Contingencies of Inheritance: On Benjamin's and Nietzsche's Like Marks

Abstract

Contingencies of Inheritance:On Benjamin's and Nietzsche's Like Marks Kristina Mendicino (bio) There may be something contingent about inheritance, besides the way it can never be settled in advance, if it is to proceed. For would not at least a touch of uncertainty color each instance of inheriting what may subsist of others' matters—and perhaps of matters that were never an issue of belonging or possession in the first place? Inherence and subsistence: the pairing that, in metaphysical or transcendental terms, describes a relation of accidents or variable appearances to the substance that bears them and perdures throughout their alterations, breaks down differently when one changes the subject. In signifying, "I join in, I fasten on, I cling," the Latin in-haereo cannot but testify simultaneously to my separation from whatever I would fasten onto, while the striving it implies simultaneously suggests that no efforts—however tenacious or restless they may be—could overcome this separation without remainder or guarantee that the object in question may not escape my grasp.1 At the same time, who could say how I might be altered, affected, or lost in the attempt? [End Page 489] Reading another, related word for "inheritance," Gerhard Richter traces the German heritage of "Erbe" to "Arbeit," as well as to the "orphan" (ὀρφανός) from which both "Erbe" and "Arbeit" derive (Verwaiste Hinterlassenschaften 16–19). In elaborating the relations among these terms, he works through the breach that inheritance structurally presupposes, remarking "dass die Situationen des Erbens 'eine Zäsur voraussetzen,' durch die es erst zur 'Unterbrechung in der Kette der Wesen, Dinge oder Ereignisse' kommen kann, die zur Möglichkeit eines Erbes erforderlich ist und zur Übertragung desselben führen kann" (11). Such breaches are what occasion the labors of transmission and translation; they are what create the openings for those interventions and interpretations that Richter emphasizes and enters into in his readings of writers such as Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin, among others.2 But precisely insofar as they are ruptures of successions, progressions, and trajectories—insofar as each opening also marks the end of a line—such breaches can in no way offer a method for determining how inheritance, interpretation, or reading should or could go on. Aporetic through and through, they therefore confront anyone who should attempt to encounter and inherit a legacy with the possibility that he may not only be incapable of reaching what he would have grasped, but also incapable of knowing his incapacity: "Im Erben treffen Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit des Verstehens dergestalt aufeinander, dass deren scharfe Trennung im Moment des tastend-deutenden Verstehenwollens gleichsam aufgehoben erscheint" (50). With this sentence, Richter thus indicates a radical contingency that precedes and exceeds the transcendental question of the conditions of the possibility for comprehension to take place on the parts of intentional agents. The contingency addressed here would rather extend to a moment of tentative comprehension itself. Furthermore, if possibility and impossibility were indistinguishable in such a moment, then inheritance would have to take place—or fail to take place—in a way that could not be attributed to the intentions, efforts, or shortcomings of any heir or legator—not least of all because the question of its very occurrence could not be decided. And conversely, Richter's formulation allows for the possibility that the words of one writer might touch upon those of another, whether either knows and comprehends it or not. [End Page 490] Now, because the contingencies and aporias in question here would pertain to any instance of reading or seeking to grasp another, it would not need to take ages or generations for them to become an issue. The problems of inheritance, understood in the broadest sense, could mark an immediate exchange or first come into view over immense historical distance; they could be testified in an attempt to grasp an ancient or contemporary document; they could emerge in an attempt to catch up with a friend or get a grip on oneself. To glimpse a drastic, albeit distant illustration of how these problems can arise in an instant, let us digress for a moment and cut to a chase: One of the early testified usages of...