is rational, steady, and enduring, not erratic or millenarian. Just as Benjamin distances himself from Kommerell’s impassioned aestheticism in favor of truth, Friedlaender’s concept of “creative indifference” offers the image of a neutral center, a steady orientation point for the subject. This “world-zero” is the condition for what he calls “a decision which—instead of declaring itself for or against—hits the center of all yeses and nos.”29

Elsewhere, Friedlaender provides a topological figure to depict this: it is a “center which is alive in such a way that it neutrally communicates the extremes (–∞ and +∞)! So, like a living border.”30 This “living border” names a subject position of indifference—not in the sense of apathy, but in the sense of holding the extremes in tension without being consumed by them. It is a point neither inside nor outside, but the threshold between them.

Benjamin picks up Friedlaender’s concept of creative indifference in “The Dipped Magic Wand,” where he refers to it as “the point of rest around which the world’s scales balance.” This formulation positions Friedlaender as a key interlocutor in Benjamin’s reading of Jean Paul. Importantly, the reference to a “point of rest” also foreshadows Benjamin’s later call for an historical approach in which time has come to a “standstill,” where dialectical tension suspends linear progression and opens the possibility of interruption and insight.31

Friedlaender’s profane theology resists the kind of flight into the beyond found in Schmitt’s political theology, George’s archaic naturalism, and Bloch’s millenarian frenzy. Instead, it begins from nothingness and holds fast to it: “It goes from nothing into the world, not from the world into the beyond. Drop the priestliness! Become sober and profane!”32 Friedlaender’s sobriety is not resignation but precision: a disciplined refusal of extremism, grounded in the capacity to read the historical situation without a compulsion to hastily take sides. Only the creature who finds equanimity at the “point of rest around which the world’s scales balance,” who can not panic when confronted with the abyss but instead repose amidst the “eternity of downfall,” can make its home on earth, certain that the sovereign can only endlessly stave off the day when his rule becomes his ruin. As Friedlaender remarks: “The fact that everything flows can be verified only from the vantage of something steady.”33

A Goethean Mathematics 

In a cryptic note in volume thirteen of his Werke und Nachlass, Benjamin sketches out four interlinked points: 

Relationship of the Theory of Colors to School Physics
The skewed defensive stance of the editor (Steiner and the Goethe Archive)
Correct framing of the question by S. Friedländer (Goethean mathematician)
Polarity as the key.34

This condensed constellation anticipates much of the labor undertaken in Benjamin’s essay “Goethe’s Theory of Colors,” a review of a new edition of Goethe’s Theory of Colors edited by Hans Wohlbold, acolyte of Rudolf Steiner. In this review Benjamin raises the “decisive question”: “Does Goethe’s physical theory of color stand apart from Newton’s; that is, can it possibly be maintained independently from Newtonian theory? Or is it the contrary—that is, if one of them is true, must the other be false, and vice versa?”35 Goethe OR Newton, or Goethe AND Newton? Here Benjamin asks if Goethe’s Theory of Colors can be said to contradict Newton’s, i.e., if both cannot, at the same time, be true.

Newton’s Optics represents a mathematical, objectivist worldview in which color is an effect of the different refrangibility of light corpuscules, neglecting the role of the subject in the perception of color. In contrast, figures like Rudolf Steiner and the Goethe Archive interpret Goethe’s theory as advocating a subjective—even aesthetic or relativist—account of color, dismissive of mathematical proof. Which side is correct? Benjamin suggests that Friedlaender has pointed out the best way to pose this question, with his method of “polarity” serving as a key.

The “rose of temperaments” (Temperamentenrose), a study from 1798–99 by Goethe and Schiller, matching twelve colors to human occupations and character traits (tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, and rulers), grouped into four temperaments.

Benjamin begins by saying that the editor of this new edition of Goethe’s work, Hans Wohlbold, gives the wrong answer to the above questions. Benjamin quotes Wohlbold: “Proofs lie, like the fate of stars, in one’s own breast … If contemplation of nature is to have any value, it can ultimately lie only in an elevation of humanity, in an intensification [Steigerung] of lived experience, an inner shaping [Gestaltung] and transformation.” Benjamin then critiques Wohlbold here, writing that “this is indeed the language of a ‘guardian of the threshold.’”36 He attacks the lofty attitude of the Steiner school—an inflated subjectivity that rejects objective truth and instead liturgizes personal aesthetic education.

Benjamin continues by saying that Friedlaender, by contrast, suggested the correct framing of the question concerning color, specifically in his version of the doctrine of polarity. Before Friedlaender, Goethe was an early popularizer of the doctrine of polarity in Germany, particularly through his morphological studies. For Goethe, polar tensions in nature—attraction and repulsion, positive and negative—were distilled into a principle said to underlie empirical nature. As Olaf Müller summarizes in his book on Goethe’s color theory called Ultraviolett:

The hypothesis arose that a wide range of phenomena might be interconnected through a comprehensive network of polarities: the magnetism of north/south and the positive/negative charges of electricity now seemed related to the distinctions between attractive and repulsive forces—and even between hot and cold. Thus, the question arose whether such polar opposites might be responsible for many other natural phenomena, such as crystallization. More than that, might the entire world, at its core, be held together by a single, grand, all-encompassing polarity?37

For Goethe, polarity subtends an abundance of processes throughout the natural sciences. In the scientific study of nature, every natural phenomenon involves two equally potent opposing forces. These forces stand in tension with and mutually condition each other. In perfect balance, they cancel each other out—yet both remain present. Here negation is creative, even productive, not negative. Goethe’s concept of polarity is vividly demonstrated in the phenomenon of complementary afterimages: when one gazes at a green circle with an X for thirty seconds and then shifts to a white field, the eye generates a yellow afterimage—its complementary color. This transient color, as Goethe believed, evidences the eye’s drive toward a higher unity of opposites. Crucially, the eye’s afterimages align with the laws of complementary color, affirming polarity not just in perception but in nature itself.

Goethe’s Theory of Colors can be credited with initiating a scientific paradigm shift in how we see color. Newton regarded colors as intrinsic qualities of light—each hue corresponding to a distinct corpuscle, with no interplay or tension between the various colors involved. Goethe, however, showed that color emerges at the border between light and darkness, making it a product of their dynamic tension rather than a property of light alone. In this way, the unitary light ventriloquizing as different colors is cut in two by Goethe. He disrupts Newton’s paradigm by emphasizing what has been forgotten—darkness—thereby uncovering a polarity at the foundation of color perception. 

If Goethe applied polarity within Naturphilosophie, Friedlaender reinstated the subject at the center of the doctrine of polarity. Friedlaender insisted that without the polarizer (the center, zero, indifference), there is no polarity at all, for it is the observer who serves as the middle point amid all “natural phenomena” like hot and cold, acting as the tip of the scale that holds the extremes. The indifferent self of creative indifference was not a mere lone individual but rather a universalization of humanity in a single person, and this universal could only be reached by wielding polar differences as a method.

Detlef Thiel states that for Friedlaender, “the focus lies on the living subject, which, however, is universalized in an undifferentiated way; its function is to bring forth polar opposites and tirelessly work on their balance. There is no world in itself, detached from any relation to a subject.”38 Friedlaender moves polarity away from Goethe’s natural-scientific studies and makes it a cornerstone of logic and rationality. With this logic, Friedlaender attempts “to find the hidden or suppressed non-given in everything given.”39 But this can only be done by a subject conceived as a neutral, sober middle point, one that is equally shorn of all relativity. In this way, polarity serves as a compass for the indifferent person.

Returning to Benjamin’s review of Wohlbold’s edition of Goethe’s Theory of Colors, Benjamin concludes by quoting the section titled “Color” in Friedlaender’s Creative Indifference:

True enlightenment here can only be brought about by a mathematically educated Goethean, and Goethean mathematics is less a wooden iron than the wooden horse with the help of which Goethe’s Greeks will ultimately conquer the barbarian Troy of optics and recover the Helen of the beauty of stolen from them.40

Friedlaender does not resolve the opposition of Goethe and Newton through synthesis. Instead, he polarizes it. In his concept of a “Goethean mathematics,” the laws of truth and proof are not abandoned for the lofty, relativistic ascent of a beautiful soul, as Wohlbold suggests, but rather made use of in order to demonstrate—through the manipulation of signs, symbols, letters—the impossible in all its beautiful allure. Friedlaender does not reconcile opposites in a synthetic whole, but rather stages their polarity as the very condition of insight. Goethean mathematics, asserts Friedlaender, is not a “wooden iron” (hölzernes Eisen), an old expression that denotes a paradox or an impossibility: something cannot be both iron and wood at once. From this image, Friedlaender makes an associative leap to a wooden horse, obviously the Trojan horse, which could be used as a ship to conquer Newton’s Troy, where he hides what he has stolen: Helen—the beauty of color, emphasizing the importance of the human subject in the phenomena of color.

Just as Goethe reinserted the subject into color science, Friedlaender suggests that mathematics, too, must be reclaimed from Platonic abstraction. Mathematics is not a doctrine of hidden realities or eternal, static forms, but an emergent, dynamic practice of writing and constructing the paradoxes of the most intensely lived experience. Through this practice of writing, the subject achieves a neutrality that tempers the passions, thereby preserving them—saving them from a delirious Schwärmerei (passion, rapture). From this point of view, as Friedlaender will claim elsewhere, a Goethean mathematics demonstrates that “the idea of tackling a purely logical question with the heart is not as futile as it seems.”41

Entstaltung and Invariance

At the conclusion of “The Dipped Magic Wand,” Benjamin draws out a key polarity between Phantasieanschauung (the intuition of fantasy) and Einbildungskraft (the power of imagination), a distinction at play throughout his work on aesthetics. The latter is the synthetic labor of the imagination at the center of Kant’s transcendental deduction, and is thus associated with the world of understanding, conceptual categorization, and the gebildeter (educated, cultivated) view of the adult. For Kant, the existence of something like knowledge must be predicated on a rule-governed synthesis of representations that is valid for all knowers, not merely one premised on subjective penchants and propensities. This Einbildungskraft represents a mode of approaching reality that is formative, which is to say that it seeks to put the world at its disposal. 

Phantasieanschauung, by contrast, is the potentiality of a child’s innocent gaze, a mode of pure receptivity prior to any conceptual or representative mode of thinking. If Einbildung is synthetic, Phantasie is analytic. In fantasy, it is less appearance or any ordinary object seen that is at stake, but rather pure vision freed from the laws of concepts and representation. As in a dream, this passive, purely receptive mode of vision is entstaltend (deformative); it disfigures what we know of empirical reality. The prose of Jean Paul epitomizes this latter faculty.

The practice of embodiment imitates this receptivity: “The body in its dance, the hand in its gestures mimics and appropriates” form. Yet there is a limit to this mimesis—color: 

For the human body cannot produce color. It does not correspond to it creatively, it only receives it: in the colorful, shimmering eye. Pure color is the medium of fantasy, not the strict canon [strenge Kanon] of the forming [gestaltende] artist. Her cloudy home, in which forms do not so much take shape but rather disfigure [sich weniger gestalten als entstalten], is the realm of change.42

Here Benjamin posits a limit to the Promethean subject and its productive will, coming remarkably close to what his cousin, Günther Anders, called “promethean shame”: the inevitable tendency of the human being’s grandiose productive capacity to be undermined—or even conditioned—by failure, loss, and privation.43 Benjamin, by polarizing the figure of the heroic subject, emphasizes not its triumphs but its impasses, and color is paradigmatic in this regard. He concludes “The Dipped Magic Wand” by writing that “in Kommerell’s depiction, the poet’s [Jean Paul’s] head protrudes naked against the grey backdrop of eternity.” In this light, color is not merely a theme but a central axis of Benjamin’s polemic against Kommerell. Whereas the hero bulldozes contradictions, rejecting or suppressing them while clinging instead to ideal images, the magician constructs contradictions into objects—ones that can be deciphered for their truth content.

Color corresponds to a fluid medium, a speculative faculty Benjamin calls “fantasy,” epitomized in an object: the rainbow.44 The rainbow exemplifies a striking inversion: though it appears as an extended physical object in the sky, its position shifting with the observer, it is actually formed entirely by intensive quantities of light. The colored bands of the rainbow, which we perceive as belonging to a unity, are in fact just fulgurations of the sun’s light reflecting through millions of droplets of rain. As the authors of Seeing Colour, a wonderful study of Goethe’s color theory, put it: “This is what happens when you are looking at a rainbow in the sky: you are seeing a multitude of tiny images of the sun, each created by a raindrop.”45 Each drop is a monad, acting as a prism, a turbid medium reflecting the sun’s beams. Kant’s distinction between extensive magnitude (spatial extension) and intensive magnitude (quality or degree) collapses here: the rainbow is spatially extensive yet generated by pure intensity. This paradox—extension without substance—reveals the rainbow’s contradictory nature, a seeming material phenomenon born wholly from immaterial intensities.

Fantasy is a purely receptive modality, one which trespasses not only the boundaries between subject and object, but also the world of empirical facts—of what Husserl called the natural standpoint. But conversely, fantasy is by no means reducible to subjective fancy, to “imagination.” A useful analogy here comes from mathematics: Newton once characterized infinitesimals as “ghosts of departed quantities.” The infinitesimal, like fantasy, has something real to it, even if one can never find an infinitesimal quantity—or a ghost, for that matter—anywhere in the world. To reiterate the purely receptive aspect of fantasy: even if they had to be constructed in writing, infinitesimals, like the principle of inertia in physics, were not created by humans, they were named. It is not possible for we humans to invent such things. We can only patiently unravel them, discover them, and make their acquaintance. Ghosts and rainbows: fantasy is a method for constructing an impossible object at the place of a contradiction.

Just as Goethe introduces a paradigm shift in how we see color, Benjamin seeks to elaborate the perceptual mode called fantasy—presenting “the world caught up in the process of unending dissolution.”46 If the former corresponds to intention, the latter is purely receptive. It is not that Benjamin is arguing for one perspective at the expense of the other; rather, Einbildung, responsible for conceptual knowledge, must keep itself open to its own dissolution in the truth of fantasy and the contingency that is color.

Illustration from the book Lina’s Mährchenbuch by Albert Ludwig Grimm, 1837.