Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin
Social and Critical Theory

Editorial Board
John Rundell
University of Melbourne
Danielle Petherbridge
University of Melbourne
Jeremy Smith
Ballarat University
Jean-Philippe Deranty
Macquarie University
Robert Sinnerbrink
Macquarie University
International Advisory Board
william connolly – manfred frank – leela gandhi

agnes heller – dick howard – martin jay – richard kearney
paul patton – michel wieviorka
VOLUME 14
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sct

Walter Benjamin
Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend
By
Stéphane Symons
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
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Es kann kein böser Geist sein, der an der Spitze der Welt steht;
es ist ein bloß unbegriffener.
Heinrich Von Kleist,

letter to Otto August Rühle, August 1806
CONTENTS
Volume Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Bibliographical Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Willem van Reijen
Introduction. Melancholy, Hope, Redemption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I. Benjamin’s Philosophy of History: The Messianic Is Now . . . . . . . . . . 13

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1. The Notion of ‘Weak Messianic Power’ in On the Concept of
History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2. Redemption and ‘Rejuvenation’ of the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2. The Dialectical Image and Its Ethical-Political
Relevance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3. Renewed Legibility and Redemption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.4. The Relation between Benjamin’s Materialism and His
Jewish Messianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
II. The Kafka-Essays and The Origin of German Tragic Drama: On

Failure and the Limits of Human Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
1. Franz Kafka, the Unknowability of the Divine and the
Decline of Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
1.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
1.2. The Kafka-Essay and the ‘Inaccessibility of Doctrine’ . . . . . 56
1.3. Kafka’s Last Will and Shame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
1.4. The Kafka-Letter and the Decay of Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
1.5. The Conscious Experience and Benjamin’s Critique of
Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
viii contents
2. The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the ‘Empty World’ of

the Baroque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2.1. Presentation of the Subject-Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
2.2. Trauerspiel and Allegory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
III. The ‘Will to Allegory’ and the ‘Distortion’ of Truth in History . . . . . . 95

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
1. Benjamin’s Iconography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
1.1. Benjamin and Alois Riegl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
1.2. Benjamin and Aby Warburg: The Survival of Ancient
Gods in ‘an Unsuitable, Indeed Hostile, Environment’ . . . 101
1.3. Conflicts and Compromises: The Timeless ‘Hybridity’ of
Logos and Magic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2. The ‘Distortion’ of Truth in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
2.1. Kafka, the Trauerspiel and the Messianic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
2.2. The Relation between Benjamin’s Messianism and His
Historical Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
2.3. A Case in Point: Technological Reproducibility . . . . . . . . . . 127
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Appendix: Relational ‘Purity,’ the Collector and the Flâneur . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Introduction. The Concept of Purity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
1. The ‘Representational Impulse’ of Truth and the Movement
of the Absolute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
2. The Collector and the Flâneur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Conclusion. Walter Benjamin and Joseph Roth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
VOLUME FOREWORD
The Social and Critical Theory Book Series welcomes Stéphane Symons’ new
major study on the work of Walter Benjamin. Stéphane Symons illuminates
the great richness and depth of Walter Benjamin’s work. His book is a
comprehensive assessment of Benjamin’s major themes of time, history,
experience and redemption. By presenting such a comprehensive study, as
well as tying it to current debates and assessments of Benjamin’s work, the
volume marks a significant contribution to our understanding of critical
theory.
John Rundell, Series Editor

The University of Melbourne, Australia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Il y en a qui ont le cœur si large qu’on en voit que la moitié, Jacques Brel once
sang.
I am fortunate enough to know such people and to count them among
my friends. If it were not for them, I would never have been able to start nor
finish this book.
The love, friendship and support of Marlies De Munck, Roland Breeur,
Margherita Tonon, Paul Cruysberghs, Steven Spileers, Andreas De Block and
Tomek Kitlinski have meant more to me than I can possibly convey.
For their kindness, company and inspiration, I would like to thank every-
one at the Institute of Philosophy of the KULeuven, especially Arnold
Burms, Paul Cortois, Paul Moyaert, Rob Devos, Tomas Geyskens, Pieter
Adriaens, Stein De Cuyper, Rudolf Bernet, Toon Vandevelde, Ines Van Hout-
te, Gerbert Faure, Dries Simons and everyone at the Department of Philoso-
phy of Lingnan University, Hong Kong, especially Paisley Livingston, Mette
Hjort, Thomas Tam, Josh Law, Kaye Wong and Vinnie Cheung.
Thanks are also due to everyone at the Department of Liberal Studies of
the New School for Social Research, especially Jim Miller, and to Willem
van Reijen (1938–2012), Rudi Laermans, Masakatsu Kaneko, Noriaki Kuwata,
Mikiro Kato, Sigrid Weigel and Bernard Chappuzeau.
Thanks to the support of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the
Commission for Educational Exchange between the USA, Belgium and Lux-
embourg (Fulbright), the Belgian American Educational Foundation
(BAEF), the New School for Social Research, the University of Electro-Com-
munications, Komazawa University, the University of Kyoto, Lingnan Uni-
versity, the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung and the University
of Buenos Aires, chapters of this book were written in New York City, Tokyo,
Hong Kong, Berlin and Buenos Aires.
Last but not at all least, I would like to thank those people who mean
everything to me: my parents, sister, brother, brother-in-law, family and
friends. Their unceasing and limitless dedication and encouragement are
truly exceptional and more than I can ever return.
I dedicate this book, with all the love in my heart, to my grandfather René
Redig (1919–2011).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
References to Benjamin’s works are cited by volume, part (where applica-

ble) and page from:
SW Selected Writings, Volume 1–4, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings.
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press, 1999–2004.
GS Gesammelte Schriften. Band I–VII, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-
penhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991.
AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2004.
O The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London and New
York: Verso, 2003.
B Briefe 1–2, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966.
PREFACE
It takes courage these days to publish a new book about Walter Benjamin.
The number of publications that takes up his work has grown exponentially
and this seems to have turned the project of reaching an overview of the
sometimes controversial interpretations of Benjamin’s philosophy into an
illusory endeavor. This is also the case, perhaps even pre-eminently so, when
one turns to a topic that is as tricky as the enigmatic relationship between
messianism and historical materialism—perhaps even the most tricky topic
in Benjamin’s considerations.
Stéphane Symons is very well aware of the risks that come with the
attempt to illuminate Benjamin’s ‘conceptual framework’ in which a ‘rec-
onciliation’ of logically exclusive extremities is sought. The effort of finding
a solution to this problem is not made any easier by the fact that Benjamin
never left behind even a mere outline of a possible philosophical system, let
alone a more extensive elaboration of the way these extremities relate to
each other.
It is laudable that Stéphane Symons did not allow these obstacles to
dissuade him from his purpose since his analysis has managed to contribute
to the discussion of Benjamin’s key insights in an illuminating and, unless
my assessment of the immensity of the secondary literature is too naïve,
innovative manner.
The purpose of this analysis is, first of all, to show that the moment of
a ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Benjamin’s term for the shock-like experience
of truth in the midst of relations that are drastically distorted by power
and capitalist economy) bears a most intimate connection with the end of
history, with redemption and the coming of the messiah. This is what now
needs to be clarified.
Benjamin believed an important philosophical view of time, and thus
of history, to be false, that is, the position that understands time as a con-
tinuous succession of multiple instants. This quantitative understanding in
which the governing course of time or history is thought to be devoid of
content is misleading in that time and history can only be understood in a
qualitative way. According to Benjamin the ‘empty’ understanding of time
leads to the idea, central to historicism (Ranke), that all historical periods
are ‘equally close to God.’ However, this view ignores that in some peri-
ods humanity stands closer to redemption than in other ones. Benjamin
xvi preface
believed that in the baroque or in the interwar-period—when on account

of war, dictatorship and exploitation misery was at its peak—the possibility
(and this needs to be illustrated) of salvation or reconciliation was nearer at
hand than in times of so-called prosperity. This brings us to a second point.
At the end of history awaits the possibility (Benjamin is very careful here) of
the prophesied salvation, of redemption or deliverance, and this moment is
imagined as the arrival of the messiah. This moment of redemption is not,
as Benjamin maintains, a moment in history but a moment of history. It
is, as Benjamin emphasizes, not a goal [Ziel] of history. We cannot pursue
it, let alone bring it about, in part because it does not belong to the realm
of history properly speaking. Benjamin knows that we can only express the
nature of redemption through a paradox since it is something that cannot
be thought of as a goal (in history) but only as an end (of history), that is, as
something that brings history to a close. It is important to note that noth-
ing less than Benjamin’s philosophy of history is at stake here and that his
view of the end of history entails a classless society. Only a classless society
excludes the possibility that human beings exploit other human beings and
thereby establish relations of power that allow inequality to persist. Ben-
jamin’s philosophy of history seeks to show that historical materialism and
messianism do not exclude but complete each other.
For this reason, in the first chapter of his work Symons seeks to clarify
the relationship between, on the one hand, the interruption of history in
the sudden flash of the ‘now-time’ [Jetztzeit] (and thus in history) and,
on the other, the moment of redemption (or the end of history). Symons
maintains that the possibility of a failed redemption suddenly lights up
in each moment that ‘rejuvenates’ the past and that it is this absence of
redemption—and nothing as intensely as this—which refers forward to the
possibility of the ultimate redemption that is hoped for at the end of history.
With this entanglement of an instantaneous recognition of the past with the
possibility of ultimate redemption Symons gives a fresh impetus to a new
debate.
What is at stake in the second chapter is an attempt to show that unequal
relations of power are one with the systematic distortion of truth (ideology),
and for this reason we do not have an immediate access to truth. This is
illuminated by Symons with the help of Benjamin’s The Origin of German
Tragic Drama and his interpretation of Kafka. After this he analyzes the
correspondence between Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem, who
defended a decidedly religious reading of Kafka and who (like Theodor
Adorno) noticed a pernicious influence of Brecht in Benjamin’s affinities
with historical materialism. For Benjamin, Kafka was an important writer
preface xvii
because he was convinced that it is impossible to truly know God. Symons

deals extensively with the so-called Kafka-letter to Scholem (1938) that,
according to Symons, is to be placed ‘in the heart of Benjamin’s theory of
modernity’ and with the Kafka-essay (1934). It is in the letter to Scholem
that one can find the famous passage that says: “Kafka’s work is an ellipse;
its widely spaced focal points are defined, on the one hand, by mystical
experience (which is, above all, the experience of tradition) and, on the
other, by the experience of the modern city-dweller.”1
For his thesis that historical materialism and messianism complete each
other and that they are therefore equally important, Symons does not just
find support in this passage but also in more extensive and systematic con-
siderations of Benjamin (for example, in Benjamin’s essay The Storyteller)
and in the Theological-Political Fragment. Benjamin writes there:
If one arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and
another marks the direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of
free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction. But just
as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force
on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature as secular—
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.2
Symons is thereby clearly disagreeing with some contemporary, not inau-
thoritive interpretations (like Uwe Steiner’s) that regard the emphasis on
Benjamin’s affinities with the theological theorem as a possible threat to
the enlightened nature of his thinking.
Adorno retained a distinctly skeptical attitude towards Benjamin’s mes-
sianism as well, but he found a solution that was not merely elegant but
also systematically presented, with the figure of ‘inverse theology’—that is,
a theology that, like the little hunchback in the chess-automaton, keeps out
of sight but secretly pulls the strings.
The third chapter raises the question of how Benjamin’s messianism
relates to his art-historical considerations. Symons analyzes Benjamin’s re-
ception of Riegl and Warburg and then returns to the Kafka-interpretation.
Central to his art-historical views is the thesis that there are no supra-
historical criteria to assess the correctness of the reception and the inter-
pretation of artworks and, moreover, that in this regard economic relations
and conditions of production play an important role. This idea is now, along
with medium-theoretical considerations, reconnected to the underlying
1 SW: 3, 325.
2 SW: 3, 305.
xviii preface
viewpoint that historical materialism and messianism complete each other.

Of decisive importance is the insight that this completion is not dependent
on any historical period in specific but on the way in which the realm of
history as such refers forward to a moment of ultimate redemption.
With this work Symons sets off on a mountain trip in between the sum-
mits of the different interpretations of Benjamin’s oeuvre; interpretations
that, from Scholem to Brecht, Adorno to Habermas, could not have been
more divergent. At the same time, he has explored the metaphorical ciphers
in Benjamin’s text all throughout the systematical and most fundamen-
tal traits of his thinking. The image of two extremities at work within one
ellipse remains open for further interpretation, also and most certainly in
the dynamical image of the two arrows that point in different directions,
but Symons’s contribution to this discussion is helpful for a more precise
clarification.
Willem van Reijen

University of Utrecht
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
introduction
MELANCHOLY, HOPE, REDEMPTION
In The Captive (1923), book five of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust

describes a scene where Marcel, upon entering his bedroom, finds the
sleeping Albertine and, becoming so enthralled by what he sees, cannot
bring himself to turn away from her side. While he sits down beside the
bed and takes in the view of the sleeping body of his mistress, Marcel falls
under the spell of her “attitude so natural that no art could have designed
it”1 and a “spontaneity carried to the second degree.”2 Proust describes
how Albertine’s unconscious state releases her from the complex network
of multiple personalities, mysteries and desires that Marcel continuously
encounters in ordinary existence. Albertine’s sleep surrenders her fully to
Marcel’s gaze “as though … she had become a plant,”3 that is, as if by falling
asleep her body was turned into a natural object that, divested from the
set of meanings that condition her presence in waking life, allows itself
for the first time to be meticulously scrutinized and contemplated. When
Albertine is thus turned into the mere presence of a body, what disappears
from sight may be the mask she wears in daily life or even her beauty pure
and proper, but the loss of this first superficial layer of expression is but
the precondition for the liberation of a second and more profound one.4
Marcel, namely, is so enchanted by the view of his sleeping lover because it
opens up a universe from which he cannot but remain excluded in waking
life—a universe, moreover, in which Albertine has cast off the particular
sense of distance and inaccessibility that marks her in ordinary life. “She was
animated now,” writes Proust, “only by the unconscious life of vegetation,
of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that
belonged more to me. Her personality did not escape at every moment, as
1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 2, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and
Frederick A. Blossom (New York: Random House, 1932), 425–426.

2 Ibid., 427.
3 Ibid., 426.
4 See ibid., 426. “By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped
off, one after another, the different human characters with which she had deceived me ever
since the day when I had first made her acquaintance.”
2 introduction
when we were talking, by the channels of her unacknowledged thoughts

and of her gaze.”5
The same dynamic between nearness and distance and the same sen-
sibility for the unanticipated opening-up of a not formerly encountered
universe within what is most close at hand mark the work of the German
philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). The gaze that
Benjamin shares with Proust is, in fact, the mirror-image of that of the
fetishist: whereas the latter is out to endow dead objects with a life of their
own in order to keep an unwelcome scene from reality at bay,6 Benjamin
and Proust seek precisely to strip away the semblance and the enigmatic
appearance of the lifelike nature of objects and phenomena in order to
bring to expression for the first time a more profound and irreducible ker-
nel of reality. Benjamin’s philosophy of art, for instance, is rooted in the
feeling that works of art need to be met with a movement of ‘mortifica-
tion’; that is, they first need to be released from their splendor, charms, and
‘ephemeral beauty’ before they can be brought to reveal their ‘truth-content’
in a moment of genuine ‘rebirth.’7 His overall epistemological viewpoints are
likewise founded in the belief that fragments of an absolute truth can only
be encountered in the most concrete and ordinary objects and in the insight
that ideas, however transcendent they may be, can only become visible
within immanent phenomena that retain an irrevocable sense of materi-
ality.
The absence of any systematic philosophy underlying Benjamin’s oeu-
vre makes it particularly hard to write a book that starts from his overall
philosophy to develop ideas about a supposedly ‘messianic experience’—
a combination of terms that Benjamin himself, however, does not use—
and the possibility that truth be revealed within history. Borrowing insights
and beliefs, concepts and intuitions from sources as diverse as Jewish mes-
sianism and historical materialism, German Romanticism and surrealism,
Goethe and Brecht, Benjamin’s writings form a meeting point of widely
diverging strands of thought, deriving their continuity most often from an
ongoing attempt to bring together what is otherwise kept strictly apart.
5 Ibid., 426.
6 For the most canonical references see Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the ‘lumi-
nous shine’ of the fetish which is “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the
little boy once believed in and … does not want to give up” in “On Fetishism” in The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XXI, trans. James
Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), 152–153.
7 O, 182.
melancholy, hope, redemption 3
When, in what follows, in a formula borrowed from his own philosophy of

history, Benjamin’s thinking will be characterized as “neither a-theological,
nor immediately theological,” this is to substantiate the claim that adap-
tations of Jewish messianism and historical materialism are not as irrec-
oncilable as they are so often taken to be.8 With this, however, we do not
mean to state that Jewish messianism and historical materialism can easily
be unified as such since, it must be noted, Benjamin’s own interpretations
do sometimes differ in quite substantial ways from both their original and
their canonized conceptions. It is, moreover, still unclear whether Benjamin
ever did study Jewish religion and Marxist philosophy in a serious and sys-
tematic manner and did not derive his own messianic and historical mate-
rialist beliefs and convictions primarily from conversations with friends.9
His capacity to bring Jewish messianic beliefs together in a fruitful constel-
lation with historical materialist ideas is thus not to be taken for a mere
token of his intellectual brilliance but just as much for a sign of his refusal
to reduce the significance of philosophical and theological writings to the
underlying viewpoints of their initial conceivers. As a philosopher but also
as a critic and a translator, Benjamin brought on display an extraordinary
sense of creativity, more often than not dissolving ideas and insights from
their original context and developing them in a manner that was entirely
his own. For this reason, the choice was made to focus, not so much on the
intellectual sources of Benjamin’s thinking, nor on the differences between
those original sources on the one hand and his own interpretation of them
on the other, but to enter into the conceptual framework of his writings and
to explore the stakes, unexpected connections and possible philosophical
consequences of their key insights from within. Benjamin was able to recon-
cile Jewish messianism and historical materialism and even revealed them
to be complementary to each other because his view on the former was
anything but dogmatic and his endorsement of the latter not at all uncriti-
cal.
8 See AP, 471. See also Benjamin’s famous dictum that his “thinking is related to theology
as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however,
nothing of what is written would remain.” (AP, 471).
9 Though a large part of his essays is influenced by either Jewish messianism or historical
materialism, Benjamin did never devote an entire text to a systematic elaboration of his
views on either system of thought, something he did do for German Romanticism, for
example, as well as surrealism, Goethe and Brecht. See also Susan Sontag’s claim that
Benjamin “barely looked into Marx until the later 1930s” in “The Last Intellectual,” The New
York Times, October 12, 1978.
4 introduction
Benjamin’s adherence to insights drawn from Jewish messianism, for

instance, did not revolve around an unshakeable belief in the existence
of God but precisely around a profound sentiment that this world—our
history—lacks an undistorted and immediate grasp on anything divine or
transcendent. Benjamin was neither fanatical in his beliefs nor excessive in
his religious practices since what is at stake for him is not at all the certainty
that salvation will come at some point in the future but the mere possibil-
ity that it might. Essentially rooted in an attempt to develop a concept of
hope of fulfillment in a philosophically substantial way, his thinking cannot
be reduced to the theological presuppositions on which it was built. Ben-
jamin’s framework is not immediately theological since what he took from
Jewish messianism were no articles of faith but mere images of an original
state of bliss and the accompanying longing for its restoration. Jewish reli-
gion, more than Christianity, not only offers a view of how man and God
were once fully reconciled in a paradisiacal universe but also of how the
hope can be maintained that ultimate fulfillment for humankind will come
at a specific moment in time, that is, of why it is to be seen as a public event
that will take place in history. The significance of Jewish concepts and refer-
ences to biblical stories in Benjamin’s work should therefore not be reduced
to the immediately theological context these are derived from: the story of
the Garden of Eden, for instance, is for him neither a religious dogma nor a
purely fictional story but the most suitable way to imagine an original uni-
verse in which man and nature were still fully reconciled with one another.10
Similarly, concepts like ‘messianic power’ and ‘godly violence’ are not to be
reduced to dogmatic terms that are of a purely religious nature: since they
denote, first and foremost, a redeeming force that transcends all things his-
torical and reveals itself only very briefly in the ‘flash’ of now-time they are
deeply marked by the fact that, from the standpoint of history, no genuine
truth can be methodologically aimed at or systematically comprehended.11
10 For a similar viewpoint, see for instance Andrew Benjamin’s statement that Benjamin’s
interpretation of Genesis is “not a straightforwardly theological argument. … [T]he reference

to God has to be read as a reference to the simultaneity of creating, being and naming.
… Theology, for Benjamin, provides the language in which the Absolute’s necessity can be
both posited and identified.” In Andrew Benjamin, “The Absolute as Translatability: Working
Through Walter Benjamin on Language.” Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice
Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 115–116.
11 AP, 463. Though truth is for Benjamin—and this claim will need to be further elabo-
rated—neither ineffable nor merely mystically intuitable, it cannot crystallize into an object
of experience or intention. For an illuminating discussion of these matters, see Eli Fried-
lander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
Similar strategies of interpretation and re-interpretation of Marxist and

neo-Marxist ideas underlie Benjamin’s endorsement of historical material-
ism. If Jewish messianic beliefs provided him with a view of an original state
of paradise and the hope that it will one day be restored, historical mate-
rialism brought him the images of a future state of reconciliation and the
awareness that it has not yet been attained in our age. The theories and
experiments of utopian socialism, for instance, granted him a glimpse on
a radically modified nature that, rather than being dominated by human
beings, corresponds to our needs and desires in a paradisiacal universe.
Likewise, on account of its analysis of society in terms of substructure and
superstructure and its severe diagnosis of the capitalist form of production,
Marxist philosophy was indispensable to Benjamin’s understanding of the
alienated condition of the modern world. With this, however, Benjamin
never considered Marxist ideas, nor any other philosophical framework for
that matter, as a guideline for immediate political action. True redemption,
namely, is in his mind only to be expected from an a-historical force that
interrupts the course of history, bringing our thinking “suddenly … to a stop”
and severely problematizing the instrumental logic and means-end ratio-
nality behind our actions.12 For the same reason, Benjamin releases a certain
strand in Marxist thought from the shallow naïveté of its belief in universal
progress: in his opinion, there is no principle at work within history which
could bring about, on its own account, a fully reconciled humanity and a
totally perfected universe. Benjamin maintains that human beings can and
should allow their social ideas and political actions to be inspired by both
originary and utopian images of a fulfilled world but that these become
mythic and illusionary when they are taken for immediate goals that can
be actively realized within history: the messianic power and godly violence
from which the force to truly redeem our world goes out constitute a wake-
up call for social awareness and revolutionary praxis but they can never be
fully appropriated by humankind.
The place where Benjamin’s Jewish messianism and his historical material-
ism meet is not a philosophical insight in the true sense of the word but
the urgent moral feeling that it is necessary to side with the weak. It is
England: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12, and the claims that “insofar as the presenta-
tion of truth is concerned, there is no element of intention, nothing that allows us to aim
at [a] consistency of meaning” and that “methodical digression reflects, for Benjamin, the
understanding that truth is unapproachable, not that it is ever receding and reaching an end
infinitely deferred.”
12 SW: 4, 396.
6 introduction
this stance that will be explored in the first chapter, focusing on Benjamin’s
philosophy of history. From the standpoint of Benjamin’s historical materi-
alism, the weak party is, of course, the proletariat. If the revolution should
be proclaimed—and this, in Benjamin’s opinion, is not even an issue—it
is in the name of the economically deprived, the politically powerless and
the socially oppressed. It is their material conditions that need to be rad-
ically improved and it is, most obviously, the dream of a classless society
which should continue to inspire our social goals and political action. How-
ever, the weak whose side Benjamin has so clearly chosen do not just wear
the mask of one particular social class. For Benjamin weakness remains,
first and foremost, messianic: if it deserves our continuous attention and
unceasing support, it is not only because it reveals the discontents that mark
modernity or the aberrations that characterize industrial capitalism but, in
the first instance, because it is in its features that comes to expression the
lack of fulfillment of history in toto. If Benjamin’s philosophy is indeed an
attempt to think through a concept of hope of fulfillment, it is developed
from the perspective of those who most obviously lack it because they have
lost access to anything truly absolute or divine.
The second chapter, therefore, places the ‘failure’ to comprehend truth as
an object of knowledge and the subsequent confrontation with the limits of
human understanding at the heart of Benjamin’s interpretation of the work
of Franz Kafka and the Trauerspiel. In his account, these texts are not just
about a fundamental inaccessibility of absolute truth or doctrine [Lehre] but
they become expressions [Ausdrücke] of it: it is by virtue of their capacity to
expose the failure to truly know that is central to the human condition that
these literary texts can be considered messianic.
Building on the concept of allegory that is crucial in this context, the
third chapter focuses on the view of art that underlies this discussion and
brings Benjamin’s project in the vicinity of the iconographic approach of
his near-contemporaries Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and Aby Warburg (1866–
1929). Alongside the views on the truth-content and the material content
of artworks that are laid out in the essays on German Romanticism and
Goethe, an alternative interpretation of the power of art can be found in
Benjamin’s oeuvre. This chapter will look at the way in which he, in certain
places of his writings, does not just regard works of art as expressions of
an idea but rather understands them as concrete instantiations of a neces-
sity on the part of human beings to come to terms with the universe that
surrounds them. In this sense, the concept of a ‘will to allegory’ refers to
the ability to hold out a profound failure to know while neither repressing
it nor modifying it into a more fundamental docta ignorantia. Benjamin’s
messianism begins where the belief in the possibility of a systematic com-

prehension of the absolute ends and it emphasizes the distorted nature of
truth in history in order to draw a paradoxical kind of hope from it. This
distortion [Entstellung] of truth is a feature of history as such but it is expe-
rienced in historically variable ways. For this reason, the third chapter closes
with a discussion of the inherent connection between on the one hand Ben-
jamin’s messianic beliefs about the redemption of history in general and, on
the other, his analyses of specific historical periods.
Sixty years after his death, the complexity of Benjamin’s philosophy has
been matched by an ever-increasing industry of secondary literature. Hav-
ing already exceeded the number of two thousand books and articles fif-
teen years ago, it has become impossible for anyone with a normal set of
brains and a not unlimited amount of time to maintain a clear overview of
everything that has been and is being published.13 The aims of this book,
however, are to understand the relevance and consistency of some of Ben-
jamin’s key insights and not to render a definitive or systematic presentation
of his entire philosophy, nor a summary of all the secondary literature that
can currently be found about this philosophy. For these aims a complete
overview of all the secondary literature did not prove to be as indispens-
able as a close reading of Benjamin’s own texts; the enormous amount of
secondary material, therefore, did not pose an unsurpassable problem.14
It might come as a surprise, however, to find that one of the major names
in twentieth-century philosophy and arguably the most important figure of
the Frankfurt School is all but absent in this book: Theodor Adorno. The
reason for this is first of all that other people, most notably Susan Buck-
Morss and Richard Wolin, have done a tremendous job in outlining both the
personal relationship that once existed between the two philosophers and
the intellectual connection that continues to exist between their works.15 It
13 See Reinhard Markner and Thomas Weber, Literatur über Benjamin: kommentierte
Bibliographie 1983–1992 (Hamburg: Argument, 1993).

14 It seems important to note at the very beginning of this book that two recent texts on
Benjamin have been very influential to my own interpretations: Samuel Weber’s Benjamin’s
-abilities (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008)
and Friedlander’s Walter Benjamin. In my opinion, the conceptual brilliance and philosoph-
ical range of the ideas presented in those two books are such that calling them ‘secondary’
would do them injustice.
15 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1979) and Richard Wolin,
Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1994), esp. 163–212.
8 introduction
is, moreover, my contention that it is not necessary to have a complete and

perfect knowledge of the philosophical insights of Adorno if one seeks to
understand those of Benjamin—a claim, however, that most likely cannot
be reversed.
If the development of a concept of hope of fulfillment is the ultimate aim

of Benjamin’s philosophy, and the moral awareness that it is necessary to
side with the weak its most profound impetus, then melancholy needs to
be taken as its fundamental mood. As Freud explains in his essay Mourn-
ing and Melancholia (1917), the main problem with melancholic people,
who have lost all interest in the surrounding world and cannot keep them-
selves from constantly belittling themselves, is not at all that they might
be wrong. According to Freud, “[i]t would be … fruitless from a scientific
and a therapeutic point of view to contradict a patient who brings these
accusations against his ego”16 and this, quite simply, because in most cases
these self-accusations of melancholiacs are in fact justified: more often than
not, writes Freud, the melancholiac is indeed as “lacking in interest and
incapable of love” and as “petty, egoistic, dishonest [and] lacking in inde-
pendence”17 as he claims to be. The melancholiac, he states, “merely … has
a keener eye for the truth than other people who are not melancholic” and,
therefore, “we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be acces-
sible to a truth of this kind.”18 In other words, what matters most in the
treatment of melancholy is not to prove the patient wrong but to teach him
how to face the truth.
The melancholy that underlies Benjamin’s writings is to be understood
as an expression of the failure to appropriate genuine truth as an object
of knowledge and of the inability to be completely reconciled with the
surrounding world. His entire philosophy can be considered as an attempt
to mourn a truth that is no longer immediately accessible and a happiness
that has been lost. As is the case with all melancholiacs, however, what
matters is not to provide evidence for the falseness of Benjamin’s messianic
beliefs—characteristic to messianic thinkers is precisely that they believe
that no human being can overcome a fundamental failure to know and
comprehend, for once and for all, what is true—but to find a way to cope
with them and to strip them of their most negative effects, that is, the
16 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1978), 246.
17 Ibid., 246.
18 Ibid., 246.
total disappearance of the belief in the possibility of the restoration of truth

and happiness. Benjamin’s genius consists in the fact that he did not just
diagnose this problem (an irreducible lack of fulfillment of history as such)
but also provides us with a counter-strategy that ultimately allowed him
to keep the belief in the possibility of redemption alive within a universe
that is nevertheless encountered as unredeemed. Benjamin understood that
genuine hope of redemption is nourished, not by any human ability to
overcome a basic inaccessibility of the absolute, but by the human capacity
to bring this lack of redemption incessantly to expression. Nowhere in his
oeuvre did he try to repress the feeling that history is still awaiting the
moment of its ultimate fulfillment, nor did he ever allow himself to believe
that, by being aware of this lack of fulfillment, he had already modified it
into some form of docta ignorantia: from the standpoint of his messianism,
truth can never be comprehended as the stable correlate of knowledge nor
presented as the object of any intention.
In the earlier mentioned Mourning and Melancholy, Freud asserts that
the melancholiac has not just lost all interest in the surrounding world
and all confidence in himself. The cause of melancholy is not so much the
withdrawal of the melancholiac’s libido from the world as the fact that he
has confined it to an object that is no longer freely accessible. In Freud’s
opinion, the melancholic condition does not denote a lack of libido as such
but first and foremost the inability to release one’s libido from a loved
one who has turned away from the self. The ultimate relevance of Freud’s
essay, therefore, is that it reveals melancholy as a sign of a previous love-
relationship that has not yet been fully given up and, moreover, as the
only way to go on loving an object that is nevertheless perceived as lost.
In other words, if the melancholiac does indeed “ha[ve] a keener eye for the
truth than other people who are not melancholic,”19 this might be because
he alone understands that loss is not incompatible with love and that the
inapproachability of the object of one’s affection does not necessarily entail
the disruption of one’s attachment to it.
It is in this way that Benjamin allows hope for redemption to subsist in
an otherwise unredeemed universe. Characteristic to his thinking is that it
manages to hold on to the belief in the possibility of divine salvation while it
just as well emphasizes that “nothing that is historical can relate itself, from
its own ground, to anything messianic.”20 For Benjamin, loss and love are
19 Ibid., 246.
20 SW: 3, 305.
10 introduction
not at all opposed to one another but they have, on the contrary, become
one. His philosophy is rooted in the awareness that the feeling of love for
an object need not necessarily disappear when this object itself ceases to
be immediately accessible. For him, moreover, the expression of the loss of
the loved object is capable of turning this feeling of love into something
that cannot any longer be filled and, in this manner precisely, maintains
itself. Striking a fragile balance between melancholy and hope, Benjamin
never turned away from the absence of any systematic truth-revelation in
our world nor from our inability to truly grasp anything divine from the
standpoint of history because he understood that a genuine attachment
to and a continuous longing for transcendence never did presuppose the
completeness of its presence.
In a short autobiographical fragment Agesilaus Santander (1933), Ben-
jamin denotes the ‘forces of life’ [Lebenskräfte] that are ‘bound together’ in
his person as a ‘secret name’ that should be “protected against outsiders.”21
These ‘forces of life’ are invoked as angels that, as the Kabbalah relates, are
created by God at every instant, not to protect and guard the human beings
they name but, rather, “to appear before (God’s) throne for a moment and
sing His praises … before they return to the void.”22 In this text, Benjamin
claims to have been able to turn the activity of this secret alter ego and
dark companion back against itself and thus to have succeeded in exploit-
ing it for his own use. He maintains that the very manner in which his angel
wanted to trouble him, that is, by not immediately granting him his wishes
and satisfying his desires, has become beneficial to him: “He [the angel]
may have been unaware that … he brought out the strength of the man
against whom he was proceeding—namely his ability to wait.”23 This ‘ability
21SW: 2, 714; GS: VI, 522.

22SW: 2, 714.
23 SW: 2, 715. The original phrasing is: “Er wußte vielleicht nicht, daß sich die Stärke
dessen, den er so treffen wollte, derart am besten zeigen konnte: nämlich wartend.” (GS:
VI, 522). The structure of this experience, and the way in which one is sometimes capable
of modifying reactive forces into active ones by using the very strategies that are developed
to be harmful as strategies of resistance, underlie Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s The Truth
about Sancho Panza. See, for example, the following phrase quoted by Benjamin: “Without
ever boasting of it, Sancho Panza succeeded over the years, by supplying a lot of romances of
chivalry and adventure for the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon,
whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon freely performed the maddest
exploits—which, however, lacking a preordained object, which Sancho Panza himself was
supposed to have been, did no one any harm.” (Kafka quoted in SW: 2, 815–816) See also the
final statement of the Kafka-essay that “Sancho Panza, a sedate fool and a clumsy assistant,
sent his rider on ahead; Bucephalus outlived his. Whether it is a man or a horse is no longer
to wait’ and “the fact that [Benjamin] was born under the sign of Saturn—
the planet of the slowest revolution, the star of hesitation and delay” do
constitute Benjamin’s particular strength and the most fundamental fea-
tures of his philosophical intuition.24 His thinking is motivated by the idea
that the absolute cannot yet be fully appropriated but that an active waiting
for its revelation and a presence of mind [Aufmerksamkeit, Geistesgegen-
wart] might nevertheless make it possible to already discover fragments of
something divine and prefigurations of fulfillment within our most imme-
diate surroundings. It is for this reason that Benjamin’s gaze has at all times
opposed the fetishist’s attempt to repress absence: in his writings he seeks
to preserve absence as such and even cherishes it because he understands
that it is only through a continuous openness and a profound attentiveness
that a glimpse might be caught of the redemption that is still to come. The
fetishist’s ‘I know but still …’ (‘Je sais bien mais quand même …’) has here
become ‘I do not know, and thus maybe …’ (‘Je ne sais pas et alors peut-être
…’). The mourning of and longing for a paradisiacal condition that history
has never even truly experienced and the waiting for its ultimate restora-
tion come together in a heightened awareness of the present. For Benjamin,
it is precisely from what is most nearby that a sudden truth-revelation can
go out like his secret angel who “looks him steadily in the eye, for a long
time, and then retreats—in a series of spasms, but inexorably [dann weicht
er stoßweis, aber unerbittlich zurück]” because he feels that the time of his
ultimate coming has not yet arrived.25
so important, if only the burden is taken off the back.” (SW: 2, 816) For a beautiful analysis of
this reading of Don Quixote, see Samuel Weber, “Violence and Gesture: Agamben Reading
Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes ….” Benjamin’s -abilities, 195–210.
24 SW: 2, 715.
25 SW: 2, 715; GS: VI, 523.
chapter one
BENJAMIN’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY:

THE MESSIANIC IS NOW
Introduction
Though initially meant to remain unpublished, Walter Benjamin’s 1939/1940

essay On the Concept of History is rightly considered to be one of the most
crucial texts he put down on paper. This is to a large extent due to the
conceptualization of a profound tension that marks his overall philoso-
phy, that is, the relation between his views on historical materialism and
his theological beliefs. In the first lines of the essay, Benjamin introduces
the far-reaching claim that “‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time”
and that it can “easily be a match for anyone” on the condition that it
“enlists the services of theology.”1 While famously comparing philosophy to
a chess-automaton that has the capacity to defeat all adversaries because a
little hunchback (theology) is kept hidden from sight and secretly pulls the
strings of a lifeless puppet (historical materialism), he sets out the marks of
a philosophy that readily accepts being influenced by both neo-Marxist and
Jewish messianic ways of thinking.
Benjamin’s attempt to reconcile these two fields of thought, however,
was never considered to be fully convincing by two of his most notorious
intellectual compagnons de route, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and Gershom
Scholem (1897–1982). The reasons why both thinkers have remained skep-
tical about Benjamin’s singular blend of historical materialism and Jewish
messianism seem graspable for even a mind that is not vexed in all the sub-
tleties of both philosophical and theological systems of thought. While the
former’s manner of endorsing materialism made him suspicious of religion
as such, the latter clung so firmly to his Jewish beliefs that categories of polit-
ical thought were bound to appear antithetical to theological and absolute
truths.2
1 SW: 4, 389.
2 See, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal. Erster Band 1938 bis 1942, ed. Werner
Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1974), 14: “[With Benjamin everything is] [m]ys-
ticism in spite of an anti-mystical attitude. In such a form is the materialist conception of
14 chapter one
Benjamin’s own attempts to overcome this double narrow-mindedness

originate in the feeling, perhaps nowhere described as clearly and as unam-
biguously as in the second thesis on the philosophy of history, that “we
have been endowed with a weak messianic power [schwache messianische
Kraft].”3 It is this concept of a ‘weak messianic power’ that renders com-
prehensible why he does not conceive of historical materialism and Jewish
messianism as intellectual alternatives that are mutually exclusive. In Ben-
jamin’s mind, hope, whether it is theological, political or both at the same
time, is too important to be made wholly dependent on either a social-
economic substructure that invisibly creeps up beneath our existence as
workers or a transcendent realm that remains at all times beyond our human
field of perception. The concept of a ‘weak messianic power,’ rather, elab-
orates on a force that both resides within the universe that surrounds us
and refers to what transcends it and thus allows Benjamin to overcome the
cheap alternatives of ‘beneath’ and ‘beyond.’ The messianic is in the first
instance the realm of an ‘in-between’ and of a ‘both-at-the-same-time,’ that
brings together ‘beneath’ and ‘beyond,’ immanence and transcendence in
a point where they increase each other’s utmost significance. For this rea-
son, Benjamin only endorses historical materialism to the extent that it
does not stop short at an exploration of the oppression of the proletariat
per se and, instead, discovers its suffering and weakness as elements of a
messianic constellation that points towards a Jenseits. Conversely, Jewish
messianism can in Benjamin’s mind be of interest only when it understands
that a trace of the absolute can be perceived from within history, while
the divine realm pure and proper is radically separated from the world in
which we live. Only through an exploration of this ‘weak messianic power’
hence, can be brought to the fore how high the stakes of Benjamin’s philos-
ophy really are. It illustrates that he did not only work towards a reconcili-
ation between political thought and theology—historical materialism and
Jewish messianism—but also towards a way of thinking that discovers the
history adapted! It is rather appalling” (my translation) and Gershom Scholem, Walter Ben-
jamin, The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 169:
“[Benjamin’s] later work proved that he was incapable of making a decision between meta-
physics and materialism (as he conceived of the latter). Benjamin’s attitude toward dialec-
tical materialism as a heuristic principle rather than as a dogma (his position from 1931 on)
left the way clear for the continuing development of a metaphysical, intellectual wellspring
that had little, and frequently enough nothing, to do with the categories of materialism. In
keeping with this there was also his enduring attachment to Jewish categories, which may
be discerned in his writings to the end.”
3 SW: 4, 390; GS: I-2, 694.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 15
profane and the divine—the historical and the a-historical—as realms that
are reciprocally intensifying instead of antithetical to each other. Michael
Löwy is right in calling such an interpretation a ‘fourth approach,’ that is, an
alternative to what he calls the ‘materialist school’ the ‘theological school’
and the ‘school of contradiction.’4 Löwy rightfully describes the relation
between Benjamin’s political views and his religious beliefs as one of ‘com-
municating vessels,’ ‘reciprocal reversibility’ and ‘mutual translation.’5 The
first part of this chapter retraces some of the basic characteristics of the
concept of ‘weak messianic power’ as it was introduced in On the Concept
of History. The second part will go beyond the context of that essay and
explores the notion of the messianic from the perspective of some of Ben-
jamin’s other texts.
1. The Notion of ‘Weak Messianic Power’

in On the Concept of History
In On the Concept of History, the notion of ‘messianic power’ is linked to a

specific view on time. In the fifth thesis, it is analyzed from the point of view
of the moment in which it becomes manifest: “The true image of the past
flits by [huscht vorbei]. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes
up [aufblitzt] at the moment of its recognizability [im Augenblick seiner
Erkennbarkeit], and is never seen again.”6 Messianic power is what makes
visible an “irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in
any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.”7 It is
4 Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London, New
York: Verso, 2005), 20.

5 Ibid., 68. Elsewhere in Löwy’s book, however, the analyses of Benjamin’s supposed
active messianism (“What we must emphasize, first of all, is that it is not a matter of awaiting
the Messiah … but of bringing about his coming. … Benjamin belongs to the dissident
tradition of those who were known of the dohakei haketz, those who ‘hasten the end of
time.’ ” in ibid., 104) are at odds with my own reading of Benjamin’s messianism as, along
with the discovery of the revolutionary kairos, a confrontation with a structural inadequacy
of human acting and thinking (see below). For the stakes of this discussion see, for example,
Anson Rabinbach’s claim that “[t]he chasm that separates the historical quotidian from
redemption is too wide to be bridged by determined action or profane events” and his
references to a “dilemma in the ethics of Messianism between the idea of liberation and
the absolute superfluity of any action that is often difficult to sustain.” in Anson Rabinbach,
“Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish
Messianism.” New German Critique 34 (1985), 87.
6 SW: 4, 390; GS: I-2, 695.
7 SW: 4, 391.
16 chapter one
thus characterized as the revelation, first, that a moment from the past has
somehow lived on and, second, that this moment, for that reason precisely,
can be brought back to and by the present. Hence Benjamin’s specification
of the task of the chronicler to “act in accord with the following truth:
nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.”8 In
his theses lies contained, on the eve of the Second World War, a virulent
diagnosis of the inadequacy of the belief in universal progress, which, in his
words, “bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims.”9 The belief
in universal progress, that is, as a progress not simply of the capacities and
knowledge of human beings but of history and mankind as such cannot
according to Benjamin “be sundered from the concept of its progression
through a homogeneous, empty time.”10 Irresistibly drawn to the future
while keeping their backs firmly turned to what has gone by, those people
who believe in infinite progress remain blind to the possibility that certain
events from the past can somehow return to the present. By contrast, the
true historian, that is, the historical materialist, understands history to be
“the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time,
but time filled full by now-time [von Jetztzeit erfüllte].”11 This ‘now-time’ is
the true abode of messianic power.
The concept of ‘messianic power’ is to be analyzed from the point of view
of the moment of its revelation because of the following reason: this moment
of the messianic ‘now’ is not merely a temporal unit but a ‘constellation.’
It is not just a specific instance in history but a ‘force field’ in which the
continuous flow of time is interrupted by a power that is irreducible to it.
It is for these moments that the historical materialist is to remain perma-
nently on the lookout. His task is to replace the ideal of an empty chrono-
logy with the revenant of a past that is renewed: “The historical materialist
cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but
in which time takes a stand [einsteht] and has come to a standstill.”12 The
messianic moment does away with the idea that time proceeds without
interruption from past to present and thus onwards to the future. Annihilat-
ing the experience of a linear time that can be grasped as one homogenous
whole, it makes manifest that there is no unified logos that underlies the
historical realm. Comprehending and affirming this lack of historical unity,
8 SW: 4, 390.
9 SW: 4, 394.
10 SW: 4, 395.
11 SW: 4, 395; GS: I-2, 701.
12 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 702.
the historical materialist “takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific

era out of the homogeneous course of history.”13
In Benjamin’s mind, a genuine historian’s attention is at all times to be
directed toward a past that ceases to be passed and, by way of its coming
back to the present, interrupts the homogeneous flow of time. This ‘now,’
hence, is at the same time the locus of the presence of the messianic power
and the manner in which it represents itself. The moment that is ‘filled full
by now-time’ refers both to where the messianic power is recognized and,
as the brief suspension of the continuum of history, to how it is recognized:
“Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest
[Stillstellung] as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop [einhält] in a
constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by
which thinking is crystallized as a monad.”14 For this reason, the messianic
‘now’ can be understood as a displacement. Its flashing up ‘at the moment of
its recognizability’ and ‘never [being] seen again’ is as much a disappearance
as an appearance.15 The messianic revenant disrupts the imagined conti-
nuity between past and present while divesting the latter of all sense of
unity and affecting it in such a way that it becomes non-anticipatable to
our actions and knowledge. It is, as Benjamin writes, an ‘arrest of happen-
ing’ [Stillstellung des Geschehens] in the sense that the term ‘happening’ can
be read as both a subjective and an objective genitive at the same time: the
messianic ‘now’ is itself a ‘happening’ or event too and precisely so because
it interrupts the human activity and suspends our commonly held beliefs.16
The messianic ‘becoming-now’ of a moment from the past is marked by
the same structure as a psychic symptom: it, too, is a sign of the force with
which the past comes back to the present and deprives it of its character as
something ordinary and predictable. The sentence that was partially quoted
above can therefore be completed with a shifted emphasis: “[L]ike every
generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic
power, a power on which the past has a claim.”17 The messianic is never ours
to claim though it is to us that its power has been bequeathed. It always
and necessarily comes together with a token of the non-containable. Mes-
sianic power cannot but go accompanied by a shock: on account of the past’s
renewal in the present, the unity of the latter becomes shattered while the
13 SW: 4, 396.
14 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 702–703.
15 SW: 4, 390.
16 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 703.
17 SW: 4, 390 (my emphasis).
18 chapter one
former reveals itself as a power that remains beyond the grasp of all human
categories. The becoming-now of the past does not allow for a firmer grasp
or comprehension of the meaning of what has taken place: it does not teach
us a lesson about history but it turns it into a power that becomes active in
the present and destabilizes the unity of our sphere of thinking and acting.
For this reason the messianic moment is—like a symptom—to be consid-
ered as a displacement but—unlike a symptom—not as a displacement of
a singular moment in time but as a displacement of time as such. In its ces-
sation of ‘the movement of thoughts’ and its ‘arrest of happening’ it does not
merely involve a specific historical instant from the past which is brought
back to the present, but it is a brief suspension of the homogeneous course
of history in its totality. Thus Benjamin is able to write in the more politi-
cal context of his fifteenth thesis that “[w]hat characterizes revolutionary
classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to
make the continuum of history explode [aufzusprengen].”18 The power of
the messianic is in his mind no simple translation of certain moments of
the past to the present but a dislocation of the historical realm as such
which empties out the contexts of meaning and the instrumental rational-
ity that help guide our beliefs and orient our actions. Its Nachträglichkeit
(deferred action) does not stem from a specific event from the past that was
not adequately responded to (trauma) but it affects the entire realm of his-
tory, thereby revealing current categories to be inadequate and to require
an urgent re-thinking. In Benjamin’s view, the messianic makes manifest
not a delayed response to an event from the past but a profound shortcom-
ing of our normal intentional behavior in general. It has confined us not just
to a moment experienced in delay but, as Scholem will later put it, to a “life
lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can
be irrevocably accomplished.”19
18SW: 4, 395; GS: I-2, 701.

19Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” The
Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, trans. Michael A. Meyer
(New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 35. It is important to note at this stage that the awareness
of a fundamental deferment and displacement of human thinking and acting does not at all
contradict Benjamin’s belief in the possibility of genuine historical understanding or political
action. As we will see in the remainder of this chapter, it is the very idea that the truth
about the past, that is, its renewal as a historical force in the present, is always in danger
of disappearing irretrievably which endows the historian with a task of utmost urgency. In
other words, it is precisely because our ordinary assumptions and behavior are believed to
be ‘out of joint’ that authentic historical understanding will be associated with an ability to
rescue or redeem.
2. Redemption and ‘Rejuvenation’ of the Past
“The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table.”20
2.1. Introduction
Benjamin makes a case for the existence of a past that cannot be reduced
to the present it has been: “Articulating the past historically does not mean
recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ [<wie es denn eigentlich gewesen ist>]”21
This difference between a ‘pure’ past and its having-been-present is in his
mind not the token of the deficit of historiography but that of its authentic-
ity. According to Benjamin, the historiographer needs to let go of the aim
to depict as accurately as possible what it is exactly that has occurred in the
past:
Addressing himself to the historian who wishes to relive an era, Fustel de
Coulanges [a French, reactionary, positivist historian] recommends that he
blot out everything he knows about the later course of history. There is no
better way of characterizing the method which historical materialism has
broken with.22
The genuine historical attitude picks up where all empathy [Einfühlung]
ends.23 Unlike historicism, which strives to bracket the present situation
in order to visit a supposedly uncontaminated past and ‘become one’ with
it, historical materialism turns to what has gone by precisely because it
understands that it cannot be fully recovered or made whole again. Rather
than seeking immediate accessibility to the past by (re)collecting as many
facts as possible and striving to ‘enter into it’ or ‘become one with it,’ it
should pay heed to the very distance that separates it from the present. “[N]o
state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical,”
writes Benjamin. “It became historical posthumously, as it were through
events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.”24 A genuine
historical attitude is thus not motivated by the desire for empty, that is,
factual knowledge but it, instead, strives for a true understanding of a
certain period: “Historicism offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical
20 AP, 481.
21 SW: 4, 391; GS: I-2, 695.
22 SW: 4, 391.
23 For a very interesting discussion of the concept of empathy in the context of Benjamin’s
philosophy of history, see Löwy, Fire Alarm, 46–57.

20 chapter one
materialism supplies a unique experience with the past.”25 The historicist’s

quest for the ‘eternal’ image of the past starts from the idea that what
belongs to history cannot be changed anymore, thus “deadening the past,
by making every moment of it similarly powerless to affect the present.”26
He thereby does not understand that a genuine experience of the past
is an experience with the past, marking an opportunity for change and
renewal.
The ‘founding concept’ of historical materialism is therefore in Ben-
jamin’s view “not progress but actualization.”27 This denotes a conviction
that, having cast aside the idle hope to conjure up the past ‘the way it really
was,’ the historian should remain directed to its transformation. Through its
‘actualization,’ the past is not so much re-constructed as constructed anew.
Benjamin’s philosophy of history sets up a structure for a renewal of what
was never even present in the first place or, in other words, for a becoming-
now of what was thought to have already fully passed. In this way, as Fried-
lander writes,
one might say that Benjamin brings together the two senses of ‘realizing’—
realizing as making something real or actual on the one hand and recognizing
or seeing something clearly on the other. This is strikingly put by emphasizing
how knowledge of a historical object is not ‘knowledge about’ it but actually
part of being an object itself.28
Benjamin encounters the model of such an authentic understanding of the
past in both Aby Warburg’s notion of ‘survival’ or ‘afterlife’ [Nachleben]29
and Proust’s monumental (understood in the double meaning of that term)
novel Remembrance of Things Past (1909–1922). The historiographer who
seeks to understand the collective past should follow the lead of a novelist
who strives to recapture an individual one. In his essay On the Image of
Proust (1929) Benjamin describes Proust’s notion of involuntary memory as
the most perfect illustration of a past that innovates itself by coming back
to the present: it is “the rejuvenating force [verjüngenden Kraft] which is
a match for the inexorable process of aging. … [The] very concentration,
25 SW: 4, 396.
26 Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 164. See also Benjamin’s claim that the “true method of
making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their
space).” (AP, 206).
27 AP, 460.
28 Ibid., 63.
29 See the statement that “Historical ‘understanding’ is to be grasped, in principle, as an
afterlife of that which is understood.” (AP, 406).

in which things that normally just fade and slumber are consumed in a
flash, is called rejuvenation [Verjüngung].”30 It reflects the past not in a
mere resemblance but “in the dewy fresh ‘instant’.”31 It is in this sense that
Benjamin starts from the awareness that a genuine renewal of the past
only comes forth from what was never truly present in the first place. The
‘rejuvenation’ of the past is for Proust not a mere return of what had been
forgotten but a first surfacing of what has never been lived before:
[Proust] is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true
dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us—this and
nothing else. The wrinkles and creases in our faces are the registration of the
great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not
home.32
Proust’s method, therefore, is termed by Benjamin an “actualization, not [a]
reflection.”33 The revenant does not repeat a moment from the past but it
allows it to be expressed for the first time.
2.2. The Dialectical Image and Its Ethical-Political Relevance

The clearest conceptualization of this ‘becoming-present’ of the past is
rendered in Convolute N (On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress)
of Benjamin’s unfinished chef d’œuvre The Arcades Project (1927–1940). It is
here that Benjamin gives flesh to his belief that the true historian should
bring back the past by way of the acknowledgment that it has hitherto not
truly been present. His task is
to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding—a philosophic structure—in order
to draw the most vital aspects of the past into his net. But just as the mag-
nificent vistas of the city provided by the new construction in iron … for a
long time were reserved exclusively for the workers and engineers, so too the
philosopher who wishes here to garner fresh perspectives must be someone
immune to vertigo—an independent and, if need be, solitary worker.34
Throughout Convolute N, it is stressed that such a scaffolding does not serve
to rebuild the past but to extract from it the irreducibly new:
It is … of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to [the] initially
excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of
30 SW: 2, 244; GS: II-1, 320.

31 SW: 2, 244.
32 SW: 2, 244–245.
33 SW: 2, 244.
34 AP, 459.
22 chapter one
vision [Verschiebung des Gesichtswinkels] (but not of the criteria!), a positive

and a different element emerges anew [zu Tage tritt] in it too—something
different from that previously signified.35
The fragments of text that surround these dense remarks make clear that
Benjamin only considers the past to be fully ‘actualized’ or ‘awakened’ when
its renewal takes place in the form of an image [bildlich]. The ‘positive’
and ‘different’ element which is recognized in the past is its ‘imagistic’
nature, that is, its sudden emergence as something innovated and changed
from within, thus irreducible to the ‘fact’ that it is supposed to have been.
The negative component that should be left behind, on the other hand, is
precisely the ideal to determine the past ‘the way it really was.’
The idea that the becoming-present of the past is tantamount to its
becoming-image is conceptualized in Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical
image.’ This ‘dialectical image’ serves as a further exploration of what, in
the theses on the philosophy of history, was termed the ‘time filled full
by now-time’36 (messianic now) and is in The Arcades Project described as
follows:
It is not that what is past [das Vergangene] casts its light on what is present
[das Gegenwärtige], or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image
is that wherein what has been [das Gewesene] comes together in a flash
[blitzhaft] with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is
dialectics at a standstill [Dialektik Im Stillstand]. For while the relation of the
present to the past is purely temporal [rein zeitliche], the relation of what-has-
been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlicher].37
It is, hence, as a dialectical image that the past is perceived both as different
from ‘the present it has been’ and as truly renewed. The dialectical image
entails nothing less than the discovery of the old as a means to present
the ‘new’: it is not so much a re-presentation of what has long passed as a
renewed presentation of what was never really present before.38 In this way,
Benjamin’s philosophy of history is built on the intimate relation between
the concept of singularity and that of repetition. Samuel Weber describes it
as follows (in the context of an analysis of Benjamin’s Kafka-essay): “[T]he
singular (as distinct from the individual) can only appear—and indeed is
35 AP, 459; GS: V-1, 573 (translation modified).

36 SW: 4, 395.
37 AP, 463; GS: V-1, 578.
38 See also Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 62: “Far from being merely a matter of contem-
plation, the recognition of the image is at the same time the manifestation of a force in history
(or of history as a force).”
only conceivable—as the vestigial or spectral after-effect of a repetition, as

that which does not disappear in the reproduction of the identical and yet
which by itself is ‘nothing at all’” and mentions
the transformation of repetition from a process aimed at reproducing iden-
tity to one that allows for the aporetical resurgence of the singular: aporeti-
cal, because the singular as such is not identically repeatable, reproducible,
unique—but its uniqueness is also not separable from a certain repetition.
Such repetition ‘produces’ the uniquenesss of the unrepeatable in the form of
those unexpected, often uncontrolled movements that Benjamin designates
as gestures. [Gebärde, Gestus]39
Dialectical images are such singularities and “unexpected, often uncon-
trolled movements” in that they denote a past that, in the view of Deleuze,
“preserves itself in itself” [se conserve en soi]40 and therefore, from his Niet-
zschean perspective, has retained the capacity to become an active force
within the present.41 It is the temporality that Derrida sees at work in the
‘specter’ [fantôme, spectre], that is, a “[r]epetition and first time, but also
repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it
also a last time.”42 It is dialectical because, in it, the past shows itself as having
preserved itself in the present but it is irreducibly imagistic (‘figural’ [bild-
haft]) because it is at the same time seen as innovated and transformed from
within.
39 Weber, “Violence and Gesture. Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading
Cervantes …” Benjamin’s -abilities, 203.

40 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000),
112. See also Deleuze’s discussion of the “being-in-itself of the past” [l’être en soi du passé] in
Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), for example, p. 72.
41 See Deleuze’s interpretation of the relation between Nietzsche’s views on time, the
eternal return and the active nature of forces in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 48: “The eternal return is … an
answer to the problem of passage [of time]. And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the
return of something that is, that is ‘one’ or the ‘same’. We misinterpret the expression ‘eternal
return’ if we understand it as ‘return of the same’. … It is not some one thing which returns
but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In
other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns
but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs.” On the becoming-active
of the past, on account of the difference that is produced by its mere coming-back to the
present, see ibid., 71: “[T]he eternal return produces becoming-active. … However far they
go, however dee the becoming-reactive of forces, reactive forces will not return. … In and
through the eternal return negation as a quality of the will to power transmutes itself into
affirmation, it becomes an affirmation of negation itself, it becomes a power of affirming, an
affirmative power.”
42 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 10.
24 chapter one
The understanding of the past that is delivered by a genuinely historical

image comes under the form of a new stage of ‘legibility’ [Lesbarkeit]. The
dialectical image or, in extension, the messianic now, opens up a past that
had hitherto remained sealed: “[E]ach ‘now’ is the now of a particular recog-
nizability.”43 … “What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in
the now of its recognizability.”44 This new ‘legibility’ can in the first instance
be considered from an ethical-political point of view. The moment in which
the past comes back to the present as an image, that is to say, is for Ben-
jamin nothing less than the true momentum of revolution: “The historical
materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon
a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers—man
enough to blast open the continuum of history.”45 For this reason, Convo-
lute N of The Arcades Project stresses that the dialectical image should not
only be considered as a token of a past that is not fully closed off from
what succeeded it but also as something that can only be brought to the
surface at a particular moment in the present. “What distinguishes images
from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology,” writes Benjamin, “is their historical
index [historische Index der Bilder] … [This] historical index of the images
not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that
they attain to legibility only at a particular time.”46 The dialectical image is
not an a-temporal essence that seeks to enclose the past in the ‘once and for
all’ that characterizes the ideal of absolute knowledge but it remains above
all a historical image. It does not merely condition the unexpected return
of a particular moment in time but it is, itself, just as well bound up with a
particular moment in time. The ‘historical index’ that Benjamin sees as an
essential part of the dialectical image is thus just as much characteristic to
what brings back as to what is being brought back: the dialectical image is
a ‘now’ not only because it allows the resurfacing of a ‘pure’ past but also
because this becoming-present can only occur at a particular instance. For
this reason, as Michael Jennings writes, the dialectical image
in which a moment from the past collides with a moment in the present his-
torical context of the reader, has a reciprocal effect. Not only does it provide
an essential revelation of the true historical character of the past [das Gewe-
sene], but more importantly, it reveals to the reader the only possible accurate
understanding of the present [Jetzt]. The lost forms upon which Benjamin
43 AP, 463.
44 AP, 473.
45 SW: 4, 396.
46 AP, 462; GS: V-1, 577.
concentrated held for him the key to a ‘not yet conscious knowledge of the
past [das Gewesene]’ without which a full consciousness of certain crucial fea-
tures of the present moment is unattainable.47
It is in this sense that the concepts of messianic now and dialectical image
cast light on Benjamin’s dealings with historical materialism. They serve
to both criticize the Marxist philosophy of history and save some of its
most important categories. Benjamin’s philosophy of history constitutes, as
Michael Löwy puts it, “a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation:
taking its inspiration from Marxist and messianic sources, it uses nostalgia
for the past and a revolutionary method for the critique of the present”48 and
can therefore be termed “Gothic”49 or “heretical, idiosyncratic, uncategoriz-
able.”50 Insofar as classic Marxism, primarily on account of its dialectical
view on history, was still dependent on naïve beliefs in absolute knowledge
and universal teleology it does not survive Benjamin’s vehement criticism
of the ‘dogmatic claims’ of the modern myth of progress.51 No doubt, the
famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920), which
Benjamin acquired in 1921, remains the strongest illustration of the intrin-
sic link he perceived between the modern belief in progress on the one
hand and a past filled with misery or a “tradition of the oppressed” [Tra-
dition der Unterdrückten] on the other.52 Angelus Novus depicts in his view
the angel of history who is driven “irresistibly into the future” by “a storm …
blowing from Paradise … so strong that the angel can no longer close [his
wings].”53 This storm which both expels the angel from Paradise and propels
47 Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 36.

48 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 2.
49 Ibid., 11.
50 Ibid., 37.
51 SW: 4, 394. See for instance Marx and Engels’s appeal to “the universal development of
productive forces” (my emphasis) and the “world-historical” existence of the proletariat and
communism in The German Ideology (1845–1846) and the claim there that “[c]ommunism is
… not … an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real
movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement
result from the now existing premise” (in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German
Ideology, Collected Works. Volume 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 49). For another
example of what, from Benjamin’s perspective, can only be a dogmatic and naïve statement,
see the claim that the “fall [of the bourgeoisie] and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.”
Collected Works. Volume 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 496 (my emphasis).
52 SW 4: 392; GS: I-2, 697.
53 SW: 4, 392.
26 chapter one
him into the future, prevents him to redeem the past that piles up before
him like “debris … grow[ing] toward the sky.”54 “Where a chain of events
appears before us,” writes Benjamin, “he [that is, the angel] sees one single
catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his
feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed.”55 Benjamin’s own endorsement of historical material-
ism thus burns all bridges with the belief in universal progress (“What we
call progress is this storm.”) and a teleological course of history, regardless
of whether it is Marxist in nature or not.56 In this context, he writes about a
“vulgar Marxist-conception of the nature of labor” that “recognizes only the
progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society” and hence
“already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism.”57
Likewise, his harsh criticism of social democracy revolves around its blind
endorsement of the modern dream of progress:
The Social Democrats preferred to cast the working class in the role of a
redeemer of future generations [Erlöserin künftiger Generationen], in this
way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This indoctrination made the
working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are
nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of
liberated grandchildren.58
Benjamin’s own historical materialism starts from the idea that the spirit of
a revolution only remains uncontaminated by illusory beliefs when it directs
a distinct presence of mind towards what happened in the past. As such, his
political philosophy is at all times determined by his philosophy of history.
Both are steeped in the awareness that the past needs to be innovated and
brought to a renewed ‘legibility’ in and by the present. What Benjamin
has in mind with this ‘renewed legibility’ is, on the ethical-political level,
recognition of the suffering of the past by the generations that came after
54 SW: 4, 392.
55 SW: 4, 392.
56 SW: 4, 392.
57 SW: 4, 393. For a similar analysis of the “gaping discrepancy between the gigantic
means of technology and the miniscule moral illumination it affords” (SW: 2, 312), see
Benjamin’s Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays ‘War and Warriors’, edited
by Ernst Jünger (1930) and Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian (1937) (“Technology … is
obviously not a purely scientific development. It is at the same time a historical one. … In the
development of technology, [positivism] was able to see only the progress of natural science,
not the concomitant retrogression of society. … The [energies that technology develops]
advance the technology of war and its propagandistic preparation.” (SW: 3, 266)).
58 SW: 4, 394; GS: I-2, 700.
it. Revolutionary beliefs should in his mind not be built on a desire to take
on a leading role in the future. It is, rather, the acknowledgment of the need
to side with those who have been oppressed in the past which allows to
cherish hopes for the present that are untouched by the myth of universal
progress:
The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself.
Marx presents it as the last enslaved class—the avenger that completes [zu
Ende führt] the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrod-
den [im Namen von Generationen Geschlagener].59
Class struggle … is a fight for the crude and material things without which
no refined and spiritual things could exist. … [These refined and spiritual
things] are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humor, cunning and
fortitude, and have effects that reach far back into the past. They constantly
call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.60
For this reason, no revolutionary awareness can do without a move away
from historicism. The ideal of the latter to bring back history ‘the way
it really was’ is not at all an objective one. What creeps up beneath an
empathic attitude towards the past is a hidden alliance with the winners
that preside over it. Referring to the melancholic sadness of who fails to
recognize the true rejuvenation of the past that is engendered in the mes-
sianic ‘now,’ Benjamin writes that “[its] nature … becomes clearer if we ask:
With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable:
with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors.”61 For Ben-
jamin, the place where history can be perceived as a continuous whole is
only reached by who is willing to take side with the forces that rule. It is for
this reason that his demand for the necessity to “blast open the continuum
of history” can be considered as a plea to render a voice to those who were
made mute by the course of it.62 It is a disruption of what he calls “the tri-
umphal procession in which [w]hoever has emerged victorious participates
to this day … [and] [in which] current rulers step over those who are lying
prostrate.”63 The historical materialist, by contrast, succeeds in standing by
the “tradition of the oppressed” that “brush[es] history against the grain”
and thus turns it into the foundation of hope.64 His recognition of the “sign
59 SW: 4, 394; GS: I-2, 700.

60 SW: 4, 390.
61 SW: 4, 391.
62 SW: 4, 396.
63 SW: 4, 391.
64 SW: 4, 392.
28 chapter one
of a messianic arrest of happening” is tantamount to the recognition of “a

revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”65
2.3. Renewed Legibility and Redemption

The ‘renewed legibility’ of the past thus brought about by the dialectical
image is, however, to be considered not only from an ethical-political point
of view but also, and in the last instance, from a theological one. For the final
analysis of Benjamin’s philosophy of history should not just revolve around
his historical materialist beliefs but must also take into consideration a con-
cept that is crucial to Jewish religion and philosophy: redemption [Erlösung].
The ‘weak messianic power’ that the present has been endowed with is first
and foremost a power to redeem or rescue. The movement, hence, described
in the Theses, through which the past ‘lays claim’ to this power is to be inter-
preted as a mark of the possibility of its redemption: “The past carries with
it a secret index [heimlichen Index] by which it is referred to redemption.
… [T]here is a secret agreement [geheime Verabredung] between past gen-
erations and the present one. … [O]ur coming was expected on earth.”66 It
is important to grasp the relation that links the rejuvenating force of the
present, that is, its capacity to return from the past something that was not
truly present before, to its redeeming one. It is precisely to the extent that the
renewal of what has gone by is understood as non-identical to its first occur-
rence that it is recognized as redeemed just as, vice versa, the redeeming
power of the revenant can only be recognized in the difference that sepa-
rates it from its initial appearance in the past.
Some of Benjamin’s other texts are needed to further clarify this relation.
In a letter to Benjamin, included in The Arcades Project, Max Horkheimer
concerns himself with the question whether time is to be considered com-
plete [abgeschlossen] or incomplete [unabgeschlossen]. Distinguishing neg-
ative events (suffering) from positive ones (happiness), he suggests that,
while the former can be regarded as complete, the latter are essentially
incomplete:
The determination of incompleteness is idealistic if completeness is not com-
prised within it. Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are
really slain. … Perhaps, with regard to incompleteness, there is a difference
between the positive and the negative, so that only the injustice, the hor-
rors, the sufferings of the past [Schmerzen der Vergangenheit] are irrepara-
65 SW: 4, 396.
66 SW: 4, 390; GS: I-2, 693–694.
ble. The justice practiced, the joys, the works, have a different relation to
time, for their positive character is largely negated by the transience of things
[Vergänglichkeit].67
The fragment that Benjamin devotes to Horkheimer’s remarks reads like a
very clear articulation of the problems that were raised in his On the Con-
cept of History. There is for him indeed a relation between the nature of
events (positive or negative) and their qualification as completed or uncom-
pleted but its vector, that is, the direction of this relation, runs counter to the
one suggested by Horkheimer. Benjamin believes neither the positive to be
incomplete nor the negative to be complete because there is an attitude
towards the past which succeeds in reversing precisely these two qualifica-
tions. This attitude is what he names ‘remembrance’ [Eingedenken]:
The corrective to [Horkheimer’s] line of thinking may be found in the con-
sideration that history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of
remembrance. What science has ‘determined,’ [<festgestellt>] remembrance
can modify [modifizieren]. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (hap-
piness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into some-
thing incomplete.68
What is redeeming about an authentic attitude toward history is, therefore,
nothing less than a capacity to modify events from previous times by way of
their remembrance. It is in remembrance that the most profound meaning
of Benjamin’s notion of the ‘arrest’ of the ‘continuum of historical time’ is
to be sought, that is, in a reversal of the relation between the complete and
the incomplete. When Benjamin described in On the Concept of History a
“barbarism [that] taints the manner in which [the past] was transmitted
from one hand to another,”69 it was to highlight the task of the historian to
“fan the spark of hope in the past … [by remaining] firmly convinced that
even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”70 Similarly,
in The Arcades Project he defends the viewpoint that, by the sheer power of
remembrance, the past is perceived as no longer passed and, hence, that
a ‘spark of hope’ can be distilled from even the most negative of events:
“[T]he genuine conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image
of redemption.”71 Through remembrance it becomes possible, not of course
67 Horkheimer quoted in AP, 471; GS: V–I, 588–589.

68 AP, 471; GS: V-1, 589.
69 SW: 4, 392.
70 SW: 4, 391.
71 AP, 479.
30 chapter one
to undo the injustices from previous times or to reawaken the dead, but
to annihilate the inability to testify to their suffering. Remembrance is for
Benjamin a way to modify past injustice from within by making it incom-
plete again. By granting it a voice in the present, remembrance succeeds in
disrupting the homogeneous course of time and releases the past from the
historical form of forgetfulness that yet aggravated the suffering of its vic-
tims.
This potential of remembrance to undo what science had thought to
have ascertained is in Benjamin’s words “theology; … in remembrance we
have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally
atheological.”72 This notion of remembrance is seen as ‘not atheological’
because it succeeds in releasing an event from the past from its closure
in historical time and thus refers to a realm that lies beyond its empty
homogeneity. In this way, the messianic now in which one moment from
the past briefly flashes up to be rejuvenated in the present is not just
‘untimely’ [unzeitgemäß] in the Nietzschean sense of the word (that is, a
plastic force that cannot properly fit into the linear succession of historical
time) but it is also a prefiguration of the final stage of history, that is, of the
event through which the whole of humanity will be redeemed. “Of course,”
writes Benjamin in On the Concept of History, “only a redeemed mankind
is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed
mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it
has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment
Day.”73 The messianic moment therefore does not just renew the past: this
becoming-‘now’ of what has gone by comes together with a reference to
the future. In a short and early essay entitled The Life of Students (1914–
1915), an illustration of how Benjamin’s ideas on the philosophy of history
have remained on his mind from the very start of his intellectual life on, he
describes it as follows:
[T]he elements of the ultimate condition [Endzustandes] do not manifest
themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply rooted [einge-
bettet] in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and
ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind. The historical task is to
disclose this immanent state of perfection [immanenten Zustand der Vollkom-
menheit] and make it absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the present
[sichtbar und herrschend in der Gegenwart zu machen].74
72 AP, 471. The original formula is: “[I]m Eingedenken machen wir eine Erfahrung, die uns
verbietet, die Geschichte grundsätzlich atheologisch zu begreifen.” (GS: V-1, 589).

73 SW: 4, 390.
74 SW: 1, 37; GS: II-1, 75.
This tension between a restorative and a utopian tendency is according

to Gershom Scholem constitutive of the messianic moment and will never
be entirely resolved.75 As a constellation in which the a-historical interrupts
the continuity of history, the messianic moment is as much—in a term bor-
rowed from Roland Barthes—a souvenir du futur as a genuine remembrance
of the past (dialectical image). Its suspension is in truth a monadic contrac-
tion of the whole of history, reflecting both the past in a renewed—and thus
redeemed—state and the possibility, in the future, of complete fulfillment.
Messianic time bears within itself both a retention of the past and a proten-
tion toward the future, tying them together in a ‘now of recognizibility’ that
is itself brief and acutely present. Its effect of displacement thus presents
itself as both a response in delay (the Nachträglichkeit of an event from the
past) and the mirror-image of such a response in delay, that is, a response
that cannot but be too early (Benjamin describes it as an “intensive—that is,
anticipative, intimating—realization” [intensive, d.h. vorgreifende, andeu-
tende Verwirklichung]) because the event it anticipates is always and nec-
essarily still to come.76
The idea that the redemption brought about by the messianic ‘now’ fore-
shadows the ultimate redemption of Judgment Day thus makes apparent
that Benjamin’s philosophy of history cannot be unhooked from his Jew-
ish messianic beliefs. In his mind, the brief renewal of the past within the
present amounts to a sudden experience of the possibility of a revelation
of an absolute force within the empirical. According to Benjamin, it is only
by turning the gaze to what has gone by that Jewish religion allows for a
glimpse of what is yet to come. Through the completion of the past and its
renewal in the present, remembrance seeks to distill hope from the past in
order to inject it into the future:
We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the
Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. … This does not
imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty
time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the
Messiah might enter [die kleine Pforte, durch die der Messias treten konnte].77
75 See Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” The Mes-
sianic Idea in Judaism, 3–4: “Both tendencies are deeply intertwined and yet at the same time
of a contradictory nature; the Messianic idea crystallizes only out of the two of them together.
… Sometimes the one tendency appears with maximal emphasis while the other is reduced
to a minimum, but we never find a ‘pure case’ of exclusive influence or crystallization of one
of these tendencies. The reason for this is clear: even the restorative force has a utopian fac-
tor, and in utopianism restorative factors are at work.”
76 SW: 1, 255; GS: IV-1, 12.
77 SW: 4, 397; GS: I-2, 704.
32 chapter one
The messianic ‘now’ is for Benjamin a constellation in which the a-

historical breaks through the continuum of history while thus allowing for
an experience of two radically different realms at the same time. It is the very
interruption of linear time itself that makes manifest the brief appearance of
a rescuing power that cannot be reduced to it. In a short essay that remained
unpublished during his lifetime, Trauerspiel and Tragedy (1916), he writes
that
[h]istorical time is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every moment
[unendlich in jeder Richtung und unerfüllt in jedem Augenblick]. This means
we cannot conceive of a single empirical event that bears a necessary relation
to the time of its occurrence. For empirical events time is nothing but a form,
but, what is more important, as a form it is unfulfilled. The event does not
fulfill the formal nature of the time in which it takes place.78
The resurfacing of the past as a dialectical image denotes a non-empirical
event that does ‘bear a necessary relation to the time of its occurrence.’ In
its capacity to indicate the past as not fully passed, it goes beyond historical
time and thus brings about a sudden appearance of the possibility to bring
it to perfection. The ‘renewed legibility’ it delivers is not just the recognition
of past suffering that aspires to political revolution but the rendition of its
fulfillment.
[W]e may assert that the determining force of historical time cannot be
fully grasped by, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical process. Rather, a
process that is perfect in historical terms is quite indeterminate empirically;
it is in fact an idea. This idea of fulfilled time is the dominant historical idea
of the Bible; it is the idea of messianic time.79
2.4. The Relation between Benjamin’s Materialism and His Jewish Messian-
ism
The ethical-political significance of Benjamin’s philosophy of history and
the theological one, however, are not just two different levels of inter-
pretation that may be seen as independent from each other, little as it
is permitted—despite the attempts of minds as brilliant as Brecht’s and
Scholem’s—to perceive Benjamin’s historical-materialist beliefs as irrel-
evant to his Jewish messianic ones and vice versa.80 In this sense, On
78
SW: 1, 55; GS: II-1, 134.
79
SW: 1, 55–56.
80 Jürgen Habermas, too, remains blind to the intrinsic relation between Benjamin’s his-
torical materialism and his Jewish messianism. See his “Consciousness-Raising or Redemp-
the Concept of History, written near the end of his lifetime, is not merely
to be read as a conceptualization of the two main vectors of Benjamin’s
thought but also as a depiction of the intrinsic relation between both.81 The
tive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin.” New German Critique 17 (1979),
30–59. Though Habermas writes there that Benjamin “had to bring [his reception of histor-
ical materialism] together with the messianic interpretation of history he developed on the
model of redemptive criticism” and makes mention of a “domesticated historical materialism
[which] was supposed to provide an answer for the open question concerning the subject of
the history of art and culture, an answer which was to be materialist and yet compatible with
Benjamin’s own theory of experience,” (50) these were in his mind but unsuccessful attempts
of reconciliation between two incompatible intellectual frameworks. “This attempt must
fail,” writes Habermas, “because the materialist theory of social development cannot be sim-
ply fitted into the anarchistic conception of Jetztzeiten which intermittently come crashing
through fate as if from above. An anti-evolutionary conception of history cannot be tacked
onto historical materialism as if it were a monk’s cowl—tacked onto a historical materialism,
which takes account of progress not only in the dimension of the forces of production, but
in that of domination too. My thesis is that Benjamin did not realize his intention to bring
together enlightenment and mysticism, because the theologian in him could not accept the
idea of making his messianic theory of experience serviceable to historical materialism.” (51)
Habermas thus remains blind to the fact that Benjamin’s interpretation of historical mate-
rialism was itself “an anti-evolutionary” one without any “account of progress” and that, as
will be expounded later on, “the theologian in him” needed precisely a historical material-
ist framework to analyze how the lack of redemption of history in toto manifests itself in a
specific historical era (modernity).
81 In this way, our view of the relation between Benjamin’s historical materialism and
his Jewish messianism differs from the one put forward by the prominent Benjamin scholar
Irving Wohlfarth in his essay “Re-Fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Walter Ben-
jamin’s Arcades Project.” In that essay, Wohlfarth asks himself the question whether “the
concomitant inconsistencies in Benjamin’s thinking should … be considered avoidable inter-
nal contradictions, or whether, on the contrary, they correspond to unavoidable, external
ones” (Wohlfarth, “Re-Fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades
Project.” New German Critique 39 (1986), 10). Wohlfarth’s view is the latter one, since he makes
the claim that the underlying goal of Benjamin’s philosophy was to do without all theol-
ogy whatsoever but that it was compelled to “enlist its services” on account of the historical
conditions, that is, the failure of the communist revolution to take place and the growing
popularity of fascism. “Only if the revolution had materialized,” writes Wohlfarth, “could his-
torical materialism have finally come into its own. … It was under the impact of historical
reversals that Benjamin, even as he sought to progress towards historical materialism, found
himself intermittently reverting to Jewish theology. … Benjamin’s re-emerging Messianism
was a response to the emerging fascist ‘Antichrist.’ ” (ibid., 12–13) Our own view starts from the
idea that the apparent inconsistencies in Benjamin’s thinking are to be considered precisely
as unavoidable, internal tensions. Our claim is that, regardless of the historical circumstances
in which they were conceived, Benjamin’s materialist ideas could not do away with their
underlying, theological beliefs and vice versa. It may be remarked that, in other essays, Wohl-
farth does seem willing to endorse this idea of an intrinsic connection between both, see, for
example, his “No Man’s Land: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character’.” Diacritics, 8:2
(1978), 47–65 and his statement there that “the interplay between the two poles [of political
pragmatism and theology] is also interior to each.” (57).
34 chapter one
profundity of the historical-materialist view that underlies Benjamin’s The-

ses, that is to say, can only be grasped to its fullest extent when the hope
for a ‘redemption’ of the past is seen as its complement rather than as its
antithesis. The (ethical-political) plea to pay heed to injustice from the past
remains at all times and necessarily determined by the (theological) belief
in the possibility of a brief appearance of an absolute force within history.
This injustice does not solely refer back to a hitherto unacknowledged vic-
timhood in the name of which revolution has to be proclaimed but, first and
foremost, to a suffering that needs to be redeemed. For this reason, as Löwy
puts it,
Walter Benjamin is a Marxist and a theologian … Marxism and messianism
are simply two expressions—Ausdrücke, one of Benjamin’s favourite terms—
of a single thought. … The better to grasp the complex and subtle relationship
between redemption and revolution in his philosophy of history, we should
speak of an elective affinity or, in other words, of a mutual attraction and recip-
rocal reinforcement of the two approaches, on the basis of certain structural
analogies, leading to a kind of alchemical fusion.82
The ‘tradition of the oppressed’ and the muteness in which it is enclosed
become, when they are brought to expression in the dialectical image,
tokens of a fundamental state of imperfection that marks the historical
realm as such. By way of remembrance, injustice from the past is brought
back to the present but not without becoming the paradoxical sign of
both an incapability and a responsibility that stretch out to the realm of
history in general. Benjamin’s plea to bring past suffering to a renewed
‘recognizability’ in the present is determined by the belief that it is only
in the voice of those people who are no longer here that both the finitude
of all historical existence and the possibility of salvation can be made to
resonate. The sudden ‘arrest of happening’ in which the messianic now
renews (and hence redeems) suffering and unhappiness thus serves as both
an indication and a brief interruption of a lack of fulfillment in which all
human forms of living and knowing take part. For this reason, as Friedlander
writes, “[r]escue and irretrievability are not opposed; rather, paradoxical
as it may sound at first, it is the condition of the rescue that makes the
image of the past irretrievable”:83 an awareness of crisis and an experience
of utmost urgency thus belong to the heart of every moment of rescue or
redemption.
82 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 20.

83 Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 170.
In his reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben character-

izes the messianic moment as not “the end of time, but the temporality of the
end [temps de la fin].”84 It is indeed important to distinguish the messianic
now (or, in Paul’s terms the ho nun kairos) from the ultimate redemption of
history proper. The former is in Agamben’s words “not the last day, but the
instant in which time ends, the time that contracts itself and begins to end
[commence à finir] … —or, if you like, the time that remains between time
and its end [le temps qui reste entre le temps et sa fin].”85 The messianic is the
realm of the in-between: it “subsists [dure] until the parousia, the complete
presence of the Messiah”86 but it does not coincide with it. The coming of the
messiah is not tantamount to the eschaton of history but it is a proclamation
of its possibility:
Messianic time does not coincide with either the end of time and the future
aeon, nor with profane, chronological time—without however being exterior
to it. It is, on the contrary, a remainder [portion] of profane time that under-
goes a contraction that transforms it entirely.87
This context gives a first hint of why Benjamin’s historical materialism is
to be regarded as complemented and not refuted by his Jewish messianism.
It is only on the latter level of analysis that the profound significance of
the hope that is cherished in the name of the past can become visible. The
oppression that is commemorated by the historian is not merely socially or
economically conditioned but it stands for an overall lack of redemption
that marks the historical realm in general.88 Only the messianic belief in
the possibility of complete fulfillment and the accompanying awareness
of the lack of it in history reveal the true stakes of the historian’s task. In
this sense, the notion of a ‘weak messianic power’ comes together with a
84 Giorgio Agamben, Le temps qui reste. Un commentaire de l’Épître aux Romains (Paris:
Rivages poche, 2004), 110 (my translation).

85 Ibid., 110–111 (my translation).
86 Ibid., 113 (my translation; my emphasis).
87 Ibid., 113 (my translation).
88 For a similar reading of the relation between Benjamin’s messianism and materialism,
see also Wolin, Walter Benjamin, for example, pp. 116–117, about Benjamin’s endorsement
of communist ideals: “[I]n the last analysis, he views ‘Communist goals’—like all merely
‘political goals’—as meaningless. Indeed it can be inferred that, for Benjamin, the only
ultimately worthwhile goals are still the Messianic ends that were the focal point of his earlier
days, in comparison with which all merely temporal goals must necessarily ring hollow.
Nevertheless, historical man remains separated from these higher ends by an unbridgeable
abyss. He is condemned to dwell in the profane, godless continuum of history. Thus historical
man can never act immediately on these ultimate ends.”
36 chapter one
reference to the messianic power of the weak: the weakness of the victims
of past injustice, that is, their incapacity to testify to what was done to
them, becomes sign of the (historical) condition that is in need of (divine)
redemption.89
The messianic kingdom, however, is in Benjamin’s mind never merely
a mirror-image of history—the projected realm where the last have finally
come to be first and the first end up to be last. Redeeming the past does
not mean that victims of the past are turned into posthumous victors when
their suffering is recognized. “The interest which the materialist historian
takes in the past,” writes Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “is always, in
part, a vital interest in its being past—in its having ceased to exist, its being
essentially dead.”90 It is on account of and not in spite of their weakness
that the oppressed become token of the messianic; it is their (historically
conditioned) powerlessness itself which determines their messianic power.
Benjamin’s notion of a ‘weak messianic power’ is thus in fact a tautology:
there is no messianic power that is not perceived as weak. As the medium
of renewal and redemption of past injustice the dialectical image is to be
seen both as a sign that final fulfillment might arrive in the future and as an
indication that it has not yet arrived in the present. From the perspective
of the messianic now, Judgment Day is seen as possible and, for this reason
precisely, as still to come.
It is for this reason that the difference between, on the one hand, the
redemption of a specific moment of the past (the messianic now, the dialec-
tical image) and, on the other, the ultimate redemption that will only be
brought about at the end of history (Judgment Day) should be seen, how-
ever subtle it may be, as crucial to Benjamin’s own Jewish messianic beliefs.
These beliefs are characterized by the paradox that the appearance of the
former testifies precisely to the absence of the latter: the movement in
which past suffering is redeemed cannot but reveal that the moment of final
redemption has not yet arrived. At the exact moment when the dialectical
image brings the fulfillment of one specific moment in time (“the image in
the now of its recognizability”),91 it lays bare that history as a whole remains,
in the words of Benjamin’s essay Trauerspiel and Tragedy “infinite in every
89 This idea was borrowed from A. Deuber-Mankowsky’s lecture The Image of Happiness
We Harbor: The Messianic Power of Weakness in Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin and Paul,
delivered on May 12, 2006 at the University of Antwerp on the occasion of the conference
“Messianism and the Law.”
90 AP, 363.
91 AP, 463.
direction and unfulfilled at every moment.”92 Such images thus both confirm
and transcend the Bilderverbot in that they represent precisely, as Samuel
Weber puts it, “the dislocation of the logic of representation.”93 They are Vex-
ierbilder, that “vex as much as [they] satisf[y]” and resemble those angels
that Benjamin holds so dear because they are “prevented from fulfilling
[their] destiny, but also … from disappearing. … The work of the angel has
been interrupted, but its suspension holds out another possibility: that of
a certain kind of survival.” Such images “survive” precisely as “interrupted
images.”94 The ‘flash of renewed recognizability’ rendered by the messianic
moment is therefore, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot’s characterization of
the paradoxical structure of the image, an “affirm[ation] [of] things in their
disappearance”95—both a sudden appearance and a sudden disappearance
of the moment of ultimate fulfillment.96
This is at stake when Benjamin characterizes remembrance as an expe-
rience that “forbids us,” not only—as has been explained above—“to con-
ceive of history as fundamentally atheological,” but also “to try to write it
with immediately theological concepts.”97 There cannot be talk of a direct
connection between history and theology as long as the empirical world
continues to exist in its unredeemed state. The distance that separates the
past and the present from the possibility of final fulfillment makes it impos-
sible to perceive the historical realm as an immediate expression of any
divine or transcendent will. There will, moreover, never be a direct connec-
tion between history and theology since, as Scholem points out, in Jewish
messianic thought Judgment Day is not so much a moment in history as the
one that ends it:
Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature—this cannot be suf-
ficiently emphasized—a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the
92 SW: 1, 55.
93 Samuel Weber, “Song and Glance.” Benjamin’s -abilities, 222.
94 Ibid. 222.
95 Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” Blanchot Reader. Fiction and Lit-
erary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton, ed. George Quasha
(Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999), 417.
96 See also the statement in a draft version of the Epistemo-Critical Prologue that “[e]very-
thing original is an incomplete [unvollendete] restoration of revelation. … The original is

only revealed in the dual insight which recognizes it, on the one hand, as a restoration of
revelation and, on the other, as necessarily unfinished [unabgeschlossen].” (GS: I-3, 935; my
translation).
97 AP, 471. The original phrasing is: “[I]m Eingedenken machen wir eine Erfahrung, die uns
verbietet, die Geschichte … in unmittelbar theologischen Begriffen zu schreiben versuchen

dürfen.” (GS: V-1, 589).
38 chapter one
revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical

present to the Messianic future.98
In Jewish religion, ultimate redemption is not just an event that will occur
at a specific moment in history but, more important, the final moment that
will put all history to a stop. Judgment Day is in this sense not a fulfill-
ment in history but a fulfillment of history.99 It is against this background
that the earlier quoted lines of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel and Tragedy need
to be read: “[W]e may assert that the determining force of historical time
cannot be fully grasped by, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical pro-
cess.”100 Because the ultimate redemption delivered at the end of history will
transcend all worldly events, Judgment Day will prove to be both their deter-
mination and their termination.
For this reason, Michael Jennings is only partially right in claiming that
[t]o think of the ‘weak messianic power’ with which every age is invested
as the potential for redemption within history is … contrary to Benjamin’s
intentions. … Benjamin’s understanding of messianism is thus traditional
in that it is profoundly apocalyptic; it embraces the erasure of time in the
destruction of the world.101
As long as there is history, there is indeed no final fulfillment and, vice
versa, when there is final fulfillment, history will cease to be. Overlooked
in Jennings’s statement, however, is the possibility that there are elements
that share in the moment of final fulfillment without fully embodying its
non-empirical, divine nature. From the Jewish messianic belief that the his-
torical realm will not survive its ultimate redemption it cannot be inferred
that there are no anticipations of this suspension which are, themselves,
already visible in history. Benjamin’s religious convictions are firmly rooted
98 Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” The Messianic
Idea in Judaism, 7. See also the excellent account of Benjamin’s “new Jewish spirit” in Rabin-
bach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 78–124. Benjamin’s intellectual attitude is
there described as a “product of the ‘post-assimilatory Renaissance,’” and as the illustration
of “a modern Jewish Messianism: radical, uncompromising, and comprised of an esoteric
intellectualism that is as uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamored of apoc-
alyptic visions—whether revolutionary or purely redemptive in the spiritual sense.” (ibid.,
80).
99 See also Willem van Reijen, “Innerlichkeit oder Begriffsarbeit? Die Barockrezeption
W. Benjamins und Th.W. Adornos.” Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1992), 21 and Willem van Reijen and Norbert Bolz, Walter
Benjamin, trans. Hubert van den Berg (Kampen: Kok Agora, 1991), 13.
100 SW: 1, 55.
101 Jennings, Dialectical Images, 58–59.
in the awareness that redemption is indeed an essentially untimely or non-

empirical event but that, due to the unredeemed condition in which we
live, the elements that refer forward to this ultimate redemption and bring
it to expression can only be perceived from within the empirical. It is for
this reason that he can claim that “[o]nly dialectical images are genuinely
historical [echt geschichtliche]”: as an expression of the possibility of the
final fulfillment of history, the ‘weak messianic power’ that Benjamin has
in mind is not recognized in a moment in which the historical gives way
to the absolute but, on the contrary, in a constellation where both realms
meet each other and preserve their irreducibility.102 It is precisely this con-
stellation that in Benjamin’s philosophy is termed the messianic ‘now’ or
dialectical image. These belong to both the non-empirical (a-historical or
absolute) and the empirical (historical) alike: from the point of view of
what they refer to, they are of a non-empirical nature but from the point
of view of how this is referred to, they are part of the empirical. Max Pensky
describes it as follows: “[T]he appearance of the historical object as dialec-
tical image contains an irreducibly transcendent, theologically explicable
moment, in which the field of historical images itself suddenly yields forth a
rare, monadic visual image of its tormented, oppressed structure.”103 Dialec-
tical images are not just vectors pointing towards the final stage of history
but vectors that reside within history. They are elements of both the his-
torical and the absolute, or more accurately put, their definition can only
read as follows: they are an element in history, of the absolute. The ‘mes-
sianic now’ denotes precisely the moment in which the messianic becomes
a now, that is, the force-field in which the transcendent becomes visible in
and through the historical.104
That the expression of the absolute or transcendent takes place within
history is, however trivial it may seem, arguably one of the most profound
insights of Benjamin and, in any case, one that he puts major emphasis on:
Resolute refusal of the concept of “timeless truth” [<zeitlosen Wahrheit>] is
in order. Nevertheless, truth is not—as Marxism would have it—a merely
102 AP, 463; GS: V-1, 578 (my emphasis).

103 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 218.
104 See also Friedlander’s detailed account of Benjamin’s notion of origin and the following
statements in Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 61: “Origin … is to be conceived as the recogni-

tion of the idea in a singular and passing ordering of the contingent. … Although the idea is
presented as something preexisting and timeless, it must be realized again and again in the
construction from the time-bound phenomenal material.”
40 chapter one
contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time [Zeitkern]

lying hidden within the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the
eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.105
Only against this background of the difference between, on the one hand,
the divine and a-historical moment of ultimate fulfillment (Judgment Day)
and, on the other, the expression, in history, of this redemptive power (mes-
sianic now, dialectical image) can be understood why Benjamin maintains
that history should be written with neither a-theological nor immediately
theological categories. It is, moreover, through this difference precisely that
his philosophy can be shown as a unity, thus in line with certain of his own
assessments though contrary to other ones.106 The reason why Benjamin
contends that it is forbidden to write history with a-theological categories
is that, as we have seen, he believes in the possibility of experiencing in
remembrance a sign of what transcends it, that is, of the moment of final
redemption. The reason, however, why he argues that it is nevertheless for-
bidden to write history with immediately theological categories can only
be grasped by fully acknowledging the difference in nature between the
end of history proper and what expresses its possibility: it is because Ben-
jamin maintains that these expressions are experienced within history itself
that he dismisses the idea that they can be analyzed with categories of
a purely theological nature. The attempt to found history directly in the-
ology, that is to say, would start from the illusion that the course of his-
tory is an immediate manifestation of an absolute will or Spirit and thus
remain blind to the essentially unredeemed condition of the world we live
in. Solely the moment of ultimate redemption will restore the direct connec-
tion between history and theology, albeit not without instantly abolishing
the realm of the historical as such. In a world that lives in anticipation of
ultimate redemption, on the contrary, no immediate view on or full com-
prehension of the absolute is possible. In our world the only manner in
105 AP, 463; GS: V-1, 578.

106 See, for example, Benjamin’s references to the “continuity” [Kontinuität] of his thinking
in his letter to Alfred Cohn, end of June 1936 (B: 2, 715). The most fascinating remarks by Ben-
jamin on the topic of the unity of his thinking can be found in his letter to Scholem from May
29, 1926. Benjamin first writes that he does not grant a “distinction [Unterschied] [between
political and religious perspectives] in their essence” but neither a “mediation” [Vermittlung].
He then goes on to mention the “paradoxical reversals” of his thinking and characterizes his
attitude in all things important as “always radical, never consistent [konsequent].” (B: 1, 425;
my translation) See also Benjamin’s letter to Gretel Adorno from June 1934 where he writes
that “his life just as much as his thinking moves in extreme positions [extremen Positionen].”
(quoted in GS: II-3, 1369; my translation).
which transcendence can express itself is mediated, that is, it is perceived

through a token that belongs as much to history as to what lies beyond
it.
The difference between the a-historical nature of the end of history
and the not purely a-historical nature of what expresses its possibility (the
messianic now and the dialectical image take part in both history and the
absolute alike) shows the continuity of Benjamin’s thinking because it casts
light on his intellectual development towards historical materialism. It is
precisely by way of, to be sure, a re-interpretation of Marx’s concepts that
Benjamin believes to have found a framework for analyzing history as a
realm that in spite of its separation from the divine nevertheless contains
constellations that serve as its expression. Benjamin’s characterization of
historical materialism in The Arcades Project is a good illustration here:
On the elementary doctrine of historical materialism. (1) An object of history
is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue. (2)
History decays into images, not into stories. (3) Wherever a dialectical process
is realized, we are dealing with a monad. (4) The materialist presentation of
history carries along with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress.
(5) Historical materialism bases its procedures on long experience, common
sense, presence of mind, and dialectics.
Benjamin’s historical materialism is for this reason not to be regarded as
an antithesis of but as a complement to his Jewish messianism in the same
way that the latter was shown to be a fulfillment of the former (see above:
the ‘image of enslaved ancestors’ on which historical materialism is based
is, ultimately, sign of the unredeemed nature of mankind in general).107
The motivation to adopt historical materialist ideas lies contained precisely
in beliefs essential to his Jewish messianism: it is only because the latter
precludes a view of history as a direct manifestation of an absolute will
that he understands the necessity to develop a philosophical system that
neither rejects theology nor turns to immediately theological categories.108
107 SW: 4, 394.

108 In this regard, see also Susan Buck-Morss’s claim that “theology permeates Benjamin’s
thought [in the deepest sense], that is, precisely in his theology-free, manifestly ‘Marxist’
writings. … Important elements of the Kabbalist paradigm provided Benjamin with a meta-
physical base for revolutionary pedagogy vital to Marxist politics, but it is expressed in the
fully, secular, historically specific discourse of women’s fashions and street traffic, in which
every trace of positive theology has been extinguished” in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter
Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 232. The rest of
the chapter, however, overly emphasizes the active side of messianic politics, making claims
about a “purpose” to “bring about” utopia (234) and a “burden of ushering in the Messianic
42 chapter one
Benjamin’s historical materialism is, as Willem van Reijen and Norbert Bolz
put it, “the incognito of his theology” and results from a “plea for an expan-
sion of the historical experience in the light of theology.”109 This theology,
moreover, is according to the same authors most accurately described as
an “inverse theology” (Adorno), that is, as a set of concepts that “holds
on to metaphysical and theological motives” only because it “places them
squarely within the realm of the profane.”110 Benjamin’s version of historical
materialism, which makes use of concepts like ‘messianic now,’ ‘redemp-
tion’ and ‘dialectical images’ does allow for the discovery of sudden glimpses
of the absolute within the historical but it at the same time severely prob-
lematizes the relation between both. As such, only the historical materialist
grasps the historical realm as an anticipation of divine fulfillment, that is,
as something that refers to the end of history by being historical. In the
framework of historical materialism the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ remains
an incarnation of a weak messianic power and thus reveals as much the
absence of ultimate fulfillment as the possibility of its advent.
Only in this way are the opening lines of On the Concept of History fully
understandable. The introduction of theology as a little hunchback who
is to be kept hidden behind the wooden puppet of historical materialism
serves Benjamin as an illustration of the prohibition to use immediately
theological categories—a prohibition that, paradoxically, originates in his
Jewish messianic beliefs. Since in a non-redeemed world the divine only
finds expression in a non-immediate way, the little hunchback’s activities
are nowhere visible but in the movements of the wooden puppet. As a
consequence, the brief and sudden appearances of what transcends history
will only be grasped by a presence of mind that is directed towards history
itself (as will become clear later on, Benjamin’s concept of Aufmerksamkeit
is crucial here). The historical materialist understands that it is not until the
final stage of history will be achieved that the little hunchback will come out
into the open, though not any longer to give hints of his existence through
the game of chess that is history but to deliver its fulfillment by clearing the
board with a single stroke of his arm.
Age [which] falls squarely on human beings” (235) that seem hard to match with Benjamin’s
own views of politics as either a ‘politics of waiting’ or a nihilistic, destructive anarchism (see
Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921)).
109 Van Reijen and Bolz, Walter Benjamin, 42 (my translation).
110 Ibid., 32.
Conclusion
It is clear that Benjamin understands the categories that make up the crux of
his philosophy of history, that is, the messianic now and dialectical image,
as not immediately theological in nature. His philosophy of history cannot
be reduced to the theological presuppositions on which it is built because
of the following reason: Benjamin categorically rejects any principle that
underlies the course of history and brings it univocally to the moment of
its redemption.111 The images of weakness, that is, the images of “enslaved
ancestors,” which nourish his historical materialism and, in fact, turn his
entire oeuvre into an edifice of remembrance, deconstruct the ideal of an
“ ‘eternal’ image of the past” and are deeply marked by the transitory and
unstable material that is called history.112 As a consequence, these renewals
of past suffering in the present do stand out as souvenirs du futur (pre-
figurations of the divine moment of final fulfillment) but they pass judg-
ment, in first instance, on history: they do not fail, first and foremost, to
disclose the distance that separates history from its redemption and they
thus reveal how the very notion of Heilsgeschichte links up two terms that,
from the standpoint of history that is our own, are mutually exclusive. In
the first lines of his brief but crucial Theological-Political Fragment (1920–
1921 or 1937–1938) he writes that “the Kingdom of God is not the telos of
the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal [Ziel]. From the
standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende].”113 Never-
theless, it is from nowhere but this same ‘standpoint of history’ that it does
become possible to experience a sudden glimpse of the divine: however pro-
found the separation between both may be, it is within the very core of
the Geschichte that brief flashes of the possibility of Heil can be perceived.
111 In this sense Benjamin’s criticism of the immediately theological notion of Heils-
geschichte does not essentially differ from his resolute disavowal of the secularized concept
of universal progress. For him, it does not ultimately make a difference whether the principle
that supposedly underlies history as a whole and renders it homogeneous is of a transcen-
dent (divine Providence) or an immanent nature (human reason) since the very belief in the
redeeming force of such a principle is, in his mind, built on an illusion. See also Rabinbach,
“Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 86–87: “In Jewish Messianism the cataclysmic
element is explicit and consequently makes redemption independent of either any imma-
nent historical ‘forces’ or personal experience of liberation. … Freedom may occur in history,
but it is not brought about by historical forces or individual acts. Messianism therefore can-
cels out the possibility of an optimistic and evolutionary conception of history, of progress,
without of course foreclosing the possibility of freedom.”
112 SW: 4, 396.
113 SW: 3, 305; GS: II-1, 203.
44 chapter one
Benjamin entrusts the historian with a task of utmost importance precisely

because he knows that it verges on the impossible: the historian is both to
understand that the realm of history and the moment of its fulfillment are, in
truth, antagonistic to each other and to look for a common ground between
both.
It is because the expression of the divine takes place within the empirical
that a messianic moment is experienced as an ‘in-between’ or a ‘both-at-the-
same-time’: solely as the expression of the absolute is the empirical capable
of suddenly sharing in what transcends it and, vice versa, only by becom-
ing expressed, ever so fleetingly, within the empirical does the absolute
manifest itself in history. Such expressions are never to be considered as
‘presences’ of a transcendent force that fully reveals itself by adjourning the
realm of history in which it is revealed. The messianic now is an expression
of the absolute in the sense that the latter pushes itself out, ex-presses itself
[aus-drücken], in a medium that it essentially differs from: in leaving a mark,
it both reveals itself in the concreteness of history and retreats from it. This
medium becomes other to what it was by suddenly referring to something
that goes beyond it, but in this it remains a mere trace, itself partaking in a
singular here and now, of something that is not fully present or at hand.
In this sense, what shares in the highest degree of reality is, as Friedlan-
der writes, “not an element of the phenomenal world. It is invisible but not
because it is abstract. Rather it is invisible because it is singular and concrete
to the extreme.”114 In the dialectical moment, the absolute is both already
present and still absent. Its capacity to ‘modify’ a moment from the past
does not denote a capacity to change it, once and for all, into something
different, but the capability to renew it by estranging it from what it was
and making it other-to-itself: it does not re-place or fixate (fest-stellen in the
sense of ‘establishing a fixed position or place’) what it dislocates (ent-stellt).
The historian who modifies what was hitherto oppressed (“Die Tradition der
Unterdrücken”)115 into something that becomes expressive (ausdrucksvoll),
releases history from being an accumulative power that cannot but weigh
down on all that it touches upon and he puts it to work again as a weight-
less, plastic force [plastische Kraft] in the Nietzschean sense. Opening up
history from within means making it light again, disrupting the rhythm of
an empty repetition of the same (what Benjamin calls myth) and discovering
that what is possible in the future cannot be mapped onto what was actual

115 GS: I-2, 697.
in the past. History is now no longer an endless, continuous line of suffering

-neither a triumphal procession that tramples the vanquished ones nor a
vast landscape that piles wreckage upon wreckage—but it becomes, with
an image very dear to Benjamin, a whirlpool of heterogeneous temporalities
and non-anticipatable opportunities that are as real as they can be.
In Thesis XV messianic time is described with the enigmatic term “Zeitraf-
fer” which refers to both “a historical short-cut” and the capacity to violently
snatch away time and make it beneficial to oneself (the German verb raffen
brings together the meanings of the three verbs to abbreviate, to seize and
to understand (the last two terms denoting the English verb ‘to grasp’ in the
double meaning of the word)).116 With these views on the task of the his-
torian Benjamin is committed to the old Egyptian saying that “philosophy
either came to us in disguise or was given to us by a thief”: the historian
jerks the past out of the hands of who guards over it and he delivers its
riches to the present, just like a pickpocket snatches away someone’s purse,
throwing away the empty wallet and keeping only the money that was in
it.
The dialectical image is neither ‘imaginary’ nor a representation (Ab-bild)
of a reality that is external but it denotes the becoming-real of hitherto
undiscovered virtualities and it injects possibility into what, a mere moment
before, appeared to be all too stable and firmly rooted. “Historical material-
ism,” writes Benjamin in his essay on Eduard Fuchs, “conceives historical
understanding as an afterlife [Nachleben] of that which has been under-
stood and whose pulse can be felt in the present.”117 The endless line of
history in which one moment seems to succeed the other in a non-arbitrary
way is now opened up by a monadic point that “comprises [zusammenfaßt]
the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation”: history is no
longer perceived as a continuum governed by unbendable laws but as a mul-
tiplicity of neither necessarily nor merely contingently happening events
that are ‘seized together’ (the second meaning of the term zusammenfaßt).118
The dialectical image is a crystal-image in the sense that Deleuze under-
stood it:
[T]he crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute
it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of
116 GS: I-2, 701.

117 SW: 3, 262; GS: II-2, 468.
118 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 703.
46 chapter one
the past which is preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible, and all the more
indiscernible because distinct, because we do not know which is one and
which is the other. … What we see in the crystal is therefore a dividing in
two that the crystal itself constantly causes to turn on itself, that it prevents
from reaching completion, because it is a perpetual self-distinguishing, a
distinction in the process of being produced; which always resumes the
distinct terms in itself, in order constantly to relaunch them.119 … What we
see in the crystal is always the bursting forth of life, of time, in its dividing in
two or differentiation120 … As a dimension of time, [the ‘too late’] is, through
the crystal, the one which is opposed to the static dimension of the past as
this survives and weighs in the interior of the crystal. It is a sublime clarity
which is opposed to the opaque, but it has the property of arriving too late,
dynamically.121
The messianic moment is not to be likened to a ‘mystical now’ in which
human imagination discovers the firm ground of a revelation of absolute
truth and it divests immanence and history from all sense of self-identity.
Benjamin’s Jewish messianism is for this reason not at all irreconcilable with
an experience of immanence but it presupposes it: the expression of the
non-empirical in and through the empirical is but the discovery that the
latter partakes in an untimely process in which repetition entails difference
and actualization brings about a renewed potentiality. This process is the
absolute. The empirical im-parts, to borrow the term introduced by Samuel
Weber in his brilliant analysis of Benjamin’s work, to the exact extent
that it parts with itself.122 It is in this sense that the genuinely historical
image (the messianic now) is dialectical: though always an expression of
what transcends and interrupts it, it is perceived within time and thereby
registers the impact of a ‘weak messianic power’ within the realm of history.
119 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 81–82.

120 Ibid., 91.
121 Ibid., 96.
122 This idea underlies the majority of the essays in Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities; see, for
example, 44 (in the context of an interpretation of Benjamin’s Language-essay): “Language

is (immediately) the ability or the capacity to impart without recourse to anything else.
Impart here entails what the word in English, as in German, implies: a process of partitioning,
of parceling out ‘oneself,’ thereby becoming something else. This relation to something
or someone else is underscored in German by the prefix mit- (mit-teilen: to separate and
share with). Therefore the impartable cannot simply be equated with that which is actually
communicated or the act of communication itself. The latter are acts or processes that
actually take place, or that could take place, once and for all. The impartable, by contrast, has
another mode of being, another dynamic, which consists in its transformation, its becoming-
other.”
To fully understand this line of thinking and to grasp the possibility that
a moment in time denotes the existence of an absolute force, Benjamin’s
essay on Proust and his use there of the very same concepts (Eingedenken,
Erinnerung, Erlebnis, schwach) and formulas (wie es gewesen ist) is illumi-
nating. As mentioned above, Benjamin believes Proust’s views on human
memory to be dependent on the awareness that a moment of the past which
has itself never been fully present has survived in time. His analysis under-
stands the involuntary memory as the sign of what cannot be adequately
remembered because it was not even part of any lived experience [Erleb-
nis] in the first place:
We know that in his work Proust described not a life as it actually was [wie
es gewesen ist] but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it.
Yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important
thing to the remembering author is not what he experienced [erlebt hat], but
the weaving of his memory [Erinnerung], the Penelope work of recollection
[Eingedenken]. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is
not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s mémoire involontaire, much closer
to forgetting than what is usually called memory?123
The well-known shock that comes along with involuntary memory denotes
according to Benjamin that a moment of the past has renewed or, in his
terms, ‘rejuvenated’ itself in relation to the ‘present it has been.’ It is a mark
of the difference that lies in the scope of a process of genuine repetition and
of the ‘dividual’ (Deleuze) nature that distinguishes an authentic singularity
from what would otherwise have remained a mere (self-identical) individ-
uality. Of decisive importance to Proust’s work, however, is the awareness
that what is brought back by the revenant is in fact hardly worth remember-
ing. The past that it carries with does not consist of heroic acts or climactic
events that are entitled to an afterlife of continuous commemoration. It is
most often precisely the contrast between the nullity of the event that is
remembered and the force with which remembrance delivers it back to the
present which accounts for the latter’s disturbing effect. For this reason Ben-
jamin wonders
[w]hat … it [was] that Proust sought so frenetically. What was at the bottom
of these infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter
were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most
fleeting, most sentimental, weakest [schwächsten] hour in the life of the one
to whom they pertain?124
123 SW: 2, 237–238; GS: II-1, 311.

124 SW: 2, 238; GS: II-1, 312.
48 chapter one
This search for lost time springs forth from what, according to Benjamin,
is seldom recognized in Proust’s endeavors though it denotes their very
essence: a quest for happiness.
By submitting to these laws, Proust conquered the hopeless sadness within
him (what he once called “l’imperfection incurable dans l’essence même du
present”), and from the honeycombs of memory he built a house for the
swarm of his thoughts. Cocteau recognized what really should be the major
concern of all readers of Proust. He recognized Proust’s blind, senseless,
obsessive quest for happiness.125
It is, of course, no coincidence that these lines on Proust are constructed
around the relation between ‘weakness’ and ‘happiness’ that is so central to
Benjamin’s philosophy of history. The interpretation of Proust is important
to illuminate the significance of the messianic moment in that it shows
that the authentically historical image does not lift one’s spirits by virtue
of its content but solely through its potentiality to turn the course of history
back on itself and, as it were, brush it against the grain. Because it reaches
us from the depths of what was believed to be irredeemably lost it shows
the past to have not really passed.126 It is the sheer faculty of remembering
which is so enlivening to Proust and not so much the nature of what is being
remembered. It is the mere return of the past which renders the memory-
image an, in Benjamin’s words, ‘rejuvenating’ force and not the importance
of the resurfacing past. For this reason Benjamin goes on to describe the ‘first
happiness’ [ersten Glücks] that originates in “eternal repetition, the eternal
restoration of the original [die ewige Restauration des ursprünglichen].”127 In
his mind it is the pure renewal of the past within the present which renders
Proust the happiness he longed for.128 It is a happiness that can therefore
125 SW, 2: 239.

126 See also Irving Wohlfarth’s claim that “Proust’s ‘actualization’ of the past intermittently
prefigures that total, consuming resurrection of the dead” in Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s
Image of Interpretation.” New German Critique 17 (1979), 84–85.
127 SW: 2, 239; GS: II-1, 313.
128 See also Benjamin’s characterization of “happiness” as “the conflict in which the rapture
of the unique, the new, the yet unborn is combined with that bliss of experiencing something
once more, of possessing once again, of having lived” (SW: 2, 715) in Agesilaus Santander
(second version) and, of course, the quintessential Theological-Political Fragment: “If one
arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and another marks the
direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for happiness runs
counter to the messianic direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving
along, can augment another force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of
its nature as secular—promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.” (SW: 3, 305) For a
more elaborate account of Benjamin’s use of the term ‘happiness,’ see Friedlander, Walter
Benjamin, 195–200.
be described as “Eleatic”129 and is deemed capable of “transform[ing] [his]

existence into a preserve of memory”: “To it he sacrificed in his life friends
and companionship, in his works plot, unity of characters, the flow of the
narration, the play of the imagination.”130
129 SW: 2, 239.

130 SW: 2, 239.
chapter two
THE KAFKA-ESSAYS AND

THE ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAGIC DRAMA:
ON FAILURE AND THE LIMITS OF
HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
“Your point of departure is the … re-

demptive [heilsgeschichtlichen] perspec-
tive opened by the trial proceeding; mine
is the tiny absurd hope, as well as the crea-
tures who on the one hand are concerned
by this hope, but in whom on the other its
absurdity is mirrored.”1
Benjamin to Scholem
Introduction
Benjamin’s philosophy of history illustrates that the redemption of a par-

ticular event in history inevitably goes accompanied with the revelation of
the absence of redemption of history. As revenants of the past the ‘dialectical
image’ and ‘messianic now’ do not just exemplify ‘rejuvenation’ of moments
that were thought to have passed but they also lay bare the distance that
separates the present from the future event of complete redemption. Ben-
jamin’s concept of ‘messianic power’ always and necessarily denotes a weak-
ness in that it is seen as a prefiguration of this ultimate moment of final
fulfillment. ‘Messianic power’ thus refers to an “immanent state of per-
fection.”2 The ultimate and complete redemption of history as such is in
the messianic moment experienced as possible or, at most, as imminent
but never as actual, let alone as already having taken place. The first part
of this chapter discusses Benjamin’s reading of Kafka as a witness to the
absence of complete fulfillment of history as a whole and, subsequently,
Benjamin’s critique of modernity and of the impoverishment of experience.
1 B: 2, 617.
52 chapter two
The second part zooms in on a similar attempt to bring to expression the

lack of redemption of history, but this time in his Habilitationsschrift The
Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924–1925).
1. Franz Kafka, the Unknowability

of the Divine and the Decline of Experience
1.1. Introduction
In his moving account of his lifelong relation with Benjamin, Gershom
Scholem mentions that his friend characterized his own philosophy as
Janus-faced.3 Responsible for this ambiguity is, as was brought to the fore
in the discussion of Benjamin’s philosophy of history in the first chapter,
his singular blend of materialism and messianism. For this reason Scholem
is right in claiming that “[o]ne side [of Benjamin’s Janus face] was offered
to Brecht, the other to me [that is, Scholem himself].”4 Benjamin’s ideas on
Kafka will be the focal point of this chapter since they are a clear illustration
of this Janus face. In November 1927, when he read The Trial while in
bed with jaundice (“As an angel of illness I have Kafka at my bedside.”)5
Benjamin started to discuss Kafka’s work and relevance with Scholem. As
becomes clear from their correspondence, the side of Benjamin’s Janus face
that was turned to Scholem really was a most religious one. For Scholem’s
own interpretation of Kafka, to be sure, is nothing less than immediately
theological and, from start to end, steeped in his Jewish beliefs. On August
1, 1931, he sends Benjamin the following remarks:
[My] “individual thoughts” about Kafka … do not concern Kafka’s position in
the continuum of German literature (in which he has no position of any sort,
something that he himself did not have the least doubt about; as you probably
know, he was a Zionist), but his position in the continuum of Jewish literature.
I advise you [that is, Benjamin] to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book
of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which
I regard as the sole subject of Kafka’s production [worthy of] being treated in
a work of literature. These, you see, are in my opinion also the vantage points
from which one can describe Kafka’s linguistic world, which with its affinity
to the language of the Last Judgment probably represents the prosaic in its
most canonical form. … It would be an enigma to me how you as a critic would
3 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 197–198.

4 Ibid., 197–198.
5 Benjamin, in a letter from November 1927 to Scholem, quoted in ibid., 145.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 53
go about saying something about this man’s [that is, Kafka’s] world without
placing the Lehre [teaching], called Gesetz [law] in Kafka’s work, at the center.
I suppose this is what the moral reflection—if it were possible (and this is the
hypothesis of presumptuousness!)—of a halakhist who attempted a linguistic
paraphrase of a divine judgment would have to be like. Here, for once, a world
is expressed in which redemption cannot be anticipated—go and explain
this to the goyim! I believe that at this point your critique will become just
as esoteric as its subject; the light of revelation never burned as unmercifully
as it does here. The overwhelming statement that the Last Judgment is, rather,
a martial law was made, unless I am mistaken, by Kafka himself.6
Elsewhere, Scholem even goes as far as to write that he told his students
that “in order to understand the Kabbalah, nowadays one had to read Franz
Kafka’s writings first, particularly The Trial.”7
The other side of the spectrum is personified by Bertolt Brecht, with
whom Benjamin discussed the writings of Kafka in June 1931. According to
Benjamin’s notes of these discussions, Brecht considered Kafka to be “the
only truly Bolshevist writer.”8
Scholem, always preoccupied by the desire to show that messianic in-
sights were ultimately of far more significance for Benjamin than materialist
ones, makes the assertion that his essay on Kafka (written in 1934) bears
evidence of the fact that even at this later stage of his work Benjamin’s
Marxism was outweighed by his Jewish beliefs. With this purpose in mind,
he describes Benjamin’s ideas on Kafka as “certainly not in line with [his]
work [for the Institute of Social Research]” and as “diametrically opposed
to those of Brecht.”9 There is indeed, in Benjamin’s letters, ample proof to
be found that Scholem’s insights on Kafka had an enormous influence on
his own reading and writing. In May 1934 Benjamin writes the following to
Scholem: “Your particular views of Kafka emanating from Jewish insights
[would be] of the greatest importance to me in this undertaking [of writing
an essay on Kafka]—not to say virtually indispensable.”10 It should therefore
be clear from the outset that for Benjamin no interpretation of Kafka can be
meaningful if it is unable to confront the theological side of his thinking.
However, there are obvious differences between Benjamin’s interpreta-
tion of Kafka and Scholem’s, which seem to be strategically overlooked in
6 Ibid., 170–171.
7 Ibid., 125.
8 Benjamin’s notes on a conversation with Brecht of June 6, 1931, quoted by Scholem in
ibid., 175.
9 Ibid. 197–198.
10 Ibid. 198.
54 chapter two
the latter’s attempts to ward off an in his opinion overly materialist read-
ing of his friend’s philosophy. Benjamin’s acknowledgment of the ‘failure’
[Gescheiterten] that he deems central to Kafka’s work is indispensable here.11
On August 11, 1934, for instance, Benjamin writes to Scholem that “[t]he
Work of the Thora … is—when we occupy us with Kafka’s presentation
of it—thwarted.”12 In the Kafka-essay itself, moreover, it is stated in one of
the most essential paragraphs that “he did fail [gescheitert] in his grandiose
attempt to convert poetry into teachings [Lehre, doctrine], to turn it into
a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in
the face of reason, seemed to him the only appropriate thing for it.”13 With
the central place that is allocated to Kafka’s failure to “convert poetry into
teachings” Benjamin takes a clear step back from Scholem’s interpretation,
however much he took over from the latter’s theological framework. For
Kafka’s prose is in Benjamin’s opinion not at all written from the ideal stand-
point of the “halakhist who attempted a linguistic paraphrase of a divine
judgment.”14 The causes of Kafka’s failure to ‘convert poetry into teach-
ings’ are rather to be sought in precisely the human incapacity to make
the halakhist’s standpoint our own. In Benjamin’s essay Kafka’s writing is
sketched out as a careful analysis of the impossibility to access divine truth
(teachings, doctrine). Benjamin defends the viewpoint that Kafka expresses
nothing less than the condition of being deprived of the “language of the
Last Judgment.”15 For Benjamin, as Peter Osborne points out, Kafka’s genius
consists in having given up the halakhist’s position and his attempts to con-
vert Halakah (the divine law, doctrine of rules) into Haggadah (the set of
traditions and stories that are meant to transmit the Halakah) and in sub-
stituting it for a description of the ongoing efforts of a haggadhist who,
vice versa, seeks to “convert Haggadah into Halakah.”16 Since immediate
access to the doctrine of the divine has been lost to mankind, however, these
attempts are doomed to fail.
11 SW: 3, 327; B: 2, 764.

12 B: 2, 618 (my translation).
13 SW: 2, 808; GS: II-2, 427.
14 Ibid., 171.
15 Ibid., 170.
16 See Peter Osborne, “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Pol-
itics of Time.” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Ben-
jamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 74: “Kafka’s reflections
are … not the reflections of a halakhist. Their indeterminacy does not derive from the
unbridgeable gap between the divinity of law and its human interpretation. They are those
of a haggadhist, seeking to fill the gap created by the loss of law (Halakah), seeking to convert
Haggadah into Halakah.”
The differences between Scholem’s and Benjamin’s reading of Kafka

are crucial because they cast light on Benjamin’s own and most profound
philosophical intuitions. To be precise, that Benjamin points out that his
thoughts on Kafka remain indebted to his Jewish messianic convictions
does not at all mean that they can be reduced to them and it would for
that reason be a serious misreading of his Kafka-interpretation if no atten-
tion would be paid to Benjamin’s interests in Marxism. As Peter Osborne
remarks, Benjamin’s views on Kafka need to be recast as a constellation
where his Jewish messianic convictions and his materialist ones are brought
together under the flag of a more substantial interest in the relation between
truth and history:
[While reading the Kafka-essay] it is a fundamental error to suppose these
concerns [that is, the Jewish messianic ones] to be removed from Benjamin’s
interest in Marxism. The two interests make claims upon the same philosoph-
ical ground—the relationship of truth to history—from different historical
and theoretical standpoints.17
This topic of the relation between truth and history places the Kafka-essay
firmly within the philosophical continuum to which Benjamin’s philos-
ophy of history belongs as well: the concepts of the ‘messianic’ and of
‘redemption’ are as indispensable to understand Benjamin’s ideas on Kafka
as they are central to his On the Concept of History. This is the case because
Benjamin’s reading of Kafka is, like his philosophy of history, neither a-
theological nor immediately theological. Benjamin neither reduces Kafka’s
work to religious matters nor does he entirely release it from them: “There
are two ways to miss the point of Kafka’s works,” writes Benjamin in 1934,
“One is to interpret them naturally [natürliche]; the other is to interpret
them from a supernatural [übernatürliche] perspective.”18 It should be clear,
hence, that Benjamin’s interpretation of Kafka rejects and transcends both
the immediately theological framework of Scholem’s Jewish messianism
and the a-theological framework of Brecht’s Marxist reading. The most cru-
cial characteristic of Benjamin’s ‘Janus face’ is therefore not, as Scholem
thinks, that two gazes seem to look in opposite directions but that those two
gazes do stare out from the same face. Benjamin’s interpretation of Kafka is
characterized precisely by the attempt, determined by his refusal to choose
between both, to show how Jewish messianism can be a complement to
historical materialism and vice versa. This interpretative standpoint that
17 Ibid., 70.
18 SW: 2, 806; GS: II-2, 4 25.
56 chapter two
lies in-between immediate theology and a-theology makes one think that
the universe that is according to Benjamin being depicted in Kafka’s nov-
els and stories is the very one that supports his own philosophical writings.
It is for this reason that the choice was made to pay so much attention to
Benjamin’s Kafka-essay: nowhere in his work has it been made more clear
what it means to live in a world that cannot comprehend the absolute as a
unified object of experience or relate to truth as an object of intention. Ben-
jamin’s understanding of Kafka brings out how the inaccessibility of what
he calls ‘doctrine’ (divine teachings, Lehre) seems to have condemned us to
a disenchanted universe. Moreover, it is in the Kafka-essay that Benjamin
introduces the idea that even a truly fallen universe should not cast aside
the hope for redemption.
1.2. The Kafka-Essay and the ‘Inaccessibility of Doctrine’

In the Kafka-essay Benjamin explains why an immediately theological inter-
pretation of Kafka’s writing cannot be upheld. Criticizing the commonly
held viewpoint that the true topic of The Castle (posthumously published
in 1926) is divine Grace that cannot be forced by man at will, Benjamin rec-
ognizes an extreme example of the reductionist, theological viewpoint in
Willy Haas’s reading of Kafka as “the only legitimate heir” to Kierkegaard
and Pascal.19 The target of his attack against the ‘supernatural’ interpreta-
tion is Haas’s statement that
in [Kierkegaard, Pascal and Kafka], there is an excruciatingly harsh basic
religious theme: man is always in the wrong before God [immer im Unrecht
ist vor Gott] … Kafka’s upper world, his so-called Castle, with its immense,
complex staff of petty and rather lecherous officials, his strange heaven, plays
a horrible game with people … yet man is very much in the wrong even before
this god.20
Benjamin refers to these statements as a “theology [that], lagging far behind
the doctrine of justification formulated by Saint Anselm of Canterbury, falls
into barbaric speculations [barbarische Spekulationen] which do not even
seem consistent with the text of Kafka’s works.”21 He is thus out to show
that it testifies not only to blasphemy but also to a sloppy reading of Kafka’s
work if one is to take the omnipotent forces that are being described in
it as manifestations of a divine will. In the same manner, the dynamic of
19 SW: 2, 807.
20 Haas, quoted in SW: 2, 807; GS: II-2, 426.
21 SW: 2, 807; GS: II-2, 426.
infinite deferral and unceasing retreat that is central to The Castle should
not be confused with the inapproachability of the absolute or the inacces-
sibility of divine teaching since this inapproachability and inaccessibility,
of such crucial importance to both Kafka and Benjamin, are not at all to
be regarded as signs that genuine truth is forever receding and wrapped up
in a mythical fog or that the absolute can only be presented in a negative
way. As we will see further on, the world of Kafka and Benjamin is charac-
terized neither by a feeling that divine forces are entirely absent nor by an
experience of sublime non-representability but by the awareness that the
absolute suddenly asserts itself in the here and now and therefore cannot
be approached at will. Crucial to Kafka’s writings is therefore the idea that
a presentation of absolute truth can occur in our immediate surroundings
but that it cannot be actively brought about and is no object of knowledge
or intention.22
To make this double point in a first, simple way Benjamin contrasts
Haas’s view with a sentence in The Castle that literally forecloses the link
between the Kafkaesque authorities and divine forgiveness (“[E]ven [the
supreme authorities] can probably not forgive but only judge.”)23 and with a
statement that he does seem to endorse, borrowed from the Swiss writer
Denis de Rougement: “All this … is not the wretched situation of man
without a god, but the wretched state of a man who is bound to a god
he does not know [einem Gott verhaftet ist, den er nicht kennt], because
22 In this context, it seems important to mention that Benjamin’s interpretation of Kafka
does not just reject both the idea that the absolute is absent and the idea that it is embodied
in (political and juridical) authorities but also the idea—only seemingly close to his own—
that it is revealed in a gradual way. As Friedlander writes, Benjamin criticizes Scholem’s
formal account of the realization of meaning (shared by the Romantics) that deems it
possible (and even essential) to distinguish between a sign of the existence of the divine
on the one hand and the content of its revelation on the other. In this view, revelation
evolves from a first recognition that the absolute is present (but undecipherable) to an
ever-increasing ability to ‘read’ more and more of its content. Benjamin, however, criticizes
this view by maintaining that the presentation of absolute truth always already entails a
distinct articulation of content and an actualization of meaning. For this reason, “a sign
without content cannot be revelation. Benjamin would thus argue that the condition in
which scripture is lost and the one in which it cannot be deciphered come to the same
thing.” (Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 213–214). This explains, as we will see later on, why
the universe of Kafka is marked by a dualism between, on the one hand, a dynamics of
the postponement of truth-revelation and, on the other, the sudden discovery of something
absolute or the abrupt arrival of moments of truth-revelation (the gestus). The former does
bring about an openness for or an attentiveness towards the latter but it always entails a
confrontation with the absence of truth-presentation and it does not contain any (not even
a gradual) actualization of meaning.
23 SW: 2, 807.
58 chapter two
he does not know Christ.”24 Backed up by these statements Benjamin’s

own views on Kafka distinguish themselves, first, from the immediately
theological interpretation that starts from the idea that man as described
by Kafka is a sinner in the eyes of a punishing God and, second, from the
a-theological interpretation that starts from the idea that Kafka depicts a
universe without any divine force whatsoever. The viewpoint that Benjamin
makes his own is the neither immediately theological nor a-theological
interpretation that in Kafka’s stories divine forces remain unknown but
that they are neither evil nor inexistent. Kafka’s universe does allow for the
presence of a divine and absolute force but human beings lack the medium
to comprehend it and to aim for it as an object of intention or consistent
meaning.
The novel where Benjamin finds the most obvious proof of this theme
of the inapproachability of the divine or the inaccessibility of doctrine
is The Castle. According to him, the village at the foot of the castle is a
metaphor for a village in a Talmudic legend where a princess is exiled
and separated from her fiancé who is, in truth, the Messiah. In Jewish
tradition, this village “whose language [the princess] does not understand,
far from her compatriots” symbolizes the human body and incapacity to
comprehend the absolute—an incapacity that cannot be overcome in any
way.25 When the princess, who symbolizes the soul, receives a letter from her
fiancé, there is therefore no way to communicate the news of his imminent
arrival to her fellow villagers. Due to the absence of a shared language there
is no means to convey the message of the coming of the Messiah: “She
prepares a meal for him because this is the only way in which she can
express her joy in a village whose language she does not know.”26
This unknowability of the divine is for Benjamin not merely a theme in
Kafka’s work but it is also a quality and, paradoxically, even a condition
of possibility of his artistic writing itself: the “wretched state of a man
who is bound to a god he does not know” is just as much the position of
Kafka, the writer as that of his literary characters.27 It is in this context that
Benjamin mentions, twice, that Kafka was not “the founder of a religion”28
24 De Rougement, quoted in SW: 2, 807; GS: II-2, 426.

25 SW: 2, 805.
26 SW: 2, 805.
27 SW: 2, 807.
28 SW: 2, 806. “The air of this village [at the foot of the castle or, metaphorically, of the
Talmudic legend recounted above] blows about Kafka, and that is why he was not tempted
to found a religion.” … “He was neither mantic nor the founder of a religion. How was he able
to survive in this air [of the village at the foot of the castle]?” (SW: 2, 806).
and states that “[n]o other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt
not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully.”29 It is this inability to
gain knowledge of the absolute that marks Kafka’s work with the above
mentioned ‘failure’ vis-à-vis the Work of the Thora and the inability “to
convert poetry into teachings.”30 It is crucial in this regard that for Benjamin
Kafka’s genius was closely connected to his own acknowledgment of this
failure. Kafka’s relation to his own artistic work is steeped in an awareness
of the limits of his understanding: “Kafka wished to be numbered among
ordinary men. He was pushed to the limits of understanding at every turn
[Die Grenze des Verstehens hat sich ihm auf Schritt und Tritt aufgedrängt],
and he liked to push others to them as well.”31
1.3. Kafka’s Last Will and Shame

Benjamin maintains that the notion of failure casts light on Kafka’s much-
debated demand that his unpublished writings should be destroyed after
the event of his death: “[His testament] says that the writings did not sat-
isfy their author, that he regarded his efforts as failures [verfehlt], that he
counted himself among those who were bound to fail [daß er sich selbst zu
denen rechnete, die scheitern mußten].”32 The fact that he specifically asked
Max Brod to destroy his writings means for Benjamin that Kafka understood
that they did not grasp truth or comprehend it as an object of knowledge
and that they were, in a sense, as insubstantial (which is not at all synony-
mous to meaningless) as the law in his famous short story:
[Kafka’s] parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the con-
trary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his
writings. … The text of his will is another case in point. Given its background,
the directive in which Kafka ordered the destruction of his literary remains
is just as unfathomable, to be weighed just as carefully as the answers of the
doorkeeper in “Vor dem Gezetz.” Perhaps Kafka, whose every day on earth
brought him up against insoluble modes of behavior and imprecise commu-
nications, in death wished to give his contemporaries a taste of their own
medicine.33
Between the lines of this discussion of Kafka’s last will Benjamin draws
attention to an important nuance. In the letter to Scholem (1938) that
29 SW: 2, 808.
30 SW: 2, 808.
31 SW: 2, 804; GS: II-2, 422.
32 SW: 2, 808; GS: II-2, 427.
33 SW: 2, 804.
60 chapter two
contains his review of Max Brod’s biography of Kafka he includes the sen-
tence that “Kafka presumably had to entrust his literary remains to someone
who would not comply with his last request.”34 He thus hints at the possi-
bility that Kafka knew very well that Max Brod would in the end fail his
friend’s last will to have his unpublished writings burnt. In that case Kafka’s
wish to have his writings destroyed after his death would not prove that he
considered them unworthy to be preserved. This distinction is significant
because it would mean, first, that, despite the content of his last will, Kafka
did want to leave behind a legacy and, second, that an important element
of this legacy that he wanted to leave behind is precisely the idea that he
did not consider himself worthy to leave one behind. In other words, Kafka
wanted to bring on display the very failure that is central to his thinking
and he could only do so by way of an unheeded last will to have his work
destroyed. A confrontation with the limits of understanding and the feeling
that nothing that is profoundly truthful can be aimed at in an intentional
way thus become not just central characteristics of his writings but even
conditions of possibility of genuine authorship.35
It is in this same context that Benjamin hints at Kafka’s feeling of shame.
He writes that “[s]hame … is Kafka’s strongest gesture [Die Scham … ist die
stärkste Gebärde Kafkas]”36 and goes on to derive, from the sentence in The
Trial that “[i]t was as if the shame of it were to outlive him,” a notion of
shame that is not to be equated with an individual property: “Shame is not
only shame in the presence of others, but can also be shame one feels for
others.”37 Kafka’s shame is to be termed ‘singular’ or ‘dividual’ rather than
individual because it is of both a particular and a universal nature at the
same time: it is a shame experienced within the heart of the Self but for
the Other. In shame, the ego is opened up from within and thus affected
by an alterity that it cannot take distance from.38 In shame the I is forced
34 SW: 3, 323.
35 For an extensive exploration of this ‘aesthetics of silence’ in literature, see Susan
Sontag’s beautiful essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” in Styles of Radical Will (New York:
Picador, 2002), 3–34 and Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co, trans. Jonathan Dunne
(New York: New Directions, 2004).
36 SW: 2, 808; GS: II-2, 428.
37 SW: 2, 808.
38 See, for example, Rudi Visker, “Dis-possessed: How to Remain Silent ‘after’ Levinas.”
Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrecht, Boston, London:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 116–117: “[The subject] is not without a centre, but
caught in the unbreakable spell of something from which it derives its singularity. Accord-
ingly, what is most ‘proper’ to the subject, what lies at the basis of its irreplacability, of its
to suffer in the place of the Other and it brings on display a life that it can
neither make fully into its own nor differentiate itself from: it is “an intimate
human reaction, but at the same time it has social claims.”39 Benjamin’s
concept of shame thus runs counter to a commonly held viewpoint that
associates it with an awareness of guilt and the possibility of atonement.
Though Benjamin contends, albeit for entirely different reasons, that guilt
is an equally important element in Kafka’s writings, it is not in guilt that
their Grundgefühl lies: the opinion that guilt and atonement are Kafka’s
most basic themes, namely, would restore both the immediately theological
interpretation that Benjamin so violently criticizes (that is, the idea that
his writing originates in the feeling of being “in the wrong before God”)
and the belief in the possibility of a recovered sense of autonomy or a fully
individualized Self.40 What Benjamin has in mind for Kafka, rather, is not
at all a shame that originates in a feeling of being individually responsible
for a committed wrongdoing or in a longing for a restored innocence but a
shame that follows from a never resolved feeling of not being responsible
for one’s very being. It allows us to experience a layer of being that belongs
to the essence of humanity (an “elemental purity of feeling”) but does refer
to something beyond it and it denotes a life which does separate us from
the absolute but does not fully suspend our relation to it.41 In a similar vein
Emmanuel Lévinas will write only one year later that “[s]hame does not
depend … on the limitations of our being, in so far as it is susceptible to
sin, but on the being of our being itself, and its incapacity to release it from
itself [son incapacité de rompre avec soi-même].”42 The shame that stands out
in Kafka’s stories and self-reflections is caused by the awareness that it is
being human itself, and not the act of committing a sin, which condemns
us to the “wretched state of [being] bound to a God [we] do not know.”43
Because the life contained within the feeling of shame is singular and
non-individual, it needs the mediation of artistic practice and writing to be
non-interchangeable singularity—in short of its being ‘itself’—has nothing to do with some

secret property or some hidden capacity, but results from a lack of resources on its part, from
its eliminable poverty, its incapacity: the subject is something that has missed an appoint-
ment, and it would never have even existed without that break, rent or gap through which it
gains, rather than loses, its intimacy.”
39 SW: 2, 808.
40 SW: 2, 807.
41 SW: 2, 808.
42 Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’ évasion (Paris: Biblio Essais, Livre de Poche, 1982), 111 (my
translation).
43 SW: 2, 807.
62 chapter two
expressed. The shame that Benjamin endows Kafka with instills an inability
to comprehend and to grasp truth as an object of knowledge or intention but
it can be taken up in literary contexts that, on account of their artistic char-
acter, do not presuppose the aim of knowledge or systematic meaning. The
shame that is central to Kafka’s writing denotes a layer of being that cannot
be aimed at or brought into a context of knowledge but it can be expressed
in an artistic medium where it is obvious that the actions, thoughts and
feelings that are described are neither to be immediately identified with
those of the author nor for that reason to be regarded as entirely unreal-
istic. For this reason, though the dividual and singular character of the feel-
ing of shame precludes it from finding an adequate medium of expression
in ordinary experiences (where emotions are immediately identified with
individual properties), it can be brought to visibility in that realm where
truth and semblance meet without fully merging with each other, that is, in
art. Such strategies of writing are neither magical nor realistic, and they do
not turn Kafka into a modern-day Socrates who draws on the very aware-
ness that knowledge is lacking in order to gain a more profound knowledge.
Shame cannot be aufgehoben into a Socratic docta ignorantia because it
draws attention to an incapacity that cannot be overcome: what is remark-
able with shame is that it exemplifies how the incapacity of human beings
to intentionally express an essential layer of their being does not prevent
this layer to be expressed on its own account and as if in an involuntary
way. Shame, in the words of Lévinas, “relates to all one wants to conceal
but cannot escape from.”44 The expression of shame that Benjamin refers
to can therefore never be directly aimed at and Kafka was only capable of
bringing it to expression through the intervention of a third party who went
against his will (in both a literal and figurative way, that is, it is only because
Brod did not do what Kafka had asked him to do that his writings are able to
express the power that is contained within them). In other words, even the
most significant elements of his writings, that is, the very feelings of failure
and shame and the awareness that they do not gain knowledge of truth, are
expressed as failures.
44 Ibid., 112. See also Lévinas’s discussion of the scene in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights
(1931) where the Tramp attends a concert of a chamber-orchestra but, having swallowed a
whistle earlier that day, constantly disrupts the performance with his hiccup. These hiccups
are in Lévinas’s opinion exemplifications of the experience of shame. According to Lévinas,
namely, the Tramp is not ashamed on account of a previous event or act but merely because
something that is part of his inner core does not let itself be contained and expresses itself
in an involuntary way.
1.4. The Kafka-Letter and the Decay of Tradition

In the so-called Kafka-letter to Scholem, written four years after the Kafka-
essay, Benjamin renders what is in his opinion a new aspect of his interpre-
tation, one that is “more or less independent of [his] earlier reflections.”45
The crux of these new ideas is nevertheless the same notion of ‘failure’
that was central to the Kafka-essay: “To do justice to the figure of Kafka
in its purity, and in its peculiar beauty, one should never lose sight of one
thing: it is the figure of a failure [Gescheiterten].”46 In line with his earlier
views, Benjamin writes that “in Kafka, there is no longer any talk of wisdom.
Only the products of its decomposition [Zerfallsprodukte] are left.”47 What
is new, however, is that Benjamin brings this Kafkaesque theme of failure
into a historical context. First of all, the decline of wisdom and the inacces-
sibility of truth are, in the Kafka-letter, linked to a more general decay of
tradition: “Kafka’s work represents a sickening of tradition [Erkrankung der
Tradition]. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth.
Wisdom is thus characterized as an attribute of tradition; it is truth in its
haggadic consistency. This consistency of truth has been lost.”48 This ‘sick-
ening of tradition,’ now, is in Benjamin’s mind a specifically modern con-
dition. What in the Kafka-letter is deemed essential to the topic of truth
is not only that it has become inaccessible as an object of knowledge but
that this inaccessibility or inapproachability is most clearly traceable in an
existence that is characteristic of modernity. According to Benjamin, Kafka
discovered that the literary rendering of the alienated state of modern man
and, more in specific, of people living in big cities can serve as a means
to lay bare a process that has struck at the heart of the power of tradi-
tion:
Kafka’s work is an ellipse; its widely spaced focal points are defined, on the
one hand, by mystical experience (which is, above all, the experience of tradi-
tion) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern city-dweller. … What
is actually and in the precise sense crazy [Tolle] about Kafka is that this abso-
lutely new world of experience comes to him by way of the mystical tradition.
This could not have happened, of course, without devastating occurrences …
within the tradition itself.49
45 SW: 3, 325.
46 SW: 3, 327; B: 2, 764.
47 SW: 3, 326; B: 2, 763.
48 SW: 3, 326; B: 2, 763.
49 SW: 3, 325; B: 2, 760–762.
64 chapter two
What Benjamin has in mind with this description of life under the sign of
modernity is in the Kafka-letter itself only very briefly hinted at. The whole
question of the loss of the legitimacy of tradition, however, is one of the most
important themes in his work in the late thirties and needs to be regarded as
nothing less than the foundation of a large number of his most well-known
essays. In essays like The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov (1936) and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), for instance, Ben-
jamin sheds light on the process through which tradition takes shape and
builds on the assertion that it can be interpreted as a passing on [tradere] of
experience [Erfahrung]. Benjamin’s concept of tradition denotes precisely
a sphere of existence that mediates, by way of a so-called ‘true’ experience,
between the individual and the community to which he belongs.50 “Expe-
rience,” writes Benjamin in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire “is … a matter of
tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is the product less
of facts firmly anchored in memory [Erinnerung] than of accumulated and
frequently unconscious data that flow together in memory [Gedächtnis].”51
He reads Baudelaire’s concept of correspondances as an instance of such an
experience which goes beyond the individual’s conscious memory: “Corre-
spondances are the data of remembrance [Eingedenkens]—not historical
data, but data of prehistory. What makes festive days great and significant is
the encounter with an earlier life [früheren Leben].”52 To the inner structure
of experience, therefore, belongs an intimate connection between a purely
individual past and a past that precedes that individual: “What is past mur-
murs in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its
place in a previous life.”53 Experience brings about the sense of belonging
that is indispensable to overcome the barriers that separate an individual
from the other members of a community. Benjamin goes on to describe sto-
rytelling as an activity that gives rise to such an experience of continuity: the
story, and the actual moment when it is being narrated, allow the individual
to experience a past that stretches out beyond his own limited existence. It
is by way of storytelling that an individual learns that he is a member of a
larger community: “A story does not aim to convey an event per se, which
is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the
storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.”54
50 SW: 4, 314.
51 SW: 4, 314; GS: I-2, 608.
52 SW: 4, 334; GS: I-2, 639 (translation modified).
53 SW: 4, 334.
54 SW: 4, 316.
In the essay that is devoted to the specific significance of the activity

of storytelling Benjamin refers to it as an “ability to share experiences.”55
The sense of belonging that is passed on by the storyteller to those who
are listening is here further analyzed and, likewise, depicted as one of the
main features of the ‘true’ experience that is handed over as tradition: “The
storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported
by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening
to his tale.”56 The story is what moulds the ‘previous’ or ‘earlier’ life of a
community into its communicable form: “[H]e is granted the ability to
reach back through a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not
only his own experience but much of the experience of others; what the
storyteller knows from hearsay is added to what is most his own).”57 It is here
that the individual grows intuitively aware of the ties between his own past
and a collective past that, even though it essentially precedes the former,
does form an intimate part of it.
It is only by grasping the importance and specific role of memory that
can be understood what is essential to the activity of storytelling and, in
extension, to the concept of ‘true’ experience. By way of a specific type of
memory that contains the ‘earlier’ and pre-individual life of the community
and is itself contained within the story, both storyteller and listeners go
beyond their individual lives:
Memory [Erinnerung] creates the chain of tradition which transmits an event
from generation to generation. … It starts the web which all stories together
form in the end. One connects up with the next, as the great storytellers,
particularly the oriental ones, have always readily shown. In each of them,
there is a Scheherazade who thinks of a fresh story whenever her tale comes to
a stop. This is epic remembrance [episches Gedächtnis] and the muse-inspired
element of the narrative.58
The memory which gives shape to the transmissibility of experience, in
other words, does not just belong to the community instead of to the indi-
vidual but it is, to be precise, the very medium through which the latter
grows aware that he cannot be released from the former. The story as sub-
strate of ‘true’ experience has the ability to transform reminiscences into
a remembrance of things past—not, as in Proust’s novel, of things that
belong to the past of an individual, but of things that belong to a collective
55 SW: 3, 143.
56 SW: 3, 146.
57 SW: 3, 162.
58 SW: 3, 154; GS: II-2, 453–454.
66 chapter two
history. Experience grants the storyteller a claim to a truth that for its
part endows him with a sense of authority. “[The story],” writes Benjamin
“contains, openly or covertly, something useful. In one case, the usefulness
may lie in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a
proverb or maxim.”59 Even though some stories do advocate a practical
advice Benjamin’s notion of usefulness does not here refer to the logic of
pragmatism and problem-solving: being useful means in this context that,
in the story, storyteller and listener are granted access to a deeper form of
wisdom:
[T]he storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel
[weiß Rat]—not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many,
like the sage.60 … [C]ounsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal
concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding. To
seek this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story. … Counsel
woven into the fabric of real life [gelebten Lebens] is wisdom.61
It is only in this sense that the story can turn into the receptacle of ‘the epic
side of truth’: to the extent that it conveys wisdom, it is not directed towards
a context of verifiable knowledge, an accuracy of meaning or a psychological
explanation of certain events but it delivers a deeper understanding of their
inner structure.62 Benjamin thus presupposes the very same dualism that
will underlie his philosophy of history (see Chapter I): the story does not
concern itself with facts and the way in which certain events have occurred
in history (the positivist ideal of the ‘wie es gewesen ist’) but with a truth
or absolute force that can be discovered in life as such (which is why one
story is never an autonomous whole but usually leads to another). It does
not refer to elements that can be verified and causes that can be determined
once and for all but it embodies a broader view and a more dynamic context
of meaning. Seeing the chronicler as an instance of the storyteller and
opposing him to the type of historian who is merely concerned with the
verification and comprehensibility of the events depicted, Benjamin writes
that
[t]he historian’s task is to explain in one way or another the happenings with
which he deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with simply
displaying them as models of the course of the world. But this is precisely
what the chronicler does … By basing [his] historical tales on a divine—
and inscrutable—plan of salvation [den göttlichen Heilsplan … der ein uner-
59 SW: 3, 145.
60 SW: 3, 162; GS: II-2, 464.
61 SW: 3, 145–146; GS: II-2, 442.
62 SW: 3, 326.
forschlicher ist], at the very outset [he has] lifted the burden of demonstrable
explanation from [his] own shoulders. Its place is taken by interpretation,
which is concerned not with an accurate concatenation of definite events,
but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the
world [den großen unerforschlichen Weltlauf ].63
If, in the story, both the storyteller and the listeners grow intuitively aware
of how they belong to a greater whole, it is therefore only because both
understand that the events themselves that are conveyed in the story bear
the mark of a larger, not verifiable but all-encompassing force. The wisdom
that lies contained within the story cannot be taken as an object of intention
nor be aimed at as the source of knowledge and for that reason precisely it
is believed to convey a truth that is absolute.
Benjamin devotes so much attention to the storyteller’s task to mould
experience into its communicable form because it has become so endan-
gered that by now we can only turn to the shattered pieces that are left
behind. The very concept of experience, namely, seems to be the only rem-
nant of a world that is no longer there—a past in which the actual ability
to have and share these experiences had not yet been so drastically impov-
erished. The essay The Storyteller is in first instance to be read as a careful
description of a phenomenon on the verge of disappearance. In the very first
lines of the essay, Benjamin writes:
Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living efficacy is
by no means a force today. He has already become something remote from
us and is moving ever further away. … This distance and this angle of vision
are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have almost every day.
It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. One meets with
fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale properly.64
Underlying the entire essay is an awareness that the level of experience that
the story presented us with has moved beyond our reach: “It is as if a capa-
bility that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions,
has been taken from us. … [E]xperience has fallen in value. And it looks as
if it may fall into bottomlessness.”65 In Benjamin’s opinion, the advent of
the novel was one of the first moments when experience disclosed its fallen
state. In line with Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1916), he sees the
novel as “the form of transcendental homelessness [of the idea].”66 As such,
63 SW: 3, 152–153; GS: II-2, 451–452.

64 SW: 3, 143.
65 SW: 3, 143.
66 Lukács, quoted in SW: 3, 155.
68 chapter two
what lies at the origin of the novel is not the “[c]ounsel woven into the fab-
ric of real life” that is wisdom but, on the contrary, nothing less than the
very gap between meaning and life itself.67 The novelist is continuously on
the lookout for what lies concealed beneath the surface of his life and impa-
tiently aims at what is capable of turning this sheer multiplicity of events
into a coherent lifespan. Benjamin writes that
[t]he earliest indication of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling
is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. … The birthplace
of the novel is the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no
longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel
and can give none. To write a novel is to take to the extreme that which is
incommensurable in the representation of human existence. In the midst of
life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives
evidence of the profound perplexity [Ratlosigkeit] of the living.68
While the novelist is thus ceaselessly trying to overcome the gap between
meaning and life, it is precisely here that he deprives himself of every
true form of experience: the novel locks up writer and reader alike in the
particularity of their own existence and essentially diverts attention away
from any notion of an all-encompassing and ‘inscrutable’ force that can
be presented as a model for a larger context of meaning.69 The sphere of
existence which is explored in the novel is purely individual, never belongs
to any form of community and nowhere transcends the specific period in
history in which it is set:
The “meaning of life” is really the center around which the novel moves. But
the quest for it is no more than the initial expression of perplexity with which
its reader sees himself living this written life. “Meaning of life” versus “moral
of the story”: with these slogans novel and story confront each other, and
from them the totally different historical coordinates of these art forms can be
discerned. … A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller;
even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel,
however, is isolated, more so than any other reader.70
The novel, though perhaps the ‘earliest,’ is merely an ‘indication’ [Anze-
ichen] or ‘symptom’ of a more profound malaise.71 In The Storyteller it is
Benjamin’s aim to explore a more widespread decline of experience that
67 SW: 3, 146. See Lukács, quoted in SW: 3, 155.

68 SW: 3, 146; GS: II-2, 443.
69 SW: 3, 152–153.
70 SW: 3, 155–156.
71 SW: 3, 146; GS: II-2, 442.
has affected the different strata of contemporary existence: “Every glance

at a newspaper shows that [experience] has reached a new low—that our
image not only of the external world but also of the moral world has under-
gone changes overnight, changes which were previously thought impossi-
ble.”72 Though the evolution that led to the end of the art of storytelling
may here itself be understood to be of a more general nature, the result
to which it gave rise does stand out as a typically modern phenomenon.73
The storyteller has disappeared, namely, because modernity saw the advent
of another form of communication that has drastically isolated storytelling
from the context of speech:
[W]e can see that with the complete ascendancy of the middle class—which
in fully developed capitalism has the press as one of its most important
instruments—a form of communication emerges which, no matter how an-
cient its origins, never before decisively influenced the epic form. But now it
does exert such an influence. And ultimately it confronts storytelling as no
less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way … This new
form of communication is information.74
The general deficit of experience in modernity is thus retraceable to an
increase in importance of information. In Benjamin’s mind, an obsession
with comprehensibility is to be held responsible for the desire to be in-
formed. Therefore, only the importance granted to the ideals of verifiabil-
ity and demonstrability can cast sufficient light on the specifically modern
inability to reach what, in essence, is to remain unverifiable, that is, the
‘great inscrutable course’ of the world and the ‘divine’ force that is suppos-
edly present in it:
[It is] strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelli-
gence coming from afar [that is, the story], but the information which sup-
plies a handle for what is nearest. Intelligence that came from afar—whether
over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition)—
possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject
to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The
prime requirement is that it appear ‘understandable in itself.’ Often it is no
72 SW: 3, 143.
73 See SW: 3, 146; GS: II-2, 442: “The art of storytelling is nearing its end because the epic
side of truth—wisdom—is dying out. This … is a process that has been going on for a long
time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to wish to see it as merely a ‘symptom of
decay,’ [Verfallserscheinung] let alone a ‘modern symptom.’ It is, rather, only a concomitant
of the secular productive forces of history—a symptom that has quite gradually removed
narrative from the realm of living speech …”
74 SW: 3, 147.
70 chapter two
more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries. But while the latter was
inclined to borrow from the miraculous, information must absolutely sound
plausible.75
The decline of experience that is here understood as an outcome of the
desire for information has profound psychological consequences. Accord-
ing to Benjamin, the modern mania with comprehensibility brings along
with it a leveling down of our consciousness. From a psychological perspec-
tive, the higher forms of experience are characterized by their simplicity
and the trace they leave behind in the inner core of our psyche. Storytelling,
for instance, “submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order
to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story
the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel.”76 A condition for
absorbing the wisdom embodied by the story is therefore a state of mental
relaxation and boredom: “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, bore-
dom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that
hatches the egg of experience.”77 The experience that is brought about by
information, on the other hand, is more complex and needs to be processed
by our consciousness: it comes together with a ‘must’ (it requires us to verify
the data that is presented and to comprehend it as knowledge) and cannot
for that reason reach the deeper layers of our psyches. While information
needs to be consumed by the reader and thus detaches the events that are
being reported from his most inner psyche, the story makes a simple point
that is characterized by the multiplicity of possible meanings that is neces-
sary to set our minds and imagination in motion.78 “Every morning,” writes
Benjamin
brings us the news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy
stories. This is because nowadays no event comes to us without already
75 SW: 3, 147.
76 SW: 3, 149.
77 SW: 3, 149. For a detailed and profound account of the connection between the concept
of wisdom that is conveyed by the story (the unity and simplicity of the point made and the
cunning that is involved) and the specific type of experience that allows one to absorb it
(the dialectics between boredom and prompt thinking), see Friedlander, Walter Benjamin,
180–189.
78 See ibid., 186: “[T]he constitution of the meaning of life as a plurality of stories provides
a way to conceive experience so that essential limits disappear or are dissolved. A funda-
mental teaching of stories is the possibility of dissolving every sense of ‘must’ in experience.
There is, always another way, even if it appears as postponement. Or more precisely, since we
are speaking here of remembrance, there is no necessity to understand things in an already
determined way, according to an unavoidable progression, or caught in a nexus of causality
or explanatory justification.”
being shot through with explanations. … [I]t is half the art of storytelling to
keep a story free from explanation as one recounts it. … [In Leskov], [t]he
most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest
accuracy, but the psychological connections among the events are not forced
on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands
them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.79
1.5. The Conscious Experience and Benjamin’s Critique of Modernity

In the essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Benjamin continues this critique
of the modern impoverishment of experience by applying these thoughts
to a literary oeuvre that is, in his mind, profoundly stamped by the nine-
teenth century: the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Benjamin even
goes as far as to claim that the type of experience that is depicted in some
of Baudelaire’s most brilliant poems, the shock-experience [Chockerlebnis],
leaves behind such a small trace in our psyche that it does not even deserve
the name experience at all.80 In a reference to Sigmund Freud’s text Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920) and starting from the distinction between con-
scious and unconscious experiences, Benjamin explicitly aims at “testing
the fruitfulness of Freud’s hypothesis in situations far removed from the
ones he had in mind when he wrote.”81 Indeed, in On Some Motifs in Baude-
laire concepts from psychoanalysis and phenomenology are transferred to a
historical context. For Benjamin, no insight into the life of the human mind
can claim to be complete if it starts from an a-historical subject and thus
loses track of “the individual’s life in society”82 and the “historical determina-
tion of experience” [geschichtliche Determinierung der Erfahrung].83 Quot-
ing Freud’s basic formula that “becoming conscious and leaving behind a
memory trace are incompatible processes within one and the same system”
Benjamin is not so much interested in how that statement grasps some-
thing about the supposed a-temporal essence of our experiences as in how
it can be made relevant to our modern minds.84 Psychoanalysis and (Bergso-
nian) phenomenology serve Benjamin as more than a framework to explore
our thoughts and actions; he turns them into valuable tools to discover
how these thoughts and actions and the experiences that are embedded in
79 SW: 3, 147–148.
80 GS: I-2, 614.
81 SW: 4, 317.
82 SW: 4, 314.
83 GS: I-2, 608.
84 Freud quoted in SW: 4, 317.
72 chapter two
them are affected by society. He endows (non-)experiences with a historical

vector or label that points to the era in which they arise, thus using psycho-
analysis and phenomenology as indispensable components of any profound
critique of culture.
This philosophical methodology will allow Benjamin to see the conscious
experience as the specific trademark of a modern society. The latter has
so drastically affected our capacity to reach a higher level of experience
on account of the “special characteristic of consciousness that, unlike what
happens in all other systems of the psyche, the excitatory process does not
leave behind a permanent change in its elements, but expires, as it were,
in the phenomenon of becoming conscious.”85 Contrary to the ‘true’ expe-
rience that, as we have understood from the descriptions of the storyteller,
“submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of
him again” the conscious or lived experience does not at all penetrate into
those deepest layers of our minds.86 Rather than leaving behind a permanent
memory trace in the lower strata of our consciousness, the typically modern
form of experience only attains the more superficial level of reminiscence
that, rather than protecting impressions like genuine memory does, “aims
at their dissolution.”87 Quoting from the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst
Theodor Reik, Benjamin writes that “[m]emory [Gedächtnis] is essentially
conservative; reminiscence [Erinnerung, that is, the conscious experience],
destructive.”88 Moreover, the specific aim of consciousness is to disintegrate
stimuli because, according to Freud, Reik and Benjamin, the significance of
the former lies precisely in its capacity to protect us from the latter: “For a
living organism, protection against stimuli is almost more important than
the reception of stimuli.”89 The true task of consciousness is to serve as a
“protective shield … against the effects of the excessive energies at work in
the external world.”90 Consciousness wards off stimuli on those moments
when they, due to a sudden increase of input from the external world, might
become traumatizing. This is what Benjamin has in mind with his famous
concept of ‘shock-experience’:
The threat posed by these energies [that is, of the external world] is the threat
of shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less

86 SW: 3, 149.
87 Reik quoted in SW: 4, 317.
88 Reik quoted in SW: 4, 317; GS: I-2, 612.
likely they are to have a traumatic effect. Psychoanalytic theory strives to

understand the nature of these traumatic shocks “in terms of how they break
through the shield that protects against stimuli.”91
It is only here that the specificity of the modern experience or, rather, of
the modern lack of experience, comes to the fore. Painting the modern life
by way of a depiction of phenomena like mass-production (industrializa-
tion), city-life and crowds (urbanization) and photography (technical repro-
ducibility), Benjamin develops, in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, the thesis
that what lies in the scope of the nineteenth century is a psyche that is con-
stantly endangered by the traumatizing effect of an excess of excitation. The
drastic impoverishment of our mental lives under modernity is caused by an
increase of stimuli of such severity that these can no longer be warded off,
let alone bring about a (higher form of) experience. The modern condition,
claims Benjamin, is characterized by a continuous awareness that ‘exces-
sive energies of the external world’ threaten to break through the ‘protective
shield’ of consciousness. In short, rephrased in terms borrowed from a com-
pletely different context, it is now the case that the “state of emergency”
[Ausnahmezustand], that is, the moment when stimuli from a dramatically
unstable external world can become harmful to the ego, “is not the excep-
tion but the rule.”92
Such analyses, in which an excess of stimuli is held immediately respon-
sible for an overall decay of the so-called ‘true’ experience, form the nexus
of the majority of Benjamin’s essays from the thirties.93 Together they con-
stitute what can probably most adequately be referred to as Benjamin’s
‘critique of modern society.’ The essay Experience and Poverty (1933), for
instance, one of the most transparent texts of his oeuvre, shows how no
analysis of this decline of experience can be precise unless the impact of
historical factors is sufficiently accounted for. Experience and Poverty does
not only both bear the imprint of the trauma of the First World War and
refer forward to the Second one but it understands these very historical
events as determining elements of the so-called “poverty of experience”
[Erfahrungsarmut]:
91 SW: 4, 317.
92 SW: 4, 392; GS: I-2, 697.
93 For an interesting analysis of Benjamin’s concept of modern experience (and his theory
of art from the thirties) that goes beyond the stakes of this discussion, see Susan Buck-Morss,
“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62
(1992), 3–41.
74 chapter two
[T]his much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which
from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in
the history of the world. … [N]ever has experience been contradicted more
thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare;
economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral
experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in
horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which
nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field
of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. With
this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty [ganz
neue Armseligkeit] has descended on mankind.94
In Benjamin’s account, the horror of war and the political chaos and social
upheaval of the interwar-period have penetrated so deeply into the bodies
and minds of his contemporaries that they ended up damaging their very
ability to, as he put it in the Storyteller-essay, “share experiences.”95 Like the
Baudelaire-essay and the Storyteller-essay, Experience and Poverty sets up
a connection between the rise of technology and the increase of rational-
ization on the one hand and the loss of the legitimacy of trans-individual,
shared experiences on the other: “[W]hat is the value of all our culture if it
is divorced from experience? … Indeed (let’s admit it), our poverty of expe-
rience is not merely poverty on the personal level, but poverty of human
experience in general. Hence, a new kind of barbarism [eine Art von neuem
Barbarentum].”96
Benjamin’s critique of modernity is marked by both an awareness of the
loss of the authority of the past and a profound feeling of anxiety about
the future. It is developed from the standpoint of a generation that has
somewhere along the way both closed itself off from its historical roots and
lost the ability to dream about the future: having foreclosed the immediate
legitimacy of traditional beliefs no less than the ideal of universal progress,
the interwar period ended up locking itself in with a despair that could only
become more and more unbearable. Though most explicit in the essays
of the thirties, this causal link between modernity and the loss of ‘true’
experience had already been prepared by Benjamin at a very early stage of
his work, that is, in an essay called On the Program of the Coming Philosophy
(1917–1918), written at the age of twenty-five. This text mainly deals with
what Benjamin calls “the experience … of the Enlightenment” and, more
94 SW: 2, 731–732; GS: II-1, 214.

95 SW: 3, 143.
96 SW: 2, 732; GS: II-1, 215.
importantly so, with the necessity to escape from it, but it proves to be
of great value as the conceptual background of his views on modernity as
such.97 Benjamin retraces Kant’s concept of experience to his desire “to take
the principles of experience from the sciences—in particular, mathematical
physics” and, for that reason, considers it as “a view of the world … of the
lowest order.”98 In the course of the essay Kant’s system will be deemed
fruitful to the coming philosophy but Benjamin does vehemently criticize
the spirit of the Enlightenment in general for confusing experience with
scientific knowledge and the quest for comprehension—a move in which
physics is granted the sole right to certitude, thereby inevitably banning
religion to the realm of the vague and uncertain. According to Benjamin,
the Enlightenment has deprived what is given in time of its metaphysical
weight while it, vice versa, maintained that metaphysical truth cannot in
any way stem from the material of natural experience:
The very fact that Kant was able to commence his immense work under the
constellation of the Enlightenment indicates that he undertook his work on
the basis of an experience virtually reduced to a nadir, to a minimum of
significance. … For the Enlightenment there were no authorities, in the sense
not only of authorities to whom one would have to submit unconditionally,
but also of intellectual forces who might have managed to give a higher
context to experience [geistige Mächte die der Erfahrung einen großen Inhalt
zu geben vermocht hätten].99
The instability by which the present situation so sadly characterizes itself
is thus to be seen as a consequence of the enduring influence of an all-too-
ardent form of rationalism. In Benjamin’s mind the move towards moder-
nity has equaled nothing less than a continuous effort to replace religious
belief by a purely rational understanding and the ideal of positivistic knowl-
edge. Benjamin recognizes the hopelessness and despair of the interwar
period as proof that centuries of Enlightenment have not at all discov-
ered human reason to be the stable foundation for truth and the fertile
ground for progress that Descartes and Kant took it to be. On the con-
trary, thirty years prior to the analyses of Adorno and Horkheimer, Ben-
jamin discloses not merely a specifically modern set of problems but the
fact, precisely, that it is modernity itself which is to be considered as the
problem.
97 SW: 1, 101.
98 SW: 1, 101.
99 SW: 1, 101; GS: II-1, 159.
76 chapter two
Comparing Benjamin’s critique of modernity with his interpretation of

Kafka it is striking to see that those two major intellectual enterprises of
the thirties are both eager to analyze the theme of the ‘unknowability of
the divine’ and the ‘inaccessibility’ or inapproachability of absolute truth.
With regard to this topic, however, there is an important difference between
Benjamin’s two interpretations of Kafka. The Kafka-letter (1938) has its
place in the heart of Benjamin’s theory of modernity, the first traces of
which date back to the end of World War I: the general idea that, due to the
modern decline of tradition, the ‘ability to share experiences’ has been lost
is just as central to the Kafka-letter as it was to, for instance, The Storyteller,
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire and Experience and Poverty. These essays
from the thirties are for their part dependent on the assessment (made
for the first time around fifteen year earlier) of the vulgarity of experience
that is thought to characterize the post-Enlightenment-era in general. In
1917 Benjamin had already added to his violent rejection of the concept of
experience of the Enlightenment the remark that “that same state of affairs
that has often been mentioned as the religious and historical blindness of
the Enlightenment” has not yet been recognized as something of which the
“features … pertain to the entire modern era.”100
The base notion of experience that reduces to mere quantifiability what
should otherwise mediate between the individual and the community is
thus believed to have been dominant from the eighteenth century onwards
and remains a determining factor in modern existence. Benjamin thus sees
an intrinsic connection, first, between the Kantian concept of experience
and the modern mania for knowledge and verifiability and, second, between
this specifically modern poverty of experience and the decline of tradi-
tion.
It is, however, only in a seemingly similar way that the Kafka-essay of 1934
emphasizes the human inability to discover a kernel of absolute truth, hold-
ing on to the idea that the highest truth, that is, doctrine or teachings [Lehre]
has somehow ceased to be an object of intention. In the Kafka-essay Ben-
jamin emphasizes the author’s inability to “convert poetry into teachings”
and refers to the Bilderverbot that supposedly underlies his writings, thus
introducing the unknowability of the divine as a theological theme and not
as a historical assessment.101 It is no mere coincidence that the Kafka-essay
refrains from rendering the historical context of the theme of the ‘inacces-
100 SW: 1, 101.

101 SW: 2, 808.
sibility’ of absolute truth that will have become so important four years later
in the Kafka-letter as the “different view [that is] more or less independent
of [Benjamin’s] earlier reflections.”102 The formula of being “bound to a
God [which] [man] does not know” is in the Kafka-essay not to be read as
the outcome of modern phenomena and developments like technology or
excessive rationalization, but it expresses the situation of mankind as such:
it is no statement about any historical era in specific but a description of the
historical realm in general and it refers, rather than to la vie moderne, to la
condition humaine.103
For a clarification of this difference between, on the one hand, the theme
of the specifically modern context of the inaccessibility of what is genuinely
truthful and, on the other, the idea that it is essentially history as such and
not some historical age in particular which has lost its immediate connec-
tion with the absolute, the entirety of Benjamin’s work needs to be taken
into account. Just like the Kafka-letter cannot be fully understood outside
of the context of Benjamin’s critique of the ideal of the Enlightenment, the
presentation of the themes of the unknowability of the divine in the Kafka-
essay and the unredeemed state of history as such in his On the Concept of
History demand to be read against the background of some of his earlier
writings. It is, to be precise, Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift, titled The Ori-
gin of German Tragic Drama, which renders the most extensive discussion of
the universe marked by the inaccessibility of absolute truth which will later
characterize his reading of Kafka and his texts on history. In that quintessen-
tial text some of the categories that Benjamin deems indispensable for both
an understanding of Kafka’s work and a philosophy of history are introduced
in a wholly different context, albeit not without the very same set of philo-
sophical associations. The protagonists of the Trauerspiele, that is to say,
are equally characterized by failure and indecisiveness and the events in
which they partake are read by Benjamin as a similarly critical exposure of
an inability to aim for truth as an object of intention. Moreover, what singles
out the German playwrights of the baroque era from their contemporaries
is the same ongoing attempt to bring to expression the human inability to
comprehend and to bring what is absolutely true or worthwhile into a con-
text of knowledge. The literary mode of allegory comes, as will be explained,
with a particular relevance in this context in that it plays a role that can be
likened to the one that was assigned to Kafka’s last will, that is, it brings to
102 SW: 3, 325.

103 SW: 2, 807.
78 chapter two
expression the very limits of human understanding and bears out a fragile
balance between knowing and not knowing that is neither repressed nor
overcome.
2. The Origin of German Tragic Drama

and the ‘Empty World’ of the Baroque
2.1. Presentation of the Subject Matter

In the first chapter of Benjamin’s study the discussion of German tragic
drama is centered on one of its protagonists: the sovereign. This role of
the sovereign is equivocal because its most characteristic features are at
first sight mutually exclusive: the baroque monarch embodies, according
to Benjamin, both a tyrant and a martyr: “In the baroque the tyrant and
the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch. They are the necessarily
extreme incarnations of the princely essence.”104 Benjamin’s depiction of the
baroque monarch as a tyrant is, as he freely acknowledges himself, for a large
part borrowed from Carl Schmitt’s analysis of political power, as rendered
in the latter’s Political Theology (1922). For both thinkers, political power is
not so much the power to legislate, that is, to create and enforce the judicial
system of a state, as the power to suspend that legislation. Invested with
the power to declare the so-called ‘state of emergency’ [Ausnahmezustand],
the baroque sovereign is the sole character who rightfully determines the
moment when a political entity is under such a threat that its judicial system
no longer suffices to protect the stability of the community and to warrant
the security of its citizens:
Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty amounts to a supreme executive
power on the part of the prince, the baroque concept emerges from a discus-
sion of the state of emergency, and makes it the most important function of
the prince to avert this. The ruler is designated from the outset as the holder
of dictatorial power if war, revolt, or other catastrophes should lead to a state
of emergency.105
The character of the sovereign is torn between both this right to hold
absolute, dictatorial power and the profound incapacity to act on it. Verging
on the divine on account of the former, his failure to bring stability to
his land unmasks him as a human being, in this no different from the
104 O, 69.
105 O, 65.
citizens he is supposed to govern. The baroque sovereign “falls victim to the

disproportion between the unlimited hierarchical dignity, with which he
is divinely invested and the humble estate of his humanity [Stande seines
armen Menschenwesens].”106 It is indecisiveness which ultimately prevents
the monarch to become identified with the non-human status he is by law
endowed with. For the failure to resolve the lack of stability that affects his
land is due precisely to a lack of resolution on the part of the sovereign:
“The prince, who is responsible for making the decision to proclaim the
state of emergency, reveals, at the first opportunity, that he is almost inca-
pable of making a decision.”107 For this reason the sovereign does not just
evoke fear but also pity. As the sole person capable of declaring the state
of exception the sovereign is doomed to a life lived in the middle of chaos
and insecurity: ceaselessly confronted with the threat to be overthrown,
his mind is unable to shake off a profound despair and impending insan-
ity.
Benjamin goes beyond Schmitt’s framework that allowed him to analyze
the sovereign as an exemplification of the political rulers of the era. The
significance of the role of the monarch, namely, is derived from how he
expresses the baroque image of history as such and not merely from the
judicial powers and the psychological characteristics that he brings on stage.
“The sovereign,” writes Benjamin “is the representative of history. He holds
the course of history in his hand like a sceptre.”108 The sovereign is thus not
just a figure because he is the protagonist of a theatre-play but also because
he serves as a constellation through which history as such is brought to
expression. The view on history that comes out of the figure of the sovereign
is, like himself, marked by both instability and indecisiveness and, due to the
particular combination of the former and the latter, by the quasi permanent
risk to dissolve into chaos. In Benjamin’s mind, the baroque is “haunted
by the idea of catastrophe. … [It] knows no eschatology; and for that very
reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are gathered
in together and exalted before being consigned to their end.”109 It is here
that the sovereign is to be revealed as a martyr: his downfall illustrates, in
truth, the far more profound distress of an entire universe gone mad. If, in
the figure of the sovereign, the course of history is revealed as a piling up
106 O, 70; GS: I-1, 250.

107 O, 71.
108 O, 65.
109 O, 66.
80 chapter two
of one disastrous event after another, it is to show how in the eyes of the
playwrights of the baroque the worldly realm has lost its underlying order:
“[I]f the tyrant falls, not simply in his own name, as an individual, but as a
ruler and in the name of mankind and history, then his fall has the quality
of a judgment, in which the subject too is implicated.”110 The judgment that
is exemplified by the failure of the sovereign is the harshest of all possible
verdicts: the baroque world is ‘out of joint’ and all powers that used to govern
it have gone down along with it.
This is the first reason why Benjamin is at pains to make clear that the
world of the German Trauerspiel of the baroque era is in no way compa-
rable to that of Greek tragedy: the former, namely, relates to the latter as
history relates to myth. Whereas Greek tragedy aspires to universal valid-
ity and often leaves the time and location of the events undetermined, the
Trauerspiel is marked by sufficient details to at least conjure up a historical
background for the enacted events:
Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is its content, its true object.
In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history,
but myth, and the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive
from rank—the absolute monarchy—but from the pre-historic epoch of their
existence—the past age of heroes.111
These historical data set up the baroque framework which ultimately iso-
lates the enacted events from a broader context of meaning. One of the
paradoxes that Benjamin deems essential to the German Trauerspiel is the
following: it is the very particularity of their historical setting which makes
the events on stage stand out as an exemplification of the course of history
in general.112 The Trauerspiel expresses history as such because history is, in
essence, nothing less than a Trauerspiel: “The Trauerspiel, it was believed,
110 O, 72.
111 O, 62.
112 The Trauerspiele are therefore to be called “paradigmatic” for the baroque view on
history in the way that Giorgio Agamben understands that term: “[T]he paradigm is a singular
case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes
intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.” in Giorgio Agamben,
“What is a Paradigm?” The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin
Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 18. The baroque Trauerspiel is marked by a specific
historical setting and thus cannot be taken for a mere individual case illustrating a general
rule that can be stated a priori. It is only because it stands apart in its singularity that it is
able to exhibit a more general rule. See ibid., 24: “[T]he example is excluded from the rule
not because it does not belong to the normal case but, on the contrary, because it exhibits
its belonging to it.”
could be directly grasped in the events of history itself; it was only a ques-
tion of finding the right words.”113
At stake in this discussion of the Trauerspiel as the expression of the
baroque view on history is an analysis of the radical separation between the
profane and the divine. If it is impossible to discover a logos that underlies
the course of history, it is because the here-and-now has been divested of its
view on the beyond:
The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of
this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which …, at
its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an
ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with
catastrophic violence.114
Benjamin’s interpretation of the Trauerspiel is supported by his view of the
baroque as a heir to both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unable
to reconcile the former’s religious aspirations with the latter’s secularized
ideals. The baroque mindset that the Trauerspiel testifies to is torn between
a longing for the divine on the one hand and the incapacity to achieve it on
the other:
[R]eligious aspirations did not lose their importance: it was just that this
century denied them a religious fulfillment, demanding of them, or imposing
upon them, a secular solution instead. … [T]he Counter-Reformation sees the
hierarchical strain of the middle ages assume authority in a world which was
denied direct access to a beyond.115
What thus disappears from sight is, of course, a dynamics of salvation. The
universe of catastrophe and chaos depicted in the baroque Trauerspiel is
most obviously lacking in transcendence and for that reason comes across
as an endless series of catastrophes and, indeed, as the ‘tradition of the
oppressed’ that will be central to Benjamin’s philosophy of history.116 The
events that are brought on the baroque stage are not just part of a world
that is as yet unredeemed but they exemplify a suffering that seems as
irredeemable as it is widespread:
[W]hereas the Christian mystery-play and the Christian chronicle present
the entire course of world history as a story of redemption [heilsgeschichtli-
chen], the Haupt- und Staatsaktion deals with only a part of pragmatic events.
113 O, 63.
114 O, 66.
115 O, 79.
116 SW 4: 392.
82 chapter two
Christendom or Europe is divided into a number of European Christian

provinces whose historical actions no longer claim to be integrated in the
process of redemption [Heilsprozesses]. The relationship of the Trauerspiel
to the mystery-play is called into question by the insuperable despair which
seems necessarily to be the last word of the secularized Christian drama.117
It is for this reason that the madness and insanity that haunt the baroque
monarch and turn him into a martyr are in truth features of the overall
course of history, confining it to an immanence that cannot seemingly be
overcome: “Whereas the Middle Ages present the futility of world events
and the transience of the creature as stations on the road to salvation
[Stationen des Heilswegs], the German Trauerspiel is taken up entirely with
the hopelessness of the earthly condition [die Trostlosigkeit der irdischen
Verfassung].”118
This life under the yoke of immanence goes, in Benjamin’s writings,
under the name of the ‘creaturely condition’ [Kreaturzustand].119 Prevented
from seeing man and world as immediate manifestations of a divine will the
turn to this creaturely condition is both a symptom of the baroque’s lack of
transcendence and a means to come to terms with it. Most crucial to this
creaturely condition of all things earthly is, therefore, their hopelessness
and the creature’s inability to discover, within itself, a principle of salva-
tion. “[C]onsequent upon the total disappearance of eschatology,” writes
Benjamin “is the attempt to find, in a reversion to a bare state of creation,
consolation for the renunciation of a state of grace. … Such redemption
as it knows resides in the depths of this destiny itself rather than in the
fulfillment of a divine plan of salvation.”120 In Benjamin’s opinion, no dra-
matic form is as suitable to render this non-enviable state of the world as
the German Trauerspiel. It is on account of this inaccessibility of the cat-
egory of redemption that it distinguishes itself, not only from the plays
that came before or after it but also from contemporary dramatic forms
of other regions. As has already been pointed out, the medieval mystery-
play which preceded baroque theatre was equally preoccupied with the
transitory nature of all things profane but it did not fail to overcome this
self-enclosure through a final moment of divine salvation. Likewise, after
the baroque period, the romantic era will see the rise of an important new
117 O, 78; GS: I-1, 257.

118 O, 81; GS: I-1, 260.
119 O, 91; GS: I-1, 270.
120 O, 81.
form of theatre, the drama of fate, which just as well accorded salvation a
crucial place in the play, though now no longer a salvation of a religious
nature but one that was disguised as reflective thought having become infi-
nite. “[T]hanks to [reflection],” Benjamin writes about romantic theatre—
in line with the ideas presented in his doctoral thesis—“heroes are always
able to turn the order of fate around like a ball in their hands, and contem-
plate it now from one side, now from the other.”121 This romantic drama of
fate is, for its part, the immediate successor of the Spanish baroque tragic
drama, as exemplified by Calderón. Characteristic to these drama’s, con-
temporaries to the German Trauerspiel though not at all sharing in the same
significance,122 is their cheerfulness. It is through mockery and play that the
absolute is here injected into the events on stage, thus lifting the weight of
their seriousness: “The very precision with which the ‘mourning’ [Trauer]
and the ‘play’ [Spiel] can harmonize with one another gives [Calderón’s dra-
mas] [their] exemplary validity.”123
None of this applies to the Trauerspiele that were produced in the same
period in Germany: contrary to the Spanish baroque drama, they fail to take
on exemplary value, they preclude the view of salvation and they derive
their unique character precisely from the way in which they never allow
the element of play to dissolve the movement of mourning. The German
baroque is, according to Benjamin, historically singular in that it rejects the
hope for redemption inherent to both the medieval form of spirituality and
its ‘profane complement,’ that is, the later ideal of a romantic, secularized
will to freedom.124
Benjamin’s discussion of the baroque image of an unredeemed and irre-
deemable earthly life centers around the essence of both man and world.
The main characters of the German Trauerspiel are the most obvious exem-
plifications of the ‘creaturely’ condition of all human beings. The baroque
monarch, for instance, is “[h]owever highly he is enthroned over subject and
state, … confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but he
121 O, 84.
122 Benjamin describes Calderón’s drama’s as incarnations of the “perfect form of the
baroque Trauerspiel” with “conclusion[s] which [are] superior to [those] of the German
Trauerspiel.” (O, 81) As we will see later on, however, it is precisely on account of the
superiority of these Spanish drama’s and the ease with which they resolve “the conflicts of
a state of creation without grace” that they are ultimately of much less interest to Benjamin
than the German Trauerspiele.
123 O, 81.
124 O, 84.
84 chapter two
remains a creature.”125 The intriguer or schemer, for his part, who is out to
overthrow the authority of the sovereign, is no more decisive than his adver-
sary and equally unfit to engage in meaningful activity. The protagonists of
the German Trauerspiel are in the end marked by an a-moral attitude that
is even more shocking than the immoral acts they present us with. They do
not so much transgress the standards of a ‘good’ life as remain oblivious to
them and are thus brought on stage as mere ‘forces of nature’ governed by
passions that are as unbendable and devoid of virtue as the physical laws of
the universe:
Baroque drama knows no other historical activity than the corrupt energy of
schemers. In none of the countless rebels who confront a monarch frozen in
the attitudes of the Christian martyr, is there any trace of revolutionary con-
viction. Discontent is the classic motive. … [I]n the terms of [such] martyr-
drama[s] it is not moral transgression but the very estate of man as creature
which provides the reason for the catastrophe.126
The a-moral nature of politics and the base personality of who partakes in it
affect, in Benjamin’s mind, the significance of the story that is staged in the
Trauerspiel and relentlessly lay bare the lack of transcendence that marks all
things earthly. With the disappearance of moral standards and the absence
of higher causes for the actions of the protagonists, the entire world of the
baroque is disenchanted and turned into a chain of pointless events. With
the term ‘creaturely’ condition, Benjamin refers to a state in which both man
and history have become drained of all meaning, the rhythm of the latter
having grown no less empty than the minds and actions of the former. “The
creature,” Benjamin summarizes,
is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed to the
baroque. … Since it was the view of the age that all historical life was lacking
in virtue [alles historische Leben der Tugend abging], virtue was also of no
significance for the inner constitution of the dramatis personae themselves.127
What gets lost with the advent of a-moral man is the historical signifi-
cance of history proper: under the creaturely condition history has turned
into nature. Like the ongoing cycle of nature, condemned to the law of the
always-the-same, history has here fallen sway to the rhythm of empty repe-
tition and never attains a proper fulfillment on its own account:
125 O, 85.
126 O, 88–89.
127 O, 91; GS: I-1, 270.
[J]ust as the inner life of the person has to attain mystical fulfillment in
the creaturely condition, even in mortal pain, so do the authors attempt
to impose the same restriction on the events of history. The sequence of
dramatic actions unfolds as in the days of creation, when it was not history
which was taking place.
The main characteristic of this so-called natural history is ‘transience’ with
an irresolvable lack of closure, making it impossible to discover anything
absolute or truly worthwhile in the midst of what goes on. The course of
history, rather, is as disconsolate as the clock’s moving hand which “is, as
Bergson has shown, essential to the representation of the non-qualitative,
repeatable time of the mathematical science.”128 The difference between
Greek tragedy and the German Trauerspiel is most relevant in this context:
unlike the baroque monarch the protagonist of Greek tragedy does provide
evidence of both the will and the ability to overcome the fundamental lack
of meaning that resounds throughout the universe. Tragic figures are, unlike
martyrized tyrants, heroes who are capable of an action that is so full of
significance and determination that it cannot ever be repeated nor even be
expressed through language: sacrifice. Quoting from his own earlier essay
Fate and Character (1919), Benjamin writes that
in tragedy the hold of demonic fate is broken … [,] in [it] pagan man realizes
that he is better than his gods, but this realization strikes him dumb, and it
remains unarticulated. … [I]t is the attempt of moral man, still dumb, still
inarticulate—as such he bears the name of hero—to raise himself up amid
the agitation of that painful world. The paradox of the birth of the genius in
moral speechlessness, moral infantility, constitutes the sublime element in
tragedy.129
Tragic heroes are, in Benjamin’s opinion, demigods whose death always
goes accompanied with the delivery of something new. A tragic death is,
in truth, an act of decisive reconciliation with the divine that might indeed
bring the end of the life of an individual but never without giving birth to a
hitherto non-existent community: “The tragic death has a dual significance:
it invalidates the ancient rights of the Olympians, and it offers up the hero
to the unknown god as the first fruits of a new harvest of humanity.”130
In sharp contrast to a heroic, meaningful death stands the downfall
of the baroque martyr in the Trauerspiel. The latter fully belongs to the
endless repetition of history-become-nature and does not rise up against
128 O, 97.
129 O, 109–110.
130 O, 107.
86 chapter two
it. In the Trauerspiel, death does not entail any form of redemption, closure
or determination, let alone the meaningful installment of a new order. The
ends of the lives of baroque characters, rather, are without any consequence
for the community and, perceived from the perspective of the individual,
often condemn them to an existence as a specter or ghost:
Whereas the tragic hero, in his “immortality,” does not save his life but only
his name [as the word which will found a new community], in death the
characters of the Trauerspiel lose only the name-bearing individuality, and
not the vitality of their role. This survives undiminished in the spirit world.131
The martyrs of the baroque drama are despairing in the Kierkegaardian
sense of the term; their lives do not so much end with death as with a failure
to die. Rather than rising from the depths of a sorrowful existence, theirs is
the hopelessness of those who cannot die because they are sick unto death:
“[T]o be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope
of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope,
death.”132
This failure to die brings to the surface a more profound failure to act
and to know on the part of the characters of the Trauerspiel: their actions
are described as ‘mere spectacle,’ enclosed in the framework of individuality
and, unlike the hero’s decisive behavior, as closer to the sphere of comedy
than to the tragic.133 Opposed to the sacrificial act of the tragic hero are,
therefore, the lethargic pensiveness and feelings of melancholy that mark
baroque characters. For the playwrights of the baroque, melancholy is no
mere emotive quality of an individual but an expression of the dynamic of
natural history itself (“[In Calderón’s drama] Herod does not kill his wife
out of jealousy; rather is it through jealousy that she loses her life. Through
jealousy Herod is subject to fate.”)134 and thus rather to be taken as an
ontological category than as a psychological one:
If the laws which govern the Trauerspiel are to be found, partly explicit, partly
implicit, at the heart of mourning, the representation of these laws does not
concern itself with the emotional condition of the poet or his public, but with
a feeling which is released from any empirical subject and is intimately bound
to the fullness of an object.135
131 O, 136.
132 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 18.
133 O, 121.
134 O, 133.
135 O, 139.
Benjamin thus treats melancholy as Kierkegaard and Heidegger treat

Angst: it is a Grundgefühl that expresses, through the characters that are
affected by it, the overall nothingness of the baroque universe (“Something
new arose: an empty world.”) and not just an individual’s awareness of it.136
For Benjamin, as for Freud, melancholy originates in mourning; a mourn-
fulness, to be precise, which has the entire world as its object and, more-
over, which cannot but include the melancholiac himself. Melancholy is
not merely felt by someone who accurately acknowledges and experiences
the meaninglessness of the world in which he lives but by someone who
realizes that both he himself and the very acknowledgment and experience
of meaninglessness share in it. The melancholy in the baroque universe is
therefore, just like the shame in Kafka’s world, not an individual property
but a mark of ‘singularity’: it opens up the ego from within and affects it
with an alterity it cannot possibly differentiate itself from. Since melan-
choly (like shame) refers to a life that clearly belongs to the inner core of
an individual but since it nevertheless cannot be made into its own, this
lack of closure inevitably turns back on itself. Melancholy (like shame) will
never find an adequate expression since its ‘dividual’ nature precludes any
sense of an autonomous Self. It is for this reason that Benjamin claims that
melancholy is an expression of the creaturely condition of both man and
world: “If melancholy emerges from the depths of the creaturely realm to
which the speculative thought of the age felt itself bound by the bonds of the
church itself, then this explained its omnipotence. In fact it is the most gen-
uinely creaturely of the contemplative impulses [unter den kontemplativen
Intentionen die eigentlich kreatürliche].”137 The physiological explanation of
melancholy that was based on Hippocrates’s pathology of the four humors
and retraces melancholy to an excess of black bile has remained influen-
tial until the baroque, precisely because it was derived from a reduction of
human beings to creatures.138 Similarly, the Hellenistic, astrological inter-
pretation which associated the sloth and dullness of the melancholiac with
the long duration of Saturn’s orbit could in Benjamin’s mind only hold such
interest for the baroque age because it appealed to their image of a crea-
turely universe.139
136 O, 139.
137 O, 146; GS: I-1, 324.
138 O, 145.
139 O, 148.
88 chapter two
This shared status of man and world that is revealed in the melancholic
feelings of the characters involves an important paradox. That human
beings take part in the same condition as the universe in general, namely,
is made manifest precisely by the gap that separates both: the lack of tran-
scendence that marks man and world alike is revealed by the inability of
the former to gain knowledge of the latter and, vice versa, by the stubborn-
ness with which the universe defies the categories of human understanding
and intention. “The deadening of the emotions,” writes Benjamin, “and the
ebbing away of the waves of life which are the source of these emotions
in the body, can increase the distance between the self and the surround-
ing world to the point of alienation from the body.”140 The relation between
subject and object, constitutive for the Grundgefühl of melancholy, is set up
through the very feeling that there is no true relation between them. The
clearest illustration of this non-relation between man and the surround-
ing world can be found in Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I
(1514). The sitting figure who is surrounded by utensils that were cast aside
as an illustration of their uselessness does here not only stand for the inabil-
ity to engage in meaningful action but it anticipates, by way of the specific
gesture with which it leans its reclining head on its left hand, to the atti-
tude of pensiveness and the failure to truly know that Benjamin deems
essential to the Trauerspiel. For Benjamin, Dürer’s figure exemplifies the
baroque scholar as someone who is constantly drawn to the universe to dis-
cover its secrets but ends up being confronted with the inability to do so.
In this context he writes about the “pathological state, in which the most
simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it
lacks any natural, creative relationship to us”141 and, a couple of pages later,
about the “hopeless loyalty to the creaturely” [hoffnungslosen Treue zum
Kreatürlichen]142 and “irredeemability of things” [inaptitude des choses]143
that characterize the detachment of the melancholiac: “[A]ll the wisdom of
the melancholic is subject to the nether world; it is secured by immersion in
the life of creaturely things, and it hears nothing of the voice of revelation.”144
140 O, 140.
141 O, 140.
142 O, 156; GS: I-1, 333.
143 Daniel Halévy quoted in O, 157; GS: I-1, 334.
144 O, 152.
2.2. Trauerspiel and Allegory

This unceasing quest for knowledge on the one hand and the no less unceas-
ing confrontation with the inapproachability of truth on the other are of
vital importance to understand the second part of Benjamin’s study of the
Trauerspiel (Allegory and Trauerspiel). Devoted to the most significant lit-
erary mode of baroque drama, allegory, Benjamin begins his chapter with
the discussion of what it is not: a symbol. Building on the ideas of the late
eighteenth- /early nineteenth-century philologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer
(1771–1858), Benjamin associates the symbol with an expression of a myste-
rious truth that is as beautiful and alive as it is non-repeatable. In his mind
it is “[t]he unity of the material and the transcendental object, which con-
stitutes the paradox of the theological symbol.”145 According to Benjamin,
whereas symbols are to be considered after the example of the mystical
now, that is, as a suspension of time and a purification of nature, allegory
is described as being unable to shake off the transience of time and the
materiality of nature: “[Allegory] immerses itself into the depths which sep-
arate visual being from meaning.”146 Whereas Benjamin associates the sym-
bol with an (auratic) experience of mysterious truth that reveals itself in an
involuntary way, allegory is considered as the vehicle of an excessive, pos-
sessive and active quest for knowledge (the statement that “knowledge is
possession” of its object147 whereas truth is an “intentionless state of being”
is crucial here).148 At stake in this distinction between symbol and allegory is,
of course, the possibility of redemption. Allegory is, in contrast to the sym-
bol, to be read as an expression of nature’s hopelessness and irresolvable
immanence:
Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face
of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the
observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified,
primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning,
has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather
in a death’s head.149
145 O, 160.
146 O, 165.
147 O, 29.
148 O, 36. Important and helpful texts in this regard—and sources of inspiration for the
remainder of this chapter and the interpretation of the literary mode of allegory—are,
amongst others, the chapter “Myth” in Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 112–138 and Samuel
Weber, “Storming the Work: Allegory and Theatricality in Benjamin’s Origin of the German
Mourning Play.” Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 160–
180.
149 O, 166.
90 chapter two
If the baroque suffers from a lack of transcendence it is thus because

allegory fails where symbols succeed: allegory is tantamount to a full immer-
sion in the very disconsolate and meaningless world that symbols release us
from. Hence allegory’s obsession with death:
This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular
explanation of history as the Passion of the world [weltlichen Exposition der
Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt]; its importance resides solely in the
stations of its decline [Stationen ihres Verfalls]. The greater the significance,
the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged
line of demarcation between physical nature and significance.150
Establishing a connection between the baroque writer’s use of allegories
and the scientist’s fascination with hieroglyphs that was more or less con-
temporary to it, Benjamin claims that both were constantly drawn to nature
because they felt an urge to disclose and take possession of its most hidden
essences. Through allegory and hieroglyphs alike, the world looks back as a
promise of divine knowledge, as if extensive research and mystical enlight-
enment would ultimately endow human beings with the secret language in
which nature was written.151 For Benjamin, the mere fact of being allegorized
transforms an object into a sign of something else—something more enig-
matic and, ultimately, more profound: “[A]ll of the things which are used
to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a
power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane
things, which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanc-
tify them.”152 However, contrary to the mysterious character of the symbol,
the enigmatic character of the allegorized object invites an all-too-brutal
grasp on the part of the subject. For this reason, nature never gives way to
the hidden language that would allow its most profound essence to be taken
possession of. Like hieroglyphs, allegorical language maintains an obscu-
rity that cannot be overcome, thus laying bare that the ultimate knowledge
of nature that it had seduced the writer with is held back from him: “[In
allegory],” writes Benjamin, “[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can
mean absolutely anything else. … The allegory of the seventeenth century is
not convention of expression, but expression of convention [Ausdruck der
Konvention].”153 Allegory derives its force from what it cannot ever obtain;
150 O, 166; GS: I-1, 343.

151 Hence the association of allegory with satanic knowledge and excessive subjectivity.
See Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 131.
152 O, 175.
153 O, 175; GS: I-1, 350–351.
it lays claim to a language that forms a natural bond with what it denotes
(fusei) but it only delivers what is merely arbitrary (thesei). The disappointed
quest for knowledge, in other words, makes itself felt first and foremost as
a confrontation with the inability to grasp absolute truth or to aim for it
as an object of intention. The allegorical gaze looks out for the enigmatic
knowledge that would grant possession of the world but ends up as a dis-
enchantment of the entire universe: it promises meaning but hits in the
face with contingency. “The intention which underlies allegory,” writes Ben-
jamin, “is so opposed to that which is concerned with the discovery of truth
that it reveals more clearly than anything else the identity of the pure curios-
ity which is aimed at mere knowledge with the proud isolation of man.”154
In its stubborn resistance to truth, allegory is interpreted by Benjamin as
a fragmentation and as an extinction of the life and beauty that are ren-
dered by the symbol. Allegory disrupts the “false appearance of totality”
[falsche Schein der Totalität] by way of which the symbol succeeds in rec-
onciling materiality and transcendence.155 Looking for the major patterns of
allegory, what comes to Benjamin’s mind is “lack of freedom, the imperfec-
tion, the collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature”:156 “In the field of alle-
gorical intuition the image is a fragment [Bruchstück], a rune.”157 The alle-
gorist therefore belongs to the dynamic of the history-become-nature which
tuned the baroque world to a rhythm of empty repetition and transience
(“[T]he movement from history to nature … is the basis of allegory.”).158 In
the gaze of the allegorist, moreover, it is the entire universe, not just history
but also nature, which is disenchanted from within: similar to how history
is turned into an ongoing process of ruination and a ceaseless “pil[ing] up
[of] fragments … without any strict idea of a goal,” nature is emptied of all
154 O, 229.
155 O, 176; GS: I-1, 352. As we will see later on, it is this shattering of the supposed unity of a
material object and a transcendent meaning that will ultimately save allegory from its nega-
tivity and will endow it with a redemptive potential that is fully its own. Benjamin explores
and problematizes the concept of such a supposed unity in numerous places throughout
his work, for example, in his doctoral thesis on the Romantics (Benjamin criticizes them
for considering “art [to be] the region … [for] the immediate reconciliation [unmittelbare
Versöhnung] of the conditioned with the unconditioned.” (SW: 1, 181; GS: I-1, 114)) and the
Goethe-essay (the “false, errant totality—the absolute totality [die falsche, irrende, Totalität—
die absolute]” of semblance [Schein] that is shattered by the expressionless [Ausdruckslose]
(SW: 1, 340; GS: I-1, 181)).
156 O, 176.
157 O, 176; GS: I-1, 352.
158 O, 182.
92 chapter two
meaning:159 “[I]t is fallen nature which bears the imprint of the progression
of history. … Never does their transcendence come from within.”160 What
makes the disconsolateness of the baroque universe complete, hence, is just
as much a history-become-nature as a nature-become-history: “The word
‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of
transience.”161
The concept of allegory is crucial to understand Benjamin’s interpreta-
tion of the German Trauerspiel for at least two reasons. The first has to do
with the subject matter of the baroque drama. In its naturization of history
and historization of nature, allegory serves to express the two sides of what
Benjamin considers to be a specifically baroque world-view. Allegory is to be
seen as a translation into language of the ‘creaturely’ condition of man and
universe alike: it is just as well the former’s self-enclosed situation as the irre-
ducible immanence of the latter that makes up the content of allegory. The
allegorical attitude is conditioned by the melancholic one in that it serves
as an expression of the gap that separates the protagonists of the Trauer-
spiel from the world in which they live. It is by drawing attention to man’s
inability to derive any meaning from his environment that Benjamin paints
a picture of the world that he will later re-introduce in On the Concept of His-
tory, that is, an Unheilsgeschichte (Weber) in which history as such sheds its
significance and partakes in the disconsolate repetition that characterizes
the laws of nature: “[T]he dramatic incident is not conceived as an isolated
catastrophe, but rather as one that is necessary by nature and inherent in
the way of the world.”162 In a similar way, allegory disenchants nature itself
because it brings to the fore the baroque world’s absence of transcendence
and thus blocks the way for any idealization, be it a medieval/early renais-
sance divinization or a romantic Vergeistlichung: “[N]ature was not seen by
[the baroque] in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her
creations. In nature [the allegorists] saw eternal transience [ewige Vergäng-
nis], and here alone did the saturnine vision of this generation recognize
history.”163
A profound inability to know and a melancholic confrontation with
the inapproachability of anything absolute, however, inevitably turn back
on themselves: it is impossible to adequately express an impossibility to
159 O, 178.
160 O, 180.
161 O, 177.
162 O, 192.
163 O, 179; GS: I-1, 355.
express itself. For this reason, melancholy is marked by the same dynam-
ics that characterizes the feeling of shame in Kafka’s writings. Melancholy
is to allegory what shame is to Kafka’s last will: since it denotes the very
irreducibility of an Otherness and an alterity that cannot be transferred to
a systematic context of meaning or knowledge, the melancholy that lies
at the heart of allegory cannot itself be intentionally expressed or aimed
at. The second reason why allegory is of such importance to Benjamin’s
interpretation of the German baroque drama has therefore to do, not with
what it describes but with how this is being done. With his discussion of
the use of allegories in the Trauerspiel, Benjamin does not only cast light
on the absence of revelation and the emptiness that marks the world that
is described by the baroque playwrights but also on the necessarily indi-
rect manner in which such absence and emptiness are to be expressed. If
allegories are the main building blocks of the Trauerspiel and if they do
indeed amount to a confrontation with a fundamental lack of knowledge
and a failure to comprehend, it follows that the activity of reading and study-
ing German baroque dramas renders nothing less than an experience of the
very limits of human understanding themselves. Just as Kafka’s writings can
be read as, so to say, involuntary expressions of his inability to truly know
(that is, they express this inability literally and figuratively against his—
last—will) the allegories in the Trauerspiel do not just denote the human
inability to grasp truth as an object of knowledge but they are themselves
(indirect) expressions of it. In allegory, German baroque drama exposes the
limits of understanding without, however, overcoming them: the failure to
comprehend that stares out from allegory never crystallises into the foun-
dation of a more profound form of knowledge.
chapter three
THE ‘WILL TO ALLEGORY’ AND

THE ‘DISTORTION’ OF TRUTH IN HISTORY
Introduction
In the very first and last paragraphs of his study, Benjamin goes through
pains to illustrate that his research is in no way aimed at an ‘essentialization’
of the Trauerspiel:
Given the by no means excessive quantity of dramatic production, the task
of such research must not look for schools of poets, epochs of the oeuvre,
or strata of individual works, as the literary historian quite properly might.
Rather will it be guided by the assumption that what seems diffuse and
disparate will be found to be linked in the adequate concepts as elements
of a synthesis.1
Benjamin puts emphasis on the claim that the ‘synthesis’ rendered by his
research does not aim for the so-called unity behind the multiplicity of
different Trauerspiele. His attention neither goes out to a list of elements
shared by all of the Trauerspiele that have survived, nor to the most ‘typical’
of them, that is, to the one specific work which is supposed to most clearly
illustrate the general themes and motives of the genre. His focus shifts to
those plays that seem to suffer from a lack of profundity. It seems, in other
words, that only works of a lesser significance allow Benjamin, and this
precisely by reason of their inferior quality, to catch a glimpse of what he
is really looking for. “The life of the form,” writes Benjamin at the beginning
of the first part of his study,
is not identical with that of the works which are determined by it, indeed the
clarity with which it is expressed can sometimes be in inverse proportion to
the perfection of a literary work; and the form itself becomes evident pre-
cisely in the lean body of the inferior work [schmächtigen Leib der dürftigen
Dichtung], as its skeleton so to speak.2
1 O, 57–58.
2 O, 58; GS: I-1, 238.
96 chapter three
Making use of a similar vocabulary, Benjamin finishes the last pages of

his book with references to a supposed “inadequacy [Insuffizienz] of the
German Trauerspiel”:3
In the ruins [Trümmern] of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more
impressively [eindrucksvoller] than in lesser buildings, however well pre-
served they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpre-
tation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a
fragment [Bruchstück]. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day;
this form [that is, allegory] preserves the image of beauty to the very last.4
The ‘inadequacy’ that the Trauerspiele suffer from on account of the central
role of allegory is, in other words, not an obstacle for their expressive power
but the very reason why they are able to express a specific ‘life of the form.’ In
a distinctly non-Aristotelian turn, Benjamin maintains that it is only because
Trauerspiele are marked by a lack of unity and coherence that they retain
a life of their own that, moreover, comes with a specific relevance to our
times and that thus, as it were, ‘posthumously’ grows into a historical force
(see Chapter I).5 In this way, Benjamin’s Trauerspiel-study already entails
a remarkable rejection of the framework for the interpretation of artworks
that would later be set up by one of the founding fathers of the discipline of
iconology, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), in his Studies in Iconology. Human-
istic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939). On first view, Benjamin’s
research of the German baroque drama does seem directed to what Panof-
sky considers to be the final stage of the analysis of a work of art, that is,
the discovery of a timeless essence or the so-called “intrinsic meaning or
content” which is “apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles
which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or
philosophical persuasion.”6 In such a framework (inspired by historicism)
artworks are believed to render the ‘eternal’ image of the past that allows
one to truly comprehend what was most characteristic to a specific time
and age. From the outset, Benjamin does appear to approach the Trauerspiel
as an artistic exemplification of the German baroque mind and at times he
3O, 235; GS: I-1, 409.

4O, 235; GS: I-1, 409.
5 On the ‘afterlives’ of Benjamin’s concept of the baroque and the ways in which it can,
as he himself hinted on, be mobilized for twentieth-century issues, see Jane O. Newman,
Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press and Cornell University Library, 2011).
6 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 7.

the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 97
even raises the hope that a clear understanding of the most important ele-
ments of the baroque drama could suffice to grant the twentieth-century
researcher knowledge of essential patterns of thinking and characteristic
themes of the seventeenth century. In his curriculum vitae from 1928, for
instance, he characterizes his own view on art criticism as an “analysis [that]
would regard the work of art as an integral expression of the religious, meta-
physical, political and economic tendencies of its age, unconstrained in any
way by territorial concepts.”7 From this perspective, the characters of the
sovereign and the intriguer, the feeling of melancholy and the literary mode
of allegory as an expression of the creaturely state of man and world are
interpreted as epistemological tools to comprehend an underlying world-
view that was marked by an inability to truly know and an emptiness of
revelation. However, this very inability and emptiness undermine Panof-
sky’s historicist ideals and framework. Allegory, that is to say, does not just
refer to the subject matter of the Trauerspiel but it is a ‘distinctive mode of
signification’ (Weber) affecting the very way of referring to this subject mat-
ter: because allegory amounts to a confrontation with the limits of human
understanding, it instils a gap between the baroque world of experience on
the one hand and the representation of this world by an artwork on the
other. Benjamin’s emphasis on the structural ‘inadequacy’ of the German
mourning play and his devotion to it as a fragment, ruin or extremity pre-
clude the (positivistic) idea that it can first adequately capture and then
convey a unified historical context. Allegories make it impossible to estab-
lish what Panofsky calls the ‘intrinsic meaning or content’ of the Trauerspiel:
the baroque drama can never be seen as a ‘method’ for historical truth that
leads straight into this final stratum of subject matter, that is, the ‘time-
less’ essence of the era in which it was produced.8 In the Trauerspiele the
7 SW: 2, 78.
8 See Benjamin’s important statement in the introduction to the Trauerspiel-book that
“[m]ethod is a digression. Representation as digression—such is the methodological nature
of the treatise. The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure is its primary charac-
teristic.” (O, 28) That Panofsky never understood to what extent his own manner of thinking
ran counter to Benjamin’s most profound intuitions on the relationship between images
and meaning becomes painfully clear from the following excerpt from a letter to Fritz Saxl
in which he describes his reaction to the Trauerspiel-book: “[I] have also already read Ben-
jamin’s book and it is also too witty for me, but in any case I learnt a lot from it. … Whatever
way you throw a cat [into the air], it will always land on its familiar, iconological feet.”
(Panofsky, quoted in Sigrid Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste wahrer Philologie. Zur
Odyssee des Trauerspielbuchs in der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg.” Walter
Benjamin. Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Ver-
lag, 2008), 253 (my translation)).
98 chapter three
distance between language and meaning is laid bare, thus preventing sin-
gular artworks and literary texts to be mapped out in a discursive field of
knowledge: they are images that do not allow to be translated into knowl-
edge—icons that constantly defy their logos.
1. Benjamin’s Iconography
1.1. Benjamin and Alois Riegl

In his essay The Rigorous Study of Art (1932), written as a review of the
first volume of the yearbook Research Essays in the Study of Art [Kunst-
wissenschaftliche Forschungen], Benjamin makes a plea for a wholly new
approach to art history, which would leave behind all “understanding of
art history as universal history.”9 Quoting from Hans Sedlmayr’s program-
matic opening piece Toward a Rigorous Study of Art, Benjamin endorses the
view that “[f]ormerly a mere means to knowledge, a trace of something else
which was to be disclosed through it, the artwork now appears as a self-
contained small world of its own, particular sort.”10 It is as such a ‘trace of
something else which was to be disclosed through it’ that Panofsky’s later
concept of ‘intrinsic meaning or content’ needs to be recognized, thus run-
ning the risk to reduce the work of art to a ‘means’ to gain knowledge of
the particular historical and geographical circumstances in which it origi-
nated. In Benjamin’s mind, following the lead of the prominent scholar of
the second Viennese school Otto Pächt (1902–1988), a ‘rigorous’ study of art
is to do away with all such presuppositions of ‘intrinsic meaning or content’
and to replace them by the insight that “the realm of perception [Anschau-
ungsspielraum] itself changes over time and in accordance with shifts in cul-
tural and intellectual [geistigen] direction.”11 Thus firmly rejecting the idea
that the “formal makeup” of objects is “determined by a changing ‘stylistic
drive’ within perceptual surroundings that remain constant,”12 the art histo-
rian ought in Benjamin’s (and Pächt’s) opinion not pierce through the work
of art in order to release from it the unity of a content but discover the singu-
lar work itself as the vehicle of a specific “cultural and intellectual function
[Funktion].”13
9 SW: 2, 666.
10 Sedlmayr quoted at SW: 2, 667.
11 Pächt quoted in SW: 2, 667; GS: III, 365.
12 Pächt quoted in SW: 2, 667.
13 Pächt quoted in SW: 2, 668; GS: III, 366 (my emphasis).
These views on the historical determination of the perceptive faculties of

human beings constitute, of course, the very framework that underlies Ben-
jamin’s fruitful mix of psychoanalysis and phenomenology that will later
be elaborated in, amongst other texts, his famous The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936–1939).14 From scattered ref-
erences throughout his work it is clear that the ‘cultural and intellectual
function’ of works of art is, in Benjamin’s mind, to be read as an instan-
tiation of Alois Riegl’s concept of ‘artistic volition’ [Kunstwollen]. In The
Rigorous Study of Art, for instance, Benjamin writes that Riegl’s book The
Late Roman Art Industry (1901) “demonstrates in exemplary fashion the fact
that sober and simultaneously undaunted research never misses the vital
concerns of its time.”15 In 1929 Benjamin already included Riegl’s book on
late Roman art industry in a list together with three other texts that “have
retained their liveliness” [lebendig geblieben sind] (the other three are Alfred
Gotthold Meyer’s Eisenbauten, Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption
and Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness)16 and, in a curriculum
vitae written in late 1939 or early 1940, he mentions again that it “decisively
influenced” his own writing and thinking.17 Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen has
remained a significant force of interest to Benjamin, which is testified to
by his own use of it in a short text on folk art18 and, most important in the
context of the present discussion, in his statement in 1928 that the Trauer-
spiel-book was “linked on the one hand to the methodological ideas of Alois
Riegl, especially his doctrine of the Kunstwollen, and on the other hand to
the contemporary work done by Carl Schmitt.”19
Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen, as it is propounded in The Late Roman
Art Industry, is founded on the insight that the work of art is not a mere
representation of a content that is supposed to ‘underlie’ (Panofsky’s term)
the work of art itself but that it is the expression of a will that does not
14 See Chapter II and Benjamin’s assessment of the “historical determination of memory”
(SW: 4, 314) and his statement in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
that “[j]ust as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical
periods, so too does their mode of perception.” (SW: 4, 255).
15 SW: 4, 668.
16 GS: III, 169–171.
17 SW: 4, 381. See also the following statement in A Berlin Chronicle (1932): “I remember
distinctly the engrossment with which, under the impression of Alois Riegl’s Die spätrömis-
che Kunst-Industrie, which I had recently studied, I contemplated the sheet-gold breastplates
and garnet-studded bracelets.” (SW: 2, 615).
18 SW: 2, 278.
19 SW: 2, 78.
100 chapter three
exist independently of its specific externalization in the cultural life of a

community. “[S]uch human Wollen,” writes Riegl,
is directed towards self-satisfaction in relation to the surrounding environ-
ment (in the widest sense of the word, as it relates to the human being exter-
nally and internally). Creative Kunstwollen regulates the relation between
man and objects as we perceive them with our sense; this is how we always
give shape and color to things. … Yet man is not just a being perceiving
exclusively with his sense (passive), but also a longing (active) being. Con-
sequently, man wants to interpret the world as it can most easily be done in
accordance with his inner drive (which may change with nation, location and
time).20
In this manner, the work of art does not so much exemplify the relation
between a content or idea on the one hand and the expression of that
content or idea on the other as it ‘regulates’ the relation between man and
world, or more precisely, embodies an attempt of the former to come to
terms with the latter. “In art,” writes Riegl first in the lecture notes to his
study Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (1899), “man re-creates nature
as he would like it to be and as it indeed exists in his mind. … This impulse,
which is in fact identical with the drive to create art, derives from man’s
striving for happiness. All human culture can ultimately be explained in
terms of this striving.”21 The work of art is in Riegl’s mind not the expression
of an intrinsic meaning (Panofsky’s “basic attitude of a nation, a period, a
class, a religious or philosophical persuasion”)22 but it is an instantiation of a
will [Wollen] to harmony or meaningfulness that can never be fully satisfied:
Man yearns incessantly for harmony. He sees this harmony constantly dis-
rupted and threatened by things and phenomena of nature that exist in a
state of perpetual struggle, both with one another and with humanity. If
nature were really the way it appears in the individual human senses, man
would never be able to attain harmony. Consequently, man creates a vision
of nature in his art that frees him from nature’s perpetual instability; he imag-
ines nature to be better than it looks. He seeks to bring order to the apparent
chaos, to push aside those raw random occurrences to which he is otherwise
subject and vulnerable. … [T]he creation of art is a contest with nature with
the aim of bringing to expression a harmonious worldview.23
20 Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider
Editore, 1985), 231.

21 Alois Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline E. Jung (New York:
Zone Books, 2004), 299.

22 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 7.
23 Riegl, Historical Grammar, 299–300.
1.2. Benjamin and Aby Warburg: The Survival of Ancient Gods in ‘an
Unsuitable, Indeed Hostile, Environment’
It is with this concept of the Kunstwollen in mind, that is, as a ‘regulation’
of the relation between man and world, that Benjamin’s notion of the ‘will
to allegory’ needs to be understood.24 While rejecting the increasingly influ-
ential Panofskyan reduction of art to an expression of unified meaning or
an object of knowledge, Benjamin’s project adheres to the iconographi-
cal approach as it was, somewhat earlier, being developed by Riegl and,
even more important perhaps, by Panofsky’s mentor, Aby Warburg.25 In The
Origin of German Tragic Drama Benjamin quotes from Warburg’s by now
famous essay Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of
Luther (1920) and derives from him the insight that even during the Renais-
sance and up to the Baroque the gods of ancient Greece continued to hold
a mysterious influence over the hearts and minds of man. Benjamin joins
Warburg in claiming that the Christian dominance of the Middle Ages did
not succeed in fully uprooting the pagan belief in the power of the ancient
gods. Moreover, in the essay that is quoted from in Benjamin’s Habilita-
tionsschrift, Warburg retraces the origins of certain astrological supersti-
tions that were still heavily clung to during the Reformation to a quasi-tacit
endorsement of key elements from Hellenistic cosmology. The sixteenth-
century attempts to derive knowledge of a person’s individual fate from the
astral sign under which he is born find their origin, according to Warburg,
in the pagan, Hellenistic belief that specific planets are being controlled by
personalized gods:
24 O, 192.
25 Some interesting research on the relation between Benjamin and Warburg has already
been done; see, for example, Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste wahrer Philologie,”
228–264, Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 138–184, Jochen Becker, “Ursprung so wie Zerstörung:
Sinnbild und Sinngebung bei Warburg und Benjamin.” Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem
van Reijen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1992), 64–89, Beatrice Hanssen, “Portrait
of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky).” MLN, vol. 114, no. 5, 1999, 991–1013 and
especially the chapter “Trauerspiel and Melancholy Subjectivity” in Pensky, Melancholy
Dialectics. These texts provided useful background information for this subchapter without,
however, having had a determining influence on its content. In what follows I render my
own account of what is at stake in the connection between Benjamin and Warburg, that
is, an attempt to cope with the feeling that man is isolated from the surrounding world
and a failure to truly know. From Benjamin and Warburg’s texts, as we shall see, a theory
can be derived that allows this feeling of isolation to be suspended from within; neither
Benjamin nor Warburg cherish the hope that this feeling of isolation will, in this world, be
fully subsumed by a more profound realm of experience or knowledge nor do they seek to
repress it through illusory and mythic forms of reconciliation (see below).
102 chapter three
Only when we bring ourselves to consider the figures of the pagan gods—
as resurrected [wiederauferstehen] in early Renaissance Europe, North and
South—not merely as artistic phenomena but as religious entities, do we
begin to sense the power of the determinism of the Hellenistic cosmology,
even in Germany, even in the age of the Reformation. … Ever since the passing
of the antiquity, the ancient gods had lived on in Christian Europe as cosmic
spirits, religious forces with a strong influence in practical affairs: indeed,
the cosmology of the ancient world—notably in the form of astrology—
undeniably survived as a parallel system, tacitly tolerated by the Christian
Church.26
Warburg thus contends that sixteenth-century astrology is to be seen as
an attempt to determine through reason, that is, by way of the meticulous
observation and calculation of locations and movements, the volition of the
gods who are irrationally believed to rule over the planets and stars.27
The crucial point that Benjamin agrees with is that the ancient gods have
indeed lived on until the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Allegory, namely, is to Benjamin precisely what sixteenth-century astrology
is to Warburg: a “survival [Fortleben] [of theological essences] in an unsuit-
able, indeed hostile, environment.”28 Moving beyond Hermann Usener’s
claim that allegory is to be considered as a mere vaporization of theological
notions, Benjamin summarizes it as follows: “In the course of such a litera-
ture [that is, Usener’s] the world of the ancient gods would have had to die
out, and it is precisely allegory which preserved it.”29 In its enigmatic capac-
ity to draw the attention of those who seek to take possession of its secrets,
allegorized nature is to be disclosed as an heir to ancient, pagan forms of
26 Aby Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther.” The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance,
trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1999), 598. For the original text see Aby Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung
in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten.” Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter
Wuttke (Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 1992), 199–304 (the quote is from 201–202).
27 For a similar argument, see also Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology
in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the
Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 563–591, for example at 564: “It was
believed that the seven planets governed the solar year in all its subdivisions—the months,
days, and hours of human destiny—in accordance with pseudomathematical laws. The most
accessible of these doctrines, that of their rule of the months, guaranteed the exiled gods a
safe haven in the medieval illuminated almanacs, as painted by Southern German artists at
the beginning of the fifteenth century.”
28 O, 223; GS: I-1, 397.
29 O, 223.
pantheism. In allegory nature shows itself as animated and endowed with

the power to seduce whoever seeks to release the promise of divine knowl-
edge that resounds from it.
However, for Benjamin and Warburg alike, the survival of pagan beliefs
cannot but go accompanied with a profound transformation. In Warburg’s
essay, the astrological superstitions of the era of the Reformation are
described as a mixture of two different influences that are irreconcilable
to each other: the belief in astral determinism testifies not only to the sur-
vival of ancient paganism but also, and no less important, to the urge to
emancipate oneself from it. The astrological make-up of the ancient gods,
namely, entails, according to Warburg, apart from their survival nothing less
than an avid attempt to expel these deities from the most immediate sphere
of proximity and influence. By transforming the ancient gods into astral
deities, man has succeeded in putting them at a distance, both literally (they
are exiled from the human world proper) and conceptually (their move-
ments can now be calculated and predicted through scientific research of
the movements of the planets). Borrowing from Nietzsche’s book on Greek
tragedy, Warburg thus makes the claim that the pagan gods that managed
to live on until the sixteenth century were marked by both an ‘Olympian’
and a ‘daemonic’ side:30
These [gods] were beings of sinister, ambivalent, and indeed contradictory
powers: as star signs they expanded space, marking the way for the soul’s
flight through the universe; as constellations they were also idols, with whom,
as befitted the childlike nature of man, the mere creature might aspire to
mystic union through devotional practices. The astrologer in the age of the
Reformation accepted these opposite poles of mathematical abstraction and
devout self-association—irreconcilable though they seem to a modern scien-
tist—as the pivots of one vibrant, primordial psychic state.31
Warburg’s claim, in other words, is double: the scientific effort to discover
the rational logic behind the movements and location of planets and stars
is both a result of and a reaction against the irrational superstition that they
were constellations of astral deities.
Just as, for Warburg, the expulsion of the ancient gods from the Olympus
to the planetary realm both endows them with a continued existence and
delivers a serious blow to their power, allegory is, for Benjamin, not merely
what makes possible the survival of ancient, pagan beliefs, but also what
30 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 598.

31 Ibid., 599.
104 chapter three
conditions their dislocation from within. For the enigmatic call, springing
forth from nature, to be possessed in its essence is, as was mentioned
above, never granted to find fulfilment. However powerful its promise of
secret knowledge may be, it is transience, decay and the inapproachability
of absolute truth that stare out from an allegorized world. According to
Benjamin, the allegorist may indeed first be drawn to capture nature’s secret
essence but, no less important, he inevitably goes away empty-handed.
Allegory always connects the feeling that knowledge can be gained from
nature with a confrontation of the inaccessibility of anything absolute. For
Benjamin it is Christianity which is to be held accountable for this ultimate
disenchantment of the universe. “Allegorical exegesis,” he writes, “tended
above all in two directions: it was designed to establish, from a Christian
point of view, the true, demonic nature of the ancient gods, and it also served
the pious mortification of the flesh.”32 For Benjamin, and it is here that he
comes closest to Warburg, allegory reveals the Baroque to be influenced
by two different systems of belief that run counter to each other: a pagan
belief that the ancient gods are somehow immediately present in nature
on the one hand and, on the other, the Christian conviction of the former’s
demonic character and the latter’s transience. Pagan gods did live on in the
Baroque but they were expelled to the realm of allegorized nature: “If the
church had not been able quite simply to banish the gods from the memory
of the faithful, allegorical language would never have come into being.”33
The stakes of these insights go beyond the historian’s fascination with
a specific period of the past and extend to the roots of the philosophical
discussion about the nature of art and expression. The importance of War-
burg’s oeuvre does not merely lie in his discovery that pagan beliefs man-
aged to live through the Christian Middle Ages but in the idea—a truly revo-
lutionary one—that the work of art is a combination of forces that can never
be contained in a discursive field of knowledge or a systematic context of
meaning. For him, as for Riegl, the work of art ceases to be a re-presentation
of meaning, in order to become a presentation of psychic, primordial drives.
In Warburg’s research, a work of art is never reduced to an illustration
a specific period, and its meaning is never detachable from its ‘imagistic’
nature. Warburg contends that an art historian should not endeavor to dis-
close the ‘intrinsic content’ of the work of art and subsequently translate
it into language, as Panofsky will later think, but that he is instead, like
32 O, 222.
33 O, 223.
a seismograph,34 to register the psychic energy that flows through the set
of beliefs and desires that seek expression. For Warburg, this combination
of irrational and oftentimes contradictory ideas, drives and superstitions is
actually present in the work of art, rather than that it would merely underlie
it as the expression of a Zeitgeist. The Nachleben35 of irrational beliefs that
Warburg discloses in the words and images of the Reformation is, in con-
trast to the title of the English translation of his collected essays, not to be
seen as a “renewal of pagan antiquity”36 unless this renewal is understood as
a ‘rejuvenation’ in the sense that was earlier considered: it does not amount
to a mere return of unchanged motives and meanings but it draws attention
to a survival of fears and desires that, like all psychic entities, are endowed
with a dynamic of their own.37 The psychic energy that Warburg discovers
in works of art is a middle term between the ‘plastic power’ that Nietzsche
describes in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874)38 and the
drives that make up Freud’s concept of the Id: they are as much historical
as they are psychic and, like Nietzsche and Freud’s concepts, untimely and
unhistorical precisely because they have a temporality of their own.39 “The
history of the influence of antiquity,” writes Warburg, “[is] observed through
the transmission, disappearance, and rediscovery of its gods,” thereby not
failing to reveal how, as we have explained above, the gods that were ini-
tially transmitted by the Greeks had undergone drastic changes before they
were rediscovered in the era of the Reformation.40
34 For a beautiful development of the metaphor of the seismograph and a very interesting
study of Warburg’s work in general, see Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire
de l’ art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002),
esp. 117–125.
35 Warburg’s term (inspired by Anton Springer, though with different connotations),
most often translated in English as ‘survival.’ For one of many examples see Warburg,
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, 181.
36 For an account of the difficulties in translating Warburg’s notion of Nachleben, see
E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute,
1970), 16. For an account of Gombrich’s (and Panofsky’s) own inability to grasp the true
stakes of the notion of Nachleben and his (their) reduction of it to the positivistic concept of
‘revival,’ that is, to a purely chronological ‘repetition of the same’ that obliterates its impure
and anachronistic temporality, see Didi-Huberman, L’ image survivante, 93–94 and idem.,
“Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,” trans. Vivian
Rehberg and Boris Belay, Common Knowledge 9:2 (2003), 273–285.
37 See Chapter I.
38 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,
Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
62.
39 For an excellent analysis of this topic, see Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante, 320–321.
106 chapter three
1.3. Conflicts and Compromises: The Timeless ‘Hybridity’ of Logos and Magic
Warburg frees these “vibrant, primordial psychic state[s]”41 from their reduc-
tion to content and meaning because he wants to explore how art can help
human beings to come to terms with the universe in which they live. In his
Lecture on the Snake-ritual (1923), for instance, in which he talks about the
art and rituals of the Pueblo Indians, Warburg’s overall aim is described as
follows:
I shall be satisfied if these images from the everyday and festive lives of the
Pueblo Indians have convinced you that their masked dances are not child’s
play, but rather the primary pagan mode of answering the largest and most
pressing questions of the Why of things.42
The main claim of this lecture is that the snake is to be seen as a symbol
that mediates between the Indians and the universe that surrounds them.
During his visit to the United States in 1895–1896 Warburg noticed how the
native population of New Mexico and Arizona derived from the serpent’s
resemblance to lightning a belief in the possibility to influence the weather-
conditions by way of so-called snake rituals, that is, dances that at times
even involved real serpents. Those snake rituals, however, are not regarded
as instances of purely irrational superstition but as transitions from such a
primitive stage of believing to a rationalized stage of understanding:
The synchrony [Nebeneinander] of logical civilization and fantastic, magical
causation shows the Pueblo Indians’ peculiar condition of hybridity and
transition. They are clearly no longer primitives dependent on their senses,
for whom no action directed toward the future can exist; but neither are they
technologically secure Europeans, for whom future events are expected to be
organically or mechanically determined.43
The serpent ritual is not entirely devoid of rationality because it testifies to
the ability to engage in means-end thinking: the Indians are, unlike ‘primi-
tives’ and animals, capable of substituting a purely passive and immediate
response to their environment by actions that have the aim of modifying it.
Warburg sees the serpent ritual as an embodiment of the process of cause-
putting: if the Pueblo Indians gain a feeling of mastery over the world in
which they live, claims Warburg, it is because they set up an intrinsic con-
41 Ibid., 599.
42 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans.
Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 48.
43 Ibid., 17.
nection between the uncontrollable weather-conditions on the one hand

and a not uncontrollable animal on the other. “[T]he Indian,” it is stated,
confronts the incomprehensibility of natural processes with his will to com-
prehension, transforming himself personally into a prime causal agent in the
order of things. For the unexplained effect, he instinctively substitutes the
cause in its most tangible and visible form. The masked dance is danced
causality.44
The Indians therefore “stand on middle ground between magic and logos”:45
the snake-ritual serves not only as a way to enter into a mystical union with
the forces that are at work in the universe but also as a strategy to ward off
the anxiety that comes with them.46
In Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther War-
burg had already used, three years earlier, the same categories to describe
the astrological practices of the age of Reformation. For Warburg, the pagan
belief in astral deities that govern the movements of planets is like the snake
ritual to be regarded as an embodiment of the process of cause-putting.
While projecting the gods onto the planetary sphere, human beings gain
a feeling of mastery. Though the gods in outer space were still believed
to influence the events on earth, they were from then on deprived of the
possibility of doing this in an immediate way: when gods become planets,
their actions cease to be immeasurable. By way of this belief in personified
planets, then, human beings grow capable of both establishing a connec-
tion with the surrounding universe and of securing, for themselves, suffi-
cient distance to overcome the feeling of its overall incomprehensibility.
For this reason, these astrological practices are, like the serpent dances of
the Pueblo Indians, not just superstitions but a sign of the ‘synchrony’ or
‘hybridity’ between irrational believing and rationalized understanding and
of the ‘transition’ from the former to the latter: the reformers of sixteenth-
century Germany are, no less than the Indians of North America at the turn
of the century, to be seen as standing “on middle ground between magic and
logos” (my emphasis). At the start of his essay, Warburg writes:
Logic sets a mental space [Denkraum] between man and object by applying
a conceptual label; magic destroys that space by creating a superstitious—
44 Ibid., 48.
45 Ibid., 17.
46 See also ibid., 2: “To us, this synchrony of fantastic magic and sober purposiveness
appears as a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indian this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating
experience of the boundless communicability between man and environment.”
108 chapter three
theoretical or practical—association between man and object. In the div-

inatory workings of the astrologer’s mind, these two processes act as a sin-
gle, primitive tool that he can use both to make measurements and to work
magic. That age when logic and magic blossomed, like trope and metaphor, in
Jean Paul’s words, “grafted to a single stem,” is inherently timeless [eigentlich
zeitlos]: by showing such a polarity in action, the historian of civilization
furnishes new grounds for a more profoundly positive critique of a histori-
ography that rests on a purely chronological theory of development.47
This passage is crucial for a double reason. The first is that it casts light on
the roots of the problem that is being dealt with in the peculiar mixture of
magic and logic that is astrology: what made the era of the Reformation turn
to the meticulous observation of planets and stars is, according to Warburg,
not a scientific interest but a feeling of anxiety. What causes this anxiety
is, for its part, timeless; it is, as is clear from the lecture on the snake rit-
ual, conditioned by the “largest and most pressing question of the Why of
things,” that is, by a mystery that is as universal as it is unsolvable.48 It is a
profound failure to know and to control that makes human beings reach
for the ‘inherently timeless’ polarity of magic and logic through which they
are to overcome a feeling of helplessness with regard to the surrounding
world. Warburg’s opening statements, however, do not only reveal the uni-
versal nature of the problem, that is, the anxiety for an incomprehensible
world but also two essential characteristics of the solution to that problem.
First of all, it is clear that the strategies that help human beings to contain
their fears are essentially dependent on historical contexts and geographical
locations; whereas the German reformers seek recourse to deified planets,
American Indians use the serpent as a mediator. In this way, the fears and
anxieties of human beings may be timeless and universal but their attempts
to deal with them are not. These efforts to ward off the fundamental anxiety
about the surrounding universe can never take place in an abstract realm
or an a-historical manner and they inevitably take on a specific, historically
and geographically variable form. The second point of interest is that these
different strategies against fear do have one element in common: they will
never succeed in replacing the mixture of believing and knowing by a com-
plete and fully rationalized understanding of the universe. What underlies
Warburg’s entire philosophical and anthropological framework is the idea
47 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 599. For the original terminology, see Warburg,
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, 202–203.

48 Warburg, Images, 48.
that the universe cannot in its entirety become an object of knowledge and
that the absolute force that underlies it (‘the Why of things’) can never be
aimed at as an object of consistent meaning. This is why he mentions the
necessity to “critique … a historiography that rests on a purely chronological
theory of development”:49 whatever progress lies await for science, the blend
between magic and logos cannot be overcome. In short, Warburg contends
that a failure to know is as irreducible now as it was for the Greek pagans,
the German reformers or the Pueblo Indians at the turn of the century. The
criterion to determine the success of a strategy of understanding or a set
of practices can therefore from Warburg’s point of view neither be their
consistency or rationality nor the sheer accumulation of factual knowledge
about the outside world but only the degree in which they are able to release
human beings from their primal fears.
From this perspective, the final paragraphs of the Lecture on the Snake-
ritual are particularly revealing. Warburg’s claim here is that modern sci-
ence and technology do not, however rational they may be, entail a funda-
mental improvement over the mythological world-view of the Indians: the
invention of electricity, for instance, has annihilated precisely the longed-
for distance between man and world that allows human beings to overcome
their anxiety:
The American of today is no longer afraid of the rattlesnake. He kills it; in
any case, he does not worship it. It now faces extermination. The lightning
imprisoned in wire—captured electricity—has produced a culture with no
use for paganism. What has replaced it? Natural forces are no longer seen in
anthropomorphic or biomorphic guise, but rather as infinite waves obedient
to human touch. With these waves, the culture of the machine age destroys
what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space
for devotion, which evolved in turn into the space required for reflection.
The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and the Wright
brothers, who invented the dirigible airplane, are precisely those ominous
destroyers of the sense of distance, who threaten to lead the planet back into
chaos.50
On account of the primal fear that conditions them, the images that War-
burg brings under research are, like Georges Didi-Huberman claims, to
be seen as symptoms. “The ‘psychological history of expression’ that was
dreamt of by Warburg,” writes Didi-Huberman in the chapter Symptom-
image of his book on Warburg,

50 Warburg, Images, 54.
110 chapter three
… was thus, before everything, meant as a psychopathology. The Warburgian

history of images attempts to analyze the pleasure of formal inventions in the
Renaissance, but also the ‘culpability’ of retentions of memory as they can
become manifest [in those inventions]; it invokes the movements of artistic
creation, but also the compulsions of ‘auto-destruction’ that are at work in
the exuberance of the forms itself; it lays bare the coherence of esthetic
systems but also the ‘irrationality’ of the beliefs [croyances] that at times
underlie [those systems] … [I]f the symbol was at the center of Warburg’s
preoccupations, it was not as an abstract synthesis between reason and the
irrational, between form and matter, etc.—but as the concrete symptom of a
cleavage that is unceasingly at work in the ‘tragedy of culture’.51
The irrational superstitions of the Pueblo Indians and the German reformers
are symptomatic because they do indeed entail both an expression of and a
reaction to a feeling of anxiety that cannot be contained. The symbol of the
snake is, for the native inhabitants of New Mexico and Arizona, a symptom
in that it is simultaneously a figure of both conflict and compromise:52 in
it, anxiety is ventilated and contained at the same time.53 Likewise, the
Nachleben of ancient, pagan beliefs in the hearts and minds of sixteenth
century man is, in truth, the Nachträglichkeit of a primal fear caused by a
fundamental failure to fully comprehend.
Though Didi-Huberman is right in claiming that the survival of super-
stitious beliefs in Warburg’s research is to be analyzed as a symptomatic
response the reasons that he gives for this are not altogether accurate.
“[E]xpression, according to Warburg,” writes Didi-Huberman, “is not the
reflection of an intention; it is rather the return of the repressed [retour
d’un refoulé] in the image.”54 There is, however, no one-to-one connection
between symptoms and repression. It is not because some symptoms are
indeed the effect of a process of repression—an unsuccessful one for that
matter—that this claim can be extended to the category of all symptoms:
from the statement that all (unsuccessful) repression causes symptomatic
51 Didi-Huberman, L’ image survivante, 284 (my translation).

52 Ibid., 298.
53 For a truly brilliant example see Warburg’s characterization of the grisaille figures in
Francesco Sassetti’s burial chapel in the Santa Trinita church in Florence: “They form part
of the symbolism of energy, synthesis, and balance; but they are confined to a shadowy
existence, beneath the sphere of the sacred, where they can never disrupt Ghirlandaio’s
serene realism by introducing the gestural eloquence of their Roman virtus.” In Aby Warburg,
“Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to His Sons.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contribu-
tions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 247.
54 Didi-Huberman, L’ image survivante, 281 (my translation).
responses to occur—be it pathological ones or not—, it does not follow that,

vice versa, all symptoms are the outcome of a process of repression. A symp-
tom can very well be the return of a desire that has remained immune to
the mechanism of repression, rather than the return of something that has
hitherto been repressed: some affects repeat themselves, not because they
were initially repressed but in spite of attempts to do so. Hence the rever-
sal by some post-Freudian thinkers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
of the research-problem that occupied Freud: what, from their perspective,
should puzzle the psychoanalyst is not so much the question why repression
so often fails and thus gives rise to a symptom as, vice versa, the question
why repression would succeed in the first place, given the extraordinary
force behind so many of our drives.55 The Nachleben of pagan beliefs that
Warburg sees at work in the era of the Reformation is to be analyzed in this
way: in spite of the symptomatic nature of these superstitions, the affect that
underlies them cannot be considered as repressed. These irrational beliefs
do spring forth from an anxiety for a universe that cannot be fully compre-
hended but they exemplify the attempt to overcome this anxiety without
the force of an external agency that would repress it. This is what Warburg
discovered in the images of the German reformers: they are not just a sign of
the times, expressing what Panofsky calls an ‘intrinsic content or meaning,’
nor the return of a repressed anxiety like Didi-Huberman claims them to
be but they are instruments that, in Riegl’s words, “regulate”56 the relation
between man and world and, moreover, succeed in taking away the very
anxiety that initially gave rise to them.
This comes most clearly to the fore in Warburg’s discussion of Albrecht
Dürer’s Melencolia I. For Warburg, Dürer’s engraving is not merely an ex-
pression of underlying ideas but the outcome of a “truly creative act [eigent-
lich schöpferische Akt] … which gives [it] [a] consoling, humanistic mes-
sage of liberation [humanistischen Trostblatt] from the fear of Saturn.”57
Warburg’s analysis focuses on the square that is built into the wall rep-
resented in Dürer’s picture. Recognizing it as the magic square of Jupiter,
Warburg makes the claim that it is the image of the one planet that could
55 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone
Press, 1984) and their statement that “the sign of desire is never a sign of the law, it is a sign
of strength [puissance].” (11).
56 Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, 231.
57 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 644. For the original terminology see Warburg,
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, 258.

112 chapter three
counterbalance the harmful influence of Saturn. By depicting this square,

claims Warburg, Dürer invoked Jupiter’s magical powers and thus grew
capable of warding off the bad effects that come from the Saturnine con-
stellation:
Magically invoked, Jupiter comes to her [that is, the winged figure in Dürer’s
engraving] aid through this benign and moderating influence on Saturn. In a
sense, the salvation of the human being through the countervailing influence
of Jupiter has already taken place; the duel between the planets … is over;
and the magic square hangs on the wall like a votive offering of thanks to the
benign and victorious planetary spirit.58
According to Warburg, Dürer explored the influence of Jupiter as a way
to transform the negative effects of Saturnine determination—gloom or
‘harmful’ melancholy—into the essentially positive quality of the humanis-
tic genius: contemplation or ‘spiritual’ melancholy. “Dürer,” writes Warburg,
shows the spirit of Saturn neutralized [unschädlich gemacht] by the individ-
ual mental efforts of the thinking creature against whom its rays are directed.
Menaced by the ‘most ignoble complex,’ the Child of Saturn seeks to elude
the baneful planetary influence through contemplative activity.59
In this way Dürer reveals that it is possible to overcome the harmful effects
of the fearful awareness that the forces at work in the surrounding universe
cannot be possessed as objects of knowledge, that is, the so called Saturnine
condition that is melancholy. However symptomatic and irrational it may
be, the response to a not fully controllable or knowable world is not inher-
ently pathological. Dürer’s engraving is, for Warburg, proof that it is not
impossible to combat “the daemonic grotesques”60 that make us anxious:
“[S]aturnine gloom has [here] been spiritualized into human, humanistic
contemplation.”61 Dürer shows that it is possible to look straight into the
eyes of a world that resists knowledge without responding with despair.
In Warburg’s opinion, moreover, Dürer brings to the fore that the anti-
dote against the Saturnine condition is to be derived from the very same
powers that were believed to cause these harmful effects in the first place.
The belief in the therapeutic influence of Jupiter is evidently as irrational
as the belief in the pathogenic influence of Saturn. The genius of Dürer,
58 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 645–647.

59 Ibid., 645. For the original terminology, see Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdi-
gungen, 261.
61 Ibid., 645.
however, lies precisely in the discovery that these irrational responses to the
failure to fully comprehend the surrounding universe could just as well be
part of the solution rather than of the problem: it is because it depicts the
absurd belief in Jupiter’s beneficial influence that Melencolia I succeeds, like
the serpent-ritual of the Indians, in transforming the despair that triggers
such superstitions into a feeling of mastery. If Dürer releases human beings
from their feeling of isolation it is therefore not by repressing it, nor by
surpassing the “inherently timeless” polarity of magic and logic62 in a purely
rational system of knowledge but by turning the harmful effects of the
feeling of despair back against itself. Melencolia I is an attempt to ward
off the discomfort about the failure to know without repressing it: it is a
symptom that uses the very energy of its underlying cause as a means to
shake off the latter’s pathogenic effects.
2. The ‘Distortion’ of Truth in History
2.1. Kafka, the Trauerspiel and the Messianic

It is from this Warburgian perspective that both Benjamin’s Trauerspiel-
book and his Kafka-essay ought to be read. For Benjamin neither the
baroque drama nor Kafka’s oeuvre expresses an ‘intrinsic content’ that
would remain external to the work of art itself, in this case a literary text:
both are rather to be considered as ‘regulations’ (in the Rieglian meaning of
the term) that help to come to terms with the irresolvable limits of human
understanding. It is nothing less than a deeply felt failure to know which is at
stake when Benjamin mentions, as a key motive of German baroque drama,
the “depths which separate visual being from meaning”63 and, as the basic
theme of Kafka’s writing, the inaccessibility of doctrine (the failure to “con-
vert poetry into teachings”).64 The Kafka-essay deserves to be read as a con-
tinuation of the research that had already started in the Trauerspiel-book.
Both texts, though separated in time by more than ten years, stem from one
and the same interest which is, moreover, the very question that occupied
Warburg throughout his entire life, that is to say: What are the different
ways to respond to a world that remains ambivalent and does not reveal
that it is meaningful or purposeful in a straightforward manner? Similar to
62 Ibid., 599.
63 O, 165.
64 SW: 2, 808.
114 chapter three
Warburg’s claims about the anxiety of Pueblo Indians and the contempla-
tive reaction of Dürer’s winged figure, Benjamin contends that Kafka’s char-
acters respond to this failure to know with shame, whereas the protagonists
of the baroque drama are overcome by melancholy. In addition to this, as
we have seen, Benjamin’s interpretations show that this lack of knowledge is
not just a theme of the Trauerspiel and Kafka’s writings alike, but that these
texts are, themselves, (necessarily indirect) expressions of it. Hence his anal-
ysis of Kafka’s last will and the claim that “[n]o other writer has obeyed the
commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faith-
fully” and, in the Trauerspiel-book, the extensive discussion of allegory as
a confrontation with the limits of human comprehension.65 Just as Kafka’s
desire to have his writings destroyed is to be seen as an expression of shame
that does not overcome it, the use of allegories in the Trauerspiel is to be
seen as the only way to express melancholy without suspending it. In Kafka’s
writings and the baroque drama alike, the failure to know is expressed as a
failure, not giving rise to a more profound ‘knowledge of not-knowing’ or
docta ignorantia.
If Benjamin is thus, like Warburg, not concerned with overcoming the
limits of human understanding in a system of knowledge it is because he is
concerned with finding a way to deal with them—and this in no other way
than by bringing them on display. He joins Warburg in assessing the irre-
ducibility of a lack of knowledge because he understands that the very quest
for knowledge is to be replaced by an attempt to make its failure bearable.
The shame that is expressed in and by Kafka’s writings and the melancholy
that is expressed in and by the Trauerspiel are, like the anxiety of the Indians
and the ‘positive’ melancholy of Dürer’s winged angel, not just the result of
the awareness of a meaningless world but also a reaction to it. Moreover, like
Warburg, Benjamin does not only maintain the incapacity to explain away
the entire universe in a fully rational system of understanding but also—
and most important of all—the possibility to avert the negative effects of
this incapacity.66 Benjamin reads Kafka and the Trauerspiel-authors the way
65 SW: 2, 808.
66 It would be worthwhile to render a detailed analysis of Benjamin’s early essay on
Hölderlin (1914–1915) from the perspective of this same, Warburgian interest. In Benjamin’s
opinion, Hölderlin’s poems express an inner suspension of the power of the Greek gods
and attack them with their own means, that is, form: “Even the god must in the end give
his utmost in service to the poem and execute [vollstrecken] its law … The structuring, the
inwardly plastic principle, is so intensified that the fate of the dead form breaks over the
god, so that—to remain within the image—the plastic dimension is turned inside out, and
Warburg looks at Melencolia I: as a successful attempt to discover, within

the very awareness that the world resists knowledge, a feeling of hope.
Kafka and the baroque playwrights do not succeed in overcoming this
fundamental unknowability through a more profound form of knowledge,
nor do they repress it but they derive, from the very awareness of a lack
of knowledge, the ability to live with it. Benjamin is a Warburgian (and
Rieglian) in that he is, unlike Panofsky, not so much interested in the
expressed content that lies behind the medium of expression, as in the
redemptive powers of the medium of expression itself.67
Such are the true stakes of Benjamin’s discussion of baroque drama: it is
precisely because the Trauerspiele amount to a ceaseless confrontation with
the irresolvable immanence of the universe that they succeed in keeping
alive the longing for transcendence. According to Benjamin, the baroque
playwrights discovered the paradox that it is only the awareness of being
unable to “hear … the voice of revelation” which allows for an attitude of
remaining open toward it and of actively waiting for it.68 For this reason,
now the god becomes wholly an object. … The heavenly one is brought [wird gebracht]. …
[T]he Greek god has entirely fallen prey to his own principle, the form.” (SW: 1, 32; GS: II-1,
121).
67 Andrew Benjamin’s essay “Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity” con-
tains very interesting ideas that zoom in on these same issues albeit from a different per-
spective. Andrew Benjamin’s analysis focuses on the Artwork-essay and the Arcades Project,
rather than on the Trauerspiel-book and the Kafka-essay and his attention goes out to the
feelings of boredom and distraction rather than to those of melancholy and shame but cru-
cial parallels between those four texts and concepts need to be pointed out. All four of these
feelings are “moods” in Andrew Benjamin’s meaning of the term, that is, “not conditions
of the subject [but] [o]n the contrary … conditions of the world. And yet they are neither
arbitrary conditions, nor are they historically random.” (Andrew Benjamin, “Boredom and
Distraction: The Moods of Modernity.” Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(London, New York: Continuum, 2005), 156) Though without referring to Warburg’s works,
Andrew Benjamin makes mention of an “ambivalence” that is to be seen as an “ontological
condition” (Ibid., 169) and emphasizes Benjamin’s intuition that the moods of boredom and
distraction will only be overcome by a dynamic that is inherent to them (“Boredom works as
a threshold precisely because the move away from boredom is carried by it as a potentiality.
The site of potentiality is the present.” (Ibid., 168)). The notions of play and habit, as realms
and strategies in which an alterity and lack of full comprehensibility can be borne out with-
out being repressed, are crucial here (“Play allows an originating event to be accommodated.
Living with it, becomes the registration of play within habit and thus within dwelling. (This
is the link between Gewohnheit and Wohnen.) Habit, now as the living out of a certain struc-
ture of activity, contains within it an element that cannot be mastered even by the demand
that habit has to be lived out continually. It harbours that transformative moment that is its
own construction.” (Ibid., 169)).
68 O, 152.
116 chapter three
the statement that “the German Trauerspiel is taken up entirely with the
hopelessness of the earthly condition” is immediately followed by the claim
that “[s]uch redemption as it knows resides in the depths of this destiny
itself rather than in the fulfillment of a divine plane of salvation.”69 The
Trauerspiel-authors not only unveil the void behind what was believed to
be a possession of divine knowledge but they equally understand that it is in
the very awareness of this irreducible immanence that hope for redemption
originates: “Never does their transcendence come from within. Hence their
illumination by the artificial light of apotheosis.”70 In the Trauerspiel, in
other words, the very awareness that transcendence cannot come from
within clears the path for the hope that it might come from without.71
This fundamental awareness underlies the dialectical reversal in the last
pages of the Trauerspiel-book, where allegory itself is allegorized and thus
divested of its most alienating features. In Benjamin’s interpretation, the
transience of the profane world and the inaccessibility of absolute truth
in history are in the baroque Trauerspiele not just expressed in and by
allegory but ultimately disclosed and sublated as instances of allegory. In
this way, since all instances of allegory are illustrations of a failure to know,
the continuous disappointment of this ideal installs an affinity for its very
opposite, that is, for the experience of something absolute. As Weber puts
it,
[A]llegory is the traditional means of investing a manifestation with a sig-
nification that it cannot possibly have in terms of a purely immanent, self-
contained structure. It thereby brings the signifying potential traditionally
associated with a generalized transcendence to bear upon the claims of a
localizable and individualizable secular immanence.72
Through their unceasing disenchantment of history and nature alike, alle-
gories empty out the ideal of knowledge and in precisely this way clear the
path for the possibility of an absolute truth-experience. The allegorist quite
obviously falls short vis-à-vis his ideal and thus inevitably ends by discred-
69 O, 81.
70 O, 180.
71 It is in this sense that Willem van Reijen, in the context of his analysis of Benjamin’s
Trauerspiel-book, rightfully claims that “antithesis and the lack of transcendence” do not
only “unceasingly represent the possibility of complete catastrophe” but just as much its
antithesis: “The experience of the absolute depravity [Hinfälligkeit] of our life and its mean-
ing becomes the starting point of the idea of salvation.” see Van Reijen, “Innerlichkeit oder
Begriffsarbeit?” 19 (my translation).
72 Weber, “Storming the Work,” 174.
iting or exhausting this very ideal itself. “[T]he mortification brought about
by allegory,” writes Friedlander, “is [thus] not the last word in the journey of
meaning. Allegory, one might say, contains the possibility of its own rever-
sal.”73 By making the active and excessive quest for knowledge (‘possession
of its object’) work against itself allegory thus prepares the way for a presen-
tation of what cannot but remain outside its grasp: the ‘intentionless’ state
of genuine truth. “[T]ransitoriness,” writes Benjamin,
is not signified or allegorically represented, so much as, in its own signifi-
cance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection [Auferstehung].
Ultimately in the death-signs of the baroque the direction of allegorical reflec-
tion is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem. The
seven years of its immersion are but a day. For even this time of hell is secu-
larized in space, and that world, which abandoned itself to the deep spirit of
Satan and betrayed itself, is God’s world. In God’s world the allegorist awak-
ens. … Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar
to it; the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead
objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with
this one about-turn [mit jenem einen Umschwung].74
The same ‘about-turn’ underlies Benjamin’s essay on Kafka. There too the
hopelessness that comes together with the awareness of the inability to
grasp the world as an object of knowledge (the failure to ‘convert poetry
into teachings’) is not granted the final word; and there too the possibility
of maintaining hope remains tied to nothing less than the unceasing expres-
sion of this awareness and this inability themselves.75 Returning to the same
categories that made up the philosophical framework of the Trauerspiel-
book a decade earlier, Benjamin describes the world of Kafka’s protagonists
as “nature” and those protagonists themselves as “creatures.”76 Hardly sur-
prising, then, that Benjamin sees hopelessness as a fundamental feature of
Kafka’s characters. According to Benjamin, it “may be this hopelessness that
brings out the beauty in [the accused].”77 Kafka’s universe is as disconso-
late as the baroque one and suffers from a heaviness that weighs down on
its inhabitants like the heavens on Atlas’s shoulders. This is what Benjamin

74 O, 232; GS: I-1, 405–406. For an interesting discussion of this dialectical reversal, see
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 173–176. Buck-Morss, however, stresses Benjamin’s
critical attitude vis-à-vis this dialectical about-turn and fails to see that it is precisely this
movement that underlies his own messianic beliefs.
75 SW: 2, 208.
76 SW: 2, 798.
77 SW: 2, 798.
118 chapter three
has in mind when he writes, in the beginning of the essay, that “Kafka thinks
in terms of cosmic epochs,” and postpones a clarification of this phrase for
almost fifteen pages:78
[Kafka] moves the mass of historical happenings the way Sisyphus rolled the
stone. As he does so, its nether side comes to light: it is not a pleasant sight,
but Kafka is capable of bearing it: “To believe in progress is not to believe that
progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”79
The second part of this statement is most significant. Kafka is deemed
‘capable of bearing’ the ‘nether side’ of history, that is, the absence of a
dynamic of salvation at work within the world, and this, moreover, for
the reason that he is deemed capable of bringing it to expression. In his
writings, no less than in the Trauerspiel, it is the relentless depiction of
hopelessness itself which allows hope to survive. In Benjamin’s mind, the
protagonists of Kafka’s stories can only recover hope when they have lost
the expectation of salvation. The despair of the characters in The Trial,
for instance, is despite everything not complete, not at all because “they
have hopes of being acquitted” but precisely because they manage to live
without them:80 “In Der Prozeß, postponement is the hope of the accused
man.”81 Kafka’s protagonists understand that they ought to be saved not by
the judicial system but from it and thus maintain hope only to the extent
that their verdict is postponed: “Salvation is not a premium on existence,
but the last way out for a man whose path, as Kafka puts it … is ‘blocked …
by his own frontal bone.’”82 If the possibility is to become visible that the
world might perhaps be saved it must first cast aside the hope of saving
itself.83
It is crucial to note that the hope of fulfilment and the attitude of actively
waiting for an experience of absolute truth do not at all presuppose, let alone
bring about, the reality of such a fulfilment or experience. On the contrary,
even though the dynamic of postponement does allow for an openness
towards the absolute it always entails a confrontation with the lack of
78 SW: 2, 795.
79 SW: 2, 808.
80 SW: 2, 798.
81 SW: 2, 807.
82 SW: 2, 804.
83 For a brilliant and moving account of this logic of postponement, the possibility of a
“hope without revelation” and the connection with the theme of storytelling, see Friedlander,
Walter Benjamin, 212–221. This subchapter has been of vital importance to the remainder of
this chapter.
any genuine revelation of truth or actualization of meaning. As was dis-

cussed earlier on, Benjamin maintains that Kafka’s universe is marked by
a presence of the absolute that is as yet unacknowledged but cannot be
approached at will.84 For this reason, similar to the liberating potential that
is associated with the literary mode of allegory, it is only when the active
quest for systematic knowledge and the hope that it can be grasped at one’s
will are emptied out from within, that an experience of the possibility of a
genuine redemption can occur. Benjamin finds this awareness most clearly
expressed in one of Kafka’s statements that he had already paraphrased
almost fifteen years earlier in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities.85 In the
Kafka-essay Benjamin cites a conversation between Max Brod and Kafka
himself in which the latter affirms that there is indeed hope, albeit not in
this world: “Oh plenty of hope,” Kafka is quoted as having said, “an infinite
amount of hope—but not for us.”86 Benjamin derives from this statement
the claim that in Kafka’s stories hope is cherished, not for human beings,
nor for animals or hybrids like Gregor Samsa or Odradek but only for the
so-called assistants from The Trial and a handful of other, less prominent,
figures. The reason why these would not be beyond salvation, unlike the
majority of the characters in Kafka’s writings, is that they do not fully belong
to our world. They are un-heimlich in the literal sense of the word; ‘not-
at-home’ in our universe. Benjamin likens them to “mist-bound creatures,
beings in an unfinished state [unfertige Geschöpfe] [,] … neither members
of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but, rather, mes-
sengers [Boten] busy moving between them.”87 For this reason Benjamin
credits Kafka with an extraordinary “attentiveness” [Aufmerksamkeit] in
which he “included all creatures”: constantly scanning the world around us
and experiencing it, like the baroque playwrights before him, as historized
nature and naturized history, Kafka is nevertheless on the look-out only for
what does not completely partake in it.88 Kafka is, no less than the baroque
84 See Chapter II.

85 See Benjamin’s beautiful reading of Goethe’s sentence, in Elective Affinities, that “[h]ope
shot across the sky above [the] heads [of the two lovers] like a falling star”: “They [the lovers]
are unaware of it [the falling star], of course, and it could not be said any more clearly that
the last hope is never such to him who cherishes it but is the last only to those for whom it
is cherished” (SW: 1, 354–355). See also the essay’s final statement that “[o]nly for the sake of
the hopeless ones have we been given hope.” (SW: 1, 356).
86 Kafka quoted in SW: 2, 798.
87 SW: 2, 798; GS: II-2, 414.
88 SW: 2, 812; GS: II-2, 432. “Even if Kafka did not pray—and this we do not know—he
still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called ‘the natural prayer of the soul’:
120 chapter three
playwrights, “hopeless[ly] loyal to the creaturely,” though not without bear-

ing in mind that it cannot be brought into a context of consistent meaning.89
This ‘attentiveness’ or presence of mind does not itself constitute a presenta-
tion of truth but merely marks a continuous readiness and an active waiting
for it and is therefore revealed in a natural affinity for the downcast and the
deformed: “It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the hapless, that
there is hope.”90
With the concept of ‘gesture’ [Geste, Gestus] Benjamin denotes the man-
ner in which these creatures stand out from our world: the “code of gestures”
that he claims to have discovered in “Kafka’s entire work” is, in truth, a
“cessation of happenings,” with actions that “are too powerful for our accus-
tomed surroundings and [therefore] break out into wider areas.”91 This ges-
ture is token of what lies outside of our world; it “combines the utmost
mysteriousness with the utmost simplicity” and originates “far away from
the continent of man.”92 Through these gestures, creatures rise up from our
universe and thus allow hope for salvation from outside to be maintained:
“Each gesture is an event [Vorgang]—one might even say a drama—in
itself.”93 Gestures are therefore associated with movement (‘messengers’)
and with the realm of a ‘both at the same time’ (‘beings in an unfinished
state’) or, in short, with that which cannot be intentionally aimed at nor
possessed or frozen into a consistency of meaning. In his book about Japan,
Roland Barthes writes about similar gestures (in the context of a description
of Japanese Bunraku-theatre) that they “produce an exaltation” in which
“emotion no longer inundates, no longer submerges [but] becomes read-
attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all creatures, as saints include them in
their prayers.”
89 O, p. 156.
90 SW: 2, 799. See also Samuel Weber’s excellent analysis of the role of the students in
Kafka’s stories: “They are always chasing off after something. It is in such unpredictable spas-
modic and interruptive ‘gestures’ that the students, in their own peculiar way … ‘reckon
with’ a time that is always in danger of running out. The gestures of the students com-
bine the most extreme concentration with the most hectic exertion bordering on loss of
control.” in Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 204. This “combin[ation] [of] the most extreme con-
centration with the most hectic exertion bordering on loss of control” is a striking definition
of both Benjamin’s concept of attentiveness and one that is, despite its obvious connota-
tions, very closely linked to it, namely that of ‘distraction’ [Zerstreuung] in the Artwork-
essay.
91 SW: 2, 801.
92 SW: 2, 802.
93 SW: 2, 802; GS: II-2, 419.
ing material.”94 It is a disruption of act, opening up this world to allow for an

unexpected glimpse on what remains excluded from it.95
Benjamin stresses that the ‘attentiveness’ by way of which hope is ulti-
mately preserved is in no way to be likened to an intuitive faith in salva-
tion. The sudden insight that redemption might still lie await for the few
creatures that are truly fallen from this world does not suspend the over-
all awareness that it is not yet present for whoever is not. For this reason,
he emphasizes the difference between Kafka’s attentiveness and “myth-
ical divination” or “existential theology.”96 The gestures that Kafka looks
out for are mere signs of differing: they do not retreat in favour of a new
or systematic horizon of meaning but only, unexpectedly and very briefly,
reveal the possibility that the world that surrounds us remains incomplete,
that is, that it might not be all there is. Benjamin therefore adds that,
though
[t]he stage on which [the gesture] takes place is the World Theater which
opens up toward heaven … this heaven is only background; to explore it
according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the
stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the
sky behind every gesture.97
Though a token of the unworldly, the “event” that effectuates itself through
gesture is not a Heideggerian Ereignis.98 It is not a purification but a mere
dislocation; there is in gesture no coming-into-itself of what transcends our
world but only a falling outside of it.99 The gestures of Kafka’s creatures
94 Roland Barthes, “On Bunraku.” The Drama Review, 15:2 (1971), 77 (also included in
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1983)).
95 The concept of gestus [the quotable gesture] will be an important element in Benjamin’s
discussion of Brecht (see The Author as Producer (1934) and, primarily, What is Epic Theater?
(1939)) where it comes together with the same set of associations (a sudden disruption
of homogeneity and unity that suspends the semblance of totality). In linking the sudden
revelation of truth with the violence that shatters the unity of a representation or the
homogeneity of classical narrative (plot) gestus belongs in a continuum of other concepts
in Benjamin’s oeuvre like the caesura (Hölderlin), the expressionless [das Ausdruckslose] or
the optical unconscious and montage.
96 SW: 2, 812.
97 SW: 2, 802.
98 SW: 2, 802.
99 For a brief but clear discussion of this difference between Benjamin and Heidegger,
see Rolf Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam
Verlag, 1973), 90–91 and his statement that Benjamin’s thinking is “irreconcilable with such
[Heidegger’s] flowing back into the originary, [irreconcilable] with the retreat into being,
into ‘the’ event [<das> Ereignis].” (90).
122 chapter three
resemble the “mute gestures”100 [Pantomimik] of the puppets that Heinrich

von Kleist describes in his short-story On the Marionette Theatre (1810):
if both reveal “the force that lifts them into the air [to be] greater than
the one that binds them to the earth,” it is because their very inability to
move themselves allows them to become visible as having been moved by
something else.101
It is in this context that the following statement from Benjamin’s letter
to Scholem of August 11, 1934 is to be understood: “That I do not deny the
aspect of revelation to Kafka’s work follows already from [the following:
namely] that I—to the extent that I assess it as ‘distorted’ [entstellt, literally
dislocated]—acknowledge for him the messianic.”102 Referring to the world
of Kafka’s stories, Benjamin writes, in the Kafka-essay, that “[n]o one says
that the distortions [Entstellungen] which it will be the Messiah’s mission
to set right someday affect only our space; surely they are distortions of our
time as well. Kafka must certainly have thought this.”103 Because he manages
to ‘hold out’ or ‘endure’ the failure to know without giving up the hope
of redemption, Kafka is, like the baroque writers that were discussed in
The Origin of German Tragic Drama for that matter, to be thought of as a
messianic thinker. Since truth in history is distorted, divine doctrine will
only be made accessible (that is, it will become an object of intention) at
the time of the Messiah’s coming: “[O]nly for a redeemed mankind has its
past become citable in all its moments.”104 In Kafka’s writings, moreover,
the promise of salvation is, as we have seen, not just left untouched by
the awareness of a fundamental failure to know but even protected by
it: it is precisely by way of the unadorned presentation of a disconsolate
universe that Kafka is able to secure the hope of its fulfillment. This is the
very duality that underlies Benjamin’s own messianic ideas. The essential
Theological-Political Fragment, most probably written as early as 1920–1921
(though some scholars date it as late as 1937–1938) and one of the most lucid
expressions of his Jewish beliefs, starts with a depiction of the irresolvable
immanence of our world: “Only the Messiah himself completes [vollendet]
100 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Thomas G. Neumiller. The
Drama Review, 16:3 (1972), 22 (translation modified). For the original German see idem., “Über
das Marionettentheater.” Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 339.
101 Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” 24.
102 B: 2, 618; my translation.
103 SW: 2, 812; GS: II-2, 433.
104 SW: 4, 390.
all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation
to the messianic. For this reason, nothing that is historical can relate itself,
from its own ground, to anything messianic.”105 In line with the earlier
quoted lines that history is “infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at
every moment,” Benjamin contends that true redemption can only come
from outside of history.106 “[T]he secular order,” writes Benjamin, “cannot
be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom” and is therefore marked by
a dynamic that is entirely its own: the quest for happiness [Glück].107 On
account of this quest for happiness, humanity is to be seen as moving in the
opposite direction of the messianic. Benjamin does not refrain from calling
it a “seek[ing] [of] downfall,” a “rhythm of [the] eternally transient worldly
existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal
totality.”108
However, the absence of redemption and hopelessness that mark the
realm of the profane are here not in contradiction with the possibility of
fulfilment that will ultimately be realized by the Messiah. For it is, according
to Benjamin, only an affirmation of this disconsolate rhythm of the profane
which allows the hope of redemption to subsist:
If one arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and
another marks the direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of
free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction. But just
as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force
on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature as secular—
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.109
For Benjamin it is precisely the ceaseless confrontation with the downfall
of everything secular which keeps alive the awareness that it remains as yet
incomplete; the possibility of redemption is only revealed in the heart of
what has so far remained unredeemed: “The secular … though not itself a
category of this kingdom [that is, the messianic one], is a decisive category
of its most unobtrusive approach. … For nature is messianic by reason of its
eternal and total passing away.”110
105 SW: 3, 305; GS: II-1, 203.

106 SW: 1, 55.
107 SW: 3, 305.
108 SW: 3, 305–306.
109 SW: 3, 305.
110 SW: 3, 305–306.
124 chapter three
2.2. The Relation between Benjamin’s Messianism and His Historical

Analyses
Benjamin’s assessment that Kafka is in truth a ‘distorted’ messianic is signif-
icant in that it casts light on the relation between the first stage of his Kafka-
reading, that is, the Kafka-essay and the second one, that is, the Kafka-letter.
The claim, in the Kafka-letter, that his work conveys an “absolutely new
world of experience” can, namely, only be substantiated if his underlying
messianic insights, elaborated in the Kafka-essay, are taken into account.111
The relevance of displaying a fundamental distortion of truth in history
or an unknowability of the absolute can only be fully grasped if they are
understood as messianic themes: they are not typically modern phenom-
ena but features of history as such. For this reason, Benjamin’s Kafka-essay,
in which he focuses on the messianic elements of his writings, is to be con-
sidered as a complement to and not as an antithesis of his later Kafka-letter,
in which he emphasizes the historical context of Kafka’s work (see Chap-
ter II). The ‘sickening of tradition’ that is there discussed cannot be released
from the messianic framework that he had rendered four years earlier since
it is only from that perspective that it can be diagnosed:112 the loss of the
legitimacy of traditional beliefs is, in other words, not the cause of a pro-
found loss of ‘the consistency of truth’ but the outcome of it.113 Benjamin
considers Kafka to be a messianic thinker in that he understood that the
failure to comprehend truth as an object of knowledge is not a problem of
one specific historical era but an unsurpassable characteristic of history as
such.
Of crucial importance in Benjamin’s characterization of Kafka, however,
are not only the words “revelation” [Offenbarung] and “messianic” [mes-
sianischen] but also the notion that links them to each other: “distorted”
[entstellt].114 Kafka’s work is to be interpreted as messianic because and only
to the extent that, for him, the experience of revelation is necessarily a dis-
torted one. In Benjamin’s mind Kafka’s work is neither tantamount to a
direct nor a gradual revelation of truth but it is precisely for that reason
that he is to be considered as messianic: Kafka is here thought to have been
aware of the resistance of truth to knowledge and the subsequent task to
bring this resistance itself to expression. It is for this reason that Benjamin
111 SW: 3, 325.

112 SW: 3, 326.
113 SW: 3, 326.
114 B: 2, 618.
points out, in the letter to Scholem, not only that Kafka shows “the consis-
tency of truth [to be] lost” but also that he understands that it cannot be
regained:115
Many had come to terms with it [that is, this loss of the consistency of truth]
in their own way—clinging to truth, or what they believed to be truth, and,
heavyhearted or not, renouncing its transmissibility [Tradierbarkeit]. Kafka’s
genius lay in the fact that he tried something altogether new: he gave up truth
so that he could hold on to its transmissibility, the hagaddic element.116
On account of this unsurpassable inaccessibility of doctrine there is, inher-
ent to messianic writing, a necessity to deconstruct/distort itself: the claim
that messianic truth can be directly expressed would contradict its own very
assessment of the inapproachability of the absolute. Since all messianic rev-
elations are distorted, the concept of a ‘distorted messianic revelation’ is in
fact, like that of a ‘weak messianic power,’ a tautology.
There is a second possible meaning to this essential distortion that makes
up the messianic undertone of Kafka’s writings. From a purely messianic
perspective on the surrounding world merely the assessment that knowl-
edge of the absolute is lacking can be derived but no understanding of how
this lack is experienced. A messianic insight entails the idea that truth is
no object of knowledge or intention but it is in need of a different, not-
immediately-theological framework if it wants to penetrate into the histor-
ically dependent set of problems in which this inaccessibility makes itself
felt. It is in this sense that the Kafka-letter is to be seen as a complement
to the Kafka-essay just as much as it was the case the other way around.
For Benjamin, namely, Kafka’s world does not just include the theologi-
cal assessment of such a universal failure to truly know but also “the exact
complement of his age, which is preparing to do away with considerable
segments of this planet’s population.”117 The Kafka-letter sketches out the
historical context and the oftentimes fatal consequences of the limits of
human understanding that are, themselves, not historically determined. For
Benjamin, Kafka’s descriptions of the alienation of the big-city dweller and
the technology of modern warfare, for example, illustrate that he not only
understood that truth in history remains distorted but also that the manner
in which these distortions are experienced and the sometimes dangerous
beliefs they lead to depend on the place and time in which one lives.
115 SW: 3, 326.

116 SW: 3, 326; B: 2, 763.
117 SW: 3, 326.
126 chapter three
The same tension underlies Benjamin’s own messianic thoughts. Like

Kafka (and Warburg for that matter) he discloses that the limits of human
understanding are themselves universal (Warburg’s ‘largest and most press-
ing question of the Why of things’), whereas the way in which these lim-
its are experienced is historically variable. Both Benjamin’s analyses of the
Baroque and his critique of modernity are, for this reason, complemented
by his Jewish messianic ideas. The lack of redemption and the hopelessness
that characterize the baroque drama and the widespread poverty of expe-
rience that, in modernity, ends up depriving tradition of its legitimacy are
nothing less than historicizations of the messianic experience of a discon-
solate and not fully comprehensible universe. Melancholy and the allegor-
ical presentation of the creaturely condition are to be seen as the specif-
ically baroque manner of experiencing the profound gap between world
and meaning and between knowledge and truth that lie at the heart of Ben-
jamin’s messianic beliefs. Likewise, the excessively rationalized concept of
(conscious and lived) experience, the fetishisation of the ideal of verifiabil-
ity and the obsession with information cannot be isolated from the mes-
sianic experience, albeit under the sign of modernity: they do not just affect
our “ability to share experiences” but disclose a poverty of experience that
goes beyond the historical era that is brought under research in essays like
On the Program of the Coming Philosophy, The Storyteller, On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire or Experience and Poverty.118 These essays cannot be fully under-
stood outside of the Jewish messianic framework of the Theological-Political
Fragment in that it is only the latter which reveals that the set of prob-
lems dealt with in the former are but specifically modern expressions of
the unfulfilled state of history as such.119 Benjamin’s critique of modernity
thus performs the same task as his The Origin of German Tragic Drama: both
present us with an analysis of a historically variable emotion—melancholy
for the baroque era, the ‘conscious’ experience and shock-experience for
modernity—in which a more substantial distortion of truth makes itself felt.
Conversely, Benjamin’s Jewish messianism is in need of a complement
because it cannot render these historical analyses out of its own accord. The
118 SW: 3, 143.

119 See, for example, Miriam Hansen’s claim that “[s]uperimposed upon the historical-
materialist trajectory of decline is a less linear—though no less pessimistic—sense of belat-
edness, endebted to the temporality of Jewish Messianism” in Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin,
Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology.’” New German Critique
40 (1987), 190.
theological, messianic framework discloses the unredeemed state of history

as such but it lacks the instruments to determine the historically variable set
of problems in which this state is experienced. Thus Benjamin’s Jewish mes-
sianism without his historical analyses is empty, his historical analyses with-
out his Jewish messianism are blind. As we have discussed in Chapter I, it
is the theological nature of the substructure of Benjamin’s philosophy itself,
that is, its messianism, which forbids an immediately theological approach:
Benjamin’s discussion of the baroque drama and his analysis of modernity
are therefore founded in philosophical, phenomenological, psychoanalytic
and literary-historical categories that are neither a-theological nor reducible
to theology. For this reason, it is important while reading Benjamin’s essays
to remain aware that even those considerations that do not seem to deal
with theological issues can nevertheless not be released from presupposi-
tions derived from messianic beliefs.
2.3. A Case in Point: Technological Reproducibility

Only in this way do Benjamin’s materialist views cease to contradict his
messianic beliefs. In his opinion, only a conceptual framework derived from
Marxist thinking is capable of diagnosing the alienation that lies at the heart
of modernity but a messianic view on the distinction between truth and
knowledge is needed to understand what is really at stake. This philosophi-
cal move also underlies the essay Benjamin is undoubtedly best known for:
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.120 This text
contains important insights for the discussion about the modern poverty
of experience and needs to be read along the lines of the other essays that
have been mentioned above (see Chapter II). The emphasis here, however,
no longer lies on the obsession with information or the increased impor-
tance of the conscious experience but on what Benjamin calls “the desire
of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things spatially and humanly.”121
Such a desire is held accountable for the annihilation of the spatial and spir-
itual distance that he has famously termed ‘aura.’ Benjamin contends that
traditional art was marked, first of all, by a spatial distance from the spec-
tator in that the latter could only admire the work itself if he was willing to
come in person to the place, for example, a church or museum, where it was
120 The first version of this essay is from 1935. The following quotes come from the canonic,
third one (1936–1939).

121 SW: 4, 255.
128 chapter three
exhibited. This distance, however, was overcome by an all-consuming “urge

… to get hold of an object at close range in an image [Bild], or better, in a
facsimile [Abbild],” which led to the industry of reproductions that saw the
light of day in the nineteenth century and continued to flourish in the twen-
tieth and twenty-first centuries.122 Benjamin contends that this industry, due
to its mechanical nature, ended up affecting the privileged status of the orig-
inal work of art. That is to say, there is an essential difference between the
way we relate to a work of art when we encounter a mechanically made
reproduction and the way we relate to it when we encounter a manually
made one. “The whole sphere of authenticity,” he writes,
eludes technological—and, of course, not only technological—reproducibil-
ity. … [W]hereas the authentic work retains its full authority in the face of a
reproduction made by hand, which it generally brands a forgery, this is not
the case with technological reproduction.123
In spite of the gained ability to “reach the recipient in his or her own sit-
uation,” the mechanical reproducibility of art has a profound impact on
the awareness that the original work has a unique existence.124 On account
of the mechanical and industrial nature of modern art-reproduction (rela-
tively recently invented media like photography and film are, according to
Benjamin, conditioned by the intervention of a machine) the reproduced
work ceases to be perceived as a singular object that was created at a spe-
cific moment in time and exists in a specific point in space. A technological
reproduction is, for Benjamin, no mere reproduction of the original work of
art but it “substitutes [setzt … an die Stelle] a mass existence for a unique exis-
tence.”125 A mechanically made reproduction is thus thought to prevent our
experience to meet the actual artwork that was reproduced: it is no longer a
medium that allows our gaze to be affected by the original work itself, but it
has developed into a simulacrum. Mechanical reproductions take in the very
place of what they refer to and they block the awareness that, in spite of the
huge number of produced copies, they still refer to an object with a unique
existence in reality. Moreover, since photography and film are not merely
used to reproduce art that was originally hand-made but developed into
popular media to produce works of art, they not only preclude the percep-
tual movement away from the copy to the original but they have suspended
122 SW: 4, 255; GS: I-2, 479.

123 SW: 4, 253–254.
124 SW: 4, 254.
125 SW: 4, 254; GS: I-2, 477 (my emphasis).
the very distinction between both. Benjamin maintains that, unlike origi-
nal paintings or sculptures, photographs or film-reels do not have a unique
existence and hence cannot rightfully lay claim to a higher status than their
so-called reproductions. Mechanically produced art is thus believed to fore-
close the right of being an original work of art with a unique existence in
space and time, not because it has the status of a mere copy but because
there has never existed an original in the first place.
The “authority” that Benjamin endows an original artwork with, how-
ever, is not only tied up with the uniqueness of its existence but also with
a remarkable legitimacy that he claims can be encountered in it.126 Auratic
works of art belong to the same category as the story: similar to how, in the
story, events are “embed[ded] … in the life of the storyteller in order to pass
it on as experience [Erfahrung] to those listening,” the manually produced
work of art serves as a medium between the artist and the spectator on the
one hand and the community that transcends both of them on the other.127
The elements of aura, authority and authenticity make up the structure of a
work of art that functions as a vehicle for the ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ experience
that Benjamin was in the process of analyzing in other essays written in the
same period: it is “identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition
[Eingebettetsein in den Zusammenhang der Tradition]. … [T]his tradition
itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.”128 In an auratic work
of art tradition is passed on from one spectator to another, thus allowing
both of them to gain a sense of belonging: “[I]t is highly significant that the
artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its rit-
ual function. In other words: the unique value of the ‘authentic’ [<echten>]
work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value.”129 It is
for this reason that the nature of the auratic artwork cannot be understood
outside the (messianic) framework that also underlies texts like The Origin
of German Tragic Drama and the Kafka-essay. An auratic artwork, that is to
say, is associated with all the qualities that Benjamin endows the presenta-
tion of something absolute with: an intentionless state of being, a unique
and non-repeatable truth that is experienced in an involuntary, mentally
relaxed and absorbed manner and, to be sure, a distinct resistance to being
transferred to a context of consistent or systematized meaning. The auratic
126 SW: 4, 254.

127 SW: 4, 316.
128 SW: 4, 256; GS: I-2, 480.
129 SW: 4, 256; GS: I-2, 480.
130 chapter three
artwork, in short, is no object of intention and cannot be possessed as an

object of knowledge. The auratic experience is therefore to be understood
as an atavism of the religious one and the examples of auratic artworks
mentioned in the text, such as the elk portrayed on the walls of caves during
the Stone Age, the Greek Venus-statues or the idols used by Christians in
the Middle Ages, share in being encountered as ritualistic objects with a
power that remains to a certain extent inaccessible to both the human
beings who created them and the ones who subsequently marveled at them.
The auratic work of art conveys a meaningful experience the way the story
conveys wisdom: its “unique apparition of a distance [Ferne], however near
it may be” demands a respectful attitude and triggers the awareness of an
extraordinary status in onlookers who sometimes even believe that it was
not created by human hands.130
However, just as the modern obsession with immediate verifiability
blocks the way for an acknowledgment of the storyteller’s authority, so
too the modern “desire of present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things spa-
tially and humanly” runs counter to the mysterious authority of traditional
art.131 When the unique existence of the artwork retreats in favor of mass-
produced copies, its cult value is severely problematized. The technological
reproduction of art demolishes claims to a higher status and suspends rights
to mediate between individuals and the community of which they are a part.
This ‘desire’ for closeness is therefore, indeed, to be understood as an exem-
plification of the quest for knowledge, sharing in its excessive subjectivity,
its frenetic need to actively possess an object and to expose all that lies hid-
den within it and, to be sure, its inability to relate to that object as a unique
and irreplaceable being. “[T]he age of technological reproducibility,” writes
Benjamin, “separated art from its basis in cult”132 in order to substitute for
it an “absolute emphasis … on its exhibition value [Ausstellungswert].”133 In
his opinion, the technological reproducibility of artworks is tantamount to
nothing less than a “violent shattering [gewaltigen Erschütterung] of tradi-
tion.”134
The discussion about the mechanical reproducibility of art contains an
analysis of modernity that goes beyond the realm of aesthetics. For Ben-
130 SW: 4, 255; GS: I-2, 479.

131 SW: 4, 255.
132 SW: 4, 258.
133 SW: 4, 257; GS: I-2, 484.
134 SW: 4, 254; GS: I-2, 477 (translation modified).
jamin, it is not so much the newly invented media of photography and film
that are to be held accountable for the decay of the aura135 as a specific
mode of human perception. In a move that expands the philosophical
framework of the phenomenologists of his time, Benjamin endows the
human psyche with a historical vector. Unlike Henri Bergson, for instance,
whose insights in his opinion do not at all have the intention to render the
“historical determination of memory,” Benjamin’s own research rejects the
idea that the structure of our perceptive and mental faculties has remained
the same since time immemorial and strives to determine the impact of
the social-economic elements.136 “Just as the entire mode of existence of
human collectives changes over long historical periods,” writes Benjamin,
“so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception
is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by
nature but by history.”137 It is this philosophical move that makes up the
nexus of Benjamin’s materialist convictions. It amounts, in fact, to a rather
strict adaptation of the insight which Marx himself had called “the guiding
principle of [his] studies”138 and which he most clearly summarized in his
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of produc-
tion appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces
of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the gen-
eral process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that deter-
mines their consciousness.139
Benjamin accepts not only Marx’s suggestion about the twofold structure
of society, with an infrastructure on the one hand (its material life or “eco-
nomic conditions of production”)140 and a superstructure on the other
135 I prefer the English term ‘decay’ to ‘destruction’ since Benjamin’s claim is not that the
auratic experience has disappeared but that it has taken on a new, problematic guise.
136 SW: 4, 314; see above.
137 SW: 4, 255.
138 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya
(New York: International Publishers, 1970), 20.

139 Ibid., 20–21.
140 Ibid., 21.
132 chapter three
(its “legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological

forms”)141 but also his groundbreaking insight that it is the former which
conditions the latter. Benjamin’s Artwork-essay starts with the claim that
“[t]he transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly than
that of the base [and] has taken more than half a century for the change
in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture”
and is then described as a set of “theses defining the tendencies of the
development of art under the present conditions of production.”142
Benjamin injects categories derived from psychoanalysis and phenome-
nology into the Marxist framework and stresses the idea that the superstruc-
ture of a society is not merely constituted by the entirety of thoughts, beliefs
and imaginary constructions through which a society reflects on itself but
also by the manner in which it experiences these ideological forms. The Art-
work-essay is rooted in the insight that it is not just art which is conditioned
by the economic infrastructure of a society but also the way in which art
is perceived. Both artistic expression and the aesthetic experience bear the
stamp of the socio-economic conditions in which they originate; the ‘his-
torical determination’ of both the images themselves and of our responses
to them is at stake in Benjamin’s research. The need for mechanical repro-
ductions of artworks which, as we have seen, he holds responsible for the
decay of the aura and thus, in part, for the annihilation of tradition is an
obvious illustration of this line of thinking. This urge to overcome all dis-
tance through mechanical reproduction is in Benjamin’s opinion not an ele-
ment of our natural mental and emotional faculties but the outcome of the
specifically capitalist mode of production. Mechanically (re)produced art is
to Benjamin what commodities are to Marx: its unsurpassable “transitori-
ness and repeatability” are the same features that characterize all mechan-
ically and industrially produced goods.143 “The stripping of the veil from the
object [Entschälung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hülle], the destruction of
the aura,” writes Benjamin
is the signature of a perception whose “sense for sameness in the world” has
so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from
what is unique. … The alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses
with reality is a process of immeasurable importance for both thinking and
perception.144
141 Ibid., 21.

142 SW: 4, 252.
143 SW: 4, 255.
144 SW: 4, 255–256; GS: I-2, 479–480.
Benjamin contends that modern man’s perceptive faculties are so much

affected by the capitalist mode of production that it has become impossible
to experience art in the same mediated way as before: the relaxed and
absorbed contemplation that allowed human beings to be mysteriously
affected by an auratic artwork has given way, in media like photography or
film, to the strained and immediate response that Benjamin terms “shock-
experience”:145
Let us compare the screen [Leinwand] on which a film unfolds with the can-
vas [Leinwand] of a painting. The painting invites the viewer to contempla-
tion; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations. Before a film
image, he cannot do so. No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed.
It cannot be fixed on.146
A mechanically (re)produced work of art has gained a tactile quality: it is
not so much passively seen nor touched by the spectator, as that it actively
reaches out for him itself or even, as Benjamin writes about Dadaist art,
“jolted the viewer [stieß dem Betrachter zu], taking on a tactile [taktile]
quality.”147 If modern man is marked by the urge to destroy all uniqueness
and distance, both spatial and spiritual, it is in part because the empty
repetition of mass production has penetrated so deeply into his mind and
body that he cannot even shake it off after having left his place on the
assembly line.
145 These same ideas are central elements in Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs. See, for
example, the claims that “historical materialism … is interested in tracing the changes in
artistic vision not so much to a changed ideal of beauty as to more elementary processes—
processes set in motion by economic and technological transformations in production” (SW:
3, 270) and that “[t]he eruptive, the immediate … [are] in this view characteristic of artis-
tic creation.” (SW: 3, 272) For excellent analyses of Benjamin’s discussion of the specifically
modern forms of apperception, revolving around the key-notions of “innervation” [Innerva-
tion] (GS: I-2, 445; first version of the Artwork-essay) and “distraction” [Zerstreuung] (SW:
4, 268; GS: I-2, 504; later versions of the Artwork-essay) and outlining both the negative and
positive sides of these notions, see, for example, Benjamin, “Boredom and Distraction.” 156–
170; Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street.” Critical Inquiry 25:2
(1999), 306–343, Howard Eiland, “Reception in Distraction.” boundary 2, 30:1 (2003), 51–66
and Gertrud Koch, “Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of
Art’ Essay.” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin
and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 205–215.
146 SW: 4, 267; GS: I-2, 502.
147 SW: 4, 267; GS: I-2, 502.
134 chapter three
Conclusion
Phenomenology and psychoanalysis serve Benjamin for more than an

exploration of our thoughts and actions; he turns them into valuable tools
to discover how these thoughts and actions and the experiences that come
along with them are affected by the society in which they occur. Benjamin
considers the mode of production to be the determining factor for the
mode of human perception, holding the alienating structure of the former
in modernity accountable for the poverty of the latter. Subsequently, how-
ever, this analysis of the modern poverty of experience and of the decay
of tradition needs to be completed in a messianic framework. For what
is held, by most members of the Frankfurt School, for mere symptoms of
Enlightenment or modernity cannot for Benjamin be released from mes-
sianic beliefs about the distinction between truth and knowledge and the
failure to grasp the former as an object of intention. Benjamin’s critique of
modernity, for its part, is for this reason also to be read as an extension of his
messianic beliefs: a materialist framework, namely, is required for whoever
seeks to disclose the way in which this failure to truly know is experienced
in modernity and, moreover, to cherish hope for the possibility of a genuine
revelation of something absolute. Though messianic convictions are needed
to determine what the modern poverty of experience and the annihilation
of tradition are expressions of, it is only materialist philosophy which allows
them to become visible as expressions in the first place.
appendix
RELATIONAL ‘PURITY,’ THE COLLECTOR AND THE FLÂNEUR
“[P]resence of mind is an extract of the

future, and precise awareness of the pres-
ent moment is more decisive than fore-
knowledge of the most distant events.”1
Introduction. The Concept of Purity
In a letter written in 1919 to Ernst Schoen, Benjamin introduces a concept of

purity that is, as Samuel Weber writes, “conditional rather than absolute”:2
The purity [Reinheit] of a being is never unconditional or absolute; it is always
subjected to a condition. This condition always differs depending on the
being at issue; never however does this condition reside in the being itself.
In other words: the purity of each (finite) being never depends upon it itself
[ist nicht von ihm selbst abhängig].3
Such a ‘relational’ purity (Agamben) can be considered as a concept that
helps us understand that what is truly absolute or redeeming is not a static
presence of the transcendent within something immanent but a (sudden)
dynamic through which a concrete being partakes in a force that seemingly
comes from without (“[T]he purity of each (finite) being never depends
upon itself.”). The absolute should therefore not be seen as entirely discon-
nected from the immanent, and it remains tied to a distinct movement or
becoming that is at work in what is most directly at hand (the “condition”
of purity is “depending on the being at issue”): it is thus both distinct and
inseparable from the concrete and immediately at hand. The absolute, that
is to say, can only present itself in and through what is immanent but not at
the expense of fully doing away with this immanence: it constitutes a pure
or mere (both meanings of the German word rein) force that both singular-
izes a concrete particularity and divides this particularity from itself. The
1 SW: 1, 482–483.
2 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 196.
3 B: 1, 206.
136 appendix
absolute is that power which allows an immanence or concreteness to be

recognized in its irreplaceable particularity but this is done by bringing on
display a movement within it that cannot be reduced to it.
The theological foundations of Benjamin’s philosophy are steeped in
the awareness that this movement of genuine truth is inherently different
from the realm of the profane and that the absolute is inaccessible to the
human quest for knowledge or appropriation: human beings can never
actively produce genuine truth nor, for that matter, would they be able to
bring about true justice on their own account. There is no method for truth
and no direct path towards justice. These ideas run through Benjamin’s
writing like chords that make up a recurrent melody or motif and they
are most clearly expressed in the opening lines of the Theological-Political
Fragment (“[N]othing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground,
to anything messianic”) or in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue:4
The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in
the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made
up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and
knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the
death of intention.5
Throughout his oeuvre Benjamin uses two distinct philosophical frame-
works to describe the manner in which this ‘intentionless state of being’
can present itself in a concrete or finite entity, for example, an artwork or
a literary text, and how absolute truth can therefore be discovered within
something immanent.6 The first one assumes that this process of fulfilment
or actualization entails an intensification of a life and beauty that are already
dormant within that immanence or concreteness and that can therefore be
further developed and transferred to a context of higher unity. Benjamin’s
doctoral thesis on the early Romantics and his understanding of the task
of criticism are crucial to understand this dynamic. The second one, on the
contrary, assumes that the presence of an absolute force within something
immanent can only be brought on display by a process of mortification that
disrupts a false totality that is at work within that immanence and thus
never overcomes a structural discontinuity. Benjamin’s essay on language
and his understanding of the task of translation are of vital importance here.
4 SW: 3, 305.
5 O, 36.
6 For what follows, Friedlander’s very clear elaboration of Benjamin’s “two distinct tele-
ologies” was particularly illuminating and inspirational, see Friedlander, Walter Benjamin,
22–23.
relational ‘purity,’ the collector and the flâneur 137
What matters the most in the context of our discussion of purity is that both
of these distinct frameworks assume that the relation between the absolute
and the immanent is a movement in which they are tied together without
fully merging and that this relation can only be understood when the dis-
tinction between truth and knowledge is taken into account.
In his doctoral thesis, to begin with, Benjamin opposes the genuine
criticism of artworks to “judgment” and identifies it as “on the one hand,
the completion, consummation, and systematization of the work and, on
the other hand, its resolution in the absolute [Auflösung im Absoluten].”7
According to Benjamin’s reading of the Romantics, the work of art is itself
to be perceived as a “center of reflection” [Zentrums der Reflexion]8 which
needs to be completed and not possessed: genuine criticism receives its
impetus from the reflection that lies already contained in the concrete
work of art (its “immanent tendency”9 and “secret” or “hidden intentions”)10
and the criterion of the former is thus internal to a potentiality at work in
the latter (the artwork’s “criticizability” [bloße Kritisierbarkeit]).11 Criticism
takes its cue from the truth-content present in the work of art in order
to fulfil it and has nothing in common with methodologies or quests for
knowledge that meet works of art as external objects to be appropriated
or as enigmas to be decoded. Criticism heeds the secret that is internal to
the work and allows it to shine forth on its own terms, rather than that it
brings artworks into a context of knowledge in which their movement of
self-revelation is brutally dispelled.12 It is responsive rather than active and
starts from the idea that truth shows itself rather than that it is exposed.
7 SW: 1, 159; GS: I-1, 78.

8 SW: 1, 155; GS: I-1, 72.
9 SW: 1, 160.
10 SW: 1, 153.
11 SW: 1, 160; GS: I-1, 79.
12 See also Winfried Menninghaus’s statement in “Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the
Romantic Theory of Reflection.” Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hanssen and
Andrew Benjamin (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 24, that “every finite reflection
can only point, in the mode of incompleteness, to the never-to-be-realized project of com-
plete ‘self-penetration’ within the infinite context of reflection.” Menninghaus, however, is
highly critical of Benjamin’s dismissal of this crucial topic as an “axiomatic presupposition”
(SW: 1, 129) or “metaphysical credo” (SW: 1, 149) that cannot be further analyzed. In this regard
see also Rolf Tiedemann’s (deeply Adornion) reading of Benjamin’s philosophy of art, such as
his statement that “in the artwork, truth can only be presented [vorgestellt] as appearing, but
only when it prohibits itself to mistake appearance for being [die Erscheinung mit dem Dasein
zu verwechseln] does it become a criticism of being” in Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie
Walter Benjamins, 127.
138 appendix
[C]riticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which

the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to con-
sciousness and to knowledge of itself. … The subject of reflection is, at bottom,
the artistic entity itself, and the experiment consists not in any reflection on
an entity, which could not essentially alter it as Romantic criticism intends,
but in the unfolding of reflection [Entfaltung der Reflexion]—that is, for the
Romantics, the unfolding of spirit—in an entity.13
It is on account of this sharp distinction between truth and knowledge that
Benjamin denotes, in a letter to Ernst Schoen of April 1919, the “core of
Romanticism” [Zentrum der Romantik] as “messianism”:14 the truth-content
that is revealed in a work of art is inseparably intertwined with elements
(usually termed its material content) that are inessential to it and make its
purity relational rather than unconditional.15
In a similar move, in Critique of Violence (1921), Benjamin introduces the
concept of “pure” and “unalloyed means” [reine Mittel]16 as means that “are
never those of direct solutions but always those of indirect solutions.”17 The
‘purity’ of such means thus refers to an inability and an indirectness, that is,
to an incapacity to use them as tools for possession or intentional behavior:
they remain ‘pure’ because they do not secure anything in advance and
for that precise reason constitute an openness towards a movement that
cannot be anticipated or a force that cannot be made into one’s own. What
makes up the purity of such means is neither their being tied to a specific
13 SW: 1, 151; GS: I-1, 65–66.

14 B: 1, 208. For a brief discussion of the relation between Benjamin’s doctoral thesis and
his messianism along the lines of what has been explained above, see Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, “Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German
Romanticism.’ ” Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Ben-
jamin (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 9–18.
15 See also Benjamin’s quintessential statements about truth-content and material con-
tent in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1919–1922): “The relation between the two,”
writes Benjamin at the start of this essay, “is determined by that basic law of literature accord-
ing to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth
content is bound up [gebunden] with its material content.” (SW: 1, 297; GS: I-1, 125).
16 SW: 1, 244; GS: II-1, 191.
17 SW: 1, 244. The concept of ‘pure’ and ‘unalloyed violence’ that is introduced in the
same essay is of a similarly relational nature in that it is both distinct and inseparable from
the realm in which it makes itself felt. In the same way as the purity of unalloyed means,
the purity of such violence shows itself precisely in its capacity to constantly turn that with
which it is caught up, that is, the mythic violence of the law, against itself. “[I]f the existence
of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured,” writes Benjamin, “this
furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence
by man, is possible, and shows by what means. Less possible and also less urgent [than such
revolutionary violence] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has
been realized in particular cases.” (SW: 1, 252).
aim, nor any supposed Kantian unconditionality but the way in which they
manage to hold themselves apart from precisely the very context in which
they are ceaselessly being deployed. Unalloyed means are thus present
within ordinary or ‘impure’ social actions but they do not merge with them.
For Benjamin, they refer to the possibility that conflicts are resolved in a
non-violent way, thus remaining outside the grasp of the ‘mythic’ violence
that Benjamin (and Jacques Derrida in his scope) associates with the force
of the law. The purity of such means illustrates a form of sociability that is
irreducible to the means-end rationality of our normal social behaviour but
which nevertheless does succeed in resolving interpersonal conflicts. “Is any
nonviolent resolution of conflict possible?” Benjamin asks himself,
Without doubt. The relationships among private persons are full of examples
of this. Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows
the use of unalloyed means of agreement. Legal and illegal means of every
kind that are all the same violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones
as unalloyed means. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust, and whatever
else might here be mentioned are their subjective preconditions.18
The sphere of purity is thus inseparable from and can only be found within
the very concreteness of our lives: the purity of unalloyed means consists
precisely in their capacity to ceaselessly alienate the means-end rationality
of our ordinary behaviour from itself and to thus bring out what Benjamin
calls a “proper sphere of understanding.”19 For this reason he sets up a
connection with another of his lifelong fascinations, language. In a letter
to Martin Buber, Benjamin takes pains to vouchsafe the absolute nature
and sacredness of language as a ‘pure’ means, rather than as an instrument
that should immediately inspire to social deeds or political action. Severely
criticizing a language that has been “denigrated to mere means [to an end]”
[zum bloßen Mittel herabgewürdigte],20 Benjamin writes that
[e]very salutary effect of writing (of the word, of language), yes every effect
that is not essentially devastating, rests in its secret. No matter in how many
different forms language can prove itself to be effective, it does not become
so through the mediation of contents, but through the most pure disclosure
[das reinste Erschließen] of its dignity and its essence.21
18 SW: 1, 244.
19 SW: 1, 245.
20 B: 1, 126.
21 B: 1, 126–127; (my translation). For a brief discussion of Benjamin’s refusal to contribute
to Buber’s journal and his underlying view on language, see for example Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, “Introduction,” 9–18.
140 appendix
These views on language and its ‘pure (or mere) disclosure’ are elabo-
rated in the essays On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916)
and The Task of the Translator (1921) and they remain indispensable to an
understanding of Benjamin’s viewpoints on the purity of truth and its rela-
tion to immanence. His philosophy of language is built on the assumption
that human languages are fallen and imperfect vis-à-vis an Adamite lan-
guage of truth [wahre Sprache] that is nevertheless still contained in them.22
Benjamin starts from the idea that “the seed of pure language” [den Samen
reiner Sprache]23 is both distinct and inseparable from human language and
describes the task of the translator as
to release [erlösen] in his own language that pure language which is exiled
[gebannt] among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work
in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks
through decayed barriers of his own language.24
The human or ‘impure’ word ‘imprisons’ a kernel of absolute truth that is
however, unlike the former, “a tensionless and even silent depository of the
ultimate secrets.”25 Pure or mere language therefore does not express any-
thing apart from itself since its sole, singular force consists in disrupting the
expressive, instrumental and communicative powers of ordinary, ‘impure’
human language. The pure is inseparably tied up with the impure but, in
being irreducible to that realm, it breaks it open from within and estranges
it from itself: “In [the] pure language—which no longer means or expresses
anything but is, as expressionless [ausdrucksloses] and creative Word, that
which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention
finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.”26
The genuine translator, that is to say, “allow[s] his language to be powerfully
affected by the foreign tongue.”27
22 SW: 1, 259; GS: IV-1, 16. This idea of a pure or true language will continue to be present
in Benjamin’s writings, inspiring his notion of “non-sensuous similarities” (SW: 2, 697) in

the essays Doctrine of the Similar (1933) (SW: 2, 694–698) and On the Mimetic Faculty (1933)
(SW: 2, 720–722). For the most substantial discussion of Benjamin’s views on language, see
Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 31–94 and Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der
Sprachmagie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1995).
23 SW: 1, 259; GS: IV-1, 17.
24 SW: 1, 261; GS: IV-1, 19.
25 SW: 1, 259.
26 SW: 1, 261; GS: IV-1, 19.
27 Rudolf Pannwitz quoted in SW: 1, 262.
1. The ‘Representational Impulse’

of Truth and the Movement of the Absolute
Benjamin’s belief that the absolute is distorted in history is thus always

immediately tied to a sharp distinction between knowledge and truth and
to the idea that truth reveals itself and can never be exposed, possessed or
fixated at will. In this context, Benjamin puts emphasis on the “represen-
tational impulse [darstellende Moment] in truth”28 and defines the “essence
of truth” [Wesen der Wahrheit] as a movement: “the self-representing realm
of ideas” [sich darstellenden Ideenreiches].29 For Benjamin, truth and sem-
blance [Schein] are no mere opposites of each other since the very purity of
truth is always and necessarily interwoven with its impulse to shine forth
and reveal itself in a medium that it essentially differs from.30 Hence, also,
Benjamin’s characterization of philosophy as a middle ground between sci-
ence and art:
The scientist arranges the world with a view to its dispersal in the realm of
ideas, by dividing it from within into concepts. He shares the philosopher’s
interest in the elimination of the merely empirical; while the artist shares
with the philosopher the task of representation. There has been a tendency
to place the philosopher too close to the scientist, and frequently the lesser
kind of scientist; as if representation had nothing to do with the task of the
philosopher.31
This, however, instils into Benjamin a profound sensibility for the redemp-
tive potential of the most unnoteworthy objects. In the Trauerspiel-book
already, he was fascinated by the way in which the melancholic condition
does not merely amount to a “deadening of the emotions, and the ebbing
away of the waves of life … [which] can increase the distance between the
self and the surrounding world [Distanz von der Umwelt] to the point of
28 O, 31; GS: I-1, 211.

29 O, 31; GS: I-1, 211 (translation modified).
30 “[T]he representation of ideas,” writes Benjamin, “[takes place] through the medium
of empirical reality [im Mittel der Empirie]. For ideas are not represented in themselves,
but solely and exclusively in an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept: as the
configuration of these elements.” (O, 34; GS: I-1, 214) See also the discussion of these matters
in the context of the discussion of art, beauty and the expressionless in the Goethe-text and,
most importantly, the statement that “[t]he expressionless is the critical violence which,
while unable to separate semblance from essence in art, prevents them from mingling
[welche Schein vom Wesen in der Kunst zwar zu trennen nicht vermag, aber ihnen verwehrt,
sich zu mischen].” (SW: 1, 340; GS: I-1, 181).
31 O, 32.
142 appendix
alienation from the body” but also instigates an awareness that the most
unremarkable and simple things can unexpectedly look back as a dislodged
promise of truth.32 What struck Benjamin the most in Dürer’s engraving
Melencolia I, for instance, was that “the utensils of active life are lying around
unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation [Grübelns].”33 In a philo-
sophical move that anticipates some of the key insights of Heidegger’s Being
and Time two years later, the baroque concepts of mourning and melan-
choly denote for Benjamin how it is precisely the distance between man
and world which should make us particularly attentive to the redemptive
potential of the objects that surround us:
As soon as this symptom of depersonalization was seen as an intense degree
of mournfulness, the concept of the pathological state, in which the most
simple object [jedes unscheinbarste Ding] appears to be a symbol of some
enigmatic wisdom [Chiffer einer rätselhaften Weisheit] because it lacks any
natural, creative relationship to us, was set in an incomparably productive
context.34
Near the end of his life, in On the Concept of History, Benjamin would use the
very same concept [unscheinbar] to denote the object of attentiveness of the
historical materialist (“The historical materialist must be aware of this most
inconspicuous of all transformations [unscheinbarste von allen Veränderun-
gen]”),35 revealing once again that the task of historical materialism cannot
be released from a messianic attitude.36 These remarks make clear that the
melancholic confrontation with the failure to truly know or possess is not
to be regarded as the mere opposite of a productive relation with the out-
side world. The experience of the limits of human understanding does not
at all result in the feeling that a presentation of truth is infinitely deferred
but, on the contrary, it instils a presence of mind to and an attitude of active
waiting for the movement and renewal that constitute such a presentation.
Melancholy, that is to say, does not denote a lack of emotional investment
in the concreteness of the outside world nor an attempt to turn away from
it but, quite the opposite, a ceaseless openness, attentiveness and renewed
responsiveness towards it precisely on account of its being experienced as
32 O, 140; GS: I-1, 319.

33 O, 140; GS: I-1, 319.
34 O, 140; GS: I-1, 319.
35 SW 4: 390; GS: I-2, 695.
36 About the concept of unscheinbare Bedeutung (inconspicuous meaning) and the way
in which it relates to the work of Aby Warburg, see Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste
wahrer Philologie,” 237–250.
incomplete and unfulfilled. Benjamin’s melancholy is in so many ways the

opposite of the sheer absence of emotions or psychological investment
that it can even be called a drive that is productive and active on its own
account: it is a drive that creates its object by discovering even the most
insignificant things as potentially endowed with meaning rather than that
it would be passively awakened or merely react to self-identical objects
that are immediately encountered as desirable or important in themselves.
Melancholy retains an interest in and an investment of the outside world
on account of a feeling that certain objects are not desirable or interesting
in themselves, that something is not yet fully present in them and that they
in a certain sense fall short to their own significance because they remain
in-complete vis-à-vis their meaningfulness and legibility.37 Such an active
desire does not disrupt its attachment to the outside world because it senses
that its object is not identical to itself, that it can still become-other-to-itself,
that it has not exhausted its possibilities and that it at all times can part with
itself: such objects are, in Deleuzian terms, dividual rather than individual.
For this reason, W.G. Sebald’s analysis of the work of the Swiss author Robert
Walser (1878–1956), whose writings were very much admired by Benjamin,
also comes with a particular relevance to Benjamin’s own work:
Walser asks: “Can a person whose feelings are so many and so lovely be at the
same time so unfeeling?” The answer might have been that in life, as in fairy
tales, there are those who, out of fear and poverty, cannot afford emotions and
who therefore … have to try out their seemingly atrophied ability to love on
inanimate substances and objects unheeded by anyone else—such as ash, a
needle, a pencil, or a matchstick. Yet the way in which Walser then breathes
life into them, in an act of complete assimilation and empathy reveals how
in the end emotions are perhaps most deeply felt when applied to the most
insignificant things [wo sie am Nichtigsten sich bewähren].38
37 To my knowledge, the relationship between the concept of the Unscheinbare and the
concept of Schein (semblance) has not yet been fully explored. It would, however, be very
interesting to analyze how Benjamin in various places presupposes a view on meaningful-
ness that is released from the classical (Aristotelian) assumptions of unity. Human attention
and presence of mind are in his opinion only truly awakened by that which does not fully
shine forth, that which does not appear to be interesting in itself and that which does not
participate in any unity whatsoever. See, for example, the claims in the Artwork-essay that
“the shock effect of film, … like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention” (SW:
4, 267) or in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, that “[t]he concepts through which the bourgeoisie
developed this notion of art no longer plays a role in Fuchs’s work: neither beautiful sem-
blance [der schöne Schein], nor harmony, nor the unity of the manifold is to be found there.”
(SW: 3, 268; GS: II-2, 478).
38 W.G. Sebald, “Introduction, ‘Le Promeneur Solitaire’” in R. Walser, The Tanners,
144 appendix
It is Benjamin’s insight that the truly absolute resists knowledge, posses-

sion and fixation and that it always involves a non-anticipatable movement
or becoming that is at work within the immanent which opens up his gaze
for the possibility that it be encountered in precisely the most insignificant
and inconspicuous things.39 In this way, he belongs to the class of philoso-
phers who, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book What is Philosophy?,
are endowed with the paradoxical tendency to investigate the very imma-
nence of reality on account of their adherence to the transcendent nature
of truth. In their opinion, “Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ … or Pascal’s gam-
bler,” for instance,
constantly recharge immanence: they are philosophers or, rather, interces-
sors, conceptual personae who stand in for these two philosophers and who
are concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with
the immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists.40
Benjamin’s viewpoint that the absolute is both distinct and inseparable
from empirical phenomena is tantamount to a similar stance: his con-
cern with the absolute results, first and foremost, in an exploration of the
immanence of this world. Since the absolute is always wrapped up with a
movement that distorts or dislocates [Ent-stellt, literally dis-places] what is
directly at hand, it is nothing other than concrete reality itself which needs
to be scrutinized if one seeks that which transcends it. The absolute is thus
both presupposed and deconstructed at the same time: Benjamin adheres
to the transcendent nature of truth but not without remaining attentive
[aufmerksam] to what surrounds us and, vice versa, he brings the concrete
under continuous research, but precisely because it comes together with an
ongoing promise of fulfillment.41 Like Deleuze and Guattari’s characteriza-
trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2009), 19. The original text is printed in
W.G. Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbug Verlag, 2000),
149.
39 These same ideas also underlie Benjamin’s positive endorsement of the surrealists
(1929) as messengers of a “profane illumination” (SW: 2, 209), thus showing that “we pene-
trate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a
dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”
(SW: 2, 216) See also the claim, on the same page, that the “reader, the thinker, the loiterer,
the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic.
And more profane.”
40 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 74.

41 See also Andrew Benjamin’s discussion of Benjamin’s theory of translation and the
statement that “[u]niversality is maintained, while the site of investigation and analysis is
tion of Pascal, he can be seen as “wager[ing] on the transcendent existence

of God, but the stake, that on which one bets, is the immanent existence of
the one who believes that God exists.”42
2. The Collector and the Flâneur
This philosophical attitude finds an interesting articulation in Benjamin’s

characterizations of the collector and the flâneur: these are described as
personae that scrutinize their immediate surroundings out of an endured
openness towards a meaningfulness that these surroundings themselves
cannot contain or appropriate. The collector and the flâneur clearly affirm
the distorted or dislocated state of their world but out of a prolonged pre-
sentiment that it is only from within such a seemingly random and arbitrary
universe that genuine meaning can be encountered.43
The collector is marked by an interest in precisely the most ordinary
and at first glimpse unnoteworthy objects. It is, however, the very ability to
‘hold out’ or exhaust (that is, not repress) this experience of their insignifi-
cance that shapes the background of his endeavors and that accounts for the
specific type of rapture that the collector experiences when he encounters
an object of interest.44 In Benjamin’s mind, the mental state of collectors
is similar to a dream state in that “the rhythm of perception and experi-
ence is altered in such a way that everything—even the seemingly most
neutral—comes to strike [him]; everything concerns [him].”45 A genuine
collector, that is to say, is not out to possess its object—in the meaning that
the insistent presence of particulars. Particulars occasion—while being the occasion of—
the universal” in “The Absolute as Translatability,” 122.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 73. Michael Löwy, as well, likens Benjamin’s
experience of the absolute—albeit in the context of his political viewpoints—to the Pas-
calian concept of the “wager,” see his Fire Alarm, 114.
43 In his excellent essay Et Cetera: The Historian as Chiffonnier, Irving Wohlfarth uses a
similar approach to describe Benjamin’s view on another one of those typically modern
personae—the rag-picker: “[T]he figures who are most threatened by exclusion should them-
selves be best placed to end it. … No one has a closer, more mimetic, more materialist relation
to the material world than [the rag-picker]: it takes an unsalvageable existence to salvage the
unsalvageable.” in Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera: The Historian as Chiffonnier.” New German
Critique 39 (1986), 148.
44 In what follows, I lean heavily on ideas put forward—in a different context—by Roland
Breeur. See, for example, his essays on Proust and “Over het voor-en nadeel van het leven
voor de geschiedenis” (“On the Use and Disadvantages of Life for History”), De tijd bestaat
niet. Essays over domheid, vrijheid en emoties (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2012), 211–236.
45 AP, 205–206.
146 appendix
Benjamin gives to that term, that is, to freeze the dynamic that seemingly
affects it from without—by immediately securing a designated place for it in
his collection: his passionate discovery, namely, thrives on the very tension
and movement that relates the utterly banal, say a normal bed, to something
that is worthy of our attention, say the famous historical person such as
Napoleon, who once slept in it. If such an experience is striking or even mov-
ing it is precisely on account of the awareness that the bed that Napoleon
once slept in is not different from the one we ourselves sleep in every night.
What marks the attitude of collecting, in other words, is the feeling that the
object of interest is indeed deeply uninteresting (that is, the feeling that it
does not at all differ from another object of the same class) but that it nev-
ertheless captures our attention: the collector clearly feels that the source
of the significance of the collected object cannot but be distinct from that
object itself but he still encounters this—in itself uninteresting—object
as endowed with an irreplaceable and unique existence. If the collector’s
interest goes out to an unremarkable and inconspicuous object, this is on
account of something that resists possession and knowledge but this ‘some-
thing’ does not in any way enrich the object from within: the source of the
significance of the collected object remains external to that object—it is
not fully present within it—and yet the object itself does matter in its irre-
ducible particularity. The example of the collector thus illustrates that the
statement that ‘purity’ is relational and that the absolute is a power to affect
the concrete as if from without entails the awareness that utterly insignifi-
cant objects can both suddenly become pregnant with meaning and retain
their contingency at the same time: the unexpected meaningfulness that
the collector encounters in a specific object does not at all sublate the arbi-
trariness of this object but it even thrives on it. “It must be kept in mind,”
writes Benjamin, “that, for the collector, the world is present, and indeed
ordered, in each of his objects. Ordered, however, according to a surpris-
ing and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection [dem
Profanen unverständlichen Zusammenhange].”46
This same capacity to be affected by an absolute force that is seemingly
at work within one’s immediate surroundings underlies the particular rel-
evance of the figure of the flâneur to Benjamin’s philosophy. In his mind,
the flâneur opens himself up towards public and anonymous spaces but
he thereby manages to develop the presence of mind to read the city like
46 AP, 207; GS: V-1, 274.

a labyrinth of hidden truths and forgotten memories:47 “The street conducts

the flâneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It
leads downward—if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past that can
be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private.”48 The
flâneur roams the streets of big cities in an intoxicated state that allows him
to discover affinities and similarities that would otherwise go unnoticed.
What is important here is that, though the past that is experienced by
way of these present experiences of the city cannot be considered ‘his
own’ or ‘private,’ it does speak to the particular existence and intimate life
of the flâneur himself. In his review of Franz Hessel’s Spazieren in Berlin
(1929) Benjamin describes “the city as a mnemonic for the lonely walker:
it conjures up more than his childhood and youth [but also] more than its
[that is, the city’s] own history.”49 Surrendering himself to the seemingly
chaotic world outside him and trying to make himself at home within
the public space in which he pursues his ways, the flâneur manages to
re-collect his own particular past through the very anonymous material
of the city he encounters. What characterizes the figure of the flâneur is
47 For a beautiful account of the flâneur and a clear discussion of Benjamin’s analysis
of modern urban personae that goes beyond the stakes that are presented here, see Irving
Wohlfarth, “Perte d’ Auréolec: The Emergence of the Dandy.” MLN 85: 4 (1970), 529–571. See
for instance his characterization of the flâneur as someone who “miraculously realizes the
If Only” and “both acknowledges hard realities and, by the style of his acknowledgment,
magically suspends them.” The flâneur “turn[s] the perilous world into his native element.”
(ibid., 553) See also the interesting note at the end of the essay (ibid., 571) on the dialectical
relation between dandy and flâneur with the former being characterized by his composure
and “centralisation” and the latter by his openness to and sensibility for the outside world
(“vaporisation”): “Dandyism … appears to function as the home base from which the flâneur
can attempt to make the city his home.” This notion of being-at-home in the city should,
however, not be overly romanticized. See, for example, Benjamin’s statement in Paris, The
Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935) that “the way of life [of the flâneur] still conceals
behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller” and that he is
not “at home” in either the metropolis nor the middle class (SW: 3, 39). For an account of
the social and economic background and changes of the figure of the flâneur, see Susan
Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New
German Critique 39 (1986), 99–140, particularly her statement that “the flaneur is not the
aristocrat: not leisure [Musse] but loitering [Müssiggang] is his trade. In order to survive
under capitalism he writes about what he sees, and sells the product” (ibid., 111) and that this
image has undergone a serious change with the rise of fascism, converging on the “historical
and conceptual level” with that of the (proletarian) sandwichman but remaining distinct
from it on the “perceptual, existential level, as social extremes. … The difference is between
feeling totally at home on the streets, and being exposed and vulnerable there because one
is totally homeless.” (ibid., 117–118).
48 AP, 416.
49 SW: 2, 262.
148 appendix
the ability to recover one’s own past precisely within the indifference and
exteriority of the city and through a force that can in no way have anything
in common with it. It is for this reason that Benjamin turns to Proust
and to Baudelaire for valuable information on this most modern of all
explorers of an unexpected and inconspicuous significance. From Proust’s
novel Benjamin retains the suddenness with which the most unnoteworthy
phenomena can stare out as affected by a meaningfulness that does not
seem to be their own, thereby revealing for the first time a life that has long
been forgotten:
[W]ithout definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sun-
light reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to
enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they
appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which
they invited me to approach and take from them, but which, despite all my
efforts, I never managed to discover.50
From Baudelaire, on the other hand, Benjamin takes over the flâneur’s
capacity to experience a sense of wild freedom in the midst of the hustle and
bustle of the anonymous big city and his ability to expand his consciousness
to such an extent that it is touched by everything that goes on around him:
To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the
world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world …
The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense
reservoir of electric energy. We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the
crowd itself.51
The flâneur submerges himself in the very randomness, arbitrariness and
chaos of the city but he nevertheless meets it as endowed with a relevance
to his own particular existence: such a relevance can therefore be consid-
ered neither as a quality of the city nor as a quality of a ‘private,’ inner Self
but only as a quality of the relation between both. It is not as if the flâneur’s
spirits are lifted by the feeling that he is learning something new about the
city or about himself: he is merely puzzled by the sentiment that the former
has anything to say about the latter. The experience that Benjamin sees as
typical to the flâneur conjures up both ‘more than his childhood and youth’
and ‘more than [the city’s] own history,’ that is, it cannot be released from a
power that is irreducible to either of them and it remains external to them
both. The meaning encountered by the flâneur neither grants knowledge of
50 Proust quoted at AP, 420.

51 Baudelaire quoted at AP, 443.
the outside world nor allows for a restored possession of the Self: it arises
in the very movement that, despite their utter foreignness to one another,
relates the city to the Self and vice versa and it remains permanently dis-
lodged between both. That is to say, the experience of the flâneur cannot
be the object of intention or of a consistent meaning and it therefore does
not at all restore the sense of a ‘deeper’ or self-identical ego: the flâneur is,
in fact, enraptured and puzzled by the very feeling that his Self seems to be
dispersed and that parts of it are exiled in a realm that is wholly alien to it.52
52 It is this same connection between city and Self, between the public realm and the
private sphere which determines the attitude that underlies Benjamin’s autobiographical
writings. This is already attested to by their titles alone, which each connect a spatial
reference to a temporal one: A Berlin Chronicle (1932) and Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (1932–
1934). These texts number among the most beautiful pages of Benjamin’s entire oeuvre, and
they depict in a Proust-like manner how the memories of his youth are essentially entangled
with his experiences of the city in which he grew up and vice versa. See, for example,
Benjamin’s claim that it was the “urban labyrinth [which] opened [him] up to the sex drive”
(SW: 3, 404; see also SW: 4, 386) and the formulation of his overall aim to set out “the sphere
of life—bios—graphically on a map.” (SW: 2, 596) In this way, Benjamin’s autobiographical
texts also deconstruct the idea that the experiences of our childhood somehow pre-exist the
awareness of social and economic realities and would therefore be more pure or natural
than the ones of our adult life. The paragraphs about beggars and poverty, for instance,
reveal how all souvenirs de jeunesse are already colored by their social-economic context (see,
for example, the passages in which Benjamin recounts his curiosity about the lives of poor
people (for example SW: 2, 612; SW: 3, 404 and SW: 3, 600)). On Benjamin’s spatialization of
memory see also Susan Sontag, “Under the Sign of Saturn.” Under the Sign of Saturn (New
York: Picador USA, 2002), 109–136 and “The Last Intellectual.”
conclusion
WALTER BENJAMIN AND JOSEPH ROTH
“[T]hen I learned that he who fights

against the night must move its deepest
darkness so that it gives out its light.”
Benjamin to Herbert Belmore, 1916
On May 27, 1939, the Galician-Austrian author Joseph Roth (1894–1939) col-
lapsed and died in a house for the poor in Paris after years of money prob-
lems and alcohol abuse. Having left his adopted home-country Germany
immediately after the Nazi’s rose to power in 1933, Roth spent the last years
of his life in a manner not unlike that of the downtrodden and outcasts
that he had so often sympathized with in his novels and short stories. In
a flight without end, Roth was moving from hotel to hotel, from bar to bar,
and witnessed the world prepare for one of the most horrible episodes in its
history, how the war-mongers were democratically elected over those who
continued to fight for peace and how, in his own words, the European mind
was “capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack
of imagination.”1 Among Roth’s papers was found an invitation letter from
the American PEN Club, devoted to granting intellectuals a way out of the
turmoil that was Europe in those days and a safe entrance into the United
States. As Michael Hofmann puts it, however, it is “tantalizing but ultimately
impossible to imagine him taking ship to the New World, and continuing to
live and to write: His world was the old one, and he’d used it all up.”2
Benjamin’s fate was in many ways similar to Roth’s. Carrying the papers
that should have gotten him safely across the border with Spain and thus
onwards to the United States, Benjamin and his fellow travellers were halted
for unclear reasons by the authorities. Exhausted by months of physical and
mental strain, Benjamin took his own life on September 27, 1940, sixteen
months to the day after Roth’s death. Like Roth, he had spent the last
1 Joseph Roth, “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind.” What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933,
trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books, 2003), 207.

2 Michael Hofmann, “About the Author.” in Roth, What I Saw, 226.
152 conclusion
years of his life in exile in Paris and, like Roth, he had grown increasingly
despairing about the world-political situation, writing in the mid-thirties
that “[h]umankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation
for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has
reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme
aesthetic pleasure.”3
In 1927, in a short book with the title The Wandering Jews, Roth had
already analysed the worrisome situation of the Jews in Europe. Visiting
their communities throughout the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire,
Roth travelled to both the shtetls in the East and the ghettos in the West,
recognized the poor conditions in which they lived their lives and foresaw
the tragedy that was yet to come: “There is a historical feeling, based on
plentiful experience, that the Jews will be the first victims in the event of
a bloodbath.”4 If the main difficulty of the Jews in Eastern Europe was that
they had isolated themselves in their villages and thus missed the train of
modernity and progress that could have made their existence less cumber-
some, the dilemma of the Jews who emigrated to Western Europe was that
they adjusted all too gladly to the life of the big city, frequently having to
pay for the discovery of a new abode with the loss of their homeland and
original culture. Those Jews who went to live in the West, that is to say, often
ended up in the outskirts of society and were usually not able to benefit from
the luxury of the modern world. As artisans and shopkeepers, peddlers and
hawkers, instalment sellers and money-changers, they were invariably the
first to be victimized by the inflation of European currency and the rise of
anti-Semitism.
What Roth discovered to have remained intact in the midst of these
pitiable conditions, however, is the quiet sense of determination that marks
those people who manage to maintain a safe distance from the chaos that
surrounds them because they keep their gaze open to the beyond. The
stories that Roth brought back from his own wanderings among the Jews
are, though painful and heavy with suffering, not at all devoid of both
longing for salvation and hope that it will come at some point and thus
testify to what he has elsewhere called ‘the blessing of the eternal Jew’ [der
Segen des ewigen Juden]. In Roth’s mind, “[e]very Jew erects borders around
himself. It would be a shame to give them up. Because however great the
3 SW: 4, 270.
4 Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books,
2001), 12.
walter benjamin and joseph roth 153
need, the future will bring the most magnificent deliverance.”5 The Jew
whose story Roth has set out to tell does live in particularly harsh conditions
but remains remarkably untouched by them because he feels that they
are merely transient and ultimately without substance. The ‘eternal’ Jew
understands not only that “nothing can happen to him except by God’s will,
and that nothing will shield him from harm as sublimely as God’s will” but,
most important of all, that this will of God cannot be comprehended in
either good things or bad.6 In this way, the Jews whose lives Roth described
do continue to have faith in the divine but in a very paradoxical way, that
is, precisely because they experience the distance that separates our world
from any absolute will: the ‘blessing of the eternal Jew’ that he has in mind
does not refer to an experience of the intimate presence of God but to
the awareness that the truly divine cannot be approached at will and that,
therefore, our universe is awaiting a salvation that is yet to come.
It is this same world which colors Benjamin’s entire oeuvre. For him the
awareness that human beings live their lives at a distance from the divine
need not result in hopelessness or anxiety. From this perspective, on the
contrary, it is the very sentiment that the absolute cannot be brought into a
consistent set of meaning of either a positive nature (divine Providence) or
a negative one (God’s wrath) which should bring human beings to go about
their ways in a relaxed and composed manner, not unlike the flâneur who
aspires to make himself at home in the middle of the very hustle and bus-
tle of the anonymous, modern metropolis. Just as, for Roth, “[t]he apparent
cowardice of the Jew who doesn’t respond to the stone thrown at him by the
child and who seems deaf to the shouted insult is, in fact, the pride of some-
one who knows that he will one day prevail,”7 an endured responsiveness to
the absolute comes together, according to Benjamin, with a succinct pres-
ence of mind for the here and now. At stake in his philosophy is the idea that
the mournful and melancholic feeling that comprehension of the absolute is
lacking does not automatically entail despair and hopelessness since it can
just as well inspire to a sharpened attentiveness and a renewed openness to
what is most nearby. “The persistence which is expressed in the intention
of mourning,” wrote Benjamin in his Trauerspiel-study, “is born of its loyalty
to the world of things.”8
5 Ibid., 29.
6 Ibid., 30.
7 Ibid., 29–30.
8 O, 157.
154 conclusion
This can only be explained by considering Benjamin’s thinking, after the

example of his own characterization of the genuinely historical moment,
as a “dialectics at a standstill”9 which “preserve[s] the intervals of reflec-
tion, the distances lying between the essential parts.”10 Benjamin’s writings
testify to an extraordinary ability to bear out the extremes of the dialecti-
cal movement, without surrendering them to the reconciling power of the
synthesis. His philosophy of history is built on the idea that the ‘messianic
now’ and ‘dialectical image’ bring to expression the unredeemed state of
history in toto, the ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘afterlife’ of a moment from the past
and the possibility of ultimate fulfillment at the end of history. His thinking
does presuppose a failure to know and possess truth but it does not how-
ever suspend the belief in the possibility of a genuine revelation altogether.
In Benjamin’s account, on the contrary, absolute truth is already present
in history, albeit in a distorted and relational way. It is for this reason that
his overall messianic belief that history as such remains unfulfilled does not
contradict his affirmation of the redemptive powers at work in the most
inconspicuous objects.
For Benjamin, a genuine form of hope cannot bypass a continuous con-
frontation with its absence; it is in the very symptoms of an immanent,
unredeemed universe that lies await the possibility of the sudden flashing-
up of the beyond. His thinking and writing share in the sentiment of the
angel in Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I but they are an ongoing attempt to
take in the place of the one he saw in Andrea Pisano’s panel Spes on the
south door of the Baptistery in Florence: “Sitting, she helplessly extends her
arms toward a fruit that remains beyond her reach. And yet she is winged.
Nothing is more true.”11
9 AP, 462.
10 AP, 456.
11 SW: 1, 471.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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INDEX OF NAMES
Adorno, Gretel, 40n106 Eiland, Howard, 133n145

Adorno, Theodor W., xiv, xv, xvi, 7, 8, El Greco, 121
42, 75 Engels, Friedrich, 25n51
Agamben, Giorgio, 35, 35n84, 80n112,
135 Freud, Sigmund, 2n6, 8, 8n16, 9, 71,
Anselm, 56 71n84, 72, 72n85, 72n89, 72n90, 87,
105, 111
Barthes, Roland, 31, 120, 121n94 Friedlander, Eli, 4n11, 7n14, 20, 20n26,
Baudelaire, Charles, 64, 71, 148, 148n51 22n38, 34, 34n83, 39n104, 44, 44n114,
Becker, Jochen, 101n25 48n128, 57n22, 70n77, 89n148,
Belmore, Herbert, 151 90n151, 117, 117n73, 118n83, 136n6
Benjamin, Andrew, 4n10, 115n67, 144n41 Fuchs, Eduard, 45, 133n145, 143n37
Bergson, Henri, 85, 131
Blanchot, Maurice, 37, 37n95 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 110n53
Bolz, Norbert, 42, 42n109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 3n9,
Brecht, Bertolt, xiv, xvi, 2, 3n9, 13, 13n2, 6, 119, 119n85, 138n15
32, 52, 53, 53n8, 55, 121n95 Gombrich, E.H., 105n36
Breeur, Roland, 145n44 Guattari, Félix, 111, 111n55, 144, 144n40,
Brod, Max, 59, 60, 62, 119 145n42
Buber, Martin, 139, 139n21
Buck-Morss, Susan, 7, 7n15, 41n108, Haas, Willy, 56, 56n20, 57
73n93, 117n74, 147n47 Habermas, Jürgen, xvi, 32n80, 33n80
Halévy, Daniel, 88n143
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 83, Hansen, Miriam, 126n119, 133n145
83n122, 86 Hanssen, Beatrice, 101n25
Chaplin, Charlie, 62n44 Heidegger, Martin, 87, 121n99, 142
Cocteau, Jean, 48 Hessel, Franz, 147
Cohn, Alfred, 40n106 Hippocrates, 87
Coulanges, Fustel de, 19 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 114n66, 121n95
Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 89 Hofmann, Michael, 151, 151n2
Homer, 152
Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 23n40, 23n41, 45, Horkheimer, Max, 28, 29, 29n67, 75
46n119, 47, 111, 111n55, 144, 144n40,
145n42 Jennings, Michael W., 24, 25n47, 38,
Derrida, Jacques, 23, 23n42, 139 38n101
Descartes, René, 75
Deuber-Mankowsky, A., 36n89 Kafka, Franz, xiv, xv, 6, 10n23, 51–54,
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 105n34, 54n16, 55–57, 57n22, 58, 58n28, 59–
105n36, 105n39, 109, 110, 110n51, 63, 76, 77, 87, 93, 113–115, 117–119,
110n54, 111 119n86, 119n88, 120, 120n90, 121, 122,
Dürer, Albrecht, 88, 111–114, 142, 154 124–126
166 index of names
Kant, Immanuel, 75 Riegl, Alois, xv, 6, 98, 99, 99n17, 100,

Kierkegaard, Søren, 56, 86n132, 87, 100n20, 100n21, 100n23, 101, 104, 111,
144 111n56
Klee, Paul, 25 Rabinbach, Anson, 15n5, 38n98, 43n111
Kleist, Heinrich von, 122, 122n100, Rosenzweig, Franz, 99
122n101 Roth, Joseph, 151, 151n1, 151n2, 152,
Koch, Gertrud, 133n145 152n4, 153
Rougement, Denis de, 57, 58n24
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 138n14,
139n21 Sassetti, Francesco, 110n53
Leskov, Nikolai, 71 Saxl, Fritz, 97n8
Lévinas, Emmanuel, 61, 61n42, 62, Schmitt, Carl, 78, 79, 99
62n44 Schoen, Ernst, 135, 138
Löwy, Michael, 15, 15n4, 15n5, 19n23, Scholem, Gersham, xiv, xv, xvi, 13,
25, 25n48, 34, 34n82, 145n42 14n2, 18, 18n19, 31, 31n75, 32, 37,
Lukács, Georg, 67, 67n66, 68n67, 99 38n98, 40n106, 51, 52, 52n3, 52n5,
53, 53n8, 54, 55, 57n22, 59, 63, 122,
Malebranche, Nicolas, 119n88 125
Markner, Reinhard, 7n13 Schweppenhäuser, Hermann,
Marx, Karl, 3n9, 25n51, 27, 41, 131, Sebald, W.G., 143, 143n38, 144n38
131n138, 132 Sedlmayr, Hans, 98, 98n10
Menninghaus, Winfried, 137n12, Socrates, 62
140n22 Sontag, Susan, 3n9, 60n35, 149n52
Meyer, Alfred Gotthold, 99 Springer, Anton, 105n35
Steiner, Uwe, xv
Napoleon, 146
Newman, Jane O., 96n5, 101n25 Tiedemann, Rolf, 121n99, 137n12
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23n41, 103, 105,
105n38 Usener, Hermann, 102
Osborne, Peter, 54, 54n16, 55 Vila-Mata, Enrique, 60n35

Visker, Rudi, 60n38
Pächt, Otto, 98, 98n11, 98n12, 98n13
Pannwitz, Rudolf, 140n27 Walser, Robert, 143, 143n38
Panofsky, Erwin, 96, 96n6, 97, 97n8, Warburg, Aby, xv, 6, 20, 101, 101n25,
98–100, 100n22, 101, 104, 105n36, 111, 102, 102n26, 102n27, 103, 103n30,
115 104, 105, 105n34, 105n35, 105n36,
Pascal, Blaise, 56, 144, 145 105n40, 106, 106n42, 107, 108,
Paul, Jean, 108 108n47, 108n48, 109, 109n49, 109n50,
Pensky, Max, 39, 39n103, 101n25 110, 110n53, 111, 111n57, 112, 112n58,
Pisano, Andrea, 154, 169 112n59, 112n60, 113–115, 115n67, 126,
Proust, Marcel, 1, 1n1, 2, 20, 21, 47, 48, 142n36
48n126, 65, 145n44, 148, 148n50 Weber, Samuel, 7n13, 7n14, 11n23,
22, 23n39, 37, 37n93, 46, 46n122,
Reijen, Willem van, xvi, 38n99, 42, 89n148, 92, 97, 116, 116n72, 120n90,
42n109, 116n71 135, 135n2, 140n22
Reik, Theodor, 72, 72n87, 72n88 Weigel, Sigrid, 97n8, 101n25, 142n36
index of names 167
Wohlfarth, Irving, 33n81, 48n126,

145n43, 147n47
Wolin, Richard, 7, 7n15, 35n88
Andrea Pisano, Spes, 1330–1336, Baptistery, Florence
(Photograph taken by author)

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Walter Benjamin

Social and Critical Theory

International Advisory Board

william connolly – manfred frank – leela gandhi

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sct

Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Heinrich Von Kleist,

Introduction. Melancholy, Hope, Redemption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

I. Benjamin’s Philosophy of History: The Messianic Is Now . . . . . . . . . . 13

II. The Kafka-Essays and The Origin of German Tragic Drama: On

2. The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the ‘Empty World’ of

III. The ‘Will to Allegory’ and the ‘Distortion’ of Truth in History . . . . . . 95

Appendix: Relational ‘Purity,’ the Collector and the Flâneur . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Conclusion. Walter Benjamin and Joseph Roth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

John Rundell, Series Editor

References to Benjamin’s works are cited by volume, part (where applica-

believed that in the baroque or in the interwar-period—when on account

because he was convinced that it is impossible to truly know God. Symons

viewpoint that historical materialism and messianism complete each other.

Willem van Reijen

MELANCHOLY, HOPE, REDEMPTION

In The Captive (1923), book five of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust

Frederick A. Blossom (New York: Random House, 1932), 425–426.

when we were talking, by the channels of her unacknowledged thoughts

When, in what follows, in a formula borrowed from his own philosophy of

Benjamin’s adherence to insights drawn from Jewish messianism, for

interpretation of Genesis is “not a straightforwardly theological argument. … [T]he reference

Similar strategies of interpretation and re-interpretation of Marxist and

messianism begins where the belief in the possibility of a systematic com-

Bibliographie 1983–1992 (Hamburg: Argument, 1993).

is, moreover, my contention that it is not necessary to have a complete and

If the development of a concept of hope of fulfillment is the ultimate aim

total disappearance of the belief in the possibility of the restoration of truth

21SW: 2, 714; GS: VI, 522.

BENJAMIN’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY:

Though initially meant to remain unpublished, Walter Benjamin’s 1939/1940

Benjamin’s own attempts to overcome this double narrow-mindedness

1. The Notion of ‘Weak Messianic Power’

In On the Concept of History, the notion of ‘messianic power’ is linked to a

York: Verso, 2005), 20.

the historical materialist “takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific

18SW: 4, 395; GS: I-2, 701.

2. Redemption and ‘Rejuvenation’ of the Past

philosophy of history, see Löwy, Fire Alarm, 46–57.

materialism supplies a unique experience with the past.”25 The historicist’s

afterlife of that which is understood.” (AP, 406).

2.2. The Dialectical Image and Its Ethical-Political Relevance

30 SW: 2, 244; GS: II-1, 320.

vision [Verschiebung des Gesichtswinkels] (but not of the criteria!), a positive

35 AP, 459; GS: V-1, 573 (translation modified).

only conceivable—as the vestigial or spectral after-effect of a repetition, as

Cervantes …” Benjamin’s -abilities, 203.

The understanding of the past that is delivered by a genuinely historical

47 Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 36.

59 SW: 4, 394; GS: I-2, 700.

of a messianic arrest of happening” is tantamount to the recognition of “a

2.3. Renewed Legibility and Redemption

67 Horkheimer quoted in AP, 471; GS: V–I, 588–589.

verbietet, die Geschichte grundsätzlich atheologisch zu begreifen.” (GS: V-1, 589).

This tension between a restorative and a utopian tendency is according

The messianic ‘now’ is for Benjamin a constellation in which the a-