“ You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.

“ …and whoever thinks that by including this story, my sole aim was not merely filing space on paper and reducing slightly the enormous number of white pages before me, is sorely mistaken.

“ The triumph of Benjamin’s text, by contrast, lies in its subtle imbrication of form and motif. In the jaded, secularized world of the Trauerspiel [tragic drama], rife as it is with sluggish melancholy and pure intrigue, the leakage of meaning from objects, the unhinging of signifiers from signifieds, is at once a matter of énoncé [utterance] and énonciation [enunciation], as the features of an already petrified, primordial landscape undergo a kind of secondary reification at the hands of the ‘fixing’ hieroglyph. Those features, indeed, include ‘psychology’ itself, which, elaborately encoded as it is, attains to a kind of dense objectivity in which ‘the passions themselves take on the nature of stage-properties’. Signifieds metonymically displace themselves onto their signifiers, so that jealousy becomes as sharp and functional as the dagger with which it is associated. If this domain of thickly reified signs is predominantly spatial, it is nevertheless propelled slowly forward by an ineluctable temporality; for allegory, as Fredric Jameson has remarked of the Trauerspiel, is ‘the privileged mode of our own life in time, a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous, disconnected instants’. Benjamin distinguishes three kinds of temporality: the ‘empirical’ time of empty repetition, which belongs to the Trauerspiel and, as we shall see later, to the commodity; ‘heroic’ time, centered upon the individual tragic protagonist; and ‘historical’ time, which is neither ‘spatial’ as in the Trauerspiel nor individual as in tragedy, but which prefigures his later concerns with the ‘nunc stans’ [now standing] or Jetztzeit [now time], in which time receives its collective fullness. The freezing of time achieved by the Trauerspiel signifies the need for the absolutist state to bring history to an end; the absolutist monarch himself becomes the primary source of signification in a world drained of historical dynamic. This theme, too, will find a later echo in Benjamin, in that ultimate abolition of history which is fascism. Such significant temporality as there is, however, belongs more to hermeneutic practice itself than to its objects; the time of the Trauerspiel is as empty as its realia [real/realities], the negation of that teleological vision which Benjamin will later denounce as ‘historicism’, listlessly open to the Jetztzeit—the totalizing, transfiguring moment—that never comes. As the petrified stage-properties are ritually shuffled, time is almost folded back into space, dwindled to a recurrence so agonizingly empty that some salvific epiphany might indeed just be conceived to tremble on its brink. If there is a moment in the Trauerspiel that resembles the Jetztzeit—the apocalyptic point at which time stands still to receive the plenitude of hitherto dismembered meaning—it resembles it only as a caricature: ‘the narrow frame of midnight, an opening in the passage of time, in which the same ghostly image constantly reappears’.