Жак Деррида в Москве

«…nearly all the individuals with whom he managed to establish contact (all Jewish, almost without exception, whether or not he was aware of it) belonged to the political or artistic opposition…»³⁹ «…In the evening Reich and I had a long conversation about my work as a writer and about the future direction it should take. He was of the opinion that I tended to belabor the things I was writing. In the same context he made the very pertinent observation that in great writing the proportion between the total number of sentences and those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant was about one to thirty — whereas it was more like one to two in my case. All this is correct (…). But I did have to disagree with him when it came to certain ideas that have never been in doubt for me and that date all the way back to my early essay on „Language As Such and the Language of Man“ (1916, posthumously published). I referred him to the polarity that exists in every linguistic entity: to be at once expression and communication. This cleary related to something we had often discussed together, „the destruction of language“ as a tendency of contemporary Russian literature. The development of the communicative aspect of language to the exclusion of all else in fact inevitably leads to the destruction of language. On the other hand, the way leads to mystical silence if its expressive character is raised to the absolute. Of the two, it seems to me that the more current tendency at the moment is toward communication. But in one form or another a compromise is always necessary. I did, however, concede that I was in a critical situation as far as my activity as an author was concerned. I told him that I saw no way out for myself here: mere convictions and abstract decisions were not enough, only concrete tasks and challenges could really help me make headway. Here he reminded me of my essays on cities. This was most encouraging to me. I began thinking confidently about a description of Moscow»⁴⁰. Беньямин вынужден был отказаться от большой работы о Москве, которая увековечила бы память его любви к Асе (с ней, по свидетельству очевидцев, он проводил все время в спорах), как он вынужден был отказаться [и от плана] иметь от нее ребенка, хотя тремя годами позже он развелся из-за нее с женой. Я не хочу сравнивать работу («Москва») и ребенка, которого надо похитить (вспомните Деметру) как примиряющий третий термин для невозможных пар, но остается фактом то, что одержимость двумя этими сюжетами буквально пронизывает «Дневник». Например:

«Today I told her that I now wanted to have a child by her. Certain gestures, spontaneous yet rare and not without significance given the control she has now imposed on herself in erotic matters, tell me she is fond of me»⁴¹.

Потом в тот же день, т. е. 20 декабря 1926 года, говоря о том, что Жид (которым он, как известно, восхищался и дневник которого, посвященный поездке в Конго, Беньямин просит Кракауэра в письме от февраля 1927 года одолжить ему) назвал «родовыми муками будущего», он добавляет:

«A contributing factor is certainly the fear that in the future, when Asja is finally well again and living here with Reich on stable terms, it will only be with a considerable amount of pain that I will be able to come up against the boundaries of our relationship. I still don't know if I will be able to disengage myself from it. At this point, I have no cause to sever myself from her completely, even admitting I were capable of it. The thing I would prefer the most would be the bond a child might create between us. But I have no idea whether I could even now bear living with her, given her astonishing hardness and, despite her sweetness, her lovelessness»⁴².