经由相似之道:论本雅明对辩证法的道家式复兴

By Way of Resemblance:On Benjamin’s Daoist Renewal of Dialectics

本雅明通过与道家某些主题的亲和力,更新了一种辩证思想的形式,它化散了进步的意识形态观念,消减了主体的本体论区别的重要性。在与中国美学的邂逅中,本雅明关注到“以相似性思考”的实践并在其写作中表现出来。他不断回到画家消失在画中的传说,在道家文学中找回了一种从渐进式综合的概念基础中解放出来的辩证反转观念;并在晚期资本主义现代性的背景下唤起这个传说的回响,产生了无法缩减为“物化”的自我遗忘的意象。道家的想象启迪本雅明打破古希腊摹仿论的人类中心主义封闭性。他更是在理论上将相似性理解为可以跨越时间上不连续的现象,且不受限于预定的存在类别。因此,本雅明将被启蒙理性贬低的相似性重塑为一种历史理解的媒介。呼应着他对明代绘画的描述,辩证法被重新想象为一种灵动其内、有待阅读,但最终却没有的短暂意象。

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of daoism,Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject.In fleeting,yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics,Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of“thinking by way of resemblance”—a phenomenon that he comes to enact in his writings.Time and again,Benjamin returns to a daoist legend about a painter(Wu Daozi)who disappears into his painting,and retrieves from daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from the conceptual infrastructure of progressive synthesis;and calling forth the tale’s resonance within the context of late capitalist modernity,he generates image-repertoires of self-forgetting which are irreducible to reification.The daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis.He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena and is unrestricted to predetermined categories of Being.Benjamin thus recasts resemblance disparaged by Enlightenment rationality as a medium of historical apprehension.He reimagines dialectics—to echo his description of Ming Dynasty paintings,as an internally dynamic,evanescent image to be read—yet never finally had.