Truth content, in contrast, is not to be sought in the conspicuous features of the work’s technique, but in the unity of its distinct form. The task of criticism is to make this truth content an object of experience. It concerns itself not with the life or intentions of the artist, but with that semblance or appearance of life that the work itself possesses by virtue of its mimetic capacity for representation: its linguistic expressiveness, which is described as a verging and bordering on life (SW 1, 350). What is essential to art, however, and what distinguishes it from the semblance of nature, is the “expressionless [Ausdruckslose]”: that critical violence within the work of art that “arrests this semblance, spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony” (SW 1, 340). “Only the expressionless completes the work” as a work of art, Benjamin argues, and it does so by shattering the work’s semblance of unity, the false appearance of totality pertaining to it. Unlike the intensification of Romantic reflection, when this semblance itself becomes the object of a higher-level semblance, a refractive dissonance is opened up. Drawing on Hölderlin’s concept of the caesura to describe this moment, Benjamin calls it a “counter-rhythmic rupture” (SW 1, 341). In focusing its efforts on representing this caesura, genuine criticism in turn deepens the refractive violence, performing a destructive or mortuary act of self-annihilation upon the work.