with the process of rationalization, and with the feelings of hope and fear that ac-
company this process. Benjamin analyzes Baudelaire’s poetry as being the epitome
of the internalization of the basic features of the Metropolis.
In order to interpret Baudelaire in this tenor, Benjamin uses negativity as a the-
oretical instrument for achieving an adequate understanding of the reality of the Me-
tropolis. What Benjamin emphasizes in Baudelaire is his way of dealing with the new
structure of experience; this new structure is entirely bound up with the total Ent-
wertungof values that occurs in the Metropolis. This process of the destruction of
values no longer leaves any room for a synthesis or for the values of humanism:
The negation of these very values is presupposed by negative thought
in its hopeless understanding of the early forms of modern capitalist so-
ciety. This negation is rationalization, is “Vergeistigung,” and it moves
in the same direction as this society, directly and knowingly sharing its
destiny. But at the same time, it lays bare the logic of this society,
negates its possibility of “transcrescence,” and radicalizes its aims and
needs; in other words, the negative reaches the point where it exposes
this society’s internal conflicts and contradictions, its fundamental
problematics or negativity.^169This interpretation is something that Benjamin recognized in the work of
Kafka, which he discussed in a letter to Scholem.^170 The most important point that
Benjamin makes in this letter, according to Cacciari, is that there is a connection be-
tween the form that the experience of the metropolitan condition takes in Kafka’s
work and the discoveries of contemporary physics. Benjamin quotes a passage,
from a book by a physicist, describing all the forces and counterforces involved in the
simple action of someone entering a room: not only must he overcome the atmos-
pheric pressure, but he must also succeed in putting his foot down on a spot that is
moving at a speed of 30 kilometers per second around the sun. The feeling of alien-
ation one gets from the extreme rationality of this fragment distinctly reminds one of
the way that Kafka traces the logical consequences of a fundamentally incompre-
hensible system such as the law. In both instances, extreme rationality leads to alien-
ation: analysis turns into tautology and there is no longer a way out of the maze to
meaning. At the same time, one cannot help suspecting that there is a meaning; one
can get a glimpse of it. This meaning, however, never becomes completely palpable.
This is what emerges in Kafka’s work—not so much a logic of the signs, nor an ulti-
mate signification, but the fact that a difference exists, a difference between sign
and thing, between language and reality. It is in the way that he insists on this differ-
ence that the meaning of Kafka’s work is to be found: “The emphasis is no longer
placed on the expression of the sign’s logic, but on the expression of difference. Car-
ried to its logical extreme, the rationality of the sign traps the sign within itself—as
signifier without signified, fact without object, contradiction and difference.”^171
3
Reflections in a Mirror