Walter Benjamin

In Spanish, adiós is said for goodbye. Taken literally, it is a reference to God (Dios). But secular Spaniards say it like everybody else, and I believe they don't think about God when they say that anymore than you think of hell when saying hello. You don't have a proper etymological reason for making the connection and they do, but it makes no difference. I don't think Marx literally believed in some literal ghost or cyclops having ever existed somewhere. His metaphor usage for the most part is pretty clear. The way to achieve this clarity is not rocket science, just have the metaphor close to the context that makes its meaning clear, don't put that context in a different chapter or worse, require familiarity some detail from another book. It's so easy to do it right that I strongly suspect people who don't do it right do that on purpose.

I don't see that in the text. He's projecting his religious sentimentality onto others. If people don't overtly show any of that attitude, they must just be hiding it well (or so he thinks), requiring "analysis" (=his noodly salad of associations and intuitions) to "reveal" it.

The point here though it that language and how we use it, especially in metaphors which are particularly tricky devices, carry with them implicit meaning that constitute the explicit meaning. What people like Benjamin and, although to a lesser extent, his fellow Frankfurts did was attempt to unpack these implicit but nonetheless present relations, whether in a text or in a commodity. One could could therefore say that, in fact, adios necessarily has theological connotations, going "towards God."

His theological critique is based around the inevitably present in dialectical history, Marxist or Hegelian. The force that drives dialects forward isn't rational in character, as Hegel puts it, but instead Theological. The argument is descriptive. It's not sentimental, but instead exposing purportedly secular theories of progress as being, at the end of the day, quasi-religious in character.


And again, Benjamin is absolutely a Marxist. This is Adorno's teacher we're talking about.

It should be noted that there's also nothing wrong with this Theological character for Benjamin, for him it opens up a whole new realm of dialectical thinking.

Just like your soul is present, eh?
One could say that you don't speak Spanish and you lack a basic grasp of how language works that people usually take for granted when they talk to each other.

I mean one of the key functions of poetry is to make these implicit meanings and etymologies explicit. Just because most people don't intend this meaning doesn't mean the meaning isn't there. It seems to me that all literary criticism, hell all serious criticism, is making implicit and unintended meanings known. And this is certainly the case with Marx, who had a supremely literary mind; taking his language and metaphors seriously as language and metaphor is a totally legitimate project, one that Marx endorses himself.

stop these fucking pedos they put pedo shit in their game
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stop these fucking pedos they put pedo shit in their game
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Consider the following situation: A Spanish atheist says adiós to another Spanish atheist, and both know each other fairly well and know that they both are atheist. Nobody else is there. What's your analysis of that? God must have been there, too?
But Marx wasn't deconstructing other writer's metaphors and sayings in the snippets referred to ITT. It was him using metaphors and in a rather direct way, and his usage only appears mysterious to you because you aren't familiar with the texts in question aside from second-hand memery.

That inherently theological meaning is still present in their language; note that this is different from theological truth. The same is the case when we say "bless you" when someone sneezes. It's now a secular term, ritually used, politely meant, but it still carries with it religious undertones. This is all to say that the language we use has unintended meanings, the origin of the word stays with the word.
But he does do this in Capital.
But the metaphor itself is used to describe the mysterious qualities of commodity fetishism. There's therefore a mysterious aspect to the metaphor, which is conveying mystery. There's also nothing "direct" about metaphor and allegory, but Paul De Man can tell you a lot more about that than I can. I've read Capital, I'm re-reading it right now for a course on the work. Being a text, it has to also be dealt with on textual and literary terms; it's pretty impossible to intelligibly separate the ideas from the language used to express them.

As in he analyses literature, I mean

A particular sentence could be interpreted in a certain way by you, it is said by a person who did not intend the meaning of your interpretation, and it is said to a person who does not recognize the meaning of your interpretation. But this interpreted meaning (uttered in a language you do not speak) exists in some higher eternal realm because you believe so?
That's like saying the word for the color blue must have an aspect of that color to it.
I don't believe that.