Walter Benjamin’s importance as a philosopher and criticaltheorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influenceand the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as aliterary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis ofBenjamin’s writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were adecisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno’s conception ofphilosophy’s actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931).In the 1930s, Benjamin’s efforts to develop a politicallyoriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulusfor both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poetand dramatist Bertolt Brecht. 

The delayed appearance of Benjamin’s collected writings has determinedand sustained the Anglophone reception of his work. (A two-volumeselection was published in German in 1955, with a full edition notappearing until 1972–89, and a 21-volume critical edition has been in production since 2008; English anthologies first appeared in1968 and 1978, and the four-volumeSelected Writings between1996 and 2003.) Originally received in the context of literarytheory 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 literaturethat it has produced, his work remains a continuing source ofproductivity. An understanding of the intellectual context of his workhas contributed to the philosophical revival of Early GermanRomanticism. His philosophy of language has played a seminal role in translation theory. His essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of ItsTechnical Reproducibility’ remains a major theoretical text forfilm theory.One-Way Street and the work arising from hisunfinished research on nineteenth century Paris (The ArcadesProject), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory andphilosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin’s messianicunderstanding of history has been an enduring source of theoreticalfascination and frustration for a diverse range of philosophicalthinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and, in acritical context, Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique ofViolence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ areimportant sources for Derrida’s discussion of messianicity, which hasbeen influential, along with Paul de Man’s discussion of allegory, forthe poststructuralist reception of Benjamin’s writings. Aspects ofBenjamin’s thought have also been associated with a revival ofpolitical theology, although it is doubtful this reception is true tothe tendencies of Benjamin’s own political thought. More recently,interest in Benjamin’s philosophy of education has been fueled by thetranslations of hisEarly Writings in 2011 and thetranscripts of his radio broadcasts for children (RadioBenjamin) 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
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Biographical Sketch

Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, theeldest of three children in a prosperous Berlin family from anassimilated Jewish background. At the age of 13, after a prolongedperiod of sickness, Benjamin was sent to a progressive co-educationalboarding school in Haubinda, Thuringia, where he formed an importantintellectual kinship with the liberal educational reformer GustavWyneken. On his return to Berlin, he began contributing toDer Anfang(‘The Beginning’), a journal dedicated to Wyneken’sprinciples on the spiritual purity of youth, articles which contain inembryonic form important ideas on experience and history that continueto occupy his mature thought. As a student at the universities ofFreiburg im Breisgau and Berlin, Benjamin attended lectures by theneo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and the sociologist GeorgSimmel, whilst continuing to be actively involved in the growing YouthMovement. In 1914, however, Benjamin denounced his mentor and withdrewfrom the movement in response to a public lecture in which Wynekenpraised the ethical experience that the outbreak of war afforded theyoung. In 1915 a friendship began between Benjamin and Gerhard (laterGershom) Scholem, a fellow student at Berlin. This relationship wouldhave a lifelong influence upon Benjamin’s relation to Judaism andKabbalism, notably in his interpretations of Kafka in the early 1930sand in the messianic interpretation of the Paul Klee paintingAngelus Novus inhis later theses ‘On the Concept of History’. Scholem wouldprove instrumental in establishing and, in part, shaping the legacy ofBenjamin’s works after his death (Raz-Krakotzkin 2013).

Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation, ‘The Concept of Art Criticismin German Romanticism’, was awarded,summa cum laude, bythe University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1919. His celebrated essay onGoethe’s novella,The Elective Affinities, was begun shortlyafter and put into practice the theory of art criticism developed inhis dissertation. Benjamin’sHabilitationsschrift ontheOrigin of the German Mourning-Play (Ursprung desdeutschen Trauerspiels)—the thesis which would have enabledhim to become a professional academic—had, he feared, with thedeath of his intellectual ally, the Protestant theologian FlorensChristian Rang, lost its “proper reader” (GB 3:16). In 1925, he was forced to withdraw his submission from theUniversity of Frankfurt am Main and with it the possibility of afuture academic position. However, despite this academicfailure, an excerpt from the work appeared in a literary journal twoyears later and the book was published the following year (1928),quickly receiving favourable attention in a number of well regardednewspapers and periodicals in Germany and further afield (Brodersen1996, 154). In an ironic twist, Benjamin’sfailedHabilitation study became the subject of a seminarcourse taught at Frankfurt University in 1932–3 by TheodorWiesengrund (later Theodor W. Adorno).

Much of the writing for his thesis was completed in 1924 on the Italianisland of Capri, where Benjamin had retreated for financial reasons.The stay would prove decisive, however, since it was here he met theBolshevik Latvian theatre producer Asja Lacis, with whom he begun anerotically frustrated but intellectually productive relationship.‘Naples’ was jointly written with Lacis in 1925, whilstOne-Way Street,a quasi-constructivist collection of fragments written between1923–1926 and dedicated to Lacis on its publication in 1928, and theunfinishedArcades Project,begun in the late 1920s, both exhibit a modernist experimentation withform that can in part be attributed to Lacis’ influence. HisMarxist turn towards historical materialism was compounded by hisenthusiastic study of Georg Lukács’History and Class Consciousnesswhilst on Capri and a visit to Lacis in Soviet Moscow in the winter of1926–7.

By the early 1930s Benjamin was closely involved in the plansfor a left-wing periodical to be entitled ‘Crisis andCritique’, in collaboration with Ernst Bloch, Sigfried Kracauerand, among others, the Marxist poet, playwright and theatre directorBertolt Brecht (Wizisla 2009, 66–98). Benjamin had been introducedto Brecht by Lacis in 1929 and over the following decade developed aclose personal friendship, in which their literary and politicalaffinities had been cemented under the difficult conditions ofpolitical exile. Benjamin undertook a series of studies ofBrecht’s “epic theatre” and modelled the radiobroadcasts he wrote and presented during this period upon thelatter’s experiments in theatrical didacticism (Brodersen1996, 193). In 1933, Benjamin departed Nazi Germany for the last time,following Adorno, Brecht and many other Jewish friends into an exile hedivided between Paris, Ibiza, San Remo and Brecht’s house nearSvendborg, Denmark.

During the 1930s the Institute for Social Research, by this pointunder the directorship of Horkheimer and exiled from its base in theUniversity of Frankfurt, provided Benjamin with importantopportunities for publishing as well as an increasingly necessaryfinancial stipend. Theodor W. Adorno, who had been introduced toBenjamin a decade earlier by a mutual friend, Siegfried Kracauer, wasinstrumental in securing this support. An important consequence ofthis dependence, however, was the editorial revisions to which keyessays in which Benjamin developed his materialist theory of art weresubjected, such as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its TechnicalReproducibility’ and those on Baudelaire and Paris that grew outofThe Arcades Project.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily internedin the French “concentration camps” established for Germancitizens. On his release a few months later he returned to Paris andthere continued his work in the Bibliothèque NationaleonThe Arcades Project. The notes for his unfinishedresearch were left in the safekeeping of librarian and friend, thewriter Georges Bataille, as Benjamin fled Paris before the advancingGerman army in the summer of 1940. The last few months of Benjamin’slife reflect the precarious experience of countless other JewishGermans in Vichy France: a flight to the border and preparations foremigration by legal or illegal means. Lacking the necessary exit visafrom France, he joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees in anattempt to enter Spain as illegal refugees. Turned back by customsofficials, Benjamin took his life in the small, Spanish border town ofPort Bou, on September 27, 1940.

2. Early Works: Kant and Experience

The importance of Benjamin’s early unpublished fragments for anunderstanding his wider philosophical project has been emphasised by anumber of scholars (Wolfharth 1992; Caygill 1998; Rrenban 2005).Indeed, without them it becomes difficult to understand theintellectual context and historical tradition out of which Benjamin iswriting and therefore nearly impossible to grasp the philosophicalunderpinnings of his works. Of Benjamin’s earliest publishedwriting his attempt in the essay entitled ‘Experience’(‘Erfahrung’, 1913/1914) to distinguish analternative and superior concept of experience provides a usefulintroduction to a central and enduring preoccupation of histhought. Benjamin’s concern with delineating an immediate andmetaphysical experience of spirit is valuable in providing a thematicdescription of a conceptual opposition working throughout histhought. Filtered here through the cultural ideals of the YouthMovement, this contrasts the empty, spiritless [Geistlosen]and unartistic “experiences” accumulated over a lifemerely lived-through [erlebt] with that privileged kind ofexperience which is filled with spiritual content through its enduringcontact with the dreams of youth (SW 1, 3–6). The influence ofNietzsche in these earlier texts is discernible (McFarland 2013),particularly, in the importance the young Benjamin places uponaesthetic experience in overcoming the embittered nihilism ofcontemporary values (although he is unable to articulate this culturaltransformation here beyond a vague appeal to the canon of Germanpoets: Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Stefan George).

By 1918 the attempt at a more systematic and philosophicallysophisticated understanding of a “higher concept ofexperience” (SW 1, 102) within what Benjamin now calls “thecoming philosophy” is articulated in relation to Kant’stranscendental idealism. Benjamin argues that the value of Platonic andKantian philosophy lies in its attempt to secure the scope and depth ofknowledge through justification, exemplified in the way Kant conducts acritical inquiry into the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Butthis Kantian attempt to grasp a certain and timeless knowledge is inturn 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 transcendentalsubject, his system remains tied to a naïve empiricistunderstanding of experience, of the kind privileged in the positivistscientific 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 investedthe world with a deeper and more profound significance, because theCreation assumes a revelatory religious importance. This is apparentnot only in the deeply Christian world-view of mediaeval Europe, butsurvives in secularized form in Renaissance and Baroque humanism, andin “Counter-Enlightenment” thinkers such as J. G. Hamann,Goethe, and the Romantics. Benjamin suggests that the “greattransformation and correction which must be performed upon the conceptof experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-mechanicallines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language, as wasattempted 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 Sprachedes Menschen’, c. 1916), Benjamin offers a theologicalconception of language which draws on Hamann’s discussion of Creationas the physical imprint of the divine Word of God, to claim that there“is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature thatdoes not in some way partake of language” (SW 1,62–3). This implies that all experience—includingperception—is essentially linguistic, whilst all human language(including writing, typically associated with mere convention) isinherently expressive and creative. Language is privileged as a modelof experience in these early essays precisely because it underminesand transgresses the neat divisions and limitations operating in theKantian system, including that fundamental one that distinguishesbetween the subject and object of sensations. If both areconstitutively linguistic, language serves as a medium of experiencethat binds the ostensible “subject” and“object” in a more profound, perhaps mystical,relationship of underlying kinship. More generally, Hamann’smetacritique provides Benjamin with a sense of the hypocrisy of theKantian separation of understanding and sensibility on the basis of anempty and purely formal notion of pure reason, which can itself onlybe postulated according to the concrete, aesthetic content oflanguage.

Whilst Benjamin is not interested in returning to the pre-criticalproject of a rationalist deduction of experience, nor to a directlyreligious conception of the world, he is interested in how thescientific concept of experience that Kant is utilising distorts thestructure of Kant’s philosophical system, and how this might becorrected with the use of theological concepts. Epistemology mustaddress not only “the question of the certainty of knowledge thatis lasting”, but also the neglected question of “theintegrity of an experience that is ephemeral” (SW 1, 100).Benjamin’s suggestion as to how this project might be formulatedwithin the Kantian system is sketchy, but nonetheless indicates some ofthe preoccupying concerns of his later writings. In general, itinvolves the expansion of the limited spatio-temporal forms andessentially causal-mechanistic categories of Kant’s philosophythrough the integration of, for example, religious, historical,artistic, linguistic and psychological experiences. Benjamin’senduring concern with the new, the outmoded and the heteronomousreflect this attempt to integrate more speculative phenomenologicalpossibilities of experience into the remit of philosophicalknowledge. It resists privileging any single discipline of knowledge,preserving a multiplicity that implicates truth in the problem ofaesthetic representation. This would lead Benjamin to attempt a radicalrethinking of the philosophical concept of the Idea, away from itsdualistic associations with a timeless and purely rational essence ofthings.

Benjamin also believes that a more speculative metaphysics wouldnecessitate the abolishment of the sharp distinction between Natureand Freedom—or causal mechanism and moral willing—inKant’s architectonic. Since it is a specific understanding of“dialectic” which mediates between these two spheres inKant’s critical system, this entails a speculative rethinking of theKantian dialectic. This suggests that new possibilities of syllogisticlogical relations might themselves be opened up, including what hecalls “a certain nonsynthesis of two concepts in another”(SW 1, 106; cf. Weber 2008, 48). The relation of nonsynthesis hintedat here can be seen to inform Benjamin’s understanding of the Idea asa constellation of extremes in theOrigin of the GermanMourning-Play and of the dialectical image in his maturewritings. In this sense, Benjamin’s metacritique of Kant represents anattempt to construct an alternative post-Kantian tradition to that ofHegelian dialectics. It therefore required a new philosophy ofhistory.

3. Romanticism, Goethe and Criticism

Benjamin initially sought to develop these ideas in the context ofKant’s philosophy of history, believing it was in this context thatthe problems of the Kantian system could be fully exposed andchallenged (C, 98). A very early article, ‘The Life ofStudents’ (‘Das Leben der Studenten’,1915), is useful for suggesting how these problems manifest themselveswithin the philosophy of history. It rejects a “a view ofhistory that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and thusconcerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which peopleand epochs advance along the path of progress” and contraststhis with a perspective “in which history appears to beconcentrated on a single focal point, like those that hadtraditionally been found in the utopian images of thephilosophers” (SW 1, 37). The latter, ‘messianic’view of history has a distinct intention and methodology: it aims tograsp how elements of what Benjamin calls “the ultimatecondition” and “highest metaphysical state” ofhistory—which we might call the historical Absolute—appearnot as thetelos or end of history, but as an immanent stateof perfection which has the potential to manifest itself in anyparticular moment (SW 1, 37). He claims that the necessary recognitionof such metaphysical condition requires an act of criticism[Kritik] (SW 1, 38). Benjamin had initially proposed Kant’sphilosophy of history as the topic of his doctoral dissertation, andwhile he felt it necessary to change this to the Early GermanRomantics’ philosophy of art, crucial features of the proposed projectsurvive in the final work. Astute readers, he says, may still discernin it an “insight into the relationship of a truth tohistory” (C, 135–6). Specifically, the concept of artcriticism operating in Romantic aesthetics rests upon epistemologicalpresuppositions that reveal the ‘messianic’ essence ofRomanticism (SW 1, 116–7; n.3, 185). The messianic conjunctionbetween the highest metaphysical state of history and the ephemeralityof each particular moment is here seen as theoretically determiningthe Romantic relationship between the artistic Absolute—or whatBenjamin defines as the Idea of art—and each particularartwork.

In his doctoral dissertation, Benjamin argues that the philosophicalrelationship between the Idea of art and particular artworks posited inRomantic aesthetics must be understood in relation to Fichte’stheory of reflection. This sought to ground the possibility of acertain and immediate type of cognition without recourse to theproblematic notion of an intellectual intuition. For Fichte, reflectionindicates the free activity of consciousness taking itself as its ownobject of thought: its capacity for thinking of thinking. In doing so,the initial form of thinking is transformed into its content. In suchreflection, thought seems capable of immediately grasping itself as athinking subject and therefore of possessing a certain kind ofimmediate and foundational knowledge. Although Benjamin introduces anumber of specific criticisms of Fichte’s philosophical positionin his dissertation, he nonetheless values the Fichtean concept ofreflection for providing the epistemological foundation of FriedrichSchlegel’s and Novalis’ understandings of the metaphysicalfunction of art criticism. Some scholars have, however, questioned theaccuracy of Benjamin’s interpretation of Fichte’s conceptof reflection and the importance he accords to it in Romanticepistemology (Bullock 1987, 78–93; Menninghaus 2005, 29–44). 

Unlike in Fichte, here immediacy and infinitude are not mutuallyexclusive aspects of cognition. The uniqueness of the Romantic conceptof the Absolute resides in the fact that the Romantic conception ofinfinitude regards it not as empty but “substantial andfilled” (SW 1, 129). Benjamin argued that the Romanticsspecifically identified this structure of the Absolute with the Idea ofart, and in particular with artistic form (SW 1, 135). Art criticismbecomes central to this concept of infinite fulfilment because, likethe epistemological relation between reflection and thought in Fichte,criticism both consummates the finite and particular work by raising itto a higher level—in which the form of the work is transformedinto content as the object of criticism—and simultaneouslyconnects the work’s particular artistic form with the continuityand unity of absolute form in the Idea of art. Criticism is, for theRomantics, the continuation and ongoing completion of the particularwork through its infinite connection with other art works and works ofcriticism. By conceiving the Idea of art as a ‘medium ofreflection’, the early Romantics dissolve the Enlightenmentworld-view of the positive sciences that Fichte inherited from Kant,and in doing so overcome the critical injunctions placed upon theexperience of the infinite (SW 1, 132; 131). This conception of afulfilled infinity constitutes the messianism that Benjamin claims isessential to Early Romantic epistemology.

In the version of the dissertation formally submitted to theuniversity, Benjamin concludes by identifying the Romantic theory ofart criticism with ‘the consummation of the work’ (SW 1,177). The artwork provides the immanent criterion for criticalreflection, which in turn completes the work by raising it into anautonomous and higher existence. This immanent criticism rejects boththe dogmatic imposition of external rules (such as those of classicalaesthetics) and the dissolution of aesthetic criteria (with the appealto artistic genius). It provides, Benjamin thought, one of thefundamental legacies for a modern concept of art criticism. The versioncirculated amongst friends and colleagues does not conclude with acomplete affirmation of Romanticism, however, but contains a criticalafterword that renders explicit the critical objections that Benjaminhad carefully inserted into the text. These suggest that the Romantictheory of art, and by implication the structure of the Absolute it isgrounded upon, is problematically one-sided and incomplete with regardto (1) its formalism, (2) its positivity, and (3) its singularity. 

1. Since the content of each, successive,level of reflection is supplied by the form of its object, thecriticism unfolds the germ of immanent criticizability contained ineach particular artwork’s form. This formalism precludes anyserious discussion of the artwork’s specific content.

2. Conversely, anything immanently uncriticizable cannot constitute atrue work of art. As a consequence, Romantic criticism is unable todifferentiate between good or bad artworks, since its only criterionis whether a workis oris not art. Such criticismis entirely positive in its evaluation, and lacks the importantnegative moment essential to judgement.

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

The consequent need for what Benjamin presents as a Goetheanmodification of Early German Romanticism is laid out in the afterword.The relation between these criticisms of Romanticism and Goethe’sthought is suggested in the claim that, “Ultimately the mysticalthesis that art itself is one work…stands in exact correlation withthe principle which asserts the indestructibility of works that arepurified in irony” (SW 1, 167). With its mistaken emphasis on thesingularity of the Idea of art, Romantic fulfilment only coincides withthe infinity of the unconditioned, meaning that fulfilment is anessentially non-historical category of the infinite. Such criticismcannot be described as judgement, since all authentic judgementinvolves 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 providethe content required to complete their theory of art. 

Goethe’s conception of aesthetic judgement and his principleof the ‘uncriticizability’ of great works provided Benjaminwith a way of thinking the necessary modification to the Early GermanRomantic Idea of art. His explication of the implicit metaphysicalstructure of Goethe’s corresponding Ideal of art reveals thecontrasting features of his structure of the Absolute: as a sphere ofpure content, a medium of destructiverefraction,and a plurality of discontinuous archetypes (Charles 2020, 53–67). Because finite, particularworks can never be romanticized into the unity of an individualAbsolute, they remains immanently incomplete and yet nonethelessincapable of higher consummation: a “torso”, dismembered inrelation to the whole, corpse-like in its deadness. In this context,the true task of criticism becomes not the consummation of the livingwork, but that destructive completion of the dying one.

Benjamin’s essay on ‘Goethe’sElectiveAffinities’ (1924–5) provides an exemplary piece ofsuch criticism, whilst developing the concept further by situating itmore explicitly within the context of history. Here, criticism ischarged with the task of revealing what Benjamin calls the“truth content of a work of art”, which is intimatelybound up with its “material content” at the beginning ofthe work’s history (SW 1, 297). In contrast to merecommentary—which proceeds no further than a consideration ofthese now historically anachronistic features of its materialcontent—the aim of criticism is the destruction of this outerlayer in order for the work’s inner truth content to be grasped. Thefundamental philological error of commentary is merely to situate thework in relation to the “lived experience[Erlebnis]” of its author’s biographical life(exemplified in Friedrich Gundolf’s 1916 biographyofGoethe), instead of the broader medium of historicalreception through which it has passed down to the contemporarycritic. Benjamin’s Romantic theory of immanent criticism insists thatthe work must contain its own inner criterion, such that the criticproceeds from the work itself and not from the life of the author (SW1, 321). Beginning, therefore, with the odd and striking features ofGoethe’s work that come to preoccupy later critics, Benjamin examineshow these are derived from techniques borrowed from the distinct formof the novella. This novella-like construction grants theElectiveAffinities its strange, fable-like quality, which differentiatesit from the naturalism of a typical novel. It is this mythical layer,as the real material content of the work, which expresses the presenceof a pantheistic and “daemonic” attitude toward nature inGoethe’s work.

Truth content, in contrast, is not to be sought in the conspicuousfeatures of the work’s technique, but in the unity of itsdistinct form. The task of criticism is to make this truth content anobject of experience. It concerns itself not with the life orintentions of the artist, but with that semblance or appearance of lifethat the work itself possesses by virtue of its mimetic capacity forrepresentation: its linguistic expressiveness, which is described as averging 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 thissemblance, spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony”(SW 1, 340). “Only the expressionless completes the work”asa work of art, Benjamin argues, and it does so by shattering thework’s semblance of unity, the false appearance of totalitypertaining to it. Unlike the intensification of Romantic reflection,when this semblance itself becomes the object of a higher-levelsemblance, a refractive dissonance is opened up. Drawing onHölderlin’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 criticismin turn deepens the refractive violence, performing a destructive ormortuary act of self-annihilation upon the work.

Art, at the very limit of its mimetic capacity, draws attention toits construction and in doing so finds the resources to encapsulate adeeper truth. It is against what Benjamin calls the Christian-mysticalcertainty in future reconciliation (which Goethe inserts into theconclusion of the novella as an attempt to counter the mythicalfatalism which holds sway elsewhere) that he instead endorses theparadoxical glimmer of hope identified with the image of a shootingstar which appears in Goethe’s novella (SW 1, 354–5). If theimage of the star retains its relationship to the symbolic here, itdoes so in accordance with Benjamin’s earlier description of theexpressionless as “the torso of a symbol” (SW 1, 340).However, it might be better to understand the significance of thecaesura here in the context of the theory of allegory. This is onlyproperly formulated in Benjamin’s next major work, his thesis ontheOrigin of the German Mourning-Play (Ursprung desdeutschen Trauerspiels, 1928).

4. Baroque Constellations

‘Mourning-play’ (Trauerspiel)is a term used to characterise a type of drama that emerges during thebaroque period of art history in the late 16th and early 17th century.The principle examples discussed in Benjamin’s thesis come notfrom its great exponents, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and WilliamShakespeare, but the German dramatists Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius,Johann Christian Hallmann, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and AugustAdolf von Haugwitz. Their plays are characterised by a simplicity ofaction which is comparable to the classicism of earlier Renaissancetheatre, but also contain peculiarly baroque features. These include anexaggerated and violent bombast in their language (including afigurative tendency towards linguistic contraction), an absence ofpsychological depth in its characters, a preponderance of anddependency upon theatrical props and machinery, and a crude emphasis onviolence, suffering and death (cf. Newman 2011; Ferber 2013).

Leaving aside for now the methodological introduction (referred toin English as the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’), the firstpart of Benjamin’s thesis is concerned with repudiating the dogmaticattempt by later critics to impose onto these plays the externalcriteria of Aristotelian aesthetics, which are rooted in classicaltragedy. Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy here (and his approach tothe mourning-play in general) is partially influenced by FriedrichNietzsche’sThe Birth of Tragedy. Benjamin claimsthatThe Birth of Tragedy substantiates the critical insightthat the empathy of undirected modern feeling is unhelpful for properlygrasping ancient tragedy (OGT, 93). Instead, Nietzsche undertook ametaphysical inquiry into the essence of tragedy as a dialecticalinterplay of the contrasting aesthetic impulses of Apolloniansemblance and Dionysian truth. This dialectic is central to Benjamin’sown philosophical investigations, particularly his claim—derivedfrom his discussion of Goethe’sElectiveAffinities—that an expressionless moment is constitutive ofart, in which the limits of semblance are broached precisely in orderto illuminate an artistic truth.

But Benjamin is also critical of Nietzsche for restricting hisapproach to aesthetics, and therefore renouncing the understanding oftragedy in historical terms. Lacking a philosophy of history,Nietzsche’s study was unable to situate the political and ethicalsignificance of the metaphysical and mythical features it isolates(OGT, 93). Influenced by ideas from Franz Rosenzweig and FlorensChristian Rang (Asman 1992), Benjamin presents tragedy asexpressing a perceived break between the prehistorical age of mythicalgods and heroes and the emergence of a new ethical and politicalcommunity. The historical limitations of Nietzsche’s theory oftragedy become acute when it comes to the question of the possibilityof a recuperation of the tragic form in modern theatre. WhilstNietzsche tends to simply denounce the weakness of modern drama againstthe strength of the Greeks (excepting, in his early work, the operas ofWagner), Benjamin is concerned with establishing whether the historicalconditions of the tragic form are themselves a limit to itscontemporary efficacy. 

In line with the principles of Romantic criticism discussed above,mourning-plays contain their own distinct form and should be criticisedaccording to their own immanently discovered standards. The“content [Gehalt]” and “true object” of the baroque mourning-play is not, as it is intragedy, myth but rather historical life (OGT, 46). As withGoethe’s borrowing of the novella form, this content is in partderived from other aesthetic structures, principally the eschatologicalfocus of mediaeval Christian literature: the Passion-Plays,Mystery-Plays and chronicles whose historiography portrayed “thewhole of the course of history, world history as salvation history” (OGT,65). But the Lutheran renunciation of the Catholic emphasis upon goodworks, and the secularizing tendency implicit in the naturalistic legaland political philosophies of the 16th and 17th century (discussed inrelation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty) resulted in thestripping bare of human value and significance from such history. Thistense, antinomical combination of transcendence and immanence producesan uneasy hybrid, in which history—as a narrative of the humanmarch towards redemption on the Day of Judgement—loses theeschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomessecularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle overpolitical power. 

Benjamin’s reflections on sovereign violence in the 17th centurymay be contrasted with his discussion of the revolutionary kind in hisearlier ‘Critique of Violence’ (‘Zur Kritik derGewalt’, 1921), itself a response to GeorgesSorel’sReflections on Violence (1908). These texts haveprovoked a number of responses in the context of political theology,most notably from Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida and GiorgioAgamben. Schmitt responded directly to Benjamin’s essay inHamletor Hecuba (1956). Derrida’s section on the ‘Critique ofViolence’ in hisForce of Law: The Mystical Foundation ofAuthority (1989) interrogates this evocation of a revolutionarykind of divine violence, a critical engagement which continues inDerrida’s discussion of the messianic inSpectres of Marx(1994) and ‘Marx and Sons’ (1999), and in relation toSchmitt inThe Politics of Friendship (1994). These complexrelations between Benjamin, Schmitt, and Derrida have become thesubject of a number of studies, including Agamben’sStateof Exception (2004) (Bredekamp 1999, 247–266; Liska 2009),although more careful studies have emphasized the clear divergencesbetween Benjamin’s position and those of Derrida and of Schmitt (Tomba2009, 131–132; Averlar 2005, 79–106; Weber 2008,176–194). In this respect, it was not Schmitt’s politicaltheology but the reactionary vitalism of Ludwig Klages that proved amore influential and enduring object of fascination for Benjamin (Fuld1981; 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 ofallegory to expose the implicit eschatological structure of theseworks. However, the first part utilises the distorting tension of thisstructure to distinguish the specific and historically conspicuoustechnique of the German baroque mourning-play. This concludes byidentifying sorrow or mourning (Trauer)as the predominant mood inherent to its metaphysical structure, incontrast to the suffering of tragedy. With the “total secularization of the historical in the state of creation…Historypasses into the setting” to become natural history (OGT, 81),whose attendant cognition is a melancholic contemplation of thingswhich derives enigmatic satisfaction from its very recognition of theirtransience and emptiness (OGT, 141). “For all wisdom of themelancholic hearkens to the deep”, Benjamin claims:“it is won from immersion in the life of creaturely things, andnothing of the voice of revelation reaches it. Everything to do with Saturnpoints into the depths of the earth…” (OGT, 157).

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

Drawing on undeveloped insights found in the work of themythographers Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Joseph vonGörres, 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 ofthe allegorical, in contrast, as something dynamic, mobile, andfluid. This authentic concept of allegory arises in the 17th centurybaroque as a response to the antithesis between mediaeval religiosityand Renaissance secularization discussed earlier. The spatializationof the temporal structure of eschatology in the allegoricalcorresponds to the naturalization of the religious structure ofhistory in the baroque: “Whereas in the symbol, with thesublimation of downfall, the transfigured countenance of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light of salvation, in allegorythere lies before the eyes of the observer thefacies hippocratica [lit. ‘Hippocratic face’= the sunken, hollow and pinched features exhibited by the dying] of historyas petrified primallandscape. History, in everything untimely, sorrowful, and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in aface—no, in a death’s head [Totenkopfe]”(OGT, 174).

From the perspective of the allegorical, the instantaneoustransformation within the symbolic becomes a natural history slowed tosuch an extreme that every sign appears frozen and—seeminglyloosened from every other relationship—arbitrary. The concretecorporeality of the written script exemplifies this allegoricalemphasis upon things. Allegory is not theconventionalrepresentation of some expression, as misunderstood by later critics,but anexpression of convention [Ausdruck derKonvention] (OGT, 185). Allegorical expression includes as itsobject this very conventionality of the historical, this appearance ofinsignificance and indifference. That is, convention itself comes tobe signified or expressed. What Benjamin rediscovers in theallegorical is, then, something akin to the concept of theexpressionless, as the torso of a symbol, introduced in the essay onGoethe. Benjamin argues that this predominance of the allegoricalviewpoint in the 17th century baroque finds it most dramaticexpression in the mourning-play, and that consequently the Idea of themourning-play must be grasped via the allegorical.

TheErkenntniskritische Vorredeor ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to the work may beunderstood as having  two central functions: it provides a directmethodological justification for the theory of criticism being utilisedin the work, by way of a problematization of existing disciplinaryapproaches, and it implicitly recovers a concept of allegoricalexperience which is delineated  in the second part of the thesisin terms amenable for modernity. At the level of methodology, Benjaminadvocates the necessity of a transdisciplinary approach (Osborne 2011, 24) to artworks,capable of critically overcoming the epistemological and historicallimitations of the existing disciplines of the philosophy of art andthe history of art (specifically, literary history). Thistransdisciplinary aspect of Benjamin’s thesis may partiallyaccount for the difficulties in its reception at the University ofFrankfurt, where the thesis was rejected by the departments of bothphilosophy and literature. Much of the theoretical discussion in thePrologue is concerned with correcting the methodological one-sidednessof each existing approach by way of the positive features of the other.In general, the philosophy of art correctly attends to the problem ofessences, but remains hampered by its lack of any adequate historicalconsideration. Conversely, the history of art is preoccupied withhistorical lineage but has no adequate concept of essence. Yet it isnot simply an amalgamation of aesthetics and history that is required,but their radical rethinking in accordance with first a historicalconcept of essence and second a philosophical concept of history. 

Broadly speaking, Benjamin’s theory of Ideas transposes thephilosophical problem of metaphysical realism into the context ofaesthetics. That is, it asks about the reality of aesthetic genres suchas ‘tragedy’ or of artistic epochs such as the‘Renaissance’ that classify a group of particular worksaccording to a set of common characteristics. The Prologue criticisesexisting traditions of aesthetic nominalism for their inadequateresolution of the problem. The uncritical use of inductive methodsdemonstrated by literary historians rejects the hypostatization ofterms such as “Renaissance” on the grounds that it promotesa false identity between similar empirical features, which obscurestheir diversity. This aversion to any realism of constitutive Ideas isgrounded on the positivist criterion of factual verification. A termlike the “Renaissance” is consequently utilised by themonly on the proviso that it is understood as merely an abstract generalconcept. This quickly leads to scepticism, however, since its stillfails to address the problematic criteria by which this general conceptis initially picked out and abstracted from the multiplicity ofparticulars or on what grounds these particulars are grouped together.Consequently, it fails to appreciate the necessity of the Platonicpostulation of Ideas for the representation of essences: whilstconcepts seek to make the similar identical, Ideas are necessary toeffect a dialectical synthesis between phenomenal extremes (OGT, 18–19).In contrast, philosophers of art possess a concern with the essentialthat ends up renouncing any notion of generic forms, on the groundsthat the singular originality of every single work entails the onlypossible essential genre must be the universal and individual one ofart itself. The error—as Benjamin had previously charged theEarly German Romantics, discussed above—is to dissolve real andimportant 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 anddifficult to understand outside the context of Benjamin’s earlierworks, and the philosophical tradition that it engages with is furtherobscured in the first English translation. However, the critical aspects ofBenjamin’s investigation advocate—against aestheticversions of positivist empiricism—a metaphysical realism, and,against certain versions of philosophical idealism, a non-singularessentialism. That is, he does not restrict the possibility ofmetaphysical reality only to actual empirical particulars and headvocates 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 thetranscendental/supersensuous appears immanently within thematerial/sensuous. Benjamin is clear that the relation between Ideasand phenomenon is neither one of Aristotelian ‘containment’nor one of Kantian lawfulness or hypothesis. Ideas are not given tosome intellectual intuition, but they are capable of being sensuouslyrepresented. Such a sensuous representation of the truth remains thetask of philosophy.

Benjamin’s theoretical elaboration proceeds by startling imagisticreconfigurations of pre-existing elements within the philosophicaltradition. He offers a number of possibilities for thinking such Ideasin the Prologue, taken from the realm not only of philosophy but ofaesthetics, theology and science. The first is the Platonic Idea, heredivorced from its association with the scientific ascent to somepurely rational, objective knowledge (such as appears in the accountof dialectic in theRepublic) and instead linked to thediscussion of beautiful semblance in theSymposium (OGT,6). The second is that of the Adamic Name, as developed in hisearlier theory of language. In this context, he comments that theEarly German Romantics were frustrated in their attempt to renew thetheory of Ideas because truth took on the character of reflectiveconsciousness for them, rather than that intentionless, linguisticcharacter in which things were subsumed under essential Names byAdam’s primal-interrogation [urvernehmen] (OGT, 15). Namingis the primal history [Urgeschicte] of signifying, indicatinga thing-like disinterest which contrasts with the directed, unifyingintentionality of Husserlian phenomenology (OGT, 14). The third isthe Goethean Ideal, which is recalled here in the context of theFaustian “Mothers” and which implicitly gestures towardshis earlier discussions of Goethe (OGT, 11). Finally, and most famously,Benjamin compares the virtual objectivity of the Idea representedthrough the reconfiguring of actual phenomena to an astrologicalconstellation, which simultaneously groups together and is revealed bythe cluster of individual stars (OGT, 11). Truth is said to be “actualized in the round dance of presented Ideas [vergegenwärtigtim Reigen der dargestellen Ideen]” (OGT, 4). This concept of the constellation is taken updirectly in Adorno’s inaugural lecture ‘The Actuality ofPhilosophy’, where he speaks of ‘the manipulation ofconceptual material by philosophy…of grouping and trialarrangement, of constellation and construction’ (Adorno 1931,131). It comes to inform Benjamin’s philosophical practice in hismajor writings from this point onwards, fromOne-Way Street(1928), via the methodological demand for the construction of historyand the attendant theory of the dialectical image in his work relatedto the “Arcades Project” in the 1930s, through to theconcept of history presented in his celebrated late essay, ‘Onthe Concept of History’ (1940). 

Benjamin’s concern to reincorporate the perspective ofart’s temporal transformation demands an analogousradicalization. The “genetic and concrete classification”(OGT, 24) that Benedetto Croce called history (in order to distinguishit from that generalizing thought that abstracts away from change anddevelopment) must now be reconciled with Benjamin’s theory ofIdeas. For the messianic philosophy of history that groundsBenjamin’s work problematizes existing formulations of theconcepts of history and historical origin. In line with his discussionof the Idea, the concept of historical origin should not be reduced tothe causality and actuality of the empirically factual, nor should itbe regarded as a purely logical and timeless essence. It is notmerely, 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 berepresented must include not only that of the actual phenomena of agiven period, but also that of their subsequent development in theunderstanding of later epochs. An investigation of the essence of theGerman mourning-play, for example, cannot restrict itself tocontemporaneous events and actual plays as if these were‘facts’ settled and decided once and for all, but mustalso investigate the changing understanding of this historical epochand the varying reception of these plays, including the priorconditions of its own self-understanding. But nor is it a“purely logical” category, as if the Idea were someessence detached from and unrelated to history, to be grasped throughan abstraction from all these particular historical developments (OGT,25). Origin [Ursprung] is therefore distinguished from amerely genetic coming-into-being [Enstehung] and evolutionarydevelopment of ‘pure history’, to include the essentialinner history of the “life of the works and forms” (OGT,24–6). The “science of the Origin” is a philosophicalhistory, a history of the essential, whose contemplation enlists adialectical perspective to grasp the form of the “originalphenomenon”: as something subject to a process of becoming anddisappearing, and therefore only partial and incomplete. Benjaminonce again resorts to an image: “The origin stands as eddy in thestream of becoming and vigorously draws the emerging material into itsrhythm” (OGT, 24). Criticismattempts to virtually reassemble the fore- and after-history [Vor-und Nachgeschichte] of the phenomena into a historicalconstellation, in which the Idea is represented and the phenomenaredeemed. This is its messianic function in relation to the historicalAbsolute. 

The Prologue also seeks to rescue the allegorical experiencerecognised in the mourning-plays for a modern theory of criticism.Allegorical contemplation aims at the ruination of things so that itcan, in its redemptive moment, construct [baun]a new whole out of the elements of the old. The character of thisconstruction distinguishes it from the creative invention of fantasy,since it manipulates and rearranges pre-existing material. To leave animprint or impression of this construction [Konstruktion]is one of its aims. This dual emphasis upon destruction andconstruction has led a number of scholars to see an anticipation ofDerridean deconstruction in Benjamin’s work (Fischer 1996,Section 1: Modernity/Postmodernity; Weber 2008, 122–128), although itshould be noted that his consideration of the specific historicity ofthis concept of criticism and his insistence of the immanent truthcontent of artworks remains resolutely modernist, and cannot be easilyassimilated into any ‘postmodernist’ position (cf. Weigel1996, xiv). The underlying affinity between romanticism and the baroquelies in their shared modernist concern with correcting classicism inart and the quasi-mythical perspective of classicism in general (OGT,230; 185). The Prologue reflects upon this ‘modernity’ ofthe 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 isciting the similarities between Expressionism in modern literature andthe Mannerist exaggeration of the baroque, his own reconstruction ofallegorical experience and its value for aesthetic theory isexperienced according to a historical conjunction between the baroquepast and the modernity of Benjamin’s present: modernity bothreveals and is revealed in the baroque. 

The book on mourning-plays concluded Benjamin’s German “cycleof production” (C, 322). At the beginning of the 1920sBenjamin became immersed in what was planned as a large-scale study ofpolitical thought, of which only a few fragments and the ‘Critique ofViolence’ remain (Steiner 2001, 61). As Uwe Steiner notes, whileBenjamin’s political thought may be situated in the milieu ofExpressionist Nietzsche-reception, the centrality that the realizationof happiness occupies in his definition of politics as “thesatisfaction of unenhanced humanness” is constructed in directopposition to Zarathustra’s tragic heroism (Steiner 2001, 49–50,61–62). This marks both a continuity with and a break from what IrvingWohlfarth has called his earlier “politics of Youth” (Wohlfarth 1992,164), which drew heavily on a philosophy of history and cultureinfluenced by Nietzsche’sUntimely Meditations. Benjaminremarked that his break from the Youth Movement did not constitute theabandonment of this earlier thought, however, but its submergence intoa ‘harder, purer, more invisible radicalism’ (C, 74). This in partaccounts for what T. J. Clark describes as the “cryptic” character of- what Adorno termed (SW 4, 101-2) - the anthropological materialismofThe Arcades Project, where, Clark comments, it is “as ifsuch a politics were being actively aired and developed elsewhere”(Clark 2003, 45–46).

A new cycle was initiated withOne-Way Street(Einbahnstraße), written 1923–6, published 1928),whose form and content puts into practice that speculative concept ofexperience, with its allegorical immersion into the depths of things,which was theoretically articulated in the works considered above. Thecity furnishes the sensuous, imagistic material forOne-WayStreet, whilst the genres of the leaflet, placard andadvertisement provide the constructive principle by which it isrearranged as a constellation. This formal methodology resembles thetechnological media of photography and film, as well as theavant-garde practices of Russian Constructivism and FrenchSurrealism. This entails what Adorno describes as a “philosophydirected against philosophy” (Adorno 1955, 235) or what HowardCaygill calls a “philosophizing beyond philosophy”(Caygill 1989, 119).

The presentation of contemporary capitalism as metropolitanmodernity inOne-Way Street also marks the turning point inBenjamin’s writings, away from what he retrospectively called“an archaic form of philosophizing naively caught up innature” (BA, 88) towards the development of “a politicalview of the past” (SW 2, 210). The theory of experience outlinedin his early writings is enlisted for revolutionary ends. In theessay, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the EuropeanIntelligentsia’ (1929), Surrealist experience provides anexample of a “profane illumination”, which in contrast tothe sacred and moralistic kind found in religion was guided by apolitical and a “materialistic, anthropologicalinspiration” (SW 2, 209). The latent energy residing in the mostdestitute and outmoded of things is, through the construction of newpolitical constellations, transformed into an intoxicating,revolutionary experience (SW 2, 210). The possibility of such aprofane illumination of nineteenth century Paris, to be presented asthe origin of modernity, preoccupied the remaining decade ofBenjamin’s life, and his research for the monumental and unfinished“Arcades Project” provides the material from which all hisremaining work is constructed.

5. The Arcades Project

The city was the seedbed of Benjamin’s ‘gothic’ Marxism(Cohen 1993); Paris its testing ground. All of Benjamin’s writingsfrom the autumn of 1927 until his death in 1940 relate in one way orother to his great unfinished study ‘Paris—Capital of theNineteenth Century’, otherwise known asThe ArcadesProject (Das Passagen-Werk), after its founding image,taken by Benjamin from the 1926 novel,Le Paysan de Paris, bythe French surrealist Louis Aragon. This was a book of which Benjaminwrote: “I could never read more than two or three pages in bedat night before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to laythe book aside.” (BA, 88) The arcades would become just one offive or six archetypal images of the psychosocial space of19th-century Paris around which the project was organized—eachpaired with a particular, thematically representative individual. Butit provided the model for the others, and its surrealist origin andliminal utopian impulse, neither quite inside nor out, established thewish-image and the dream-image—on the threshold of sleeping andwaking—at the heart of a work that was initially conceived as akind of ‘dialectical fairytale’. (The figure with whom‘the arcades’ was paired was the utopian socialist CharlesFourier.) All of Benjamin’s major essays of the 1930s derived theirimpetus and orientation from his Arcades work, and served to defer itscompletion in the act of elaborating its elements. 

This deferral was also, in part, the result of a process ofmaturation—a kind of ripening—immanent to the workitself.The Arcades was a vast and ambitious project, notsimply in terms of the mass and breadth of its archival sources(sought out by Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale inParis), but also—indeed, primarily—with respect to itsphilosophical and historical intent, and the methodological andrepresentational challenges it posed. Its sprawling, yet minutelyinvestigated historical object was to act as the point of entry intothe philosophically comprehended experience of metropolitancapitalism—not some past experience, or the experience of a pastphase of capitalist development, but the experience of the capitalistmetropolis in Benjamin’s own day—through the construction of aspecific series of relations between its elements ‘then’and ‘now’. The practice of research, conceptualorganization and presentation that it involved was self-consciouslyconceived as a working model for a new, philosophically oriented,materialist historiography with political intent. Its final,fragmentary and ‘ruined’ status has come to stand notsimply as the sign of a failure of completion, but as a paradigm of aform of constitutive incompletion that is characteristic of allsystematically oriented knowledge under the conditions ofmodernity. In this respect, in its very failure to be actualized, itconfirmed the fundamental historical and philosophical truth ofBenjamin’s earlier analysis of the Romantic fragment—extendingthe genre in a hitherto unimagined way.

In the ebb and flow of its changing rhythms—additions,revisions, reformulations and retrievals—Benjamin’sArcadesProject provides an extraordinary case study in the labour ofconceptual construction via the configuration and reconfiguration ofarchival materials. The voluminous ‘Notes and Materials’that make up theArcades as it has come down to us remainedunpublished until 1982, finally appearing in English only in 1999 (GSV; AP). Only since their publication has it been possible to get aclear sense of the overall trajectory of Benjamin’s thought duringthis period—rendering redundant, or at least displacing, many ofthe polemics associated with previous cycles of reception. The notesand materials are organized into twenty-six alphabetically designated‘convolutes’ (literally ‘bundles’) or folders,thematically defined by variousobjects (arcades, catacombs,barricades, iron constructions, mirrors, modes oflighting…),topics (fashion, boredom, theory ofknowledge, 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 awhole received two ‘exposés’ or summaries, in 1935and 1939 (the second, in French). However, its scope and theoreticalambition—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 apublisher for the project) to frustrate its realization. The onlylengthy segment of completed text derives from the part devoted toBaudelaire (one of five parts in the 1939 exposé, cut down fromsix in the initial 1935 version): the second of its three projectedsections, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire inBaudelaire’—although even this was never published inBenjamin’s lifetime. However, the central chapter of this section,‘The Flaneur’, was revised and expanded (in part, inresponse to an exchange of letters with Adorno) into the essay‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, which was published in theInstitute’s journal,Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung(Journal for Social Research) in January 1940. A powerfulcompressed draft of material corresponding to the final section, onthe commodity as a poetic object, exists as ‘Central Park’(SW 4, 161–199). As the project evolved, and in response to thebarriers to its realization, Baudelaire thus became increasinglycentral to Benjamin’s thinking. (‘Convolute J’, onBaudelaire, is by far the longest of the convolutes.) Encouraged byHorkheimer, Benjamin planned to publish the material on Baudelaire asa separate book, to be entitled,Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poetin the Era of High Capitalism. The development of this process,whereby a primal history of the nineteenth century gradually morphedinto a book on Baudelaire and ‘high capitalism’, may berepresented, diagrammatically, as follows.

However, to reduce the project to its own, restrictedde factotrajectory, rich as it is, does too much violence to the historical andphilosophical framework it embodies, from which the material onBaudelaire gains its broader significance. The overarching historicalframework is that of capitalist modernity as a ‘crisis ofexperience’. (The two terms, capitalism and modernity, areinextricable for Benjamin in the context of 19th- and early20th-century Europe.) The founding problematic of Benjamin’sthought—the expansion of the Kantian concept of experience, toinfinity—is thus here provided with a concretely historicalcontext, in which the notion of infinity/absoluteness becomesassociated with the concept of history itself. The problem: todialectically redeem the concept of experience [Erfahrung]by finding an appropriate way of experiencing the crisis of experienceitself. In classically ‘modern’ terms, the present isdefined as a time of crisis and transition, and philosophicalexperience (truth) is associated with the glimpse within the present,via the past, of a utopian political future that would bring history toan end. More immediately, the crisis is given political meaning by twopossible resolutions: the one destructive; the other constructive/emancipatory—fascism and communism, respectively. In thisrespect, for all his theoretical heterodoxy as a ‘Marxist’and his philosophical affinities with Adorno, Benjamin was in searchof, and in solidarity with, new forms of collectivity connected to acommunist future. Herein lay the basis of his friendship with Brecht.Unlike Brecht, however, he conceived them within the terms of aspeculative cultural history (Caygill 2004).

Within this framework, three distinct strands of work (discussed inthe next three sections) can be discerned: (1) investigation of thecrisis of experience via the ‘crisis of the arts’(SW  2, 212) through the interrelated termsoftechnology/technique[Technik],aura,reproducibility,andcollectivity; (2) philosophical distillation of theformal structure of the experience of the new, and its historical andpolitical contradictions, out of its social forms, and the examinationof its relations to allegory and commodity-form; (3) construction of anew historiography and a new philosophical concept of history. Thefirst may be traced through a linked series of essays of which‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the EuropeanIntelligentsia’ (1929), ‘Little History ofPhotography’ (1931), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of itsTechnical Reproducibility’ (1935–9) and ‘TheStoryteller’ (1936) are the most important. The second isconcentrated in readings of Baudelaire and related texts by Nietzscheand Blanqui. (The focusing-in on these three thinkers is a focusing-inon the relationship of capitalism to modernity in its purest,nihilistic form). The third is conjured from a reflective conjunctionof Marx, Nietzsche and Surrealism. It takes methodological form in‘Convolute N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory ofProgress]’ inThe Arcades Project and achieved itsaccidentally definitive presentation in Benjamin’s most frequentlycited, but still fiercely interpretatively disputed text (Caygill2004; Löwy 2005; Tiedemman 1989; Wohlfarth 1978): thefragments—known as theses—‘On the Concept ofHistory’.

6. Art and Technology

That Benjamin approached the symptomatic significance of the‘crisis of the arts’ for the ‘crisis ofexperience’ through the concept ofTechnik attests tothe fundamentally Marxist character of his conception of historicaldevelopment. It is the development of the forces of production that isthe motor of history. However, Benjamin was no more orthodox a Marxistabout 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 thepotential for a “bloodbath” in a technology subjected to“the lust for profit” (SW  1, 487)—amplydemonstrated in the horrors of the First World War—but he cameto distinguish between a ‘first’ and a‘second’, potentially liberatory technology, the lattermaking possible “a highly productive use of the human being’sself-alienation” (SW 3, 107; 113). It appears, in places, as thebasis for a kind of ‘technological cosmopolitics’ orpolitics of a ‘new collective technoid body’ (Caygill2005, 225; Leslie 2000, 153, in Osborne 2005, II: 391).

The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose ofall technology [Technik]. But …technology is not themastery of nature but of the relation between nature andhumanity. …In technology aphysis is being organizedthrough which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new anddifferent form from that which it had in nations[Völkern] and families. (SW 1, 487, translationamended)

The collective is a body, too. And thephysis that isbeing organized for it in technology can, through all its politicaland factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to whichprofane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body andimage so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodilycollective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of thecollective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcendeditself to the extent demanded by theCommunist Manifesto. (SW2, 217–8)

These passages, from the concluding sections ofOne-Way Streetand the ‘Surrealism’ essay, respectively, convey somethingof the ecstatic character of Benjamin’s political thought at theoutset of the 1930s, in which technology appears on a politicalknife-edge between its possibilities as “a fetish of doom”and “a key to happiness” (SW 2, 321). Art—an art ofthe masses—appears within this scenario as the educativemechanism through which the body of the collective can begin toappropriate its own technological potential.

The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas thesecond aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. Theprimary social function of art today is to rehearse thatinterplay. This applies especially to film.The function of filmis to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed todeal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expandingalmost daily. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them thattechnology will release them from their enslavement to the powers ofthe apparatus only when humanity’s whole constitution has adapteditself to the new productive forces which the second technology hasset 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 TechnicalReproducibility’ (‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seinertechnischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 1936), Benjamin refers usto the ‘phalansteries’, the “self-contained agrariancollectives” of Fourier’s socialist utopia. In the Fourierconvolute of theArcades Project, these are compared to thetwo main articles of Benjamin’s politics: “the idea ofrevolution as an innervation of the technical organs of thecollective… and the idea of the ‘cracking open of naturalteleology’” (AP, [W7, 4], 631). For Benjamin, art, in theform of film—the “unfolding <result> of all theforms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed intoday’s machines”—thus harboured the possibility ofbecoming a kind of rehearsal of the revolution. “[A]ll problemsof contemporary art”, Benjamin insisted, “find theirdefinitive formulation only in the context of film” (AP, [K3,3], 394). In this respect, it was the combination of the communistpedagogy and constructive devices of Brecht’s epic theatre that markedit 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 twintheses of the transformation of the concept of art by its‘technical reproducibility’ and the new possibilities forcollective experience this contains, in the wake of the historicaldecline of the ‘aura’ of the work of art, a process thatfilm is presented as definitively concluding. Much ink has been spiltdebating the thesis of the decline of the aura in Benjamin’swork. On the one hand, with regard to some of his writings,Benjamin’s concept of aura has been accused of fostering anostalgic, purely negative sense of modernity as loss—loss ofunity both with nature and in community (A. Benjamin 1989). On theother hand, in the work on film, Benjamin appears to adopt anaffirmative technological modernism, which celebrates the consequencesof 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 theidea of the work of art as a structure from the symbol of theology onthe one hand, and from the taboo of magic on the other. I now find itsomewhat disturbing —and here I can see a sublimatedremnant of certain Brechtian themes—that you have now rathercasually transferred the concept of the magical aura to the‘autonomous work of work’ and flatly assigned acounter-revolutionary function to the latter. (BA, 128)

Brecht himself, meanwhile, was appalled by even the residuallynegative function of the aura, recording his response inhisWorkbook: “it is all mysticism mysticism, in aposture 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 wasgrounded 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 rolesin Benjamin’s writings, in his various attempts to grasp hishistorical present in terms of the possibilities for‘experience’ afforded by its new cultural forms; which heincreasingly came to identify (some say precipitously) withrevolutionary political potential. Yet Adorno was wrong to see a simplechange of position, rather than a complex series of inflections of whatwas a generally consistent historical account. Benjamin had writtenaffirmatively of “the emancipation of object from aura” asearly as 1931, in his ‘Little History of Photography’, inwhich he described Atget’s photographs as “suck[ing] theaura out of reality like water from a sinking ship” (SW 2, 518).It is here that we find the basic definition of aura: “A strangeweave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance ofdistance, no matter how close it may be.” Importantly, theexamples given with this definition are from nature: mountains and abranch observed “at rest on a summer’s noon … untilthe moment or the hour become part of their appearance…”.The ‘destruction’ of the aura by transience andreproducibility is judged “a salutary estrangement” (SW 2,518–9). Similarly, when ‘The Storyteller’ recountsthe “dying out of the art of storytelling” and “theincomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller”, it isnonetheless maintained: “nothing could be more fatuous than towish to see it as merely a ‘symptom of decay’, let alone a‘modern symptom’. It is rather, only a concomitant of thesecular productive forces of history…” (SW 3, 146; 162).‘The Work of Art’ essay extends and enriches the earlieraccount of photography’s technological transformation ofperception (“the optical unconscious”) with reference tofilm. The difference resides in the insistent political dimension ofthe later essay (after Hitler’s taking of power in 1933), and itsdetermination to introduce concepts “that are completely uselessfor the purposes of fascism” (SW 3, 102). The main problem withthe auratic (which is deemed historically residual, not eliminated,indeed is perhaps ineliminable [Didi-Huberman 2004]) was that, Benjaminbelieved, it was precisely “useful for fascism”. Thiscontext over-determines the essay throughout, with its almost Manicheanoppositions between ritual and politics, cult value and exhibitionvalue. Quite apart from the intervening technological and socialdevelopments, it makes it a very difficult text simply to‘use’ today. For some, however, it is precisely theconnection it draws between a certain kind of mass culture and fascismthat provides its continuing relevance (Buck-Morss 1992).

7. Baudelaire and the Modern

Benjamin’s thinking of ‘the modern’ [die Moderne]is his most important theoretical contribution to the historical studyof cultural forms. Frequently mistranslated in early English-languageeditions of his writings as ‘modernism’, and still oftenrendered as ‘modernity’ (although Benjamin tended toretain Baudelaire’s coinage,la modernité, when makingthat reference),die Moderne designates both a formaltemporal structure and the diverse range of its historicalinstances—past and present. Baudelaire is the main writerthrough whom Benjamin thought ‘the modern’; not as mightbe expected, with reference to the canonical accountofmodernité in ‘The Painter of ModernLife’ (1859/60), but with regard to what Benjamin called the‘theory’ of the modern first set down in ‘The Salonof 1845’: “the advent of the truenew (die Heraufkunftdes wahrhaft Neunen)” (SW 4, 45–6, translationamended; GS 1.2, 580). 

In Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter’ essay,modernitéfamously denotes ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, thecontingent’. It is associated with transitoriness as thegeneralized social instantiation of the temporality of the modern, inthe capitalist metropolis. In contrast to transitoriness as such,however, Benjamin was first and foremost (politically andphilosophically) interested in ‘the new’, in its‘advent’ or historical becoming, and in its quality asnewness or novelty (the newness of the new), in a way that wasconceptually distinct from the conventional opposition of the‘modern’ to the ‘ancient’—whichBaudelaire notoriously retained. As a result, Benjamin was consequentlyalso interested in what the German sociologist Max Weber would havecalled its ‘routinization’ (although Benjamin did not usethis vocabulary): the routinization accompanying the generalization ofthe new as a mode of experience—in fashion and boredom, inparticular—and the formal structure of sameness involved in itsrepetition. It is here that transitoriness enters the picture—as a result of the generalization of novelty. Baudelaireself-consciously embraced modernity with ‘heroic effort’,attempting, like the painter of modern life, to ‘extract its epicaspects’ and ‘distill the eternal from thetransitory’; Benjamin, on the other hand, sought to understand itin order to find a way out of what he called its ‘hell’. Hepicked up on the relationship of the transitory to the eternal inBaudelaire’s account of modernity, but first, he de-classicizedthe 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’sportrayal of modernity as read it ‘symptomatically’ (inLouis Althusser’s sense), or more precisely, allegorically, in orderto uncover beneath it the experience ofthe transformation ofhistorical time by the commodity form. Baudelaire was able tograsp this experience, according to Benjamin, through thecontradictory historical temporality that structured his work: at onceresolutely modern yet, in its poetic form (lyric), alreadyanachronistic. Benjamin similarly valued the disjunctive historicaltemporality 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 inevitablefailure of an attempt to translate the experience [Erlebnis]of modernity into the language of tradition(Judaism)—Baudelaire’s poetry was able to convey the intensityof the experience of modernity through the very tension between thatexperience and his chosen, lyrical means; not merely negatively (likeKafka), but via the way in which modernity transformed those means. Inparticular, the lyric allowed Baudelaire to register the full effectof the temporality of the modern on the dissolution of subjectivity,and the fact that it consequently “takes a heroic constitutionto 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 isjustly famous—the bohemian, the flaneur, the prostitute, thegambler, the ragpicker—are the figures via which this structureof experience appears. Primary within Baudelaire, they are nonethelessmethodologically 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 incorporatedthe anachronism of the lyric form into his work. Benjamin appropriatedthis method, with its dissociated ‘ritual elements’ (SW 4,333), to read Baudelaire himself. In the essay ‘Some Motifs inBaudelaire’, correspondences of temporal structure, experiencedas ‘shock’, link the machine, the film, the crowd, and thegame of chance:

What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyorbelt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in thefilm. … The shock experience [Chockerlebnis] which thepasser-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated‘experiences’ of the worker at his machine. … Thejolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called coup in a gameof chance…. (SW 4, 328–30)

A single repetitive and dissociated formal temporal structure isdetected beneath the rich array of phenomenological forms presented inBaudelaire’s poetry: “the price for which the sensation ofthe modern could be had: the disintegration of the aura in shockexperience”. (SW 4, 343, translation amended; GS 1.2, 653)

Furthermore, this interpretative key, the experience of shock, isitself understood through a series of theoretical correspondenceswithin Benjamin’s own present; primarily, that betweenProust’s ‘involuntary memory’ and Freud’stheory of consciousness. This theoretical correspondence is read in thelight of the ‘shell shock’ first diagnosed during the FirstWorld War, about which Benjamin had previously written in hisreflections on Ernst Junger in his 1930 review essay, ‘Theoriesof German Fascism’ (SW 2, 312–321). The connection of themodern to fascism does not appear solely through the thematic of thefalse restoration of the aura, but also within the process of itsdisintegration by shock. (Structurally, the shock of the crowd is‘like’ shell shock.) Baudelaire is thus not merely theprivileged writer for the advent of the theory of the modern, but theone in whose work the nineteenth century appears most clearly as thefore-life of the present. However, if it was through Baudelaire thatBenjamin grasped the structure of the temporality of the‘modern’, it was through Nietzsche and Blanqui that heexplored its ambiguous historical meaning, via the way in which theirphilosophies reflect the transformation of the new by the commodityinto the ‘ever selfsame’. “Just as in the seventeenthcentury it is allegory that becomes the canon of dialectical images, inthe nineteenth century it is novelty” (AP, 11):  “Thecommodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode ofapprehension.” (SW 4, 188)

It is the fragment ‘Central Park’ that most clearlyreveals the consequences of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire for hisconcept of history: the modern completely transforms the possibilitiesfor the experience of history. On the one hand, it de-historicizesexperience, wresting it away from the temporal continuities oftradition. On the other hand, a messianic structure—an openingof history to something outside of time—reasserts itself withinthe still life [nature mort] of modernity’s restlesssameness. This is Benjamin’s famous ‘dialectics at astandstill’ (Tiedemann, 1982). It transforms the historicalnaturalism of the baroque, analyzed in theOrigin of the GermanMourning-Play (Section 4, above), in a futural direction. Inparticular, it involves a prioritization of the interruptive stasis ofthe image over the continuity of temporal succession. In fact,Benjamin maintained: “The concept of historical time forms anantithesis to the idea of a temporal continuum” (SW 4, 407).]

8. Image, History, Culture

Debate over Benjamin’s conception of history was for many yearspreoccupied with the question of whether it is essentially‘theological’ or ‘materialist’ in character(or how it could possibly be both at once), occasioned by theconjunction of Benjamin’s self-identification with historicalmaterialism and his continued use of explicitly messianic motifs(Wolhfarth 1978; Tiedemann 1983–4). This was in large part thepolemical legacy of the competing influence of threefriendships—with Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno and BertoltBrecht—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 ofHistory’). Scholem promoted a theological interpretation, Brechtinspired a materialist one, while Adorno attempted to forge some formof compatibility between the two. Yet the question is badly posed ifit is framed within received concepts of ‘theology’ and‘materialism’ (the paradox becomes self-sustaining), sinceit was Benjamin’s aim radically to rethink the meaning of these ideas,on the basis of a new philosophy of historical time. This newphilosophy of historical time is the ultimate goal of Benjamin’s laterwritings. It appears most explicitly, under construction, in‘Convolute N’ ofThe Arcades Project, ‘Onthe Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’; it is applied toart history in the 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuch, Collector andHistorian’; and is manifest in a condensed, rhetoricallypolitical and problematic form in ‘On the Concept ofHistory’. It derives from a dual critique of the ‘vulgarnaturalism’ ofhistoricism and the deferral of actioninvolved in the associated Social Democratic conceptofprogress (Kittsteiner 1986). It gives rise to aconception of historical intelligibility based on ‘literarymontage’ as the method of construction of ‘dialecticalimages’ (AP, 460–1). And it culminates in aquasi-messianic conception of revolution as an‘interruption’ of history or an ‘arrest ofhappening’: “Classless society is not the final goal ofhistorical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achievedinterruption” (SW 4, 402).

Benjamin took as one of the main ‘methodologicalobjectives’ of hisArcades Project “todemonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated withinitself the idea of progress”, taking as its “foundingconcept… not progress but actualization”  (AP, [N2,2], 460). He had both philosophical and political reasons forthis. Philosophically, Benjamin saw the conventional idea of progressas projecting into the future a conception of time as‘homogenous’ and ‘empty’ epitomized by theattempt of Ranke’s historicism to represent the past “the way itreally was” (SW4, 395; 391). This is a conception of time basedon the temporal continuity of past, present and future,‘in’ which events occur and are understood as causallyconnected. It is naturalistic in so far as it acknowledges nofundamental temporal-ontological distinction between past, present andfuture time; it has no sense of time as the ongoing production oftemporal differentiation. Time is differentiated solely by thedifferences between the events that occur within it. In particular, itfails to grasp that historical time (the time of human life) isconstituted through such immanent differentiations, via theexistential modes of memory, expectation and action. In this respect,there are affinities between Benjamin’s philosophy of time andHeidegger’s (Caygill, 1994).

The political consequence of the temporal naturalism underlying theidea of ‘progress’ is conformism. For Benjamin,paradoxically, this applied in particular to the German SocialDemocrats’ understanding of communism as anideal, in theneo-Kantian ethical sense of the object of an ‘endlesstask’:

Once the classless society had beendefined as an infinite task, the empty homogeneous time was transformedinto an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for theemergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.(SW 4, 402)

In other words, the concept of progress is demobilizing; and Marxismhad become infected by the ideology of progress. However, rather thanpositing an existential alternative, in the manner of Heidegger’s‘resolute decision’, Benjamin set out to construct novelconceptions of historical time and historical intelligibility based onthe relationship, not between the past and the present, but between the‘then’ and the ‘now’, as brought together inimages of the past. Each historically specific ‘now’ wasunderstood to correspond to (in a Baudelairean sense), or to renderlegible, a particular ‘then’.

It is not that what is past casts its light on what ispresent, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, animage is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with thenow to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at astandstill. For while the relation of the present to the past ispurely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now isdialectical: 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 tobe the means of production of historical intelligibility. Furthermore,the ‘static’ temporality of the image was understood toconnect such an experience of historical meaning, directly, to aradical or ‘revolutionary’ concept of action, associatedwith the idea of the present as crisis. The passage above continues:

The image that is read—which is to say, the image inthe now of its recognizability [das Bild im Jetzt derErkennbarkeik]—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading isfounded. (AP, [N3, 1], 463)

Such “perilous critical moments” are both immanent tothe temporality of modernity, at a structural level (the temporality ofcrisis), and, in each particular case, contingent and conjuncturallyspecific. In them, the past is understood “to bring the presentinto a critical state”. However, this critical state is not acrisis of the status quo, but rather of its destruction: the criticalmoment is that in which “the status quo threatens to bepreserved” (AP, [N10, 2], 474). Dialectical images counter thethreat of preservation (tradition) by virtue of the interruptive forcethey are understood to impart to experience as a consequence of theinstantaneous temporality of the now, or what Benjamin famously callednow-time [Jetztzeit]:“The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in aflash” (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 dischargeof an explosive force—the explosive force of now-time, blastingopen ‘the continuum of history’—for which Benjaminis probably best known. The philosophy of historical time which theseimages sum up was elaborated by him in two main contexts: thedevelopment of a new conception of cultural history and a politicaldiagnosis of the historical crisis of Europe at the outset of theSecond World War.

Benjamin did not see culture as threatened by‘barbarism’, so much as itself being implicated init:

Barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture—asthe 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 theapotheosis 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.” Onlyan understanding of “the crucial importance of reception…enables us to correct the process of reification which takes place ina 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 thathappened to the work, externally; it was asconstitutive ofthe work itself as its ‘fore-life’ [Vorleben], orconditions of production—which are themselves rendered invisibleby the idea of culture as value, and are themselves “involved ina constant process of change” as the work itself changes. Amaterialist cultural history would restore to the experience of worksa sense of both of these changing sets of conditions (before andafter), and the conflicts between them, in an engagement“originary for every present”, since “[i]t is thepresent that polarizes the event into fore- andafter-history”  (SW 3, 261–2; AP, [N7a, 8], 471). Itis here, in an ontological rethinking of reception, that thephilosophical significance of Benjamin’s interest in technologies ofreproduction lies. With these concepts of fore- and afterlife,Benjamin founded a new problematic for cultural study.

Benjamin was interested in ‘culture’ not as anautonomous realm of values (“the independent values of aesthetic,scientific, ethical… and even religious achievements”),but on the contrary, like the sociologist Georg Simmel, whosePhilosophy of Moneyhe cities in this regard, as “elements in the development ofhuman nature” (Simmel, quoted in AP, [N14, 3], 480). In thisrespect, cultural study is situated within the field of a materialistphilosophy of history. And the philosophy of history insists on aconception of history as a whole. It is here than the messianicstructure of Benajmin’s concept of history confronts us asunavoidable; although not thereby necessarily‘theological’, since it is the transition of a conceptualstructure 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 hissearch for a non-Hegelian, non-developmentalist conception of historyas a whole, in ‘On the Concept of History’ Benjamin figurednow-time, quasi-messianically, alternatively as a ‘model’of messianic time and as “shot through with splinters ofmessianic time.” In the context of a diagnosis of the Europeancrisis of 1939–40 as a world-historical crisis, the‘critical state of the present’ thus came, in this text, toacquire a theological-political tenor. “A revolutionary chance inthe fight for the oppressed past” is compared to “the signof a messianic arrest of happening” (SW 4, 396–7). Benjaminwas aware that this rhetoric would lead to misunderstanding. But thecombination of perceived political urgency and isolation compelled himto extend his concept of history beyond the state of his philosophicalresearch, experimentally, into an apparently definitive statement. Itis as if Benjamin had hoped to overcome the aporia of action within hisstill essentially hermeneutical philosophy (Osborne 1995) through theforce of language alone. Formally, however, ‘On the Concept ofHistory’ should be read as a series of fragments, in the earlyRomantic sense. As such, it remains resolutely negative—andthereby importantly partial—in its evocation of the historicalwhole, which is acknowledged as unpresentable. In this respect,Benjamin’s final text recalls his earliest major publication, the1919 thesis ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in GermanRomanticism’: as a gesture towards the philosophy of historyneeded to complete a modified and ‘modernized’ version ofthe early Romantic project.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

The current standard German edition of Benjamin’s work remainsSuhrkamp’s seven volumeGesammelte Schriften, edited byTiedemann and Schweppenhauser, although a newKritishGesamtausgabe is currently being edited, also by Suhrkamp andprojected at twenty-one volumes over the next decade. The standardEnglish edition is Harvard University Press’ recent fourvolumeSelected Writings,Early Writings, andThe ArcadesProject.

Biographies in English 

• Eiland, H. and Jennings, M. W.,Walter Benjamin: A CriticalLife, 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 aFriendship, New York: Review Books.
• Witte, B., 1991,Walter Benjamin: An IntellectualBiography, Detroit: Wayne University Press.
• Wizisla, E., 2009,Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: theStory of a Friendship, London: Libris.

Selected English Anthologies

• Benjamin, A. (ed.), 1989,The Problems of Modernity: Adornoand Benjamin, London: Routledge.
• ––– (ed.), 2005a,Walter Benjamin andArt,  London & New York: Continuum.
• ––– (ed.), 2005b,Walter Benjamin andHistory, London & New York: Continuum.
• Benjamin, A. and Hanssen, B. (eds.), 2002,Walter Benjaminand Romanticism,  London & New York: Continuum.
• Benjamin, A. and Osborne, P. (eds.), 1994/2000,WalterBenjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, London &New York: Routledge/Manchester: Clinamen Press.
• Ferris, D. S. (ed.), 2004,The Cambridge Companion to WalterBenjamin, 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 WalterBenjamin, Rochester & Woodbridge: Camden House.
• Hanssen, B. (ed.), 2006,Walter Benjamin and the ArcadesProject, London & New York: Continuum.
• Hartoonian, G., (ed.), 2010,Walter Benjamin and Architecture, London & New York: Routledge.
• Osborne, P. (ed.), 2005,Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluationsin Cultural Theory, Volume I: Philosophy, Volume II: Modernity,Volume III: Appropriations, London & New York: Routledge.
• Smith, G. (ed.), 1988,On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays andRecollections, Cambridge, MA. & London: MIT.
• ––– (ed.), 1989,Walter Benjamin:Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago & London: Universityof Chicago Press.

Selected Secondary Literature

• Adorno, T. W., 1955, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’,inPrisms, Cambridge, MA.: MIT., 1983, pp. 227–242.
• –––, 1931, ‘The Actuality ofPhilosophy’, inTelos 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: WalterBenjamin’s Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Benjamin, A. (ed.),1989, pp. 122–140. 
• –––, 2013,Working with Walter Benjamin:Recovering a Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.
• Bernsaïd, D., 1990,Walter Benjamin sentinellemessianique: À la gauche du possible, Paris: Plon.
• Bolle, W., 2009, ‘Paris on the Amazon? PostcolonialInterrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism’, in Goebel2009, 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: ThePhilosophical Development of Literary Theory and Literary History inWalter Benjamin & Friedrich Schlegel, New York, Bern &Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Caygill, H., 1994, ‘Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destructionof Tradition’, in Benjamin and Osborne 1994/2000,pp. 1–31.
• –––, 1998,Walter Benjamin: The Colour ofExperience, London: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Concept ofCultural History,’ in Ferris 2004, pp. 73–96.
• –––, 2005, ‘Non-Messianic PoliticalTheology 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, andEros’, 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 theParis of Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley & Los Angeles:University of California Press.
• Cowan, B., 1981, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory ofAllegory’,New German Critique, 22:109–122.
• Derrida, J., 1989–90, ‘Force of Law: The“Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, trans. MaryQuaintance,Cardozo Law Review, 11: 973–1045,reprinted in Osborne 2005, 1: 398–432.
• –––, 1994,Spectres of Marx: the state ofthe 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’,inGhostly demarcations: a symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectresof Marx, ed. M. Sprinker, London & New York: Verso, pp.213–269.
• Didi-Huberman, G., 2005, ‘The Supposition of the Aura: TheNow, the Then and Modernity’, in Benjamin, A., 2005b,pp. 2–18.
• Eagleton, T., 1981,Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards aRevolutionary Criticism, London: NLB.
• Eiland, H., 2011, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in EW,pp. 1–13.
• Ferber, I., 2013,Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s EarlyReflections on Theater and Language, Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.
• Friedlander, E., 2012,Walter Benjamin: A PhilosophicalPortrait, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Frisby, D., 1996, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Prehistory of Modernityas Anticipation of Postmodernity? Some MethodologicalReflections’, in Fischer 1996, pp. 15–32.
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