benjamin thesis on history

Walter Benjamin 1940

On the Concept of History

Source : http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.html ; Translation : © 2005 Dennis Redmond; CopyLeft : translation used with permission, Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike); Original German : Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974; Transcribed : by Andy Blunden .

Translator’s Note : Jetztzeit was translated as “here-and-now,” in order to distinguish it from its polar opposite, the empty and homogenous time of positivism. Stillstellung was rendered as “zero-hour,” rather than the misleading “standstill”; the verb “stillstehen” means to come to a stop or standstill, but Stillstellung is Benjamin’s own unique invention, which connotes an objective interruption of a mechanical process, rather like the dramatic pause at the end of an action-adventure movie, when the audience is waiting to find out if the time-bomb/missile/terrorist device was defused or not).

It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.

“Among the most noteworthy characteristics of human beings,” says Lotze, “belongs... next to so much self-seeking in individuals, the general absence of envy of each present in relation to the future.” This reflection shows us that the picture of happiness which we harbor is steeped through and through in the time which the course of our own existence has conferred on us. The happiness which could awaken envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, with people we could have spoken with, with women who might have been able to give themselves to us. The conception of happiness, in other words, resonates irremediably with that of resurrection [ Erloesung : transfiguration, redemption]. It is just the same with the conception of the past, which makes history into its affair. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today? have not the women, who we court, sisters who they do not recognize anymore? If so, then there is a secret protocol [ Verabredung : also appointment] between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled lightly. The historical materialist knows why.

The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.

Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself. – Hegel, 1807

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turn, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed.

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Think of the darkness and the great cold In this valley, which resounds with misery. – Brecht, Threepenny Opera

Fustel de Coulanges recommended to the historian, that if he wished to reexperience an epoch, he should remove everything he knows about the later course of history from his head. There is no better way of characterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a procedure of empathy. Its origin is the heaviness at heart, the acedia, which despairs of mastering the genuine historical picture, which so fleetingly flashes by. The theologians of the Middle Ages considered it the primary cause of melancholy. Flaubert, who was acquainted with it, wrote: “ Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage .” [Few people can guess how despondent one has to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.] The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [ Abkunft : descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

My wing is ready to fly I would rather turn back For had I stayed mortal time I would have had little luck. – Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [ verweilen : a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

The objects which the monastic rules assigned to monks for meditation had the task of making the world and its drives repugnant. The mode of thought which we pursue today comes from a similar determination. It has the intention, at a moment wherein the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes have been knocked supine, and have sealed their downfall by the betrayal of their own cause, of freeing the political child of the world from the nets in which they have ensnared it. The consideration starts from the assumption that the stubborn faith in progress of these politicians, their trust in their “mass basis” and finally their servile subordination into an uncontrollable apparatus have been three sides of the same thing. It seeks to give an idea of how dearly it will cost our accustomed concept of history, to avoid any complicity with that which these politicians continue to hold fast to.

The conformism which has dwelt within social democracy from the very beginning rests not merely on its political tactics, but also on its economic conceptions. It is a fundamental cause of the later collapse. There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide. Technical developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement. The old Protestant work ethic celebrated its resurrection among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program [dating from the 1875 Gotha Congress] already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as “the source of all wealth and all culture.” Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, “must be the slave of other human beings, who... have made themselves into property-owners.” Oblivious to this, the confusion only increased, and soon afterwards Josef Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of modern times... In the... improvement... of labor... consists the wealth, which can now finally fulfill what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect workers, so long as these are no longer at their disposal. It wishes to perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society. It already bears the technocratic traces which would later be found in Fascism. Among these is a concept of nature which diverges in a worrisome manner from those in the socialist utopias of the Vormaerz period [pre-1848]. Labor, as it is henceforth conceived, is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which is contrasted to the exploitation of the proletariat with naïve self-satisfaction. Compared to this positivistic conception, the fantasies which provided so much ammunition for the ridicule of Fourier exhibit a surprisingly healthy sensibility. According to Fourier, a beneficent division of social labor would have the following consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human beings. All this illustrates a labor which, far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb. To the corrupted concept of labor belongs, as its logical complement, that nature which, as Dietzgen put it, “is there gratis [for free].”

We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge. – Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the “Spartacus” [Spartacist splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [ Erzklang ] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.

Yet every day our cause becomes clearer and the people more clever. – Josef Dietzgen, Social Democratic Philosophy

Social democratic theory, and still more the praxis, was determined by a concept of progress which did not hold to reality, but had a dogmatic claim. Progress, as it was painted in the minds of the social democrats, was once upon a time the progress of humanity itself (not only that of its abilities and knowledges). It was, secondly, something unending (something corresponding to an endless perfectibility of humanity). It counted, thirdly, as something essentially unstoppable (as something self-activating, pursuing a straight or spiral path). Each of these predicates is controversial, and critique could be applied to each of them. This latter must, however, when push comes to shove, go behind all these predicates and direct itself at what they all have in common. The concept of the progress of the human race in history is not to be separated from the concept of its progression through a homogenous and empty time. The critique of the concept of this progress must ground the basis of its critique on the concept of progress itself.

Origin is the goal [ Ziel : terminus]. – Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen I [Words in Verse]

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [ Jetztzeit ]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle [ Dickicht : maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before. Only it takes place in an arena in which the ruling classes are in control. The same leap into the open sky of history is the dialectical one, as Marx conceptualized the revolution.

The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:

Qui le croirait! on dit, qu'irrités contre l'heure De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour.

[Who would've thought! As though Angered by time’s way The new Joshuas Beneath each tower, they say Fired at the dials To stop the day.]

The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the “eternal” picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called “Once upon a time” in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history.

Historicism justifiably culminates in universal history. Nowhere does the materialist writing of history distance itself from it more clearly than in terms of method. The former has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time. The materialist writing of history for its part is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts but also their zero-hour [ Stillstellung ]. Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour [ Stillstellung ] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past. He perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history; thus exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work. The net gain of this procedure consists of this: that the life-work is preserved and sublated in the work, the epoch in the life-work, and the entire course of history in the epoch. The nourishing fruit of what is historically conceptualized has time as its core, its precious but flavorless seed.

“In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,” notes a recent biologist, “the miserable fifty millennia of homo sapiens represents something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour day. The entire history of civilized humanity would, on this scale, take up only one fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The here-and-now, which as the model of messianic time summarizes the entire history of humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records [ erfasst ] the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.

Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way. It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

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Walter Benjamin on the Philosophy of History (and the End of it)

How does Walter Benjamin use the insights of Marxism and theology to conceptualize history and the future?

What is history, and how will it end? These are the stark preoccupations of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. This article explores Benjamin’s attitude to history by tracing the structure of the theses as Benjamin sets them out. Given the intentional ambiguity and extensive quality of Benjamin’s argument, there is really no other way to approach it.

This article begins with Benjamin’s opening parable of the chess-playing puppet, before moving on to his analysis of human nature and class struggle. Benjamin’s critique of social democracy is explored, and the article concludes where Benjamin himself does – with an analysis of apocalypse and annihilation.

The Method of Walter Benjamin: What is Historical Materialism?

Given that it is one of the central concepts of the Theses , it is worth starting with a basic definition of what historical materialism is. It is the name given to Karl Marx’s theory of history, and it holds that the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. It is the central concept Benjamin is attempting to analyze.

Benjamin begins with a story, apparently one he had been told rather than one he invented. In it, there is a puppet that appears to play chess autonomously. The chessboard is set on a glass table, which is shown to be empty. However, it only appears to be empty. This appearance is achieved by a system of mirrors. Inside, there is a ‘hunchback,’ who happens to be an expert chess player. The point of the analogy is this:

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”The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the service of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Historical materialism is the puppet, and theology is the hunchback.

Happiness and Redemption 

The next section focuses on a quote from Hermann Lotze:

“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which our present displays to towards the future.”

Happiness, Benjamin suggests, is bound up in our own time, or rather in reiterations and possible versions of our own time – friends we could have made, lovers we could have had, and so on. Benjamin goes on to suggest that “our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.” This, Benjamin says, can also be applied to the past. Every generation has a redemptive power with respect to those previous. “The past has a claim…which cannot be settled quickly”.

Conversely, one thing which reinforces the decision not to distinguish between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ historical events – that is, to not develop any sense of what is historically important – is to recognize that the criterion of historical importance is in the future: “only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past.”

Class Struggle 

Benjamin then moves on to attempt a novel definition of a central Marxist concept, that of class struggle. Benjamin defines it as the fight for the “crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual thing could exist.” The forms that the latter take in this context are certain traits or dispositions: “courage, humour, cunning and fortitude.” This is because they have retroactive force: they qualify all victories and defeats.

“As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint a secret heliotropism the past turns towards the sun rising in the sky of history.” Benjamin concludes with a warning about the subtlety of this change: “a historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of transformations.” Benjamin then returns to our conception of the past. He posits that the past can only be understood as a momentary image. He then quotes the writer Gottfried Keller: “the truth will not run away from us”, and claims that this is the critical move of historical materialism – the recognition of every image of the past in the present, without which the past threatens to disappear entirely.

Benjamin on the Messiah

On a similar point, Benjamin then goes on to characterize historical articulation as not a matter of recreating things as they really were, but as seizing hold of memory at a moment of danger. “The Messiah comes not only as the Redeemeer, but as the subduer of the Antichrist .” This is the image of the past which historical materialism is concerned with.

One of the recurrent themes in Benjamin is this sense of mission, of time which is not homogenous, but at once recurring and converging: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”

Benjamin then turns to another element of recreating the past – that of empathy. This is, he claims, central to historicism – the attempt, among other things, to recreate the past. Here he quotes Flaubert: “Few will be able to guess how sad one must be to resuscitate Carthage.” The problem with empathy for Benjamin is that we shall generally end up empathizing with the victors. Another problem with the historicist desire to recreate the past is that it involves a veneration of cultural treasures, whose real meaning resides not just in the genius of those who created them but in the horror and barbarism of the conditions required to create them, which we are unwilling to contemplate.

The State of Emergency

The historical materialist disassociates himself from this standard way of viewing the past: it is “his task to brush history against the grain.” Benjamin is writing the theses in 1940, in the early days of the Second World War . It is striking that he first mentions fascism in order to emphasize how the state of things which has brought it about is anything but abnormal, and the apparent ‘state of emergency’ is not a genuine one. His call is for a real state of emergency, something to break with the past. We learn this, so he says, from the “tradition of the oppressed.”

This leads Benjamin on to, perhaps, the most famous passage in this work: that in which he describes the Angelus Novus (a painting by Paul Klee), taking it to represent the terrible bond history is held in: contemplating the horror of the past but forced into the future. The past is left behind, even as the ‘debris’ piles higher and higher. The storm which carries it, so Benjamin says, is called progress.

Benjamin then shifts direction, and characterizes himself and his project as one of turning away from the world and its affairs, imposing a kind of monastic discipline, or at least situating it as an extension of the tradition which counts monasticism as a part.

This turn to an ascetic life is necessary given the uselessness of politicians who are meant to be fighting fascism , their “stubborn faith in progress,” confidence in their “mass basis,” and “integration into an uncontrollable apparatus,” which Benjamin takes to be “3 aspects of the same thing.”

The point of this monastic ideal is to “convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history which avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians adhere.” Conformism within social democracy is a large part of its failure: Benjamin states that nothing has corrupted the German working class as much as the inertia with which it was going with the flow of history.

Defining progress in the context of technological development goes hand in hand with the centralization of labor as the source of power and wealth. It is Marx , Benjamin says, who notices the power dynamics which lie behind this shift in German society: “the man who possesses no property other than his labor power … must of necessity become the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners”. This conception of labor is paired with a predatory, consumptive view of nature. Benjamin draws the contrast here with Fourier’s utopianism, which focuses on unleashing the hidden potentialities in nature.

The Categories of Social Democracy

Social democracy assigns to the working class the role of redeeming future generations, rather than turning it into the last enslaved class fated to redeem generations of the past. According to Benjamin, progress in the social democratic conception involves the defense of dogmatic claims. In particular, (1) progress is of mankind itself, not just their “ability and knowledge;” (2) progress has no limit, in accord with the “infinite perfectibility” of mankind; and (3) progress was regarded as irresistible.

Criticism of progress should go beyond a critique of these dogmas of progress, and focus on what unites them; “the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time.” History is not homogenous, because time is filled by the presence of now: “to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history.”

Walter Benjamin on Revolution and the End of History 

Revolution , for Benjamin, means introducing a new calendar. Awareness that they are about to “…make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.” The historicist gives the “eternal image of the past,” the “once upon a time” – the historical materialist must be able to conceive of the present not as a transition, but as time that has stopped entirely. This is the position from which history is written.

The historical materialist “remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.” Historicism logically concludes with universal history, whereas materialist historiography aims towards a “constructive principle.” Thinking is not just a flow of thought, but the point at which thought ceases, and the structure of that thought can crystallize into a monad. Benjamin concludes with the observation that this is a revolutionary opportunity to recapitulate the battles of history.

What Do Hegel and Marx Have in Common?

By Luke Dunne BA Philosophy & Theology Luke is a graduate of the University of Oxford's departments of Philosophy and Theology, his main interests include the history of philosophy, the metaphysics of mind, and social theory.

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Theses on the Philosophy of History

by Pericles Lewis

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. [1]

In Benjamin’s interpretation of the painting, the angel is looking at us, the human beings who move through time. Much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modern Americans in their boats are ceaselessly borne into the past at the end of The Great Gatsby , Benjamin’s angel of history is irresistibly propelled into the future. History would be the attempt to make sense of the continual passage of time, but history is defeated by the same force that makes it impossible to fulfill all our dreams of what Fitzgerald calls an “orgastic future.” Time, progress, history—all are forces that constantly transform our lives and that we cannot halt or even adequately represent. [2]

• ↑ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 257-8.
• ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 32.

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Guide to Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Sean's Posts are a series of readers' guides that I wrote for my Spring 2017 Queer Theory and Posthumanism class at Westminster College. These guides were written specifically for this class and may contain allusions to other texts in the course, but they will also function as stand-alone guides.

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David Jones

Matthew Charles

NOTE: This original entry from 2011 has been updated in a 2015 revision by the authors, available on the SEP website. Walter Benjamin's importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin's writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno's conception of philosophy's actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin's efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht. The delayed appearance of Benjamin's collected writings has determined and sustained the Anglophone reception of his work. (A two-volume selection was published in German in 1955, with a full edition not appearing until 1972–89; English anthologies first appeared in 1968 and 1978; the four-volume Selected Writings, 1996–2003.) Originally received in the context of literary theory and aesthetics, the philosophical depth and cultural breadth of Benjamin's thought have only recently begun to be fully appreciated. Despite the voluminous size of the secondary literature that it has produced, his work remains a continuing source of productivity. An understanding of the intellectual context of his work has contributed to the recent philosophical revival of Early German Romanticism. His essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ remains a major theoretical text for film theory. One-Way Street and the work arising from his unfinished research on nineteenth century Paris (The Arcades Project), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory and philosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin's messianic understanding of history has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination and frustration for a diverse range of recent philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and, in a critical context, Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are important sources for Derrida's discussion of messianicity, which has been influential, along with Paul de Man's discussion of allegory, for the poststructuralist reception of Benjamin's writings. Aspects of Benjamin's thought have also been associated with the recent revival of political theology, although it is doubtful this reception is true to the tendencies of Benjamin's own political thought.

Karin Stoegner , Verlag Turia + Kant

Dennis Redmond

Original translation of Walter Benjamin's powerhouse essay on history, diachrony, synchrony and the utopian possibilities (and revanchist pitfalls) of historical change.

Chung Chin-Yi

Time is thus constellational rather than linear, where past events are teleologically linked with present events through an order which is redemptive and leading to an end which is redemptive and the arrest of all time with the Messiah " s return, who will judge the victors in history and bring victory to those who have been oppressed through class struggle throughout history, and this will entail bringing justice to the oppressed classes and judgement for the Antichrist as ruling powers from which even the dead will not be safe.Benjamin thus describes history as the procession and succession of a series of victors-these victors are the rulers in history, the political elites who have benefited from the spoils of capitalism and who have gained power from these spoils from oppressing the lower classes or working classes. History has always been shown to empathize with these victors in history, or the rulers or political elites who have derived their power from the oppression of the lower classes or proletariat. As Benjamin puts it, this empathy with the victors in history is also an occasion of horror because the spoils of victory owe themselves to the anonymous toil of contemporaries as much as their great minds and talents who have created them. Thus Benjamin holds that there is no document of civilization which is not free from barbarism, it is the violence of class oppression which has allowed the victors in history to maintain their power and advantage. The task of the historical materialist is thus to brush history up against the grain and also depict the losers in history who will be eventually redeemed by the coming of the Messiah who will bring justice for them and give them a voice. Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. (Benjamin, 1978: 312)

Paula Schwebel , Andrew Benjamin

Zeynep Cansu Başeren

Rowan Tepper

Modernist Cultures

Keith Leslie Johnson

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Seminar Notes on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

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Appearing for the first time in English translation, this essay by the late Jacob Taubes demonstrates the lasting significance of Benjamin’s thought for understanding both historical and contemporary theological trends. Taubes’s translated notes provide some highly interesting insights into Taubes’s reading of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and his interpretation of Benjamin in general. Because of the premature end of Taubes’s involvement in the seminar, the present notes cover only the first seven of Benjamin’s Theses in detail. Nonetheless, in the spirit of Taubes’s reading of the Theses, according to which “each one of [them] is a complete unified whole in which the entirety of the Theses can be found,” Taubes’s interpretation may be said to be incomplete and complete at the same time.

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Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution – Theses on History An A to Z of Theory

In theory , new in ceasefire - posted on friday, november 15, 2013 15:20 - 9 comments.

By Andy McLaverty-Robinson

“Benjamin sees Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as depicting the Angel of History, looking back to the past.” (Source: 3.bp.blogspot.com )

Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” , also known as “Theses on History” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, deals with the question of social transformation. This insightful short work is one of Benjamin’s best-known and most cited works. Of all his works, it develops Benjamin’s messianic ideas most completely.

The theses can be summarised as follows:

Thesis 1: Benjamin suggests that Marxism relates to theology much as an automaton relates to its operator. Despite its illusory determinism, Marxism is really articulating a theological response to capitalism-as-religion (see below).

Thesis 2: Every generation is endowed with a ‘weak messianic power’, because every past generation hoped for redemption or resurrection in the future. Benjamin implies that present revolutions ‘redeem’ or continue past revolutions – there is a line connecting them which is not that of linear time.

Thesis 3: Nothing is completely lost to history, but the past is comprehensible only from the position of redemption.

Thesis 4: The ‘spiritual’ is present in class struggle – even when it is about material things – as the drive towards redemption.

Thesis 5: The truth of the past is visible only as a tentative image which threatens to slip away. This image, presumably, is apparent in the continuity between past and present struggles.

Thesis 6: A revolutionary historian should not focus on ‘how it really was’, but rather, on seizing the image as it flashes by. This means one should seek to rescue ‘tradition’ from a ‘conformism’ which threatens to overwhelm it. The task is to set light to the sparks of hope in the past. On the other hand, the past is not safe from a victorious enemy. Today, images of the past threaten to disappear if the present does not recognise them.

Thesis 7: Current rulers are always the inheritors of the series of victories, and the guilt of past rulers. Every achievement of civilisation or culture is marred with barbarism, with the suffering of the exploited and excluded. The cycle cannot be broken by victory. This claim is based on Benjamin’s discussion of law as fate. The only way to escape such ongoing guilt is to ‘brush history against the grain’. This also means to be in continuity with the defeated of the past.

Thesis 8: The state of emergency is not an exceptional, but a normal situation (this idea is expanded by Agamben ). The rise of fascism requires the rejection of an idea of ongoing progress. Instead, revolution is directed against the current direction of history. The claims in theses 7 and 8 are critiques of the Marxian view of the ascension of humanity through progressive historical stages. As Benjamin argues elsewhere (in Central Park), Hell is not something to fear in the future, but is already present. The catastrophe is not around the corner if the system collapses. The catastrophe is the continuation of things as they are.

Thesis 9: Benjamin here analyses Klee’s painting Angelus Novus . This work of modern art is characteristically ambiguous, allowing the viewer to construct meanings from it. Benjamin sees it as depicting the Angel of History, looking back to the past. The Angel sees, not progress, but a growing pile of rubble. The Angel desires to redeem and put back together what is broken. But s/he is unable to do so because of a ‘storm blowing from Paradise’. This storm is what is called ‘progress’. In this analysis, Benjamin suggests a powerful image of history as an accumulation of ruins. He suggests that the power to resist this cumulative worsening is simultaneously ruptural and healing. Elsewhere he metaphorises it as pulling a stop-chord on a runaway train – the present system is a train with broken brakes, speeding towards disaster , and the messianic moment is like a stop-chord. In another passage, history is awakened with a slap born of long-contained frustration, not a kiss.

Thesis 10: Benjamin desires to make the current world and its drives repugnant, and critcises socialist politicians for their attachment to the goods of the present.

Thesis 11: Benjamin offers a critique of social-democracy for the idea of progress. The view of modernisation as progress is taken to ignore the effects of produced commodities on workers. It produces a corrosive conformity to the present, and lays the seeds for fascist technocracy. Here, Benjamin also contrasts the exploitation of nature to the release of its potentialities.

Thesis 12: Revolution avenges past generations. Progressivism reduces it to the salvation of future generations, and thus loses its ‘hate’ and its ‘spirit of sacrifice’ – which it needs.

Thesis 13: The idea of progress is inseparable from the idea of homogeneous empty time.

Thesis 14: The transformation of history does not occur in homogeneous empty time. It occurs in moments of immediacy ( jetztzeit ). It blasts particular moments of the present and past out of the linear sequence (and presumably the order of fate).

Thesis 15: Revolutions are necessarily experienced as rupturing the continuity of history.

Thesis 16: The present is not a transition between moments. Time originates and reaches a standstill in the experience of the present. Instead of an eternal past depicted as linear, we need a ruptural experience of particular moments which stand out. (This suggests an expressive relationship to temporal experience).

Thesis 17:  The difference between progressivist and truly Marxist theories of history is that the former lists dates whereas the latter constructs time from a structure. The structure is based on the idea of a messianic zero-hour in which thought concentrates into a monad. This messianic moment explodes particular epochs, lives, or works out of linear history.

Thesis 18:  Human existence is itself like a messianic zero-hour in the entire history of Earth.

Addendum A: Past events are given their historical meaning retrospectively, in messianic moments.

Addendum B: Awaiting redemption prevents time from becoming homogeneous and empty.

Analysis of the Theses

The most notable aspect of the theses is that they provide the clearest statement of Benjamin’s non-linear conception of time. Homogeneous empty time is associated specifically with capitalist effects on experiences of time. This is radical in its implications. Most everyday experiences of time are problematised as effects of capitalism. This is confirmed by studies suggesting that non-capitalist social groups experience time differently – as natural cycles rather than interchangeable instants, for example. Benjamin suggests that time would formerly be ‘filled’ by festivals and memorial days, creating connections between moments through time.

Homogeneous empty time is the kind of time measured by clocks and calendars. In homogeneous empty time, every moment of time is equivalent and empty. It is homogeneous because one “day” or “minute” or “hour” is treated as equivalent to any other. It is empty because, on the whole, it lacks special moments which give it meaning (in contrast to cyclical, ritual and biological time). It simply passes, and people fill it with contingent contents.

Homogeneous empty time passes in an eternal present which remains fundamentally the same. The new reproduces the old in a series of structurally similar moments. This experience of time arises from the constant replacement and renewal of commodities. People experience time this way because of its technological and social underpinnings in the capitalist way of life. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin associates homogeneous empty time with boredom.

The critique of homogeneous empty time has inspired authors studying phenomena such as nationalism and capitalism. Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ shows the ways in which national identity, and modern cultural forms such as the novel and newspaper, depend on homogeneous empty time as an underpinning. E.P. Thompson shows how the imposition of homogeneous empty time was crucial to the creation of capitalist work-discipline when the working-class was first formed. Scholars working on global modernity often portray homogeneous empty time rubbing up against other, historically rooted ways of experiencing time.

Benjamin’s theory also resonates with Marx’s discussions of the importance of labour-time in commodity-production. Labour and commodities are only exchangeable because they can be treated as equivalent – and they can only be treated as equivalent because units of time are treated as identical. Commodity fetishism  depends on homogeneous empty time. Homogeneous empty time is also associated with the closed world of fate and guilt.

Benjamin goes further than simply criticising capitalist forms of time. He suggests that excluded groups and revolutionaries can access another way of experiencing time, even in capitalist contexts. He suggests that the ‘messianic’ moment exists as a form of time.

This other kind of ‘messianic’ time is associated with the experience of immediacy, and the creation of non-linear connections with particular, past or future points. The present revolt is connected in spirit to past revolts. The present generation of activists is always potentially the messiah which past revolutionary movements were waiting for. If our own resistance ‘fails’ in the present, it may nevertheless be redeemed by some future movement, and is not in vain – unless the system wins so absolutely that the past is also ‘lost’.

Some similarities and differences can be listed as follows:

Homogeneous empty time is quantitative; messianic time is qualitative.

Homogeneous empty time is a continuous flow; messianic time is fully immediate.

Homogeneous empty time is experienced as anaesthetising, desensitising and meaningless. Messianic time is experienced as emotionally intense, like a drug high. It is filled or fulfilled .

Homogeneous empty time is continuous; messianic time is ruptural.

Homogeneous empty time is meaningless (empty); messianic time is the time of a ‘specific recognisability’ – it means something specific to those who experience it.

This view of time also suggests the possibility of ‘newness’ in history. The moment of messianic rupture – redemption or revolution – is also a moment when past debts and complicities are cancelled-out. This should be cross-read with the idea of law-destroying violence. By destroying the ability to enforce hierarchical exclusions and binaries, law-destroying violence ends the reign of fate. As expressive violence, law-destroying violence is ‘non-violent’, destroying the possibility of instrumental violence and therefore the ongoing complicities in past oppressions. This possibility is more radical than those considered by most poststructuralists.

In Esther Leslie’s reading, Benjamin sees messianic time filling the place left empty by capitalism. Capitalism sucks memory out of everyday life, leaving a space which messianic time can enter. Similarly, Gibbs argues hat messianic time unsticks the present from its seemingly necessary future. Instead, it establishes continuities with other, subterranean histories.

The revolutionary presence of now-time – jetztzeit – blasts open the linear continuum of history. In German, Benjamin contrasts jetztzeit or jetztsein – the present as ‘now’, as immediate – with erlebnis – the present experienced as if already past, as a moment in a process. This idea of immediacy is similar to that of Hakim Bey, and to accounts of the immanence of activist subjectivity, such as Peterson’s.

A revolutionary moment is a moment when messianic time enters and explodes homogeneous empty time. In such a moment, the whole of time is experienced as a monad. It is as if all life is reconciled and compressed into a single moment. The implication is that every singularity is brought into the new future, but minus the existing relations among different things. This moment is accessed through the dialectical image or profane illumination. ‘Truth’, in an expressive sense, appears in such moments. It causes things to leap out of their context.

The messianic moment also ruptures things from their particular locations in an order of things. Objects, ruins, ideas and language become rearticulable, or can be ‘redeemed’ (something Benjamin also relates to allegories, collecting, and non-standard uses). An old factory is ‘redeemed’ as a squat, a commodity is ‘redeemed’ as meaningful to a collector, a word is ‘redeemed’ by being used allegorically. A date such as Mayday, or November 17th in Greece, can capture a range of historical precedents and ‘redeem’ them in present revolt, ignoring the time-lapses inbetween.

The potential of allegory and montage is to seize upon the fragments of an experience which is already fragmenting, so as to create recognition or insight; the potential of collection is to rearrange objects in an esoteric world of their own. This removes the taint which the system (as order of things) otherwise places on objects, language and so on. Hence Benjamin is suggesting the possibility of a non-binarised, open-ended relationship to the world which occurs through praxis. This corresponds to the desire of the Angel of History to put back together the ruins left behind by history.

In writing, this “putting back together” occurs through the arrangement of references. For Benjamin, all texts are actually composites of different citations, or intertextual references. Every text is like a montage. In One-Way Street, Benjamin describes quotations in his work as akin to robbers, who leap out and rob the reader of her/his convictions.

In the article ‘Unpacking my Library’, Benjamin discusses the relationship of a collector to objects which are collected. Crucially, collecting is about liberating objects from their status as commodities or as instrumental objects for use. Instead, the collector places objects in a kind of magical arrangement. Collecting is thus a way of renewing the world. An object acquired for the collection is ‘reborn’ into it. The collector feels responsible towards the objects, rather than the reverse. Further, the collector comes to life in the objects. A collection exists between order (the arrangement of objects) and disorder (the passion for collecting). It is a passionate phenomenon. Collecting creates a mood of anticipation, and always carry memories from the moments of acquisition.

In One-Way Street, Benjamin re-enchants stamp-collecting via the idea of the postmark marking the face with weals or cleaving a continent like an earthquake. The collection of stamps can inventory places and dates in magical ways, and capture part of the power of great states.

In language, redemption occurs by way of allegory, or symbolic representation. Allegory overfills the present by filling it with a flash from the past. Allegories are akin to ruins. They are what is left when meaning or life is lost. It provides a vision of time and history which shows them in ruins. It also has a power to make anything mean anything else. Through allegory, the present is reconstituted as ‘expected’ – as the messianic moment which redeems the past. The way to make past phenomena present is to resituate them in the present space, connecting them to the present as a constellation.

In discussions of the poet Baudelaire, Benjamin celebrates the power of allegory. Allegory, according to Benjamin, stems from the gaze of an alienated viewer. It arises from flânerie . The  flâneur stands at the margins of the bourgeois city. Intellectuals in particular were drawn into this stance by the precarity and uncertainty of their social position, creating the phenomenon known as ‘Bohemia’. Pre-Marxist revolutionary conspiracies emerged from the ‘rebellious pathos’ of this group, its ‘asocial’ stance. But  flânerie is recuperated in the form of the department store. It was the means whereby intellectuals were ultimately brought into the market.

In the seventeenth century, allegory was the usual basis for the dialectical image – in this case, the perception of alienation. In the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire was writing, it was nouveauté (novelty). Nonconformists opposed the commercialisation of art and called for ‘art for art’s sake’ (perhaps seeking to preserve the aura of art). Benjamin sees this as a step backwards. The nonconformist as much as the commodifier ignored social phenomena. Ultimately, this view of art leads to epic delusions. Benjamin later connects this approach with the rise of fascism.

In relation to qabalah , Benjamin shares the idea that messianism can only be experienced outside the existing world. It requires us to turn away from the affairs of the world, as in a monastic withdrawal. But Benjamin’s withdrawal is more active. He is calling for the messianic moment to be experienced and used to transform the world.

Revolution is thus a kind of transubstantiation. A substance of one kind – commodities, homogeneous empty time, ordinary language – is transformed into another. It is the end of homogeneous empty time and of commodity fetishism.

It is also called ‘discovering the new anew’. Capitalism always presents us with the new, but the capitalist new is a return of the same. The new discovered anew is the possibility of radical novelty which is not a return of the same.

However, Benjamin is inconsistent regarding the extent to which messianism is realisable. In the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, Benjamin argues that the messianic moment consummates history, and is therefore necessarily incommensurable with it. The historical world therefore cannot be built on a divine or messianic model. It should be built on a model of happiness instead. This pursuit of happiness both contradicts and assists the messianic moment. Messianism is also the passing-away of the world. How can this be reconciled with the revolutionary role of messianism? It is possible that Benjamin saw messianism as a means of rupture between two ‘historical’ worlds, or that he simply changed his mind. I wonder, however, if the issue has more to do with how messianism can be used – in particular, an insistence that it must be lived in immediacy, and that politicians must not claim ‘divine’ authority for themselves.

The idea of ‘redemption’ in Benjamin’s work stems from his theory of messianism. Objects are redeemed by being used in alternative ways, distinct from their usual connections, and especially their exchange-values and their sign-values (e.g. as fashionable). This might be termed a bricolage or deconstruction of objects. Many examples can be found in the practices of squatters and other activists, in terms of the DIY reconstruction of everyday objects for new purposes – old stereos rescued from the roadside and reconfigured, scrap materials used in artworks and so on. One might think of this in terms of a ‘just in case’ rather than ‘just in time’ approach to objects, resonant with local knowledge and resilience rather than commodity systems.

Language is similarly transformed through allegory and translation. Technology also contains such potentials, revealed by children’s playful associations, designers’ fantasies and so on. Traditions of literature and theory can also be renewed through creative applications which are not confined to repetition.

Another important insight is the view that Hell or disaster is now . The theme of impending disaster is important both to reactionaries (the pending Hobbesian chaos if the system collapses) and to many progressives. Yet modernity already provides impending and ongoing disasters. Benjamin has in mind fascism and the First World War. Today we could also include nuclear weapons, ecological collapse, deaths due to capitalist enclosure in the South, the atrocities committed in the ‘war on terror’ and in many small wars worldwide, and maybe even 9/11.

It is common for such disasters to be portrayed as a violent eruption of an ‘outside’, which breaks into the otherwise peaceful development of (white, Northern) humanity. Benjamin reverses perspective, seeing such events as the Hell of the present. Benjamin seems to be seeing the ‘present’ in process here, so future disasters (World War 2 for Benjamin; today, such dangers as climate change, global war and increasingly dystopian regimes of social control) are extensions of the present, not threats to it. To stop these effects of the dominant system, it is necessary to put the brakes on it. Hope appears, not in what history brings, but in what arises in its ruins.

Benjamin here rejects the idea of progress as the extension or defence of elements of the existing situation. Instead, the messianic moment – Benjamin’s substitute for progress – is a radical interruption of the present. The messianic moment is in a sense radically exterior to the history it interrupts.

The idea of a permanent state of emergency is connected to this sense of ongoing disaster. Benjamin extends and criticises Carl Schmitt’s view, in which the state of emergency is the way the state (or ‘sovereign’) maintains its power in a context of contingency. Benjamin uses the idea of emergency to criticise, rather than reinforce, the social order.

There are both everyday and eruptive aspects to the implications of Benjamin’s critique. On an everyday level, Benjamin’s approach points towards activist practices of reappropriation of spaces and objects – squatting, DIY, bike repair, guerrilla gardening, home construction for projects such as pirate radio, and so on. He also implicitly endorses ‘subvertisement’, parody and other such symbolic means of disrupting established connections.

But he also seems to be calling for a moment of decisive rupture – a total insurrection, a Sorelian general strike, or a general movement of exodus. It is unclear how these two aspects of his project fit together. I would suggest that the messianic moment can occur firstly as an individual or small-group realisation, but that it can “redeem” the world only if it expands its scope.

Capitalism as Religion

The Theses on History provide a theological response to capitalism, because for Benjamin, capitalism is religious in nature.  In ‘Capitalism as Religion’ , Benjamin argues that capitalism did not simply stem from Protestantism (as Weber argued), but is a religion in its own right. It developed parasitically by attaching itself to Christianity. Firstly, it reduces all of existence to its own standards of value. Secondly, it colonises all of time with this regime of value, as if every day were a day of worship. Thirdly, it is a cult based on guilt and blame (not repentance). It declares everyone to be guilty. It is a ‘cultic’ religion, of ritual practices, without ‘dogma’ or religious doctrine. Objects such as banknotes carry religious symbolism. It is an unusual religion because it offers not transformation but the destruction of existence. It flourishes on anxiety or ‘worries’, which ‘index the guilty conscience of hopelessness’.

Benjamin criticises Nietzsche and Freud for accepting what he takes to be aspects of the capitalist religion – Nietzsche because of the absence of a transubstantiation or messianic moment, Freud for reproducing capitalism in the unconscious. A rather literal activist equivalent of this reading of capitalism is offered by the performance activist Reverend Billy , who parodies traditional religious practices as means to protest against consumerism .

Andy McLaverty-Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. He is the co-author (with Athina Karatzogianni) of Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (Routledge, 2009). He has recently published a series of books on Homi Bhabha . His 'In Theory' column appears every other Friday.

Perversion, fascination, habituation #2 « nuirs Dec 16, 2013 14:51

[…] Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) and damaged portrait of Walter Benjamin (via Ceasefire) […]

Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution – Theses on History | ΕΝΙΑΙΟ ΜΕΤΩΠΟ ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑΣ Jan 3, 2014 10:29

[…] https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/ […]

Walter Benjamin: Politics of Everyday Life | Ceasefire Magazine Feb 18, 2014 19:51

[…] difficult to tie together. As a political writer, the implications of his work are clearest in his Theses on History and Critique of Violence. In the latter, he suggests that state power and ‘legal […]

Mark Jul 10, 2014 13:59

wonderful encapsulation of a difficult text. Thank you!

Kiara Sep 14, 2014 14:12

RAPPORT — BASED ON CONVERSATION — MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

For example bay and bow windows they made add aesthetic appeal but they won’t add extra to the bottom line return. Although you can purchase this in sheet form, it is most commonly sold by the square foot in boxes.

An A to Z of Theory | Walter Benjamin: Politics of Everyday Life | Life Begins at the End of your Comfort Zone Oct 22, 2015 5:49

[…] difficult to tie together. As a political writer, the implications of his work are clearest in his Theses on History and Critique of Violence. In the latter, he suggests that state power and ‘legal violence’ […]

Katherine Jul 4, 2018 3:08

Anon Mar 27, 2020 3:03

Looking back on this, although it may be pedantic wouldn’t it be bad to use Marxism as the example of Benjamin’s theses in Thesis I and XVII especially when in those theses it seems Benjamin doesn’t mention Marx at all but is rather talking about interpretations of history?

Robert Michael Bosco Apr 10, 2021 20:21

To the author of this piece: Kudos. I am a tenured Professor of Political Science and International Studies (in the U.S.) and I can humbly say, with the credentials I have, that this is an absolutely excellent explanation of Benjamin. This writer, who I do not know personally, is very talented at explaining this clearly and applying it to contemporary events. When it comes to Critical Theory/Deconstruction (and related traditions) this type of writing/explication for the public is exceptionally rare. This writer should be commended, it really is a skill to be able to explain difficult concepts with this clarity. You don’t really understand something until you can explain it to an uninformed person and they get it. Fantastic job. This writer inspired me to subscribe to the Ceasefire newsletter. Great column and great website.

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Theses on the Philosophy of History

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A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could ehindxist. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at moment of danger. "In relation to the history of organic life on earth," writes a modern biologist, "the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at close of a twenty-four-hour day. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.

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What is Benjamin saying in thesis VI in On the Concept of History?

I quote it in full from here , having annotated the key points I'm struggling with in bold

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger [ what does this mean? ]. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past [ to how it really was? ], just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition [ the dead? ] as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it [ is this an argument and if so how can it be paraphrased? ]. For the Messiah [ the rest of this thesis is beyond me ] arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

To be specific, I'm confused as to why he appears to be defending a messianic version of historical materialism, when thesis 1 seems to say that

historical materialism is actually a quasi-religious fraud

• critical-theory
• philosophy-of-history
• You can see : Michael Lowy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History , Verso (2016, original ed.2001), page 42-on. –  Mauro ALLEGRANZA Commented May 15, 2017 at 15:59
• 1 It seems a peculiar blending of historical materialism and messianism . –  Mauro ALLEGRANZA Commented May 15, 2017 at 16:15
• @MauroALLEGRANZA thanks, I should have googled it. :) –  user25714 Commented May 15, 2017 at 16:47

As @MauroALLEGRANZA has indicated in the comment's Löwy's Fire Alarm is a good resource and probably the only text in English to address the whole of Benjamin's On the Concept of History thesis by thesis. Nevertheless, I thought I might attempt to give some kind of reading of it to address the points you raise. Sorry for the lengthy amount of text.

The first sentence of this thesis is very important. It announces more or less the task of the rest of the thesis, albeit in a negative way. To "recognize 'how [the past] really was'" is the task set for history by Leopold von Ranke, one of the key figures in developing historiography based on primary sources. It is this view that Benjamin is completely opposing, as is made clear in the French version* of the thesis which begins:

«Décrire le passe tel qu'il a été» voilà, d'après Ranke la tâche de l'historien. C'est une définition toute chimérique. "To describe the past as it was" there, following Ranke, the task of the historian. It is an entirely chimerical definition. (My translation)

If representing "how it really was" is a chimera then what is the task of history? History cannot be objective; it is always partial. "Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy", i.e., their history will always be re-written by the victors and the powerful to serve their own ends. (Hence the danger which lies in "handing itself [the dead and what they represent] over as the tool of the ruling classes"). Or as Löwy puts it:

The alleged neutral historian, who has access directly to the 'real' facts, in reality only reinforces the view of the victors — the kings, popes and emperors (the preferred object of Ranke's historiography) of all ages. (p. 42)

Instead, Benjamin's positive conception of history starts from the second sentence: "It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger." Once again, the French version may be helpful for clarifying this:

La connaissance du passé ressemblerait plutôt à l'acte par lequel à l'homme au moment d'un danger soudain se présentera un souvenir qui le sauve. The knowledge of the past would rather resemble the act by which a man at a moment of sudden danger offers himself a memory that saves him.

Admittedly, this is still a somewhat obscure phrasing. How does a memory save someone? Memory, for Benjamin here, is not simply a passive faculty for recalling what has happened, but a source of inspiration; hence the suggestion that there are "sparks of hope in the past" to be set alight. The past is not simply over and done with, but has been, in some way, passed on. "There is a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own," Benjamin writes in thesis II.

If such a memory appears — and I do not think that for Benjamin the appearance of such a memory is guaranteed by the moment of danger, but only made possible by it — then this is what historical materialism must "holding fast to," the saving image that arises in the moment of danger. Löwy suggests that this works because:

The danger of a current defeat sharpens the sensitivity to preceding ones, arouses interest in the battle fought by the defeated, and encourages a critical view of history. (p. 43)

Thus, it is not a matter of holding fast to "how it really was," but rather to the sparks of inspiration that still live on in memory.

These sparks of inspiration is what (in my view) Benjamin means by tradition. The tradition is not something simply handed over, since it is, in a sense, still unrealised. This is why "in every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew"; the enemy of this task is "the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it."**

To spell this out a little more clearly: the task of any historical materialist version of history*** is the production of the self-consciousness of the proletariat. The production of this self-consciousness does not seem to form of its own accord. Why? Ultimately, Benjamin's diagnosis seems to be that people tend to identify with their rulers (this is the conformism) and hence they tend to serve "as the tool of the ruling classes." If the point of historical materialist history is to fight this tendency then it must produce a different image of history, one which says something like the conditions under which you live are not natural nor are they the only possibility. The images of the past held onto by historical materialism hence become something useful: they reveal other possibilities already present (as history, as this tradition).

The point of a historical materialist conception of history is to save people from the current oppressive structures; hence it has not merely a historical purpose, but a messianic one as well. The phrase "the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ" is meant to indicate that the purpose of historical materialist history is not simply salvation; it must also work to undo the work of "the enemy" (the ruling class) and so to utterly destroy it.

Finally, it is important to remember that this is not simply some sort of abstract game. It has a real, historical context. The text was written around 1940, with the rise of the Nazi party and their concomitant re-writing of German history to produce a certain image of what being German is: the Aryan master-race that runs free over a completely Jewish-free Germany. Benjamin's hope, perhaps, was that in this moment of crisis, something else could emerge from the past, something that the Nazi's were actively trying to oppress.

[*]: On the Concept of History has a complex history as a document. It was never intended nor prepared by Benjamin for publication and there are at least 7 slightly different manuscript versions of it that had been given to various of Benjamin's friends. These are all compiled in a volume from Suhrkamp's critical complete edition [ Kritische Gesamtausgabe ] of Benjamin's work and notebooks (which differs from the collected works [ Gesammelte Schriften ] that is the edition usually cited). The French edition referred to is a French translation of the document Benjamin himself made but never published. The variations in the various German editions are usually quite minor; the French has some actual departures, so I'm treating it as a source for further explicating what Benjamin is saying.

[**]: In this instance the Zorn translation, published in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings , is superior if somewhat more figurative:

Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.

The key is that this a battle that is already going on.

[***]: It is controversial just how "Marxist" Benjamin intends to be, but I'll leave that aside.

• thanks for the detailed reply. i had read the thesis, in light of the "danger" of nazism that he was about to face, as a suicide note blaming marxism. i won't bother explaining –  user25714 Commented May 17, 2017 at 17:42

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Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin’s importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin’s writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of philosophy’s actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin’s efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht. 

The delayed appearance of Benjamin’s collected writings has determined and sustained the Anglophone reception of his work. (A two-volume selection was published in German in 1955, with a full edition not appearing until 1972–89, and a 21-volume critical edition has been in production since 2008; English anthologies first appeared in 1968 and 1978, and the four-volume Selected Writings between 1996 and 2003.) Originally received in the context of literary theory and aesthetics, only in the last decades of the 20th century did the philosophical depth and cultural breadth of Benjamin’s thought begin to be fully appreciated. Despite the voluminous size of the secondary literature that it has produced, his work remains a continuing source of productivity. An understanding of the intellectual context of his work has contributed to the philosophical revival of Early German Romanticism. His philosophy of language has played a seminal role in translation theory. His essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ remains a major theoretical text for film theory. One-Way Street and the work arising from his unfinished research on nineteenth century Paris ( The Arcades Project ), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory and philosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin’s messianic understanding of history has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination and frustration for a diverse range of philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and, in a critical context, Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are important sources for Derrida’s discussion of messianicity, which has been influential, along with Paul de Man’s discussion of allegory, for the poststructuralist reception of Benjamin’s writings. Aspects of Benjamin’s thought have also been associated with a revival of political theology, although it is doubtful this reception is true to the tendencies of Benjamin’s own political thought. More recently, interest in Benjamin’s philosophy of education has been fueled by the translations of his Early Writings in 2011 and the transcripts of his radio broadcasts for children ( Radio Benjamin ) in 2014.

1. Biographical Sketch

2. early works: kant and experience, 3. romanticism, goethe and criticism, 4. baroque constellations, 5. the arcades project, 6. art and technology, 7. baudelaire and the modern, 8. image, history, culture, other internet resources, related entries.

Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, the eldest of three children in a prosperous Berlin family from an assimilated Jewish background. At the age of 13, after a prolonged period of sickness, Benjamin was sent to a progressive co-educational boarding school in Haubinda, Thuringia, where he formed an important intellectual kinship with the liberal educational reformer Gustav Wyneken. On his return to Berlin, he began contributing to Der Anfang (‘The Beginning’), a journal dedicated to Wyneken’s principles on the spiritual purity of youth, articles which contain in embryonic form important ideas on experience and history that continue to occupy his mature thought. As a student at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin, Benjamin attended lectures by the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and the sociologist Georg Simmel, whilst continuing to be actively involved in the growing Youth Movement. In 1914, however, Benjamin denounced his mentor and withdrew from the movement in response to a public lecture in which Wyneken praised the ethical experience that the outbreak of war afforded the young. In 1915 a friendship began between Benjamin and Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem, a fellow student at Berlin. This relationship would have a lifelong influence upon Benjamin’s relation to Judaism and Kabbalism, notably in his interpretations of Kafka in the early 1930s and in the messianic interpretation of the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus in his later theses ‘On the Concept of History’. Scholem would prove instrumental in establishing and, in part, shaping the legacy of Benjamin’s works after his death (Raz-Krakotzkin 2013).

Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation, ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, was awarded, summa cum laude , by the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1919. His celebrated essay on Goethe’s novella, The Elective Affinities , was begun shortly after and put into practice the theory of art criticism developed in his dissertation. Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift on the Origin of the German Mourning-Play ( Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels )—the thesis which would have enabled him to become a professional academic—had, he feared, with the death of his intellectual ally, the Protestant theologian Florens Christian Rang, lost its “proper reader” (GB 3:16). In 1925, he was forced to withdraw his submission from the University of Frankfurt am Main and with it the possibility of a future academic position. However, despite this academic failure, an excerpt from the work appeared in a literary journal two years later and the book was published the following year (1928), quickly receiving favourable attention in a number of well regarded newspapers and periodicals in Germany and further afield (Brodersen 1996, 154). In an ironic twist, Benjamin’s failed Habilitation study became the subject of a seminar course taught at Frankfurt University in 1932–3 by Theodor Wiesengrund (later Theodor W. Adorno).

Much of the writing for his thesis was completed in 1924 on the Italian island of Capri, where Benjamin had retreated for financial reasons. The stay would prove decisive, however, since it was here he met the Bolshevik Latvian theatre producer Asja Lacis, with whom he begun an erotically frustrated but intellectually productive relationship. ‘Naples’ was jointly written with Lacis in 1925, whilst One-Way Street , a quasi-constructivist collection of fragments written between 1923–1926 and dedicated to Lacis on its publication in 1928, and the unfinished Arcades Project , begun in the late 1920s, both exhibit a modernist experimentation with form that can in part be attributed to Lacis’ influence. His Marxist turn towards historical materialism was compounded by his enthusiastic study of Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness whilst on Capri and a visit to Lacis in Soviet Moscow in the winter of 1926–7.

By the early 1930s Benjamin was closely involved in the plans for a left-wing periodical to be entitled ‘Crisis and Critique’, in collaboration with Ernst Bloch, Sigfried Kracauer and, among others, the Marxist poet, playwright and theatre director Bertolt Brecht (Wizisla 2009, 66–98). Benjamin had been introduced to Brecht by Lacis in 1929 and over the following decade developed a close personal friendship, in which their literary and political affinities had been cemented under the difficult conditions of political exile. Benjamin undertook a series of studies of Brecht’s “epic theatre” and modelled the radio broadcasts he wrote and presented during this period upon the latter’s experiments in theatrical didacticism (Brodersen 1996, 193). In 1933, Benjamin departed Nazi Germany for the last time, following Adorno, Brecht and many other Jewish friends into an exile he divided between Paris, Ibiza, San Remo and Brecht’s house near Svendborg, Denmark.

During the 1930s the Institute for Social Research, by this point under the directorship of Horkheimer and exiled from its base in the University of Frankfurt, provided Benjamin with important opportunities for publishing as well as an increasingly necessary financial stipend. Theodor W. Adorno, who had been introduced to Benjamin a decade earlier by a mutual friend, Siegfried Kracauer, was instrumental in securing this support. An important consequence of this dependence, however, was the editorial revisions to which key essays in which Benjamin developed his materialist theory of art were subjected, such as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ and those on Baudelaire and Paris that grew out of The Arcades Project .

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily interned in the French “concentration camps” established for German citizens. On his release a few months later he returned to Paris and there continued his work in the Bibliothèque Nationale on The Arcades Project . The notes for his unfinished research were left in the safekeeping of librarian and friend, the writer Georges Bataille, as Benjamin fled Paris before the advancing German army in the summer of 1940. The last few months of Benjamin’s life reflect the precarious experience of countless other Jewish Germans in Vichy France: a flight to the border and preparations for emigration by legal or illegal means. Lacking the necessary exit visa from France, he joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees in an attempt to enter Spain as illegal refugees. Turned back by customs officials, Benjamin took his life in the small, Spanish border town of Port Bou, on September 27, 1940.

The importance of Benjamin’s early unpublished fragments for an understanding his wider philosophical project has been emphasised by a number of scholars (Wolfharth 1992; Caygill 1998; Rrenban 2005). Indeed, without them it becomes difficult to understand the intellectual context and historical tradition out of which Benjamin is writing and therefore nearly impossible to grasp the philosophical underpinnings of his works. Of Benjamin’s earliest published writing his attempt in the essay entitled ‘Experience’ (‘ Erfahrung ’, 1913/1914) to distinguish an alternative and superior concept of experience provides a useful introduction to a central and enduring preoccupation of his thought. Benjamin’s concern with delineating an immediate and metaphysical experience of spirit is valuable in providing a thematic description of a conceptual opposition working throughout his thought. Filtered here through the cultural ideals of the Youth Movement, this contrasts the empty, spiritless [ Geistlosen ] and unartistic “experiences” accumulated over a life merely lived-through [ erlebt ] with that privileged kind of experience which is filled with spiritual content through its enduring contact with the dreams of youth (SW 1, 3–6). The influence of Nietzsche in these earlier texts is discernible (McFarland 2013), particularly, in the importance the young Benjamin places upon aesthetic experience in overcoming the embittered nihilism of contemporary values (although he is unable to articulate this cultural transformation here beyond a vague appeal to the canon of German poets: Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Stefan George).

By 1918 the attempt at a more systematic and philosophically sophisticated understanding of a “higher concept of experience” (SW 1, 102) within what Benjamin now calls “the coming philosophy” is articulated in relation to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Benjamin argues that the value of Platonic and Kantian philosophy lies in its attempt to secure the scope and depth of knowledge through justification, exemplified in the way Kant conducts a critical inquiry into the transcendental conditions of knowledge. But this Kantian attempt to grasp a certain and timeless knowledge is in turn based upon an empirical concept of experience which is restricted, Benjamin argues, to that “naked, primitive, self evident” experience of the Enlightenment, whose paradigm is Newtonian physics (SW 1, 101). Despite Kant’s introduction of a transcendental subject, his system remains tied to a naïve empiricist understanding of experience, of the kind privileged in the positivist scientific tradition as the encounter between a distinct subject (conceived as a cognizing consciousness receiving sensible intuitions) and object (understood as a sensation-causing thing-in-itself).

In contrast, the pre-Enlightenment concept of experience invested the world with a deeper and more profound significance, because the Creation assumes a revelatory religious importance. This is apparent not only in the deeply Christian world-view of mediaeval Europe, but survives in secularized form in Renaissance and Baroque humanism, and in “Counter-Enlightenment” thinkers such as J. G. Hamann, Goethe, and the Romantics. Benjamin suggests that the “great transformation and correction which must be performed upon the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-mechanical lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language, as was attempted by Hamann during Kant’s lifetime” (SW 1, 107–8). In the essay ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’ (‘ Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen ’, c. 1916), Benjamin offers a theological conception of language which draws on Hamann’s discussion of Creation as the physical imprint of the divine Word of God, to claim that there “is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language” (SW 1, 62–3). This implies that all experience—including perception—is essentially linguistic, whilst all human language (including writing, typically associated with mere convention) is inherently expressive and creative. Language is privileged as a model of experience in these early essays precisely because it undermines and transgresses the neat divisions and limitations operating in the Kantian system, including that fundamental one that distinguishes between the subject and object of sensations. If both are constitutively linguistic, language serves as a medium of experience that binds the ostensible “subject” and “object” in a more profound, perhaps mystical, relationship of underlying kinship. More generally, Hamann’s metacritique provides Benjamin with a sense of the hypocrisy of the Kantian separation of understanding and sensibility on the basis of an empty and purely formal notion of pure reason, which can itself only be postulated according to the concrete, aesthetic content of language.

Whilst Benjamin is not interested in returning to the pre-critical project of a rationalist deduction of experience, nor to a directly religious conception of the world, he is interested in how the scientific concept of experience that Kant is utilising distorts the structure of Kant’s philosophical system, and how this might be corrected with the use of theological concepts. Epistemology must address not only “the question of the certainty of knowledge that is lasting”, but also the neglected question of “the integrity of an experience that is ephemeral” (SW 1, 100). Benjamin’s suggestion as to how this project might be formulated within the Kantian system is sketchy, but nonetheless indicates some of the preoccupying concerns of his later writings. In general, it involves the expansion of the limited spatio-temporal forms and essentially causal-mechanistic categories of Kant’s philosophy through the integration of, for example, religious, historical, artistic, linguistic and psychological experiences. Benjamin’s enduring concern with the new, the outmoded and the heteronomous reflect this attempt to integrate more speculative phenomenological possibilities of experience into the remit of philosophical knowledge. It resists privileging any single discipline of knowledge, preserving a multiplicity that implicates truth in the problem of aesthetic representation. This would lead Benjamin to attempt a radical rethinking of the philosophical concept of the Idea, away from its dualistic associations with a timeless and purely rational essence of things.

Benjamin also believes that a more speculative metaphysics would necessitate the abolishment of the sharp distinction between Nature and Freedom—or causal mechanism and moral willing—in Kant’s architectonic. Since it is a specific understanding of “dialectic” which mediates between these two spheres in Kant’s critical system, this entails a speculative rethinking of the Kantian dialectic. This suggests that new possibilities of syllogistic logical relations might themselves be opened up, including what he calls “a certain nonsynthesis of two concepts in another” (SW 1, 106; cf. Weber 2008, 48). The relation of nonsynthesis hinted at here can be seen to inform Benjamin’s understanding of the Idea as a constellation of extremes in the Origin of the German Mourning-Play and of the dialectical image in his mature writings. In this sense, Benjamin’s metacritique of Kant represents an attempt to construct an alternative post-Kantian tradition to that of Hegelian dialectics. It therefore required a new philosophy of history.

Benjamin initially sought to develop these ideas in the context of Kant’s philosophy of history, believing it was in this context that the problems of the Kantian system could be fully exposed and challenged (C, 98). A very early article, ‘The Life of Students’ (‘ Das Leben der Studenten ’, 1915), is useful for suggesting how these problems manifest themselves within the philosophy of history. It rejects a “a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress” and contrasts this with a perspective “in which history appears to be concentrated on a single focal point, like those that had traditionally been found in the utopian images of the philosophers” (SW 1, 37). The latter, ‘messianic’ view of history has a distinct intention and methodology: it aims to grasp how elements of what Benjamin calls “the ultimate condition” and “highest metaphysical state” of history—which we might call the historical Absolute—appear not as the telos or end of history, but as an immanent state of perfection which has the potential to manifest itself in any particular moment (SW 1, 37). He claims that the necessary recognition of such metaphysical condition requires an act of criticism [ Kritik ] (SW 1, 38). Benjamin had initially proposed Kant’s philosophy of history as the topic of his doctoral dissertation, and while he felt it necessary to change this to the Early German Romantics’ philosophy of art, crucial features of the proposed project survive in the final work. Astute readers, he says, may still discern in it an “insight into the relationship of a truth to history” (C, 135–6). Specifically, the concept of art criticism operating in Romantic aesthetics rests upon epistemological presuppositions that reveal the ‘messianic’ essence of Romanticism (SW 1, 116–7; n.3, 185). The messianic conjunction between the highest metaphysical state of history and the ephemerality of each particular moment is here seen as theoretically determining the Romantic relationship between the artistic Absolute—or what Benjamin defines as the Idea of art—and each particular artwork.

In his doctoral dissertation, Benjamin argues that the philosophical relationship between the Idea of art and particular artworks posited in Romantic aesthetics must be understood in relation to Fichte’s theory of reflection. This sought to ground the possibility of a certain and immediate type of cognition without recourse to the problematic notion of an intellectual intuition. For Fichte, reflection indicates the free activity of consciousness taking itself as its own object of thought: its capacity for thinking of thinking. In doing so, the initial form of thinking is transformed into its content. In such reflection, thought seems capable of immediately grasping itself as a thinking subject and therefore of possessing a certain kind of immediate and foundational knowledge. Although Benjamin introduces a number of specific criticisms of Fichte’s philosophical position in his dissertation, he nonetheless values the Fichtean concept of reflection for providing the epistemological foundation of Friedrich Schlegel’s and Novalis’ understandings of the metaphysical function of art criticism. Some scholars have, however, questioned the accuracy of Benjamin’s interpretation of Fichte’s concept of reflection and the importance he accords to it in Romantic epistemology (Bullock 1987, 78–93; Menninghaus 2005, 29–44). 

Unlike in Fichte, here immediacy and infinitude are not mutually exclusive aspects of cognition. The uniqueness of the Romantic concept of the Absolute resides in the fact that the Romantic conception of infinitude regards it not as empty but “substantial and filled” (SW 1, 129). Benjamin argued that the Romantics specifically identified this structure of the Absolute with the Idea of art, and in particular with artistic form (SW 1, 135). Art criticism becomes central to this concept of infinite fulfilment because, like the epistemological relation between reflection and thought in Fichte, criticism both consummates the finite and particular work by raising it to a higher level—in which the form of the work is transformed into content as the object of criticism—and simultaneously connects the work’s particular artistic form with the continuity and unity of absolute form in the Idea of art. Criticism is, for the Romantics, the continuation and ongoing completion of the particular work through its infinite connection with other art works and works of criticism. By conceiving the Idea of art as a ‘medium of reflection’, the early Romantics dissolve the Enlightenment world-view of the positive sciences that Fichte inherited from Kant, and in doing so overcome the critical injunctions placed upon the experience of the infinite (SW 1, 132; 131). This conception of a fulfilled infinity constitutes the messianism that Benjamin claims is essential to Early Romantic epistemology.

In the version of the dissertation formally submitted to the university, Benjamin concludes by identifying the Romantic theory of art criticism with ‘the consummation of the work’ (SW 1, 177). The artwork provides the immanent criterion for critical reflection, which in turn completes the work by raising it into an autonomous and higher existence. This immanent criticism rejects both the dogmatic imposition of external rules (such as those of classical aesthetics) and the dissolution of aesthetic criteria (with the appeal to artistic genius). It provides, Benjamin thought, one of the fundamental legacies for a modern concept of art criticism. The version circulated amongst friends and colleagues does not conclude with a complete affirmation of Romanticism, however, but contains a critical afterword that renders explicit the critical objections that Benjamin had carefully inserted into the text. These suggest that the Romantic theory of art, and by implication the structure of the Absolute it is grounded upon, is problematically one-sided and incomplete with regard to (1) its formalism, (2) its positivity, and (3) its singularity. 

Since the content of each, successive, level of reflection is supplied by the form of its object, the criticism unfolds the germ of immanent criticizability contained in each particular artwork’s form. This formalism precludes any serious discussion of the artwork’s specific content.

Conversely, anything immanently uncriticizable cannot constitute a true work of art. As a consequence, Romantic criticism is unable to differentiate between good or bad artworks, since its only criterion is whether a work is or is not art. Such criticism is entirely positive in its evaluation, and lacks the important negative moment essential to judgement.

Finally, Schlegel “committed the old error of confounding ‘abstract and ‘universal’ when he believed he had to make that [Absolute] ground [of art] into an individual”, Benjamin claims (SW 1, 166–7). He therefore gave a “false interpretation” of the unity of all works when he conceived this as pertaining to some mystical, singular and transcendental work.

The consequent need for what Benjamin presents as a Goethean modification of Early German Romanticism is laid out in the afterword. The relation between these criticisms of Romanticism and Goethe’s thought is suggested in the claim that, “Ultimately the mystical thesis that art itself is one work…stands in exact correlation with the principle which asserts the indestructibility of works that are purified in irony” (SW 1, 167). With its mistaken emphasis on the singularity of the Idea of art, Romantic fulfilment only coincides with the infinity of the unconditioned, meaning that fulfilment is an essentially non-historical category of the infinite. Such criticism cannot be described as judgement, since all authentic judgement involves an essential negative moment of completion in “self-annihilation” (SW 1, 152). Consequently, because ‘Romantic messianism is not at work in its full force’ here (SW 1, 168), the Romantics were increasingly forced to turn to the “accoutrements” of ethics, religion and politics to provide the content required to complete their theory of art. 

Goethe’s conception of aesthetic judgement and his principle of the ‘uncriticizability’ of great works provided Benjamin with a way of thinking the necessary modification to the Early German Romantic Idea of art. His explication of the implicit metaphysical structure of Goethe’s corresponding Ideal of art reveals the contrasting features of his structure of the Absolute: as a sphere of pure content, a medium of destructive refraction , and a plurality of discontinuous archetypes (Charles 2020, 53–67). Because finite, particular works can never be romanticized into the unity of an individual Absolute, they remains immanently incomplete and yet nonetheless incapable of higher consummation: a “torso”, dismembered in relation to the whole, corpse-like in its deadness. In this context, the true task of criticism becomes not the consummation of the living work, but that destructive completion of the dying one.

Benjamin’s essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities ’ (1924–5) provides an exemplary piece of such criticism, whilst developing the concept further by situating it more explicitly within the context of history. Here, criticism is charged with the task of revealing what Benjamin calls the “truth content of a work of art”, which is intimately bound up with its “material content” at the beginning of the work’s history (SW 1, 297). In contrast to mere commentary—which proceeds no further than a consideration of these now historically anachronistic features of its material content—the aim of criticism is the destruction of this outer layer in order for the work’s inner truth content to be grasped. The fundamental philological error of commentary is merely to situate the work in relation to the “lived experience [ Erlebnis ]” of its author’s biographical life (exemplified in Friedrich Gundolf’s 1916 biography of Goethe ), instead of the broader medium of historical reception through which it has passed down to the contemporary critic. Benjamin’s Romantic theory of immanent criticism insists that the work must contain its own inner criterion, such that the critic proceeds from the work itself and not from the life of the author (SW 1, 321). Beginning, therefore, with the odd and striking features of Goethe’s work that come to preoccupy later critics, Benjamin examines how these are derived from techniques borrowed from the distinct form of the novella. This novella-like construction grants the Elective Affinities its strange, fable-like quality, which differentiates it from the naturalism of a typical novel. It is this mythical layer, as the real material content of the work, which expresses the presence of a pantheistic and “daemonic” attitude toward nature in Goethe’s work.

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

Art, at the very limit of its mimetic capacity, draws attention to its construction and in doing so finds the resources to encapsulate a deeper truth. It is against what Benjamin calls the Christian-mystical certainty in future reconciliation (which Goethe inserts into the conclusion of the novella as an attempt to counter the mythical fatalism which holds sway elsewhere) that he instead endorses the paradoxical glimmer of hope identified with the image of a shooting star which appears in Goethe’s novella (SW 1, 354–5). If the image of the star retains its relationship to the symbolic here, it does so in accordance with Benjamin’s earlier description of the expressionless as “the torso of a symbol” (SW 1, 340). However, it might be better to understand the significance of the caesura here in the context of the theory of allegory. This is only properly formulated in Benjamin’s next major work, his thesis on the Origin of the German Mourning-Play ( Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels , 1928).

‘Mourning-play’ ( Trauerspiel ) is a term used to characterise a type of drama that emerges during the baroque period of art history in the late 16th and early 17th century. The principle examples discussed in Benjamin’s thesis come not from its great exponents, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and William Shakespeare, but the German dramatists Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, Johann Christian Hallmann, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and August Adolf von Haugwitz. Their plays are characterised by a simplicity of action which is comparable to the classicism of earlier Renaissance theatre, but also contain peculiarly baroque features. These include an exaggerated and violent bombast in their language (including a figurative tendency towards linguistic contraction), an absence of psychological depth in its characters, a preponderance of and dependency upon theatrical props and machinery, and a crude emphasis on violence, suffering and death (cf. Newman 2011; Ferber 2013).

Leaving aside for now the methodological introduction (referred to in English as the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’), the first part of Benjamin’s thesis is concerned with repudiating the dogmatic attempt by later critics to impose onto these plays the external criteria of Aristotelian aesthetics, which are rooted in classical tragedy. Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy here (and his approach to the mourning-play in general) is partially influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy . Benjamin claims that The Birth of Tragedy substantiates the critical insight that the empathy of undirected modern feeling is unhelpful for properly grasping ancient tragedy (OGT, 93). Instead, Nietzsche undertook a metaphysical inquiry into the essence of tragedy as a dialectical interplay of the contrasting aesthetic impulses of Apollonian semblance and Dionysian truth. This dialectic is central to Benjamin’s own philosophical investigations, particularly his claim—derived from his discussion of Goethe’s Elective Affinities —that an expressionless moment is constitutive of art, in which the limits of semblance are broached precisely in order to illuminate an artistic truth.

But Benjamin is also critical of Nietzsche for restricting his approach to aesthetics, and therefore renouncing the understanding of tragedy in historical terms. Lacking a philosophy of history, Nietzsche’s study was unable to situate the political and ethical significance of the metaphysical and mythical features it isolates (OGT, 93). Influenced by ideas from Franz Rosenzweig and Florens Christian Rang (Asman 1992), Benjamin presents tragedy as expressing a perceived break between the prehistorical age of mythical gods and heroes and the emergence of a new ethical and political community. The historical limitations of Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy become acute when it comes to the question of the possibility of a recuperation of the tragic form in modern theatre. Whilst Nietzsche tends to simply denounce the weakness of modern drama against the strength of the Greeks (excepting, in his early work, the operas of Wagner), Benjamin is concerned with establishing whether the historical conditions of the tragic form are themselves a limit to its contemporary efficacy. 

In line with the principles of Romantic criticism discussed above, mourning-plays contain their own distinct form and should be criticised according to their own immanently discovered standards. The “content [ Gehalt ]” and “ true object” of the baroque mourning-play is not, as it is in tragedy, myth but rather historical life (OGT, 46). As with Goethe’s borrowing of the novella form, this content is in part derived from other aesthetic structures, principally the eschatological focus of mediaeval Christian literature: the Passion-Plays, Mystery-Plays and chronicles whose historiography portrayed “the whole of the course of history, world history as salvation history” (OGT, 65). But the Lutheran renunciation of the Catholic emphasis upon good works, and the secularizing tendency implicit in the naturalistic legal and political philosophies of the 16th and 17th century (discussed in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty) resulted in the stripping bare of human value and significance from such history. This tense, antinomical combination of transcendence and immanence produces an uneasy hybrid, in which history—as a narrative of the human march towards redemption on the Day of Judgement—loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over political power. 

Benjamin’s reflections on sovereign violence in the 17th century may be contrasted with his discussion of the revolutionary kind in his earlier ‘Critique of Violence’ (‘ Zur Kritik der Gewalt ’, 1921), itself a response to Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908). These texts have provoked a number of responses in the context of political theology, most notably from Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Schmitt responded directly to Benjamin’s essay in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956). Derrida’s section on the ‘Critique of Violence’ in his Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority (1989) interrogates this evocation of a revolutionary kind of divine violence, a critical engagement which continues in Derrida’s discussion of the messianic in Spectres of Marx (1994) and ‘Marx and Sons’ (1999), and in relation to Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship (1994). These complex relations between Benjamin, Schmitt, and Derrida have become the subject of a number of studies, including Agamben’s State of Exception (2004) (Bredekamp 1999, 247–266; Liska 2009), although more careful studies have emphasized the clear divergences between Benjamin’s position and those of Derrida and of Schmitt (Tomba 2009, 131–132; Averlar 2005, 79–106; Weber 2008, 176–194). In this respect, it was not Schmitt’s political theology but the reactionary vitalism of Ludwig Klages that proved a more influential and enduring object of fascination for Benjamin (Fuld 1981; McCole 1993, 178–180, 236–246; Wolin 1994, xxxi–xxxviii; Wohlfarth 2002, 65–109; Lebovic 2013, 1–10, 79–110; Charles 2018, 52–62). 

In the second part of his thesis, Benjamin employs the concept of allegory to expose the implicit eschatological structure of these works. However, the first part utilises the distorting tension of this structure to distinguish the specific and historically conspicuous technique of the German baroque mourning-play. This concludes by identifying sorrow or mourning ( Trauer ) as the predominant mood inherent to its metaphysical structure, in contrast to the suffering of tragedy. With the “total secularization of the historical in the state of creation…History passes into the setting” to become natural history (OGT, 81), whose attendant cognition is a melancholic contemplation of things which derives enigmatic satisfaction from its very recognition of their transience and emptiness (OGT, 141). “For all wisdom of the melancholic hearkens to the deep”, Benjamin claims: “it is won from immersion in the life of creaturely things, and nothing of the voice of revelation reaches it. Everything to do with Saturn points into the depths of the earth…” (OGT, 157).

To grasp how the form of these works are determined by their truth content requires a reconstruction of the baroque concept of the allegorical which structures its mood of melancholic contemplativeness. Benjamin’s claim is that a genuine understanding of the allegorical as it emerged in its highest form in the 17th century has been obscured by, on the one hand, the later Romantic aestheticizing of the symbol and, on the other, by the tendency to conceive the allegorical negatively in its contrast with this devalued, aesthetic concept. It is only by first recovering a genuine theological concept of the symbol, therefore, that we are able in turn to distinguish an authentic concept of the allegorical. This it to be done by reasserting the profound but paradoxical theological unity between the material and the transcendental found in the symbolic. The fundamental distinction between theological concepts of symbol and the allegory will then be seen as concerning not their differing objects (Idea vs. abstract concept), but the differing ways in which they signify, express or represent this object. Benjamin will conclude that this difference is, specifically, a temporal one. 

Drawing on undeveloped insights found in the work of the mythographers Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Joseph von Görres, Benjamin points out how “the temporal measure for the experience of the symbol[ Symbolerfahrung ] is the mystical instant [ Nu ]” (OGT, 173). We must understand the temporality of the allegorical, in contrast, as something dynamic, mobile, and fluid. This authentic concept of allegory arises in the 17th century baroque as a response to the antithesis between mediaeval religiosity and Renaissance secularization discussed earlier. The spatialization of the temporal structure of eschatology in the allegorical corresponds to the naturalization of the religious structure of history in the baroque: “Whereas in the symbol, with the sublimation of downfall, the transfigured countenance of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light of salvation, in allegory there lies before the eyes of the observer the facies hippocratica [lit. ‘Hippocratic face’ = the sunken, hollow and pinched features exhibited by the dying] of history as petrified primal landscape. History, in everything untimely, sorrowful, and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in a face—no, in a death’s head [ Totenkopfe ]” (OGT, 174).

From the perspective of the allegorical, the instantaneous transformation within the symbolic becomes a natural history slowed to such an extreme that every sign appears frozen and—seemingly loosened from every other relationship—arbitrary. The concrete corporeality of the written script exemplifies this allegorical emphasis upon things. Allegory is not the conventional representation of some expression, as misunderstood by later critics, but an expression of convention [ Ausdruck der Konvention ] (OGT, 185). Allegorical expression includes as its object this very conventionality of the historical, this appearance of insignificance and indifference. That is, convention itself comes to be signified or expressed. What Benjamin rediscovers in the allegorical is, then, something akin to the concept of the expressionless, as the torso of a symbol, introduced in the essay on Goethe. Benjamin argues that this predominance of the allegorical viewpoint in the 17th century baroque finds it most dramatic expression in the mourning-play, and that consequently the Idea of the mourning-play must be grasped via the allegorical.

The Erkenntniskritische Vorrede or ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to the work may be understood as having  two central functions: it provides a direct methodological justification for the theory of criticism being utilised in the work, by way of a problematization of existing disciplinary approaches, and it implicitly recovers a concept of allegorical experience which is delineated  in the second part of the thesis in terms amenable for modernity. At the level of methodology, Benjamin advocates the necessity of a transdisciplinary approach (Osborne 2011, 24) to artworks, capable of critically overcoming the epistemological and historical limitations of the existing disciplines of the philosophy of art and the history of art (specifically, literary history). This transdisciplinary aspect of Benjamin’s thesis may partially account for the difficulties in its reception at the University of Frankfurt, where the thesis was rejected by the departments of both philosophy and literature. Much of the theoretical discussion in the Prologue is concerned with correcting the methodological one-sidedness of each existing approach by way of the positive features of the other. In general, the philosophy of art correctly attends to the problem of essences, but remains hampered by its lack of any adequate historical consideration. Conversely, the history of art is preoccupied with historical lineage but has no adequate concept of essence. Yet it is not simply an amalgamation of aesthetics and history that is required, but their radical rethinking in accordance with first a historical concept of essence and second a philosophical concept of history. 

Broadly speaking, Benjamin’s theory of Ideas transposes the philosophical problem of metaphysical realism into the context of aesthetics. That is, it asks about the reality of aesthetic genres such as ‘tragedy’ or of artistic epochs such as the ‘Renaissance’ that classify a group of particular works according to a set of common characteristics. The Prologue criticises existing traditions of aesthetic nominalism for their inadequate resolution of the problem. The uncritical use of inductive methods demonstrated by literary historians rejects the hypostatization of terms such as “Renaissance” on the grounds that it promotes a false identity between similar empirical features, which obscures their diversity. This aversion to any realism of constitutive Ideas is grounded on the positivist criterion of factual verification. A term like the “Renaissance” is consequently utilised by them only on the proviso that it is understood as merely an abstract general concept. This quickly leads to scepticism, however, since its still fails to address the problematic criteria by which this general concept is initially picked out and abstracted from the multiplicity of particulars or on what grounds these particulars are grouped together. Consequently, it fails to appreciate the necessity of the Platonic postulation of Ideas for the representation of essences: whilst concepts seek to make the similar identical, Ideas are necessary to effect a dialectical synthesis between phenomenal extremes (OGT, 18–19). In contrast, philosophers of art possess a concern with the essential that ends up renouncing any notion of generic forms, on the grounds that the singular originality of every single work entails the only possible essential genre must be the universal and individual one of art itself. The error—as Benjamin had previously charged the Early German Romantics, discussed above—is to dissolve real and important aesthetic structures or forms into an undifferentiated unity (of art), which denies their irreducible multiplicity (OGT, 21–23).

The theory of Ideas presented in the Prologue is truncated and difficult to understand outside the context of Benjamin’s earlier works, and the philosophical tradition that it engages with is further obscured in the first English translation. However, the critical aspects of Benjamin’s investigation advocate—against aesthetic versions of positivist empiricism—a metaphysical realism, and, against certain versions of philosophical idealism, a non-singular essentialism. That is, he does not restrict the possibility of metaphysical reality only to actual empirical particulars and he advocates the multiplicity and not singularity of the essence (understood, in Goethean terms, as a harmony and not a unity of truth). In doing so, he must address that  ‘theological’ paradox, mentioned in the discussion of symbol and allegory, of how the transcendental/supersensuous appears immanently within the material/sensuous. Benjamin is clear that the relation between Ideas and phenomenon is neither one of Aristotelian ‘containment’ nor one of Kantian lawfulness or hypothesis. Ideas are not given to some intellectual intuition, but they are capable of being sensuously represented. Such a sensuous representation of the truth remains the task of philosophy.

Benjamin’s theoretical elaboration proceeds by startling imagistic reconfigurations of pre-existing elements within the philosophical tradition. He offers a number of possibilities for thinking such Ideas in the Prologue, taken from the realm not only of philosophy but of aesthetics, theology and science. The first is the Platonic Idea, here divorced from its association with the scientific ascent to some purely rational, objective knowledge (such as appears in the account of dialectic in the Republic ) and instead linked to the discussion of beautiful semblance in the Symposium (OGT, 6). The second is that of the Adamic Name, as developed in his earlier theory of language. In this context, he comments that the Early German Romantics were frustrated in their attempt to renew the theory of Ideas because truth took on the character of reflective consciousness for them, rather than that intentionless, linguistic character in which things were subsumed under essential Names by Adam’s primal-interrogation [ urvernehmen ] (OGT, 15). Naming is the primal history [ Urgeschicte ] of signifying, indicating a thing-like disinterest which contrasts with the directed, unifying intentionality of Husserlian phenomenology (OGT, 14). The third is the Goethean Ideal, which is recalled here in the context of the Faustian “Mothers” and which implicitly gestures towards his earlier discussions of Goethe (OGT, 11). Finally, and most famously, Benjamin compares the virtual objectivity of the Idea represented through the reconfiguring of actual phenomena to an astrological constellation, which simultaneously groups together and is revealed by the cluster of individual stars (OGT, 11). Truth is said to be “actualized in the round dance of presented Ideas [ vergegenwärtigt im Reigen der dargestellen Ideen ]” (OGT, 4). This concept of the constellation is taken up directly in Adorno’s inaugural lecture ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, where he speaks of ‘the manipulation of conceptual material by philosophy…of grouping and trial arrangement, of constellation and construction’ (Adorno 1931, 131). It comes to inform Benjamin’s philosophical practice in his major writings from this point onwards, from One-Way Street (1928), via the methodological demand for the construction of history and the attendant theory of the dialectical image in his work related to the “Arcades Project” in the 1930s, through to the concept of history presented in his celebrated late essay, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). 

Benjamin’s concern to reincorporate the perspective of art’s temporal transformation demands an analogous radicalization. The “genetic and concrete classification” (OGT, 24) that Benedetto Croce called history (in order to distinguish it from that generalizing thought that abstracts away from change and development) must now be reconciled with Benjamin’s theory of Ideas. For the messianic philosophy of history that grounds Benjamin’s work problematizes existing formulations of the concepts of history and historical origin. In line with his discussion of the Idea, the concept of historical origin should not be reduced to the causality and actuality of the empirically factual, nor should it be regarded as a purely logical and timeless essence. It is not merely, Benjamin argues, “the coming-to-be of what has originated ” and cannot be recognized in “the naked, manifest existence of the factual” (OGT, 24). For the ‘historical’ sequence that permits the Idea to be represented must include not only that of the actual phenomena of a given period, but also that of their subsequent development in the understanding of later epochs. An investigation of the essence of the German mourning-play, for example, cannot restrict itself to contemporaneous events and actual plays as if these were ‘facts’ settled and decided once and for all, but must also investigate the changing understanding of this historical epoch and the varying reception of these plays, including the prior conditions of its own self-understanding. But nor is it a “purely logical” category, as if the Idea were some essence detached from and unrelated to history, to be grasped through an abstraction from all these particular historical developments (OGT, 25). Origin [ Ursprung ] is therefore distinguished from a merely genetic coming-into-being [ Enstehung ] and evolutionary development of ‘pure history’, to include the essential inner history of the “life of the works and forms” (OGT, 24–6). The “science of the Origin” is a philosophical history, a history of the essential, whose contemplation enlists a dialectical perspective to grasp the form of the “original phenomenon”: as something subject to a process of becoming and disappearing, and therefore only partial and incomplete. Benjamin once again resorts to an image: “The origin stands as eddy in the stream of becoming and vigorously draws the emerging material into its rhythm” (OGT, 24). Criticism attempts to virtually reassemble the fore- and after-history [ Vor- und Nachgeschichte ] of the phenomena into a historical constellation, in which the Idea is represented and the phenomena redeemed. This is its messianic function in relation to the historical Absolute. 

The Prologue also seeks to rescue the allegorical experience recognised in the mourning-plays for a modern theory of criticism. Allegorical contemplation aims at the ruination of things so that it can, in its redemptive moment, construct [ baun ] a new whole out of the elements of the old. The character of this construction distinguishes it from the creative invention of fantasy, since it manipulates and rearranges pre-existing material. To leave an imprint or impression of this construction [ Konstruktion ] is one of its aims. This dual emphasis upon destruction and construction has led a number of scholars to see an anticipation of Derridean deconstruction in Benjamin’s work (Fischer 1996, Section 1: Modernity/Postmodernity; Weber 2008, 122–128), although it should be noted that his consideration of the specific historicity of this concept of criticism and his insistence of the immanent truth content of artworks remains resolutely modernist, and cannot be easily assimilated into any ‘postmodernist’ position (cf. Weigel 1996, xiv). The underlying affinity between romanticism and the baroque lies in their shared modernist concern with correcting classicism in art and the quasi-mythical perspective of classicism in general (OGT, 230; 185). The Prologue reflects upon this ‘modernity’ of the baroque when it notes how the “Striking analogies to the current state of German literature have repeatedly given rise to …immersion in the Baroque” (OGT, 36). Although Benjamin is citing the similarities between Expressionism in modern literature and the Mannerist exaggeration of the baroque, his own reconstruction of allegorical experience and its value for aesthetic theory is experienced according to a historical conjunction between the baroque past and the modernity of Benjamin’s present: modernity both reveals and is revealed in the baroque. 

The book on mourning-plays concluded Benjamin’s German “cycle of production” (C, 322). At the beginning of the 1920s Benjamin became immersed in what was planned as a large-scale study of political thought, of which only a few fragments and the ‘Critique of Violence’ remain (Steiner 2001, 61). As Uwe Steiner notes, while Benjamin’s political thought may be situated in the milieu of Expressionist Nietzsche-reception, the centrality that the realization of happiness occupies in his definition of politics as “the satisfaction of unenhanced humanness” is constructed in direct opposition to Zarathustra’s tragic heroism (Steiner 2001, 49–50, 61–62). This marks both a continuity with and a break from what Irving Wohlfarth has called his earlier “politics of Youth” (Wohlfarth 1992, 164), which drew heavily on a philosophy of history and culture influenced by Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations . Benjamin remarked that his break from the Youth Movement did not constitute the abandonment of this earlier thought, however, but its submergence into a ‘harder, purer, more invisible radicalism’ (C, 74). This in part accounts for what T. J. Clark describes as the “cryptic” character of - what Adorno termed (SW 4, 101-2) - the anthropological materialism of The Arcades Project , where, Clark comments, it is “as if such a politics were being actively aired and developed elsewhere” (Clark 2003, 45–46).

A new cycle was initiated with One-Way Street ( Einbahnstraße ), written 1923–6, published 1928), whose form and content puts into practice that speculative concept of experience, with its allegorical immersion into the depths of things, which was theoretically articulated in the works considered above. The city furnishes the sensuous, imagistic material for One-Way Street , whilst the genres of the leaflet, placard and advertisement provide the constructive principle by which it is rearranged as a constellation. This formal methodology resembles the technological media of photography and film, as well as the avant-garde practices of Russian Constructivism and French Surrealism. This entails what Adorno describes as a “philosophy directed against philosophy” (Adorno 1955, 235) or what Howard Caygill calls a “philosophizing beyond philosophy” (Caygill 1989, 119).

The presentation of contemporary capitalism as metropolitan modernity in One-Way Street also marks the turning point in Benjamin’s writings, away from what he retrospectively called “an archaic form of philosophizing naively caught up in nature” (BA, 88) towards the development of “a political view of the past” (SW 2, 210). The theory of experience outlined in his early writings is enlisted for revolutionary ends. In the essay, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), Surrealist experience provides an example of a “profane illumination”, which in contrast to the sacred and moralistic kind found in religion was guided by a political and a “materialistic, anthropological inspiration” (SW 2, 209). The latent energy residing in the most destitute and outmoded of things is, through the construction of new political constellations, transformed into an intoxicating, revolutionary experience (SW 2, 210). The possibility of such a profane illumination of nineteenth century Paris, to be presented as the origin of modernity, preoccupied the remaining decade of Benjamin’s life, and his research for the monumental and unfinished “Arcades Project” provides the material from which all his remaining work is constructed.

The city was the seedbed of Benjamin’s ‘gothic’ Marxism (Cohen 1993); Paris its testing ground. All of Benjamin’s writings from the autumn of 1927 until his death in 1940 relate in one way or other to his great unfinished study ‘Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, otherwise known as The Arcades Project ( Das Passagen-Werk ), after its founding image, taken by Benjamin from the 1926 novel, Le Paysan de Paris , by the French surrealist Louis Aragon. This was a book of which Benjamin wrote: “I could never read more than two or three pages in bed at night before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to lay the book aside.” (BA, 88) The arcades would become just one of five or six archetypal images of the psychosocial space of 19th-century Paris around which the project was organized—each paired with a particular, thematically representative individual. But it provided the model for the others, and its surrealist origin and liminal utopian impulse, neither quite inside nor out, established the wish-image and the dream-image—on the threshold of sleeping and waking—at the heart of a work that was initially conceived as a kind of ‘dialectical fairytale’. (The figure with whom ‘the arcades’ was paired was the utopian socialist Charles Fourier.) All of Benjamin’s major essays of the 1930s derived their impetus and orientation from his Arcades work, and served to defer its completion in the act of elaborating its elements. 

This deferral was also, in part, the result of a process of maturation—a kind of ripening—immanent to the work itself. The Arcades was a vast and ambitious project, not simply in terms of the mass and breadth of its archival sources (sought out by Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris), but also—indeed, primarily—with respect to its philosophical and historical intent, and the methodological and representational challenges it posed. Its sprawling, yet minutely investigated historical object was to act as the point of entry into the philosophically comprehended experience of metropolitan capitalism—not some past experience, or the experience of a past phase of capitalist development, but the experience of the capitalist metropolis in Benjamin’s own day—through the construction of a specific series of relations between its elements ‘then’ and ‘now’. The practice of research, conceptual organization and presentation that it involved was self-consciously conceived as a working model for a new, philosophically oriented, materialist historiography with political intent. Its final, fragmentary and ‘ruined’ status has come to stand not simply as the sign of a failure of completion, but as a paradigm of a form of constitutive incompletion that is characteristic of all systematically oriented knowledge under the conditions of modernity. In this respect, in its very failure to be actualized, it confirmed the fundamental historical and philosophical truth of Benjamin’s earlier analysis of the Romantic fragment—extending the genre in a hitherto unimagined way.

In the ebb and flow of its changing rhythms—additions, revisions, reformulations and retrievals—Benjamin’s Arcades Project provides an extraordinary case study in the labour of conceptual construction via the configuration and reconfiguration of archival materials. The voluminous ‘Notes and Materials’ that make up the Arcades as it has come down to us remained unpublished until 1982, finally appearing in English only in 1999 (GS V; AP). Only since their publication has it been possible to get a clear sense of the overall trajectory of Benjamin’s thought during this period—rendering redundant, or at least displacing, many of the polemics associated with previous cycles of reception. The notes and materials are organized into twenty-six alphabetically designated ‘convolutes’ (literally ‘bundles’) or folders, thematically defined by various objects (arcades, catacombs, barricades, iron constructions, mirrors, modes of lighting…), topics (fashion, boredom, theory of knowledge, theory of progress, painting, conspiracies…), figures (the collector, the flaneur, the automaton…), authors (Baudelaire, Fourier, Jung, Marx, Saint-Simon…) and their combinations. The project as a whole received two ‘exposés’ or summaries, in 1935 and 1939 (the second, in French). However, its scope and theoretical ambition—nothing less than a philosophical construction of “the primal history of the nineteenth century” (BA, 90)—joined with the circumstances of Benjamin’s life in exile (the constant need to earn money by writing and the uncertainty of a publisher for the project) to frustrate its realization. The only lengthy segment of completed text derives from the part devoted to Baudelaire (one of five parts in the 1939 exposé, cut down from six in the initial 1935 version): the second of its three projected sections, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’—although even this was never published in Benjamin’s lifetime. However, the central chapter of this section, ‘The Flaneur’, was revised and expanded (in part, in response to an exchange of letters with Adorno) into the essay ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, which was published in the Institute’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ( Journal for Social Research ) in January 1940. A powerful compressed draft of material corresponding to the final section, on the commodity as a poetic object, exists as ‘Central Park’ (SW 4, 161–199). As the project evolved, and in response to the barriers to its realization, Baudelaire thus became increasingly central to Benjamin’s thinking. (‘Convolute J’, on Baudelaire, is by far the longest of the convolutes.) Encouraged by Horkheimer, Benjamin planned to publish the material on Baudelaire as a separate book, to be entitled, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism . The development of this process, whereby a primal history of the nineteenth century gradually morphed into a book on Baudelaire and ‘high capitalism’, may be represented, diagrammatically, as follows.

PARIS—CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1939 Exposé)
A.	Fourier, or the Arcades
(+)	[Daguerre, or the Panorama—only in the 1935 version]
B.	Grandville, or the World Exhibitions
C.	Louis Philippe, or the Interior
D.	Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris ↳ 1. [Baudelaire as Allegorist] 2. The Paris of the 2nd Empire in Baudelaire i. The Bohème ii. The Flaneur* iii. The Modern * Expanded and published as ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940) ** In draft form as ‘Central Park’ (1938) However, to reduce the project to its own, restricted de facto trajectory, rich as it is, does too much violence to the historical and philosophical framework it embodies, from which the material on Baudelaire gains its broader significance. The overarching historical framework is that of capitalist modernity as a ‘crisis of experience’. (The two terms, capitalism and modernity, are inextricable for Benjamin in the context of 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.) The founding problematic of Benjamin’s thought—the expansion of the Kantian concept of experience, to infinity—is thus here provided with a concretely historical context, in which the notion of infinity/absoluteness becomes associated with the concept of history itself. The problem: to dialectically redeem the concept of experience [ Erfahrung ] by finding an appropriate way of experiencing the crisis of experience itself. In classically ‘modern’ terms, the present is defined as a time of crisis and transition, and philosophical experience (truth) is associated with the glimpse within the present, via the past, of a utopian political future that would bring history to an end. More immediately, the crisis is given political meaning by two possible resolutions: the one destructive; the other constructive/ emancipatory—fascism and communism, respectively. In this respect, for all his theoretical heterodoxy as a ‘Marxist’ and his philosophical affinities with Adorno, Benjamin was in search of, and in solidarity with, new forms of collectivity connected to a communist future. Herein lay the basis of his friendship with Brecht. Unlike Brecht, however, he conceived them within the terms of a speculative cultural history (Caygill 2004). Within this framework, three distinct strands of work (discussed in the next three sections) can be discerned: (1) investigation of the crisis of experience via the ‘crisis of the arts’ (SW  2, 212) through the interrelated terms of technology/technique [ Technik ], aura , reproducibility , and collectivity ; (2) philosophical distillation of the formal structure of the experience of the new, and its historical and political contradictions, out of its social forms, and the examination of its relations to allegory and commodity-form; (3) construction of a new historiography and a new philosophical concept of history. The first may be traced through a linked series of essays of which ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935–9) and ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) are the most important. The second is concentrated in readings of Baudelaire and related texts by Nietzsche and Blanqui. (The focusing-in on these three thinkers is a focusing-in on the relationship of capitalism to modernity in its purest, nihilistic form). The third is conjured from a reflective conjunction of Marx, Nietzsche and Surrealism. It takes methodological form in ‘Convolute N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’ in The Arcades Project and achieved its accidentally definitive presentation in Benjamin’s most frequently cited, but still fiercely interpretatively disputed text (Caygill 2004; Löwy 2005; Tiedemman 1989; Wohlfarth 1978): the fragments—known as theses—‘On the Concept of History’. That Benjamin approached the symptomatic significance of the ‘crisis of the arts’ for the ‘crisis of experience’ through the concept of Technik attests to the fundamentally Marxist character of his conception of historical development. It is the development of the forces of production that is the motor of history. However, Benjamin was no more orthodox a Marxist about technology than he was with regard to the concept of progress, the Marxist version of which the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) grounded upon it (see Section 8, below). Not only did he recognize the potential for a “bloodbath” in a technology subjected to “the lust for profit” (SW  1, 487)—amply demonstrated in the horrors of the First World War—but he came to distinguish between a ‘first’ and a ‘second’, potentially liberatory technology, the latter making possible “a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation” (SW 3, 107; 113). It appears, in places, as the basis for a kind of ‘technological cosmopolitics’ or politics of a ‘new collective technoid body’ (Caygill 2005, 225; Leslie 2000, 153, in Osborne 2005, II: 391). The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology [ Technik ]. But …technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and humanity. …In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations [ Völkern ] and families. (SW 1, 487, translation amended) The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto . (SW 2, 217–8) These passages, from the concluding sections of One-Way Street and the ‘Surrealism’ essay, respectively, convey something of the ecstatic character of Benjamin’s political thought at the outset of the 1930s, in which technology appears on a political knife-edge between its possibilities as “a fetish of doom” and “a key to happiness” (SW 2, 321). Art—an art of the masses—appears within this scenario as the educative mechanism through which the body of the collective can begin to appropriate its own technological potential. The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay. This applies especially to film. The function of film is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily . Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity’s whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free. (SW 3, 107–8) In his footnote to this passage from the second version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (‘ Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit ’, 1936), Benjamin refers us to the ‘phalansteries’, the “self-contained agrarian collectives” of Fourier’s socialist utopia. In the Fourier convolute of the Arcades Project , these are compared to the two main articles of Benjamin’s politics: “the idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective… and the idea of the ‘cracking open of natural teleology’” (AP, [W7, 4], 631). For Benjamin, art, in the form of film—the “unfolding <result> of all the forms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in today’s machines”—thus harboured the possibility of becoming a kind of rehearsal of the revolution. “[A]ll problems of contemporary art”, Benjamin insisted, “find their definitive formulation only in the context of film” (AP, [K3, 3], 394). In this respect, it was the combination of the communist pedagogy and constructive devices of Brecht’s epic theatre that marked it out for him as a theatre for the age of film (UB, 1–25; Wizisla 2009). Benjamin’s writings on film are justly renowned for their twin theses of the transformation of the concept of art by its ‘technical reproducibility’ and the new possibilities for collective experience this contains, in the wake of the historical decline of the ‘aura’ of the work of art, a process that film is presented as definitively concluding. Much ink has been spilt debating the thesis of the decline of the aura in Benjamin’s work. On the one hand, with regard to some of his writings, Benjamin’s concept of aura has been accused of fostering a nostalgic, purely negative sense of modernity as loss—loss of unity both with nature and in community (A. Benjamin 1989). On the other hand, in the work on film, Benjamin appears to adopt an affirmative technological modernism, which celebrates the consequences of the decline. Adorno, for one, felt betrayed by the latter position. He wrote to Benjamin on 18 March 1936: In your earlier writings… you distinguished the idea of the work of art as a structure from the symbol of theology on the one hand, and from the taboo of magic on the other. I now find it somewhat disturbing —and here I can see a sublimated remnant of certain Brechtian themes—that you have now rather casually transferred the concept of the magical aura to the ‘autonomous work of work’ and flatly assigned a counter-revolutionary function to the latter. (BA, 128) Brecht himself, meanwhile, was appalled by even the residually negative function of the aura, recording his response in his Workbook : “it is all mysticism mysticism, in a posture opposed to mysticism. … it is rather ghastly” (cited in Buck-Morss 1977, 149). Yet Adorno did not defend ‘auratic art’ as such. (His defence of autonomous art was grounded on the experience derived from following the ‘autonomous’ technical development of laws of form.) Clearly, the concept of the aura plays a number of different roles in Benjamin’s writings, in his various attempts to grasp his historical present in terms of the possibilities for ‘experience’ afforded by its new cultural forms; which he increasingly came to identify (some say precipitously) with revolutionary political potential. Yet Adorno was wrong to see a simple change of position, rather than a complex series of inflections of what was a generally consistent historical account. Benjamin had written affirmatively of “the emancipation of object from aura” as early as 1931, in his ‘Little History of Photography’, in which he described Atget’s photographs as “suck[ing] the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship” (SW 2, 518). It is here that we find the basic definition of aura: “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.” Importantly, the examples given with this definition are from nature: mountains and a branch observed “at rest on a summer’s noon … until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance…”. The ‘destruction’ of the aura by transience and reproducibility is judged “a salutary estrangement” (SW 2, 518–9). Similarly, when ‘The Storyteller’ recounts the “dying out of the art of storytelling” and “the incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller”, it is nonetheless maintained: “nothing could be more fatuous than to wish to see it as merely a ‘symptom of decay’, let alone a ‘modern symptom’. It is rather, only a concomitant of the secular productive forces of history…” (SW 3, 146; 162). ‘The Work of Art’ essay extends and enriches the earlier account of photography’s technological transformation of perception (“the optical unconscious”) with reference to film. The difference resides in the insistent political dimension of the later essay (after Hitler’s taking of power in 1933), and its determination to introduce concepts “that are completely useless for the purposes of fascism” (SW 3, 102). The main problem with the auratic (which is deemed historically residual, not eliminated, indeed is perhaps ineliminable [Didi-Huberman 2004]) was that, Benjamin believed, it was precisely “useful for fascism”. This context over-determines the essay throughout, with its almost Manichean oppositions between ritual and politics, cult value and exhibition value. Quite apart from the intervening technological and social developments, it makes it a very difficult text simply to ‘use’ today. For some, however, it is precisely the connection it draws between a certain kind of mass culture and fascism that provides its continuing relevance (Buck-Morss 1992). Benjamin’s thinking of ‘the modern’ [ die Moderne ] is his most important theoretical contribution to the historical study of cultural forms. Frequently mistranslated in early English-language editions of his writings as ‘modernism’, and still often rendered as ‘modernity’ (although Benjamin tended to retain Baudelaire’s coinage, la modernité , when making that reference), die Moderne designates both a formal temporal structure and the diverse range of its historical instances—past and present. Baudelaire is the main writer through whom Benjamin thought ‘the modern’; not as might be expected, with reference to the canonical account of modernité in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859/60), but with regard to what Benjamin called the ‘theory’ of the modern first set down in ‘The Salon of 1845’: “the advent of the true new (die Heraufkunft des wahrhaft Neunen)” (SW 4, 45–6, translation amended; GS 1.2, 580).  In Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter’ essay, modernité famously denotes ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’. It is associated with transitoriness as the generalized social instantiation of the temporality of the modern, in the capitalist metropolis. In contrast to transitoriness as such, however, Benjamin was first and foremost (politically and philosophically) interested in ‘the new’, in its ‘advent’ or historical becoming, and in its quality as newness or novelty (the newness of the new), in a way that was conceptually distinct from the conventional opposition of the ‘modern’ to the ‘ancient’—which Baudelaire notoriously retained. As a result, Benjamin was consequently also interested in what the German sociologist Max Weber would have called its ‘routinization’ (although Benjamin did not use this vocabulary): the routinization accompanying the generalization of the new as a mode of experience—in fashion and boredom, in particular—and the formal structure of sameness involved in its repetition. It is here that transitoriness enters the picture—as a result of the generalization of novelty. Baudelaire self-consciously embraced modernity with ‘heroic effort’, attempting, like the painter of modern life, to ‘extract its epic aspects’ and ‘distill the eternal from the transitory’; Benjamin, on the other hand, sought to understand it in order to find a way out of what he called its ‘hell’. He picked up on the relationship of the transitory to the eternal in Baudelaire’s account of modernity, but first, he de-classicized the notion of the ‘eternal’, refiguring it philosophically, and second, he rendered the relationship itself strictly dialectical: in the modern, it is transitoriness itself that is eternalized. Thus, Benjamin did not so much take over and update Baudelaire’s portrayal of modernity as read it ‘symptomatically’ (in Louis Althusser’s sense), or more precisely, allegorically, in order to uncover beneath it the experience of the transformation of historical time by the commodity form . Baudelaire was able to grasp this experience, according to Benjamin, through the contradictory historical temporality that structured his work: at once resolutely modern yet, in its poetic form (lyric), already anachronistic. Benjamin similarly valued the disjunctive historical temporality of Kafka’s fables: their status as parables after the ‘end of storytelling’. But whereas Kafka was for Benjamin “the figure of a failure” (BS, 226)—the inevitable failure of an attempt to translate the experience [ Erlebnis ] of modernity into the language of tradition (Judaism)—Baudelaire’s poetry was able to convey the intensity of the experience of modernity through the very tension between that experience and his chosen, lyrical means; not merely negatively (like Kafka), but via the way in which modernity transformed those means. In particular, the lyric allowed Baudelaire to register the full effect of the temporality of the modern on the dissolution of subjectivity, and the fact that it consequently “takes a heroic constitution to live the modern [ die Moderne ]” (SW 4, 44, translation amended; GS 1.2, 577). The extraction of the metropolitan ‘motifs’ for which Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire is justly famous—the bohemian, the flaneur, the prostitute, the gambler, the ragpicker—are the figures via which this structure of experience appears. Primary within Baudelaire, they are nonetheless methodologically secondary for Benjamin, as he explained to Adorno: “I only have to insert [them] in the appropriate place” (BA, 90). Baudelaire had found a method—what he called ‘correspondences’—which reflectively incorporated the anachronism of the lyric form into his work. Benjamin appropriated this method, with its dissociated ‘ritual elements’ (SW 4, 333), to read Baudelaire himself. In the essay ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, correspondences of temporal structure, experienced as ‘shock’, link the machine, the film, the crowd, and the game of chance: What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film. … The shock experience [ Chockerlebnis ] which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated ‘experiences’ of the worker at his machine. … The jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called coup in a game of chance…. (SW 4, 328–30) A single repetitive and dissociated formal temporal structure is detected beneath the rich array of phenomenological forms presented in Baudelaire’s poetry: “the price for which the sensation of the modern could be had: the disintegration of the aura in shock experience”. (SW 4, 343, translation amended; GS 1.2, 653) Furthermore, this interpretative key, the experience of shock, is itself understood through a series of theoretical correspondences within Benjamin’s own present; primarily, that between Proust’s ‘involuntary memory’ and Freud’s theory of consciousness. This theoretical correspondence is read in the light of the ‘shell shock’ first diagnosed during the First World War, about which Benjamin had previously written in his reflections on Ernst Junger in his 1930 review essay, ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (SW 2, 312–321). The connection of the modern to fascism does not appear solely through the thematic of the false restoration of the aura, but also within the process of its disintegration by shock. (Structurally, the shock of the crowd is ‘like’ shell shock.) Baudelaire is thus not merely the privileged writer for the advent of the theory of the modern, but the one in whose work the nineteenth century appears most clearly as the fore-life of the present. However, if it was through Baudelaire that Benjamin grasped the structure of the temporality of the ‘modern’, it was through Nietzsche and Blanqui that he explored its ambiguous historical meaning, via the way in which their philosophies reflect the transformation of the new by the commodity into the ‘ever selfsame’. “Just as in the seventeenth century it is allegory that becomes the canon of dialectical images, in the nineteenth century it is novelty” (AP, 11):  “The commodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode of apprehension.” (SW 4, 188) It is the fragment ‘Central Park’ that most clearly reveals the consequences of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire for his concept of history: the modern completely transforms the possibilities for the experience of history. On the one hand, it de-historicizes experience, wresting it away from the temporal continuities of tradition. On the other hand, a messianic structure—an opening of history to something outside of time—reasserts itself within the still life [ nature mort ] of modernity’s restless sameness. This is Benjamin’s famous ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Tiedemann, 1982). It transforms the historical naturalism of the baroque, analyzed in the Origin of the German Mourning-Play (Section 4, above), in a futural direction. In particular, it involves a prioritization of the interruptive stasis of the image over the continuity of temporal succession. In fact, Benjamin maintained: “The concept of historical time forms an antithesis to the idea of a temporal continuum” (SW 4, 407).] Debate over Benjamin’s conception of history was for many years preoccupied with the question of whether it is essentially ‘theological’ or ‘materialist’ in character (or how it could possibly be both at once), occasioned by the conjunction of Benjamin’s self-identification with historical materialism and his continued use of explicitly messianic motifs (Wolhfarth 1978; Tiedemann 1983–4). This was in large part the polemical legacy of the competing influence of three friendships—with Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht—applied to the interpretation of Benjamin’s final text, the fragments ‘On the Concept of History’ (‘ Über den Begriff der Geschichte ’, popularly known as the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’). Scholem promoted a theological interpretation, Brecht inspired a materialist one, while Adorno attempted to forge some form of compatibility between the two. Yet the question is badly posed if it is framed within received concepts of ‘theology’ and ‘materialism’ (the paradox becomes self-sustaining), since it was Benjamin’s aim radically to rethink the meaning of these ideas, on the basis of a new philosophy of historical time. This new philosophy of historical time is the ultimate goal of Benjamin’s later writings. It appears most explicitly, under construction, in ‘Convolute N’ of The Arcades Project , ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’; it is applied to art history in the 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuch, Collector and Historian’; and is manifest in a condensed, rhetorically political and problematic form in ‘On the Concept of History’. It derives from a dual critique of the ‘vulgar naturalism’ of historicism and the deferral of action involved in the associated Social Democratic concept of progress (Kittsteiner 1986). It gives rise to a conception of historical intelligibility based on ‘literary montage’ as the method of construction of ‘dialectical images’ (AP, 460–1). And it culminates in a quasi-messianic conception of revolution as an ‘interruption’ of history or an ‘arrest of happening’: “Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achieved interruption” (SW 4, 402). Benjamin took as one of the main ‘methodological objectives’ of his Arcades Project “to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress”, taking as its “founding concept… not progress but actualization”  (AP, [N2, 2], 460). He had both philosophical and political reasons for this. Philosophically, Benjamin saw the conventional idea of progress as projecting into the future a conception of time as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty’ epitomized by the attempt of Ranke’s historicism to represent the past “the way it really was” (SW4, 395; 391). This is a conception of time based on the temporal continuity of past, present and future, ‘in’ which events occur and are understood as causally connected. It is naturalistic in so far as it acknowledges no fundamental temporal-ontological distinction between past, present and future time; it has no sense of time as the ongoing production of temporal differentiation. Time is differentiated solely by the differences between the events that occur within it. In particular, it fails to grasp that historical time (the time of human life) is constituted through such immanent differentiations, via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action. In this respect, there are affinities between Benjamin’s philosophy of time and Heidegger’s (Caygill, 1994). The political consequence of the temporal naturalism underlying the idea of ‘progress’ is conformism. For Benjamin, paradoxically, this applied in particular to the German Social Democrats’ understanding of communism as an ideal , in the neo-Kantian ethical sense of the object of an ‘endless task’: Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. (SW 4, 402) In other words, the concept of progress is demobilizing; and Marxism had become infected by the ideology of progress. However, rather than positing an existential alternative, in the manner of Heidegger’s ‘resolute decision’, Benjamin set out to construct novel conceptions of historical time and historical intelligibility based on the relationship, not between the past and the present, but between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’, as brought together in images of the past. Each historically specific ‘now’ was understood to correspond to (in a Baudelairean sense), or to render legible, a particular ‘then’. It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [ bildlich ]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical … (AP, [N3, 1], 463) The experimental method of montage, borrowed from surrealism, was to be the means of production of historical intelligibility. Furthermore, the ‘static’ temporality of the image was understood to connect such an experience of historical meaning, directly, to a radical or ‘revolutionary’ concept of action, associated with the idea of the present as crisis. The passage above continues: The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability [ das Bild im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeik ]—bears to the highest degree the  imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded. (AP, [N3, 1], 463) Such “perilous critical moments” are both immanent to the temporality of modernity, at a structural level (the temporality of crisis), and, in each particular case, contingent and conjuncturally specific. In them, the past is understood “to bring the present into a critical state”. However, this critical state is not a crisis of the status quo, but rather of its destruction: the critical moment is that in which “the status quo threatens to be preserved” (AP, [N10, 2], 474). Dialectical images counter the threat of preservation (tradition) by virtue of the interruptive force they are understood to impart to experience as a consequence of the instantaneous temporality of the now, or what Benjamin famously called now-time [ Jetztzeit ]: “The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash” (AP, [N9, 7], 473). It is this image of the image as a ‘flash’ [ ein aufblitzendes ] and the corresponding image of historical experience as the discharge of an explosive force—the explosive force of now-time, blasting open ‘the continuum of history’—for which Benjamin is probably best known. The philosophy of historical time which these images sum up was elaborated by him in two main contexts: the development of a new conception of cultural history and a political diagnosis of the historical crisis of Europe at the outset of the Second World War. Benjamin did not see culture as threatened by ‘barbarism’, so much as itself being implicated in it: Barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture—as the concept of a fund of values which is considered independent not, indeed, of the production process in which these values originated, but of the one in which they survive. In this way they serve the apotheosis of the latter, barbaric as it may be. (AP, [N5a, 7] 467–8) The concept of culture as the values of a heritage was for Benjamin ‘fetishistic’: “Culture appears reified.” Only an understanding of “the crucial importance of reception… enables us to correct the process of reification which takes place in a work of art” (SW 3, 267; 269). For Benjamin, however, reception—or what he called the ‘afterlife’ [ Nachleben ] of the work—was not merely something that happened to the work, externally; it was as constitutive of the work itself as its ‘fore-life’ [ Vorleben ], or conditions of production—which are themselves rendered invisible by the idea of culture as value, and are themselves “involved in a constant process of change” as the work itself changes. A materialist cultural history would restore to the experience of works a sense of both of these changing sets of conditions (before and after), and the conflicts between them, in an engagement “originary for every present”, since “[i]t is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and after-history”  (SW 3, 261–2; AP, [N7a, 8], 471). It is here, in an ontological rethinking of reception, that the philosophical significance of Benjamin’s interest in technologies of reproduction lies. With these concepts of fore- and afterlife, Benjamin founded a new problematic for cultural study. Benjamin was interested in ‘culture’ not as an autonomous realm of values (“the independent values of aesthetic, scientific, ethical… and even religious achievements”), but on the contrary, like the sociologist Georg Simmel, whose Philosophy of Money he cities in this regard, as “elements in the development of human nature” (Simmel, quoted in AP, [N14, 3], 480). In this respect, cultural study is situated within the field of a materialist philosophy of history. And the philosophy of history insists on a conception of history as a whole. It is here than the messianic structure of Benajmin’s concept of history confronts us as unavoidable; although not thereby necessarily ‘theological’, since it is the transition of a conceptual structure from one philosophical context into another that is at issue (Benjamin’s favorite surrealist method of ‘decontextualization’ and ‘defamiliarization’), not its meaning in its original theological context as such. In his search for a non-Hegelian, non-developmentalist conception of history as a whole, in ‘On the Concept of History’ Benjamin figured now-time, quasi-messianically, alternatively as a ‘model’ of messianic time and as “shot through with splinters of messianic time.” In the context of a diagnosis of the European crisis of 1939–40 as a world-historical crisis, the ‘critical state of the present’ thus came, in this text, to acquire a theological-political tenor. “A revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” is compared to “the sign of a messianic arrest of happening” (SW 4, 396–7). Benjamin was aware that this rhetoric would lead to misunderstanding. But the combination of perceived political urgency and isolation compelled him to extend his concept of history beyond the state of his philosophical research, experimentally, into an apparently definitive statement. It is as if Benjamin had hoped to overcome the aporia of action within his still essentially hermeneutical philosophy (Osborne 1995) through the force of language alone. Formally, however, ‘On the Concept of History’ should be read as a series of fragments, in the early Romantic sense. As such, it remains resolutely negative—and thereby importantly partial—in its evocation of the historical whole, which is acknowledged as unpresentable. In this respect, Benjamin’s final text recalls his earliest major publication, the 1919 thesis ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’: as a gesture towards the philosophy of history needed to complete a modified and ‘modernized’ version of the early Romantic project. Primary Literature The current standard German edition of Benjamin’s work remains Suhrkamp’s seven volume Gesammelte Schriften , edited by Tiedemann and Schweppenhauser, although a new Kritish Gesamtausgabe is currently being edited, also by Suhrkamp and projected at twenty-one volumes over the next decade. The standard English edition is Harvard University Press’ recent four volume Selected Writings , Early Writings , and The Arcades Project . A , trans. Esther Leslie, London: Verso, 2007. AP , trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA. & London: Belknap Press, 1999. BA Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, , ed. Henri  Lonitz, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. BC , trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, MA. & London: Belknap Press, 2006 BG Walter Benjamin and Gretel Adorno, , trans. Wieland Hoban, Cambridge: Polity, 2008. BS , ed. Gershom Scholem, Cambridge, MA.,: Harvard University Press, 1989. C , eds. Gershom Scholem & Theodor W. Adorno, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. EW , trans. Howard Eiland & Others, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. GB , 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995–2000. GS , 7 vols., eds. Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann Schweppenhauser, Frankfurt am  Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, Bd. I-VII, 1972-1989. KG , Bd. 1–21, eds. Momme Brodersen et. al., Frankfurt am  Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008–. MD , ed. Gary Smith, Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 1986. OGT , trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 2019. OWS , trans. J. A. Underwood, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009. RB , ed. Lecia Rosenthal, London: Verso, 2014. SW , 4 vols., ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA., & London: Harvard University Press, 1991–1999. UB , trans. Anna Bostock, London: Verso, 2003. Biographies in English  Eiland, H. and Jennings, M. W., Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life , Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Leslie, E., 2007, Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives , London: Reaktion Books. Brodersen, M., 1996, Walter Benjamin: A Biography , London & New York: Verso. Scholem, G., 1981, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship , New York: Review Books. Witte, B., 1991, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography , Detroit: Wayne University Press. Wizisla, E., 2009, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the Story of a Friendship , London: Libris. Selected English Anthologies Benjamin, A. (ed.), 1989, The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin , London: Routledge. ––– (ed.), 2005a, Walter Benjamin and Art ,  London & New York: Continuum. ––– (ed.), 2005b, Walter Benjamin and History , London & New York: Continuum. Benjamin, A. and Hanssen, B. (eds.), 2002, Walter Benjamin and Romanticism ,  London & New York: Continuum. Benjamin, A. and Osborne, P. (eds.), 1994/2000, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience , London & New York: Routledge/Manchester: Clinamen Press. Ferris, D. S. (ed.), 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, G. (ed.), 1996, With The Sharpened Axe of Reason: Approaches to Walter Benjamin , Oxford: Berg. Goebel, R. J. (ed.), 2009, A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin , Rochester & Woodbridge: Camden House. Hanssen, B. (ed.), 2006, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project , London & New York: Continuum. Hartoonian, G., (ed.), 2010, Walter Benjamin and Architecture , London & New York: Routledge. Osborne, P. (ed.), 2005, Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory , Volume I: Philosophy, Volume II: Modernity, Volume III: Appropriations, London & New York: Routledge. Smith, G. (ed.), 1988, On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections , Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT. ––– (ed.), 1989, Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History , Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Selected Secondary Literature Adorno, T. W., 1955, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms , Cambridge, MA.: MIT., 1983, pp. 227–242. –––, 1931, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120–133. Agamben, G., 2005, State of Exception , trans. K. Attell, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Ariella, A., 2007, ‘The Tradition of the Oppressed’, Qui Parle , 16 (2): 73–96. Asman, C. L., 1992, ‘Theatre and Agon/Agon and Theatre: Walter Benjamin and Florens Christian Rang’, MLN , 107(3): 606–624. Avelar, I., 2004, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics , New York & Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Benjamin, A., 1989, ‘Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin’s Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Benjamin, A. (ed.), 1989, pp. 122–140.  –––, 2013, Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bernsaïd, D., 1990, Walter Benjamin sentinelle messianique: À la gauche du possible , Paris: Plon. Bolle, W., 2009, ‘Paris on the Amazon? Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism’, in Goebel 2009, pp. 216–245. Brederkamp, H., 1999, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’, Critical Inquiry , 25(2): 247–266. Buck-Morss, S., 1977, The Origins of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute , Hassocks: Harvester Press. –––, 1989, The Dialectics of Seeing , Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT Press. –––, 1992, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October , 62: 3–41, reprinted in Osborne 2005, I: 291–331. Bullock, M. P., 1987, Romanticism and Marxism: The Philosophical Development of Literary Theory and Literary History in Walter Benjamin & Friedrich Schlegel , New York, Bern & Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Caygill, H., 1994, ‘Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition’, in Benjamin and Osborne 1994/2000, pp. 1–31. –––, 1998, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience , London: Routledge. –––, 2004, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,’ in Ferris 2004, pp. 73–96. –––, 2005, ‘Non-Messianic Political Theology in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”’, in Benjamin, A. 2005b, pp. 215–226. Charles, M., 2018, ‘Secret Signals from Another World: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Innervation’, New German Critique , 45(3): 39–72. –––, M. 2020, Modernism Between Benjamin and Goethe , London: Bloomsbury. Chisholm, D., 2009, ‘Benjamin’s Gender, Sex, and Eros’, in Goebel 2009, pp. 246–272. –––, 2005, Queer constellations: subcultural space in the wake of the city , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chow, R., 1989, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death’, New German Critique , 48: 63–86. Clark, T. J, 2003, ‘Should Benjamin Have Read Marx’, Boundary 2 30(1): 31–49; reprinted in Osborne 2005, III: 81–96. Cohen, M., 1993, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution , Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cowan, B., 1981, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, New German Critique , 22: 109–122. Derrida, J., 1989–90, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review , 11: 973–1045, reprinted in Osborne 2005, 1: 398–432. –––, 1994, Spectres of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New International , trans. P. Kamuf, London: Routledge. –––, 1997, The Politics of Friendship , trans. G. Collins, London & New York: Verso. –––, 1999, ‘Marx and Sons’, in Ghostly demarcations: a symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx , ed. M. Sprinker, London & New York: Verso, pp. 213–269. Didi-Huberman, G., 2005, ‘The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then and Modernity’, in Benjamin, A., 2005b, pp. 2–18. Eagleton, T., 1981, Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism , London: NLB. Eiland, H., 2011, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in EW, pp. 1–13. Ferber, I., 2013, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language , Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedlander, E., 2012, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frisby, D., 1996, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Prehistory of Modernity as Anticipation of Postmodernity? Some Methodological Reflections’, in Fischer 1996, pp. 15–32. Fuld, W., 1981, ‘Walter Benjamins Beziehung zu Ludwig Klages’, Akzente 28(3): 274–287. Gilloch, G., 2000, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations , Cambridge: Polity. Goebel, R. J., 2001, Benjamin heute. Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen , Munich: Iudicium. Habermas, J., 1983, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-raising or rescuing critique’, in Philosophical-Political Profiles , trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT Press, pp. 129–163, reprinted in Osborne 2005, I: 107–136. Hamacher, W., 2002, ‘Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion”’, Diacritics , 32(3/4): 81–106. Hansen, M., 1987, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique , 40: 179–224; reprinted in Osborne 2005, II: 253–290. –––, 2011, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno , Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Hanssen, B., 1995, ‘Philosophy at Its Origin: Walter Benjamin’s Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ’, MLN , 110(4): 809–833. –––, 1998, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels , Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Hodge, J., 2005, ‘The Timing of Elective Affinity: Walter Benjamin’s Strong Aesthetics’, in Benjamin, A., 2005a, pp. 14–31. Holz, H. H., 1992, Philosophie der zersplittern Welt: Reflexionen über Walter Benjamin , Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein. Kang, J., 2014, Walter Benjamin and the Media: the Spectacle of Modernity , Cambridge: Polity. Khatib, S. R., 2013, “Teleologie ohne Endzweck. Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen” , Marburg: Tectum. Kittsteiner, H. D., 1986, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Historicism’, New German Critique 39: 179–215. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 1992, ‘Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism ,  31(4): 421–432, reprinted in Hanssen and Benjamin, A. 2002, pp. 9–18. Lambrianou, N., 2005, ‘Neo-Kantianism and Messianism: Origin and Interruption in Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin’, in Osborne 2005, I: 82–104. Lebovic, N., 2013, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of Nazi Biopolitics , New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Leslie, E., 2000, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism , London: Pluto. –––, 2008, ‘Revolutionary Potential and Walter Benjamin: A Postwar Reception History’, in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism , eds. Jacques Bidet and Stavis Kouvelakis, Leiden: Brill, pp. 549–566. Lewis, T. E., 2020, Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio , Albany: SUNY. Lindner, B. (ed.), 2006, Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung , Stuttgart: Metzler. 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An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History”’, in Smith 1989, pp. 175–209, reprinted in Osborne 2005, I: 137–168. Tomba, M., 2009, ‘Another Kind of Gewalt : Beyond Law. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin’, Historical Materialism , 17(1): 126–144. –––, 2006, La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin: la possibilità della giustizia , Macerata: Quodlibet. Weber, S., 2008, Benjamin’s abilities , Cambridge, MA., & London: Harvard University Press. Weigel, S., 1996, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin , London & New York: Routledge. Wohlfarth, I., 1978, ‘On the Messianic Structure of Benjamin’s Last Reflections’, Glyph 3: 148–212, reprinted in Osborne 2005, I: 169–231. –––, 1992, ‘The Politics of Youth: Walter Benjamin’s Reading of The Idiot’, Diacritics 22 (3/4): 160–172. –––, 2002, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Technological Eros: A Tentative Reading of Zum Planetarium ’, Benjamin Studies/Studien 1: 65–109. –––, 2008–9, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction’, Parts, 1–3, Radical Philosophy 142–144, Nov/Dec 2008, Jan/Feb 2009, March/April 2009, 7–19, 13–26, 9–24.  Wolin, R., 1994, An Aesthetics of Redemption, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database. International Walter Benjamin Society Anthropological Materialism The Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate Militant Esthetix The Future of Benjamin Adorno, Theodor W. | Althusser, Louis | Cohen, Hermann | critical theory | Croce, Benedetto: aesthetics | Derrida, Jacques | Fichte, Johann Gottlieb | Habermas, Jürgen | Hamann, Johann Georg | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Heidegger, Martin | history, philosophy of | Horkheimer, Max | Husserl, Edmund | Kant, Immanuel | Lukács, Georg [György] | Marx, Karl | metaphysics | Nietzsche, Friedrich | nominalism: in metaphysics | Novalis [Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg] | realism | Rickert, Heinrich | Schlegel, August Wilhelm von | Schlegel, Friedrich | Schmitt, Carl | Scholem, Gershom Copyright © 2020 by Peter Osborne < p . osborne @ kingston . ac . uk > Matthew Charles < m . charles1 @ westminster . ac . uk > Accessibility Support SEP Mirror sites. View this site from another server: Info about mirror sites The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054 Misfit Modernism Eng 355-01-spring 2015: studies in 20c literature, from walter benjamin’s “theses on the concept of history”: theses v and ix. Question for the Class: Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s  Goodbye to Berlin ? Thesis V: The true picture of the past  whizzes  by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.   Thesis IX: There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where  we  see the appearance of a chain of events,  he  sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [ verweilen : a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is  this  storm.   1512 NW Benjamin Dr,   Ankeny, IA 50023 What's special. *Open Weekly: Wed & Thurs: 11AM to 3PM, Sat: 9AM to Noon, & Sun 1PM to 4PM.* **ASK ABOUT OUR AUGUST FAIR FUN / SCHOOL SAVINGS PROMO!!** Greenland Homes Dogwood B Ranch Plan, home has 3 bedrooms & 2 bath areas. 1417 Sq. Ft. on the main level with an unfinished lower level already pre-plumbed for a future bathroom and wet bar making future finish much simpler. Step into the welcoming atmosphere of this home, where a well-placed mudroom & laundry room off the 3-car garage ensure a clutter-free entry. The heart of the home is a spacious eat-in kitchen, complete with premium features such as LVP floors, backsplash, sleek quartz countertops, slate appliances, and a convenient breakfast bar for casual dining. As you explore, you'll discover a slider that leads to the deck, offering a serene space to enjoy the outdoors. The open great room with a gas fireplace, perfect for relaxing or entertaining. Plus, with a 2 YEAR BUILDER WARRANTY, you can rest easy knowing that your investment is well-protected. Control your home's security with the touch of a button on your smartphone; front door lock, thermostat, front lights, and garage door opener. Greenland Homes has additional homes available in Adel, Altoona, Ankeny, Bondurant, Clive, Elkhart, Granger, Madrid, Norwalk, Van Meter & Waukee. Show more Travel times Tour with a buyer’s agent. We’ll find a local expert to take you on a private tour of 1512 NW Benjamin Dr . Next available tour time: Today at 11am Facts & features, bedrooms & bathrooms. Bedrooms : 3 Bathrooms : 2 Full bathrooms : 2 Main level bedrooms : 3 Forced Air, Gas, Natural Gas Central Air Included : Dishwasher, Microwave, Stove Laundry : Main Level Eat-in Kitchen Flooring : Carpet, Vinyl Basement : Egress Windows Number of fireplaces : 1 Fireplace features : Gas Log Interior area Total structure area : 1,417 Total interior livable area : 1,417 sqft Total spaces : 3 Parking features : Attached, Garage, Three Car Garage Attached garage spaces : 3 Patio & porch : Deck Exterior features : Deck Size : 0.25 Acres Features : Rectangular Lot Parcel number : 18100014071066 Zoning : Res Construction Type & style. Home type : SingleFamily Architectural style : Ranch Property subtype : Single Family Residence Stone, Vinyl Siding Foundation : Poured Roof : Asphalt,Shingle New Construction New construction : Yes Year built : 2024 Builder name : Greenland Homes Ia, Inc Utilities & green energy Sewer : Public Sewer Water : Public Community & HOA Security : Smoke Detector(s) Has HOA : Yes HOA fee : $200 annually HOA name : Grove Landing Hoa Second HOA name : Stanbrough Realty Region : Ankeny Financial & listing details Price per square foot : $265/sqft Date on market : 8/14/2024 Listing terms : Cash,Conventional,FHA,VA Loan Road surface type : Concrete Polk County 1512 NW Benjamin Dr Nearby cities Altoona Real estate Ankeny Real estate Bondurant Real estate Clive Real estate Des Moines Real estate Grimes Real estate Johnston Real estate Polk City Real estate Urbandale Real estate West Des Moines Real estate HISTORY 495S/496S: Honors Thesis Seminar 2024/25 Topic: Anti-imperialist music of Colombia Thesis Writers & Duke Libraries Browse all Guides at Duke Libraries Define Archival Materials and Primary Sources Appreciate the "Finding Aid" for Archival Material Search Across Finding Aid Portals Organize and Cite Your Sources Topic: The West and the Soviet Union Topic: France Colonialism Topic: NAZI Germany Persecution US Perceptions Topic: US and Bosnia 1992–1995 Topic: Counter Culture and Black Power Movements Topic: Canada and the American Civil War Topic: Asante Female Power Topic: Trinity College, Black Workers, and Durham Topic: Cherokee Women, Property, Law, and Slavery Topic: Sexual Assault in US. 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Faculty & Instructors Graduate Students Undergraduate Students International Students Patrons with Disabilities Harmful Language Statement Re-use & Attribution / Privacy Support the Libraries Rai Benjamin captures elusive gold medal, wins men's 400m hurdles at 2024 Olympics Benjamin took the silver medal in tokyo but was the best of the "big three" of norway's karsten warholm and brazil's alison dos santos in paris, by nbc new york staff • published august 9, 2024 • updated on august 10, 2024 at 3:08 pm. Team USA's Rai Benjamin captured his first individual gold medal after winning the men's 400m hurdles final at the Paris Olympics on Friday. Benjamin tied his season best-time of 46.46 seconds, besting Norway's Karseten Warholm who finished in the silver with a time of 47.06 seconds. Brazil's Alison dos Santos finished in the bronze medal position with a time of 47.26 seconds. Benjamin took the silver medal three years ago in Tokyo. 24/7 New York news stream: Watch NBC 4 free wherever you are "It was tears in Tokyo, it is all smiles here in Paris. Rai Benjamin of Mount Vernon, New York, you are an Olympic champion," said NBC Olympics' Leigh Diffey. Benjamin  tied for the second-best time in the semifinals  with a time of 47.85 seconds. Only  Warholm  (47.67seconds) had a better time. Benjamin tied with France's Clement Ducos. Warholm, 28, has the world and Olympic record time of 45.94 seconds set in the Tokyo Olympics, and was the first athlete to complete the event in under 46 seconds. Get Tri-state area news delivered to your inbox. Sign up for NBC New York's News Headlines newsletter. Benjamin has a personal best time of 46.17 seconds. His 46.17 seconds set an American record for the event. Paris 2024 Summer Olympics Watch all the action from the Paris Olympics live on NBC Algerian boxer Imane Khelif honored by celebratory parade upon return from 2024 Olympics Olympic wrestler who missed out on gold medal for being 3 ounces overweight breaks her silence Warholm, Benjamin, and dos Santos are considered the "Big Three" in the 400m hurdles and have developed quite a rivalry in the event. How many medals does Rai Benjamin have? Rai Benjamin now has three Olympics medals: gold in the men's 400m hurdles at the Paris Olympics, and silver in the men's 400m hurdles and gold in the men's 4x400m relay in the Tokyo Olympics. Here are the medals Rai Benjamin has: 2024 Paris Olympics - Gold - men's 400m hurdles 2020 Tokyo Olympics - Gold - men's 4x400m relay 2020 Tokyo Olympics - Silver - men's 400m hurdles How old is Rai Benjamin? Rai Benjamin is 27 and celebrated his birthday on July 27 during the Paris Olympics. Where does Rai Benjamin live? Rai Benjamin was born in the Bronx and lists Mount Vernon, New York as his hometown. He went to Mount Vernon High School. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California. Where did Rai Benjamin go to college? Rai Benjamin was a hurdler a sprinter for USC in 2018 after transferring from UCLA following two seasons there. He graduated from USC in 2019. He has volunteered as an assistant coach for the track program at USC. This article tagged under: 411 IMAGES Benjamin Franklin/Jonathan Edwards- A Comparison Free Essay Example 579 9th Thesis on History. W. Benjamin theses on the philosophy of history walter benjamin pdf Benjamin Was Sent To Boston Thesis in history walter benjamin Module 3 work COMMENTS Frankfurt School: On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin Historicism depicts the "eternal" picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called "Once upon a time" in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history. Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History /Theses on the Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. On the Concept of History. (often referred to as…) Theses on the Philosophy of History. I. The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a ... Theses on the Philosophy of History Über den Begriff der Geschichte (2010 edition, Suhrkamp) "Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History" (German: Über den Begriff der Geschichte) is an essay written in early 1940 by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin.It is one of Benjamin's best-known, and most controversial works. [1]Composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, the brief essay was written by ... PDF Theses on the Philosophy of History Walter Benjamin I before a unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Walter Benjamin's Theses: Is Progress Inevitable? Benjamin, Theses on The Philosophy of History, 1940. Worse still, Benjamin worries that this complacency is a corollary of a certain kind of Marxism. His Theses are an attempt to drive a wedge between this determinist faith in progress and the proper practice of dialectical history. For him, the task of the historian is active and volitional ... Walter Benjamin on the Philosophy of History (and the End of it) Photo of Walter Benjamin in Paris by Gisèle Freund, 1938, via the New York Review of Books. Given that it is one of the central concepts of the Theses, it is worth starting with a basic definition of what historical materialism is.It is the name given to Karl Marx's theory of history, and it holds that the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic ... PDF Theses on the Philosophy of History Title: Walter.pdf Author: scan Created Date: 12/22/2004 3:58:56 PM Theses on the Philosophy of History In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" ( 1940 ), the German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin presents a striking image of the fear that the individual human being had lost control of time in a modernity characterized by the rapid succession of world-changing historical events. Benjamin writes of Paul Klee's painting "Angelus ... Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History of history (in thesis IX) cannot make whole again the fragments of history, and therefore Benjamin must have resort, in the last thesis, to the Messiah, who alone can succeed where the angel must fail-namely, in the redemption of history.7 On this reading, Benjamin appears as a theologian manque, fighting to break out of materialistic categories, Guide to Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Sean's Post: Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) Obviously, Benjamin's style had changed a lot by 1940. Over his career, influenced by surrealism and by his own observations about the nature of modern life, he got interested in writing as a kind of bricolage (i.e. the collecting and arranging of fragmentary material). Walter Benjamin: The Angel of Victory and the Angel of History Walter Benjamin: The Angel of Victory and the Angel of History1. Walter Benjamin s 9th thesis on the concept of history is his most-quoted and -commented text. As it is well known, his idea of the »Angel of History« appears as a commentary on Paul Klee s famous watercolor titled Angelus Novus . I think it is necessary to open another way of ... PDF Walter Benjamin 2023 . Theseson the. Philosophy. ofHistory. Walter Benjamin. 7KLV HVVD\ ZDV RULJLQDOO\ ZULWWHQ DQG SXEOLVKHG LQ 7KLV ]LQH ZDV GHVLJQHG DQG SXEOLVKHG E\ &RXQWHUĆ RZ LQ )RU PRUH SULQW SXEOLFDWLRQV SOHDVH YLVLW FRXQWHUĆ RZ QREORJV RUJ. ,W LV ZHOO %NQRZQ WKDW DQ DXWRPDWRQ RQFH H[LVWHG ZKLFK ZDV VR FRQVWUXFWHG WKDW LW FRXOG FRXQWHU DQ\ PRYH RI D ... Seminar Notes on Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History Taubes's translated notes provide some highly interesting insights into Taubes's reading of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," and his interpretation of Benjamin in general. Because of the premature end of Taubes's involvement in the seminar, the present notes cover only the first seven of Benjamin's Theses in detail. Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution Walter Benjamin's relevance for activists today is most strongly felt in his works on social transformation. In the sixth of eight pieces on Benjamin, Andrew Robinson explores the Theses on History, and discusses the revolutionary implications of allegory, collecting, citation, DIY, and time. In Theory, New in Ceasefire - Posted on Friday ... Theses on the Philosophy of History Theses on the Philosophy of History. By Walter Benjamin. Book Critical Theory and Society. Click here to navigate to parent product. Edition 1st Edition. First Published 1990. Imprint Routledge. Pages 9. eBook ISBN 9781003059509. What is Benjamin saying in thesis VI in On the Concept of History? Benjamin's hope, perhaps, was that in this moment of crisis, something else could emerge from the past, something that the Nazi's were actively trying to oppress. [*]: On the Concept of History has a complex history as a document. It was never intended nor prepared by Benjamin for publication and there are at least 7 slightly different ... Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin. First published Tue Jan 18, 2011; substantive revision Wed Oct 14, 2020. Walter Benjamin's importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis ... From Walter Benjamin's "Theses On the Concept of History": Theses V and Thesis IX: There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. PDF Concept History Benjamin Walter Benjamin. (often referred to as) Theses on the Philosophy of History. I. The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. PDF On Walter Benjamin's Historical Materialism The image of thesis IX presents history as Benjamin himself understood it, but we still have to grasp what he hides behind that image: "There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. 1512 NW Benjamin Dr, Ankeny, IA 50023 Zillow has 28 photos of this $375,000 3 beds, 2 baths, 1,417 Square Feet single family home located at 1512 NW Benjamin Dr, Ankeny, IA 50023 built in 2024. MLS #700990. HISTORY 495S/496S: Honors Thesis Seminar 2024/25 Search for journal articles covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present JSTOR This link opens in a new window Search a collection of important scholarly journals representing a range of disciplines. HISTORY 495S/496S: Honors Thesis Seminar 2024/25 A guide for the year-long senior honors seminar (HISTORY 495S/496S) Rai Benjamin wins gold in men's 400m hurdles, first individual gold Team USA's Rai Benjamin captured his first individual gold medal after winning the men's 400m hurdles final at the Paris Olympics on Friday.. Benjamin tied his season best-time of 46.46 seconds ... assignment essay homework paper phd report review speech thesis