On Love and Related Matters
(A European Problem)

Walter Benjamin
(from Selected Writing: Vol. 1)

This age is participating in one of the greatest revolutions ever to take place in the relations between the sexes. Only someone who is aware of this development is entitled to speak about sexuality and the erotic in our day. An essential precondition is the realization that centuries-old forms, and along with them an equally ancient knowledge about relations between the sexes are ceasing to be valid. Nothing forms a greater obstacle to realizing this that the conviction that those relations are immutable at their deeper levels -- the mistaken belief that only the more ephemeral forms of erotic fashion are subject to change and to history, because the deeper and supposedly unalterable ground beneath is the domain of the eternal laws of nature. But how can anyone sense the scope of these questions and not know that what history shows most powerfully are the revolutions in nature? It may well be that every pre-apocalyptic world contains a residue of immutable existence, but if so, this residue lies at an infintely deeper stratum than is implied by the trite assertions of those accustomed to writing about the eternal war between the sexes. Even if this war does belong among the eternal verities, the forms it assumes certainly do not. But if it constantly flares up anew, and continues to do so, the cause lies in the unity of the erotic and the sexual in woman. A most unfortunate act of concealment contrives to make this unity appear natural, except when men are enabled by an incomparable act of creative love to recognize it as supernatural. Again and again, this conflict flares up because of man's inability to perceive this, particularly when, as at the present time, yet again, the historical forms of such creativity have withered and died. Today European man is as incapable as ever of confronting that unity in woman which induces a feeling of something close to horror in the more alert and the superior members of his sex, since even they remain blind to its exalted origins. Failing to perceive it to be supernatural and blindly imagining it to be natural, they flee from it. Oppressed by the blindness of men, the supernatural life of women atrophies and declines into the merely natural, and thereby into the unnatural. This alone explains the strange process of dissolution brought about in our day by the primitive instincts of men, as the result of which women can be understood only in terms of athe simultaneous images of the whore and the untouchable beloved. This untouchable purity, however, is no more a part of the immediate spiritual definition of woman than is base desire; it, too, is profoundly instinctual and coerced. The great, authentic symbol for the permanence of earthly love has always been the single night of love before death. Only now it is not the night of love, as it was earlier, but the night of impotence and renunciation. This is the classic experience of love of the younger generation. And who knows for how many future generations it will remain the primary experience? Both, however, impotence and desire alike, represent a new , unprecendented path for the man who finds the old path blocked: to arrive at knowledge through possession of a woman. He now seeks the new path: to arrive at possession through his knowledge. But like recognizes like. So man tries to make himself similar to woman, indeed like her. And this is the starting point for the vast and, in a deeper sense, almost planned metamorphosis of masculine sexuality into feminine sexuality through the medium of the mind. Now it is Adam who picks the apple, but is equal to Eve. The old serpent can vanish, and in the repurified Garden of Eden nothing remains but the question whether it is paradise or hell.

As we peer into the darkness of the transformations taking place in the great flowing stream of human physicality, our sight fails as we contemplate a future for which it has perhaps been determined that though no prophet shall pierce its veil, it may be won by the most patient man. Here flows the dark stream that for the most noble may prove to be their predestined grave. The only bridge that spans that stream is the spirit. Life will pass over it in a triumphal chariot, but perhaps only slaves will remain to be harnessed to it.

1929