Mauro Ponzi (Auth.) - Nietzsche's Nihilism in Walter Benjamin-Palgrave Macmillan (2017) PDF

nietzsche’s nihilism
in
walter benjamin
Mauro Ponzi
Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin
Mauro Ponzi
Nietzsche’s Nihilism
in Walter Benjamin
Mauro Ponzi
Rome, Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-39266-0 ISBN 978-3-319-39267-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958128
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Contents
1 Capitalism as Religion 1
2 Organizing Pessimism 21
3 Nietzsche: Editions and Interpretations of His Works 57
4 The Cry of Marsyas: History as a Place of Permanent

Catastrophe 93
5 Hidden Refusal 129
6 The Dream Space 151
7 Baudelaire 185
8 The Order of the Profane 233
Bibliography 269
Index 281
v
Abbreviations
ADHL Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of

History for Life, transl. by Peter Preuss, Hackett, Indianapolis-
Cambridge 1980.
AP Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
(Mass.)-London 1999.
B Walter Benjamin, Briefe, ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor
W. Adorno, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1978.
C The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. M. R. and E. M.
Jacobson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994.
FE Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, transl. by James
McGowan, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York 1993.
GBFA Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter
Ausgabe, ed. by Werner Hecht, Jean Knopf, Werner Mittenzei
and Klaus Detlef Müller, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1994.
GM Friedrich Nietzsche, On Genealogy of Morality, ed. by Keith
Ansell-Pearson, trans. by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge 1994.
GS Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann
and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
1974–1989.
vii
viii Abbreviations
KG Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by

Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, De Gruyter, Berlin
1967–87.
KS Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe,
ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, De Gruyter,
Berlin 1967–77.
MECW Marx Engels Collected Works https://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/cw
MEW Karl Marx Friedrich Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin 1973.
OC Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard, Paris 1975.
OFEI Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of our Educational Institutions,
Edinburgh-London 1910.
SW Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge (Mass.)-London 1999–2003.
TSZ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and
None, trans. by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge-New York 2006.
Introduction
Walter Benjamin’s analysis of modernity and modern society offers

us a key with which we can interpret the communicative and cultural
trends of our time. He tackles the major trends of the philosophy of
his own time and analyses the social and cultural phenomena character-
izing the birth of the modern age to develop a critical thinking that is
able to deconstruct the myth of modernity: namely, the idea of progress.
Benjamin rejects neither progress as a historical phenomenon nor the
technical achievements that it brings, but he is against faith in progress
as a new mythology. The best aspect of his philosophy is his method, his
approach to the modern, and it allows us to apply some of his concepts
to the present time. Benjamin’s theological-political approach to modern
society leads him to consider capitalism as a religion, ‘perhaps the most
extreme that ever existed’.1 Liberalism, totally uncritically, sees capitalism
as the ‘last’ (and unique) stage of historical development, growth as a nec-
essary objective, and production forms as synonyms for civilization and
culture. Yet capitalism is based on the dispositif guilt-debt, it is an aimless
finality that reproduces endlessly the same profit mechanism.
Although vastly unsystematic, Benjamin’s approach to modernity
undoubtedly retains a theological character, embodied in his well-known
thought image of the little hunchback hiding inside historical materi-
alism. The question therefore relates to the possibility of conceiving,
within this ‘weak’ (and perhaps desperate) messianic waiting, a political
ix
x Introduction
perspective that would allow us to speak of an order of the profane ‘here

and now’. If history is a ‘pile of debris’, a permanent catastrophe, then
what represents politics—the order of the profane—can only be the
‘organizing of pessimism’. The question is whether in the ‘empty and
homogeneous’ time of history, in the ‘meantime’ between creation and
the promised, but not yet arrived, redemption, a space exists in which the
profane becomes the possibility of being ‘organized’, despite its ephem-
eral and ‘catastrophic’ prospect. Only in this dazwischen (in between)
is a political perspective possible. Benjamin builds a ‘secret agreement’
between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s thought systems, extrapolating some of
their elements and then discarding them as empty husks. Marx’s system
does not work without its immanence of historical necessity; and the
thought of Nietzsche without the centrality of ‘bare life’ loses all vital cre-
ative impulses. The matrix of Nietzschean philosophy consists not only
in the ‘destructive character’ of modernity and in ‘negative theology’,
but above all in his ‘analogical’ thinking, which does not include any
synthesis.
The spectre that Marx evokes in the Manifesto should be compared to
another spectre that is more perturbing—the Uncanny, as Freud would
call it—evoked by Nietzsche when he writes: ‘Nihilism stands at the
door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?’ This study aims to con-
sider whether in Benjamin’s ‘materialism’ is hidden a ‘perturbing Guest’;
namely, Nietzsche’s nihilism. The conceptual core of the book consists
in retracing the ‘eccentric’ route of Benjamin’s philosophical discourse
in the representation of modernity as a ‘place of permanent catastrophe’,
attempting to ‘overcome’ Nietzsche’s nihilism through the notion of a
‘weak’ messianic hope. At the same time, the book also focuses on the
function of Nietzsche’s thought in relation to the theory of art, and par-
ticularly the theory of the avant-garde, of which Benjamin was the main
proponent. The inherent ambiguity of Nietzsche’s thought caused an
often irreconcilable diversity of interpretations. Not only has Nietzsche’s
thought been interpreted and used differently by German and broader
Western culture in the early twentieth century, but even today there is a
multiplicity of interpretations. Among the many sources of Benjamin’s
thought, the influence of Nietzsche’s nihilism has rarely been explored
by literary criticism. Apart from a few essays by Helmuth Pfotenhauer2
and Irving Wohlfarth3 (1988, 2005), I am aware of only two systematic
Introduction xi
studies on the subject: one in Italian,4 which therefore did not have inter-
national resonance, and one in English, a book by James McFarland.5
The analysis of Benjamin’s complex conceptual reception of Nietzsche
needs a dual interpretative strategy: at first we must have an interpreta-
tion of Nietzsche’s thought, and then we have to provide an interpreta-
tion of its influence on Benjamin. This seemingly obvious claim holds
many difficulties, because the characteristic of both philosophers is to
be ambiguous, therefore interpreting them implies the need to choose.
And since the two thinkers are radical, these choices must necessarily be
radical: namely, to accept some lines of interpretation and exclude oth-
ers. Benjamin, who repeatedly dealt with the problem of translation, was
perfectly aware that Nietzsche’s complex and ambiguous thought could
be misunderstood. In a note, written between 1935 and 1936, with the
French title ‘La traduction—le pour et le contre’ (Translation—For and
Against), he puts the problem of the difficulty of translating a philosophi-
cal text and, albeit paradoxically, the problem of the translation of some
key words, some fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy:
When Nietzsche brilliantly misuses the German language, he is taking

revenge on the fact that a German linguistic tradition never really came into
being—except within the thin stratum of literary expression. He took double
the liberties allowed by language, to rebuke it for permitting them. And mis-
use of the German language is, finally, a critique of the unformed state of the
German person. How can this linguistic situation be translated into another?6
He draws the conclusion that translation is always and at the same time
a comment; that is, an interpretation. Nietzsche ‘forced’ the German lan-
guage to radicalize his concepts and used thought images,7 metaphors
and icons that the reader must decipher; therefore, the translation of his
key concepts is always an interpretation of his thought. Even if, in the
context of a translation theory, this paradoxical claim of Benjamin’s does
not say anything new—in fact, the French used to say ‘traducteur/tradit-
eur’ (translator/traitor)—related to Nietzsche’s philosophy his statement
does acquire a particular significance. In fact, Nietzsche’s thought images
have multiple meanings. In German, Übermensch, for instance, means a
person who claims to be ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the ‘normality’: the word has
a semantic spectrum that simultaneously indicates ‘to overcome’ and ‘to
xii Introduction
go beyond’. However, this duplicity and ambiguity of meaning become

a clear difference of interpretation if we translate the term as ‘superman’
or ‘beyond man’ (or ‘overman’). And this happens with the term Rausch
too, which Nietzsche uses to express the feeling of the Dionysian, and on
which Benjamin draws very often in his writings. The word Rausch has
a very complex and wide semantic spectrum: in German it means at the
same time drunkenness, intoxication, euphoria and rapture. If we choose
the translation ‘drunkenness/intoxication’, we reduce the philosophy of
Nietzsche (and Benjamin’s literary theory) to writing and thinking caused
by the use of wine, absinthe or drugs; while if we choose the translation
‘euphoria/rapture’, we aim to emphasize the Dionysian, philosophical,
self-destructive and at the same time creative aspect of his thought.
The fact remains that speaking of Nietzsche in a language other than
German—and that is what Benjamin meant in his allusive and esoteric
claim—means having to make a choice: to discard some semantic values
and to emphasize only one or two of those contained in the original term.
In One-Way Street, in the section ‘To the Planetarium’, Benjamin writes:
The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic
trance [Rausch]. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain
knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never
of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic
contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of
modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and
to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.8
In the usual English version Rausch is translated as ‘ecstatic trance’ and

‘rapture’. However, often in other passages of Benjamin’s writing and in
literary criticism the term is translated as ‘intoxication’. The dual transla-
tion of this word implies a dual and different interpretation of Nietzsche’s
and Benjamin’s thought. The duplicity and ambiguity of Nietzsche’s
thought caused a very different interpretation and reception of his phi-
losophy. He has been considered either the ‘godfather of Nazism’ or a
victim of manipulation and misunderstanding.9
At the beginning of the new millennium, we find ourselves again in a
‘state of emergency’—in fact, it has become the norm. The West’s con-
Introduction xiii
ceptual and institutional models are made in the midst of crises that stem
from both outside and within. Faith in rationality and progress is no lon-
ger able to provide adequate responses to new material and intellectual
needs. Nihilism really does seem to have become ‘world politics’. It is
now time to ‘rethink’ Benjamin in another way and to make an attempt
to understand whether it is possible to define an ‘order of the profane’.
We must—above all—rethink his concept of history, to see whether it
can provide a key to reading the most recent past and if it might contain
elements that can help us to construct a theoretical apparatus, to under-
stand the present, this ‘space’ that is in continuous transformation, where
old categories are no longer required.
In his Arcades Project Benjamin uses some well-known figures
(Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust, Blanqui and so on) as allegories to
explain fundamental aspects of modernity. This book is built around
these allegorical figures, and aims to explain both Benjamin’s interpreta-
tion of Paris and the major trends of modernity through his interpretative
criteria. Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to criticize modernity,
or, rather, to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, its immanent
negative dimension. He considers Baudelaire to be the key figure of his
era, because the French poet consciously lived through the great changes
of modernity, and because in his poems he expressed the unease of the
individual caused by these great transformations. Baudelaire puts explic-
itly the problem of poetry’s audience and treats his verses as commodities.
He is aware that the social function of the poet has undergone a trans-
formation. Benjamin aims to write the ‘prehistory of modernity’, because
he means that the search for origins can help us to understand both the
communication mechanisms (in which images play a central role) and
the false promises of happiness of modernity and its faith in progress. By
extrapolating the significant objects as charged with allegorical meaning,
Benjamin wants to write a history of dreams; that is, he aims to pinpoint
the origin of the dream images. They derive, in fact, from the dream-
er’s lived experience of the past and from the image space (Bildraum),
populated by images originating from advertising, cinema and the col-
lective imagination. In this process he definitely prefers the moment of
awakening to that of dreaming, and uses a technique very similar to that
of Freud. Communication’s images in the modern era are body-and-space
xiv Introduction
images: they are an expression of the unconscious that takes on itself frag-
ments of bodily experience, instincts and memory traces, combined with
the collective imagination. This oneiric language has to be deciphered,
interpreted, ‘read’ like a book. The topography of the image space in the
modern presents similarities with the topography of the metropolis: both
are to be defined through memory, because of their temporary nature,
their continuous changing.
The individual is constantly subjected to the shock of the new, which
asserts itself as the destroyer of the already existing. The ‘pile of debris’
on which the melancholic look of Klee’s famous angel falls is also the
result of continuous renewal, which the modern brings with it, and corre-
sponds to the systematic destruction of the already existing. Baudelaire’s
allegories (and also those of Benjamin) are comprehensible only if related
to the epochal situation, in close contrast to the modern. And in this
sense, the allegories express that radicalism and that destructive nature of
which Benjamin talked regarding the ‘productive impulse’ unleashed by
the same modernity. This process is directly connected to the conception
of expressive means. The poet is far from being spontaneous, but—as
Poe said (echoed by both Baudelaire and Benjamin)—he operates pro-
grammatically through the process of montage and ‘splicing’ in order
to achieve his purpose. Producing art therefore requires the systematic
destruction of the modern world’s culture.
Benjamin deals with the ‘mythology of the modern’, a notion deriving
from the psycho-anthropological arena, supported especially by ‘eccen-
tric’ intellectuals, who were not progressive. His much evoked ambiguity
lies in his interest in this kind of methodology, which he partly tries to
use, and in his firm intention to fight against a ‘mythological’ interpreta-
tion of the modern on a conceptual level. Paradoxically, precisely when he
‘goes’ down into the ‘subterranean’, in the places of the mythical, of the
magical, of the ‘sacred’, he practises his ‘political’ action: his incursions
into these territories have the value of a political-cultural battle against
those who would interpret the phenomena of modernity as ‘inexplicable’.
In his essay on Aragon and the Surrealists, mainly in his Arcades Project,
Benjamin vehemently denies the possibility of interpreting the contem-
porary epoch by the myth. The mythological key is, according to him, an
insufficient interpretative key, because it is linked to the oneiric element
Introduction xv
and because it is not capable of resolving the ‘inexplicability’ of visible

phenomena in current society.
Benjamin’s anthropological writings remain fragmentary, but reveal a
very precise conceptual strategy. The access to the underworld, to the sub-
terranean realm of the metropolis, is drawn from Greek mythology. That
is to say that traces of the ancient city—of its ruins—are to be found,
metaphorically, underneath the modern metropolis, and that layered
traces, archetypes, dreams and traumas of the ancient and the primitive
man are to be found in the human psyche. Psychoanalysis itself relies on
a mythical iconography. The icon of the labyrinth unmistakably emerges
from such imagery. Benjamin’s concern is wholly directed at emphasizing
the cunning with which it is necessary to venture into the labyrinth and
manage oneiric materials without attempting to build a ‘mythology of the
modern’. The mythical elements serve to establish anthropological arche-
types; as Bachofen claims, they are symbolic expressions and not prehistor-
ical realities. Benjamin aims to make the ‘fields’ of myth ‘arable by reason’,
he wants to ‘clear’ the ‘primeval forest’ of mythical thinking, ‘where, until
now, only madness has reigned’, with the ‘whetted axe of reason’.10
Benjamin tried to determine the threshold between a ‘critical’ and
a ‘mythical’ thinking. His polemic against the ‘mythology of modern’
is a result of the fight between mythical and religious thought that has
characterized the Jewish tradition. Yet the principal characteristic of
Benjamin’s ‘critical thought’ consists in wanting to assign a ‘political’
value to this choice. The transition from a mythical violence to violence
divine or revolutionary, which Benjamin handles in his essay Critique of
Violence, is the political decision to found a justice based on the Logos
and not the instincts of ‘bare life’. He does not confer on Nietzsche’s
nihilism a ‘natural’ or physical meaning; rather, he refers the ‘bare life’
to its ephemeral character and its contrastive relation to the Kingdom of
God, to eternity. Nietzsche is part of the constellation referring to this
archetypal and ‘mythical’ order that must be overcome in the name of
a theological-political dispositif. Benjamin’s process is involved in this
controversy, leading to the formulation of the allegory of the angel of
history.
Rome, February 2016

xvi Introduction
Notes
1. SW 1, 288.
2. See Helmut Pfotenhauer, Benjamin und Nietzsche, in Burckhard
Lindner (ed.), ‘Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln …’. Walter
Benjamin im Kontext, Frankfurt a. M. 1978, pp. 100–126.
3. See Irving Wohlfarth, Resentment begins at home: Nietzsche, Benjamin
and the University (1981), in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin.
Critic, Essays and Recollections, MIT, Cambridge (Mass.) 1988,
pp. 224–259; Id., Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus. Walter Benjamins
‘Weltpolitik’ aus heutiger Sicht, in Bernd Witte – Mauro Ponzi (ed.),
Theologie und Politik. Walter Benjamin ein Paradigma der Moderne,
E. Schmidt V., Berlin, 2005, pp. 107–136.
4. Mauro Ponzi, Organizzare il pessimismo. Benjamin e Nietzsche, Lithos,
Roma 2007.
5. James McFarland, Constellation. Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter
Benjamin in the Now-Time of History, Fordham University Press,
New York 2013.
6. SW 3, 250.
7. ‘The thought-image (Denkbild)—a word used by Benjamin as a kind
of generic term for his own shorter text-pieces—can be seen as lying
at the heart of his work on thinking-in-images (Bilddenken)’ (Sigrid
Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin,
Routledge, London- New York 1996, p. 48.
8. SW 1, 486 (my emphasis).
9. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist,
Princeton University Press, Princeton 1950; Heinz Frederick Peters,
Zarathustra’s Sister: The Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche,
Crown, New York 1977; Alexander Kostka – Irving Wohlfahrt (ed.),
Nietzsche and ‘an architecture of our minds’, Getty Research Inst. for
the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles 1999; Golomb,
Jacob – Wistrich, Robert (ed.), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On
the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy, Princeton University Press,
Princeton-Oxford 2002; Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will
to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster- Nietzsche, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana 2003; Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche. Attempt at a
Mythology, University of Illinois Press, Urbana-Chicago 2009; Ashley
Introduction xvii
Woodward (ed.), Interpreting Nietzsche. Reception and Influence,

Continuum, London-New York 2011; Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen,
American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and his Ideas, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago-London 2012.
10. ‘To cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned. Forge
mead with the whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor left
so as not to succumb to the horror that beckons from deep in the
primeval forest. Every ground must at some point have been made
arable by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delu-
sion and myth. This is to be accomplished here for the terrain of the
nineteenth century’ (AP, 456 s. [Nl, 4]. My emphasis).
1
Capitalism as Religion
1 The Dispositif Guilt-Debt

In his brief text entitled Capitalism as Religion (1921), Walter Benjamin
defines capitalism as a ‘cultic religion’ (Kultreligion). In this text, much
like its predecessor Theological-Political Fragment and the essay Critique
of Violence, he lays the theoretical foundations—the first draft, if you
will—for his understanding of the concept of history and his political
theory. These notes allow us to access the source of Benjamin’s thought,
even though when tackling his philosophical reasoning it is particularly
important to understand how he uses the ‘conceptual pearls’ that he
‘extracts’ from the most diverse heuristic systems.1 These sources have
already been studied in detail,2 so it makes rather more sense here to
highlight the changes in function taken on by a whole series of concep-
tual definitions within Benjamin’s project.
Benjamin’s intention to turn on its head Max Weber’s thesis, as laid out
in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, is evident both in his
consideration of capitalism as a religion and in his critique of asceticism
as a masked affirmation of consumerism. ‘Capitalism is a purely cultic
religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed’,3 writes Benjamin.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Ponzi, Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_1
2 Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin
From the outset he draws attention to capitalism’s ‘extremist’ nature,

which permits neither responses not critiques, and will not accept any
discussion of either free enterprise or the self-regulation of markets.
However, worship ‘sans trêve et sans merci’ consists of being continually in
debt.4 ‘And third,’ continues Benjamin, ‘this cult makes guilt pervasive.
Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt and
debt, not atonement [nicht entsühnenden, sondern verschuldenden].’5
The cornerstone of Benjamin’s reasoning is the equivalence between
moral guilt (Schuld) and economic debt (Schulden), terms that, in
German, are condensed in the same word. The theses emerging from this
notes are clearly laid out: capitalism is a ‘cultic religion’ that manifests
itself as a pure rite; this is the religion that does not stop (‘Money never
sleeps’ is one of the latest slogans of financial capital); this religion does
not bring redemption but brings debt and a sense of guilt, while the God
of this indebting religion remains hidden.6
In his text, Benjamin clearly cites the sources for his theory, calling
Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud the ‘priests’ of this
religion. The equivalence between guilt and debt in fact derives from
a reading of Nietzsche, who dedicates an entire section of Genealogy of
Morality to this subject.7 Nietzsche states that morals come about as the
result of a contract, which brings with it a debt to be paid to the gods in
herds, one’s own body and even in blood.8 The origins of guilt therefore
lie in a contractual relationship. Indeed, under Roman law creditors were
even permitted to use torture in order to ensure their debt was repaid.9
Nietzsche writes:
The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, to pursue our train of inquiry

again, originated, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal
relationship there is, in the relationship of buyer and seller, creditor and
debtor […].10
We can see, then, that Nietzsche understands guilt as a debt, a guarantee

that must be physically repaid or secured against something of real value.
Debts come with an inherent sense of guilt, which becomes a moral and
legal guilt, leading ultimately to punishment. This model stands not
only within a cultic religion, but as the basis for the understanding of
capitalism as religion. However, what is most important is Nietzsche’s

conviction that one can never be fully free from this debt.11
Nietzsche’s wish to emphasize the vital ‘purity’ of the ‘blond beast’
is the expression of an aristocratic view of culture, a material concep-
tion created, in a truly ‘physiological’ sense, by the aristocracy. Benjamin’s
position, while utilizing some of Nietzsche’s nihilistic categories, is
entirely different: he is firmly on the side of the masses (workers and
intellectuals) and against the aristocracy. Thus the Nietzschean elements
bring tension to Benjamin’s thought, precisely because their elitist roots
are in direct conflict with his basic aim to liberate the oppressed masses
from ‘all rulers’.12
So when Nietzsche, with his scientific and positivist language, talks
of human nature as elitist and aggressive, he tends to confer a ‘natural’
basis on his concept of ‘will to power’, redirecting the moral sense of
‘guilt’ towards the economic roots of ‘debt’, and turning his back on
previously accepted notions in order to interpret capitalism as a reli-
gion: ‘Punishment is supposed to have the value of arousing the feeling
of guilt in the guilty party; in it, people look for the actual instrumen-
tum of the mental reflex which we call “bad conscience” or “pang of
conscience”.’13
Nietzsche talks of the Unlösbarkeit der Schuld (‘impossibility of paying
back the debt’) and the Unlösbarkeit der Busse (‘impossibility of discharg-
ing the penance’), as within this condition of perennial reproduction,
the guilt-debt can never be erased. There is no redemption for human-
kind; instead, there is a constant renewal of ‘guilt’ and the feelings of
guilt that grow and take control of the individual’s conscience, ‘like a
polyp’ (polypenhaft).14 Nietzsche defines this ‘fixed idea’ as an inherently
negative and nihilistic ‘madness’ (Wahnsinn), precisely because it denies
humankind’s primary vital instincts. His whole discourse is turned against
Christian morality: his is a critique of religion. However, if we take as a
starting point the relationship that he highlights between economy and
the origins of guilt as debt, many of his considerations—particularly
those regarding the ‘madness’ of creating an irrational and fundamentally
nihilistic system with ‘finality without aim’, an end in itself and entirely
self-referential—could be applied to capitalism, just as Benjamin does in
Capitalism as Religion.15
Yet the madness of capitalism is precisely this: setting in motion a

mechanism that has an aimless finality in itself, under whose gaze the
individual (but also social class and even entire nations) can do nothing
but recognize their own impotence. That which Nietzsche sets out in
Genealogy of Morality as a ‘fixed idea’, like a ‘madness’ or even the ‘will’
of humans to view themselves as guilty because of an ‘eternal’ debt, with
capitalism has become a reality. It is no longer a ‘sensation’ or a ‘state of
conscience’, but a real and insurmountable debt towards the banks.
2 The Credo of Capital

Benjamin quotes Marx as another significant source for his philosophical
thought regarding the relationship between moral guilt and economic
debt. In the first book of Capital (section VII, chapter 24), dedicated to
primitive accumulation, Marx refers explicitly to a structural relationship
between capitalism and religion:
This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same

part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell
on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as
an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of
people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other,
lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The leg-
end of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be con-
demned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of
economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by
no means essential.16
Marx draws a parallel between original sin and the torment of ‘eat[ing]
bread in the sweat of his brow’, the economic legend of an original sin,
according to which an active and parsimonious section of the population
would have accumulated capital, while the rest—lazy ‘squanderers’—
would have frittered away the little they had. Marx deconstructs this leg-
end by drawing a parallel with the theological legend of original sin. Both
theological damnation and economic condemnation are justified by an
‘original sin’. Capitalism is therefore founded on a ‘guilt’, which is, in

itself, also ‘debt’.
According to Marx, the process of primitive accumulation was deter-
mined by the division of salaried labour and capital, and by the fact that
the sharecroppers had to use land owned by the state or landowners, using
a workforce composed of labourers. Accumulation was attained by rein-
vesting a large percentage of the profits in the manufacturing, while colo-
nialism obviously played a significant role in increasing accumulation.
This entire process is explained by Marx using theological terminology:
It was ‘the strange God’ who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl
with the old Gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick
chucked them all on a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole
and end aim of humanity.17
The global domination of capitalism and colonialism is expressed here in

theological terms, where the thinly veiled irony is less significant than the
confirmation of that parallel between capitalism and religion, postulated
at the beginning of the chapter: in one fell swoop, capitalism freed itself
of ‘idols’—or, rather, of the previous forms of production (remnants of
which were still in existence)—and proclaimed the ‘production of surplus
value’ as humanity’s only purpose.
It is often claimed that Benjamin’s method of using political language
to speak of theology, and vice versa, came from his studies of Hebrew
mysticism, in particular Kabbalah. This passage by Marx points to a new
source, not just for Benjamin’s idea of a structural relationship between
capitalism and religion, but for a way of structuring an argument in such
a way as to create an inverse relationship between political language and
that attached to religion. It is widely known that Marx derives his lan-
guage from biblical metaphors and careful study of the classics.18 If at
the time of writing his text it was unlikely that Benjamin had any direct
knowledge of Das Kapital, he was nevertheless familiar with the 1848
Manifesto, in which biblical hyperbole and sudden digressions are very
much a defining trait.19
At the very end of his chapter on primitive accumulation, Marx
maintains that the accrual of debts and production of guilt are struc-
tural characteristics of capitalism, and he finds a correlation between the

increasing debt in which state finances find themselves and the religious
notion of original sin:
The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose origin we dis-
cover in Genoa and Venice as early as the middle ages, took possession of
Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial system
with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house for
it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of
the state—whether despotic, constitutional or republican—marked with
its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth
that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is
their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doc-
trine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public
credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-
making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy
against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.20
In German, the coincidence between the concepts of ‘guilt’ and ‘debt’ is ren-
dered by the same type of word: Schuld (singular) means ‘guilt’ and Schulden
(plural) means ‘debt’. It is worth highlighting that here the two concepts
of guilt and debt coincide, even in terminology: Marx talks precisely of
Staatsschuld (understood as ‘state debt’), making particular reference to trea-
sury bonds, but which, in the singular, has strong resonances with the term
‘guilt’. The contextual root of capitalism as religion can be found in this pas-
sage, and it is made particularly explicit when Marx talks of ‘public credit’
as the ‘credo’ of capital, therefore postulating a ‘faith’, which Benjamin then
transforms into a cultic religion in which worship goes uninterrupted.
At the beginning of the chapter, Marx talks about a ‘vicious circle’ in
reference to the process of capital accumulation. This definition could
easily be extended to the process of debt accrual and the generation
of guilt that characterizes this system. The ‘debt of the living’, as dis-
cussed by Stimilli,21 is a vicious circle involving not only the state, but
also all capitalist enterprise and all citizens in the accrual of an eternally
renewed debt to the banks, independently of their expenses or their qual-
ity of life. Everyone is indebted: a real debt is owed to the desperate and
impossible attempt to break even, but, at the same time, they are victims
of a guilt-debt when it comes to the state, the banks and even God—both
the metaphysical god and the money god.
Guilt—which Marx calls ‘original sin’ and to which Nietzsche also
makes reference—is everlasting (although Nietzsche does talk of the
grace [Gnade] that God bestows on the chosen few), but debt is eternal
because the economic and social system is built on a perpetual increasing
of debt by the state and enterprise and, to a lesser degree, by all citizens.
This whole movement, to use Marx’s words, in addition to being a ‘vicious
circle’,22 has the traits of a religion; or, rather, it is the religion of capital
that speaks the language of Christianity. If capital has created a society ‘in
its own image’, its ‘credo’ was created in the image of Christianity.
3 Umkehr and Steigerung
Two key concepts of Benjamin’s brief text are Umkehr (reversal) and
Steigerung (increase). The latter is used in the Nietzschean sense, ‘growth’
as ‘an increment in capital’, but also as an increment in capital owed,
a perpetual accrual of debt. In Nietzsche’s philosophy ‘is magnificently
formulated’ the ‘capitalist religious thought’:
The idea of the superman transposes the apocalyptic ‘leap’ not into conver-
sion, atonement, purification, and penance, but into an apparently steady,
though in the final analysis explosive and discontinuous intensification.
For this reason, intensification and development in the sense of non facit
saltum are incompatible. The superman is the man who has arrived where
he is without changing his ways; he is historical man who has grown up
right through the sky. This breaking open of the heavens by an intensified
humanity that was and is characterized (even for Nietzsche himself ) by
guilt in a religious sense was anticipated by Nietzsche.23
Nietzsche’s philosophy is so connected to an apocalyptic dimension

and a ‘religious thought’ that it makes Nietzsche a ‘priest’ of capitalism:
his idea of superman corresponds to the capitalistic ideal of Steigerung
developed to infinity, which denies the existence of God, but is based on
a mechanism of debt and guilt. In this passage Benjamin seems to iden-
tify in Nietzsche an apologist of capitalism, not only because he uses the
theological-political device, but also because he projects in a metaphysi-

cal dimension the typical capitalistic model of unlimited growth without
any moral scruple. The Übermensch is here the capitalist, who seeks profit
all the way, who reproduces indefinitely this aimless finality. The capital-
ist, the ‘economic agent’ (as Foucault writes), becomes quite a deified
man, a superman who practises capitalism as religion. Here Benjamin
anticipates the meanings of Heidegger and Löwith; namely, he considers
the Übermensch, which is undoubtedly linked to the concept of eternal
recurrence, the reclaiming of a metaphysical dimension, a representation
of a capitalistic ideal. The political value of Nietzsche’s thought does not
consist in being the ‘godfather of Nazism’,24 but in this (sometimes ex
negativo) apologetics of capitalism as religion.
In Critique of Violence, Benjamin talks of ‘demolishing’ the vio-
lence of the myth, and uses the term Entsetzung in his aim to ‘depose’
the mythical order through ‘pure violence’, ‘divine violence’, ‘revo-
lutionary violence’.25 However, this implies a reversal in temporal
direction, the foundation of a new historical era; the ‘spatial con-
version’ of a historical direction moving from a mythical right to
a religious one.26 Key-concepts of Theological-Political Fragment are
‘direction’, Richtung, of historisches Geschehens (historical events) and
the Intensität (intensity) of a Pfeilrichtung (arrow direction). The
‘task of world politics’ is to erect the order of the profane and to
point it ‘towards happiness’. Yet the method used in order to do
this is nihilism, as we cannot attain happiness on Earth. The ‘rever-
sal’ (Umkehr), the change in direction, consists in overcoming the
theocracy.
The reference to Nietzsche (which also appears in this fragment with
the nihilism of world politics) is realized in the concept of Umkehr, which
we also find in the Geneology of Morality:
Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself,
slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’,
‘non-self’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal [Umkehrung] of the
evaluating glance—this essential orientation to the outside instead of back
onto itself—is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality
first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speak-

ing, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction.27
Nietzsche uses the term Umkehrung, which in Benjamin’s essay reappears

as Umkehr, in this case meaning ‘reversal’. The ‘conversion’ (Umkehr)
to which Benjamin refers is also a change of direction, and therefore a
reversal: an Umkehrung.
Even within the capitalist system, there needs to be a ‘reversal’; that
is, a reversal of its religious character, a politics that breaks with religious
and ritualistic logic and the guilt-debt that lies at the basis of capitalism.
This means that the critique of Christian morals used by Nietzsche in
the field of philosophy of religion must be brought to the domain of the
economy and Weltpolitik. The idea of happiness is therefore antithetical
to that of capitalism, and the task of world politics is to aim to abandon
the saeculum in a total and messianic way.
According to this interpretation, the ‘secret’ relationship between the
profane and the theological lies in the fact that the profane ‘takes place’
only in its downfall, and therefore the method of world politics can only
be nihilism, or rather the tendential obliteration of the saeculum with a
‘weak’ messianic hope. Nihilism is the prerequisite for messianism, just
as the apocalypse is the prerequisite for redemption and apocatastasis.
This thesis28 contradicts the more traditional view that sees messianism
as the overcoming of nihilism and Nietzsche’s philosophy only as an inter-
mediate stage of Benjamin’s thinking.29 It is clear that Benjamin com-
bines Nietzsche’s nihilistic suggestions with negative theology, even in the
Kabbalistic sense of tsim-tsum (that God has retreated from the modern
world). However, the question remains whether the aperture to messian-
ism and messianic times is founded on nihilism or on messianic destruc-
tion (and overcoming) of the profane. Yet perhaps—deep down—it is
the same thing: the messianic breaks into history when the profane ends
(endet), so the caesura between the profane and the theological cannot be
overcome. Nihilistic world politics ‘favours’, or rather ‘increases’, ‘antici-
pates’ the messianic, just as it ‘anticipates’ the destruction of the profane.
However, if this makes sense from a theological (and messianic) point of
view, it makes a little less sense from a political one.
4 Forgiveness of Debt
Following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Marx and Benjamin, the refocus-
ing of the discourse from a legal or religious-philosophical level to one
that deals with the economy and ‘bare life’ was carried out by Foucault.
He puts the problem of legitimacy, deconstructing the pretexts of neo-
liberalism, demonstrating how in reality, beyond the slogans on the
‘free’ market and the freedom of individuals, the liberal and neo-liberal
mechanics of power are based on economic principles.
Homo oeconomicus obeys his own material interests, which (according
to neo-liberalism) would spontaneously converge with those of others.30
Here we once again see the ‘invisible hand’ of which Adam Smith spoke:
neo-liberalism tends to make us believe that by pursuing our own per-
sonal interests, we are in fact pursuing the common good, automatically
deriving from this assumption the law of the free market. However, the
optimism and faith in the ‘invisible hand’ that characterize this theory
are remnants of a theological concept of natural order: it is a religious
faith.31 The ‘spirit of capitalism’, its ‘credo’, as Marx calls it, consists in a
religious-type faith, what Benjamin terms a ‘cultic religion’, in which the
‘invisible hand’ ‘harmonizes’ nothing, but instead leads to an increase in
the infinite dispositif guilt and debt.
Marx had already defined this theory as a ‘legend’. Events of recent
years have demonstrated how the free market is in no way capable of
‘self-regulation’. However, Foucault points out the trick forming the basis
of neo-liberalism, which from the outset privileges economic principles,
both in theory and in practice. The principle of an irreducible and non-
transferable subjective choice is called interest. English empiricism con-
structed its own theory around the concept of ‘subject of interest’ and
conceived interest as a form of will, basing it entirely on the empirical
principle of a contract. The subject of interest is an irreducible element
of legal will. It never demands that an individual renounce their own
interests.32 The general profit was understood as the maximization of each
person’s interests. This has proved to be the most false of all principles. The
laws of the market favour the strong and crush the weak. Furthermore,
with advanced capitalism, it is financial capital that brings the greatest
profits, while sapping the resources of individuals and entire states alike.
In recent years, starting with the crisis in 2008, Marx’s analysis has been
proven correct, not only regarding the crisis of over-production but also
with the tendential decrease in salary. The capitalist system’s response to
the crisis was the traditional cutting of labour costs (with redundancies
and pay cuts), which has been proven ineffective because it has done
nothing more than accentuate the crisis in over-production and, there-
fore, that affecting businesses. Short-sighted individual interests have
brought about the self-destruction of industry.
If, at first glance, the analysis from the eighteenth century could be
connected to that of the social contract, up close we see that it is charac-
terized by the presence of the subject of interest: homo oeconomicus can-
not be superimposed onto homo juridicus or homo legalis. Neo-liberalism
tends to consider the destiny of individuals and businesses to be uncon-
trollable. Homo oeconomicus is placed within an undefined field of imma-
nence and owes the positive character of his calculation to everything that
it does not take into account.33
The essentially anarchic character of capitalism—as theorized by Marx
and assumed by Benjamin—is identified by Foucault within the eco-
nomic theories of English empiricism and a belief in natural law. These
‘rules’ of natural law, which believe themselves to be ‘universal’, are in
reality a trick to legitimize legal and (above all) economic differences in
property and decision-making rights that play a major role in determin-
ing the life of an individual, but are described as ‘uncontrollable’, ‘unpre-
dictable’, ‘inevitable and necessary’ precisely because they are the laws of
the market. Even the 2008 crisis was defined as ‘improbable’.34
In order for collective profit to be a certainty, it is absolutely neces-
sary for each of the actors to be blind to this possibility. The common
good must not be an objective: obscurity and blindness are necessary
for all economic agents, and no political agent must interfere with the
free market. The expected economic rationality therefore reveals itself to
be founded on the unknowable totality of the process. Economics is an
atheist discipline, without God and without totality.35 It subtracts itself
from the legal form of the sovereign.
Paradoxically, Foucault takes as his starting point the thesis that uni-
versals do not exist, as such deconstructing any normativist discourse,
since the political-legal world and the economic world have, since the
eighteenth century, appeared to be heterogeneous and incompatible.
Political economics presents itself as a critique of the reasoning used
by government and confirms the impossibility of an economic sover-
eign. All of Foucault’s analysis of the state, the government and political
economy looks at the ‘classical’ form that these dispositifs have had in
Great Britain, Germany and France; in short, in the civil areas of north-
ern Europe. These same entities, but this time in Italy, Greece, Spain and
other southern countries, have taken on specific forms, ‘Mediterranean’
variants that present compromises and contaminations of previous and/
or parallel regimes and dispositifs. It would be interesting to analyse these
‘Mediterranean’—in particular Italian—variants of state, nation, local-
ism, biopolitics, government and political economics. Here, for example,
the programmatic impossibility of the economic agent identifying him-
self with homo legalis has the consequence that the capitalist often con-
siders himself outside and above the law, believing that he has the right
not to pay taxes and to increase his profits with outlawed business. Homo
oeconomicus often assumes the form of a mafioso or drug runner. This does
not deconstruct the Foucauldian categories, but submits their meaning
to a small modification. It is not worth saying how this ‘Mediterranean
variant’ proceeds in parallel to the second model of metropolises anal-
ysed by Benjamin (Naples, Marseilles, Moscow),36 since the backward
or Mediterranean model of government, civil society or whatever it
might be can be applied to all Eastern European countries, formerly part
of the Soviet bloc, where criminal organizations count more than the
government.
Since the eighteenth century, liberalism and neo-liberalism have
installed (through, as Foucault refers to them, the English empiricists
and believers in natural law) a principle for determining the truth with
the conception of the free market (Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’), which
determines prices and salaries according to the free game of supply and
demand, and for viewing the market itself as a place of truth that cannot
and must not be influenced or controlled by political action. Yet, as
Foucault himself demonstrates, these principles, these petitions for ‘natu-
ral’ truths, reveal themselves to be nothing more than a defence of the
particular material interests of homo oeconomicus, the economic operator,
the capitalist, who is capable of sacrificing not only the ‘common good’
but also the livelihoods of his workers and even the budget of his state at
the altar of personal profit. The presumed truth is revealed not only to be
false, but to be a highly useful lie.
With the technological revolution of the early 1980s, the regulation
of the market (or rather, the deregulation of the market) introduced a
mechanism that guaranteed the scam, making it untraceable. The whole
history of financial capital over the last few decades, which reached its
pinnacle in 2008, is a scam based on the sale of financial products at an
unjust price and the desperate search for a way to balance the budget; or
rather, a way to increase the profits of financial operators and banks by
plundering savings, imposing unfair price rises on banking services and
state intervention to save those banks.
We have reached the unprecedented paradox in which citizens are
forced to pay in order to balance the banks’ budgets, and therefore in
order to stop banks that have invested in junk bonds from failing, states
are caused to fail instead (Argentina, Ireland, Greece).
Criticizing capitalism means overcoming its religious conception, it
means historicizing it (Marx), but also ‘secularizing it’ (Benjamin). If this
remains on a purely theoretical level, we find ourselves in the field of
political economics, critiques of religion or, at best, political philosophy.
If the ‘power of rapture’ comes into play in order to find a ‘space of
political action’, then, in the meantime, we must find a new development
model that breaks the rule of guilt-debt. Freeing ourselves from Schuld
means neither paying the debt nor expiating the guilt, but rather not
feeling either indebted or guilty, and in order to do this we must inter-
rupt the mechanics of capitalism—something that can only happen with
Gewalt, with its dual meaning of ‘power’ and ‘violence’.
In the Fragment Welt und Zeit (World and Time, 1920/1921),
Benjamin wrote: ‘The real divine power [Gewalt] can manifest itself in
other ways than destructive only in the world to come [of accomplish-
ment]. Where instead the divine power enters the earthly world, this
breathes destruction.’37 Here emerge both the presence of the ‘perturb-
ing guest’ and the anarchic character of Benjamin’s political position. ‘So
nothing durable and no order must be founded in this world’, he writes
subsequently. Therefore the divine power too is considered as destructive.
In fact, in German the word Gewalt means ‘power’ and at the same time
‘violence’.
The way to avoid the dispositif guilt-debt passes through the rejection
of the ‘mythology of modernity’.38 Benjamin attempted to define the
threshold between ‘critical’ and mythical thought very clearly. He found
in politics and philosophy the depravity of the Romantic notion of myth
that reverses here the original progressive impulses into their opposites.
Benjamin’s attitude is also somewhat ambivalent towards this trend in
thinking. Even if he drew on much of the Romantic theory of language
and art, he contrasts it strongly with the universalist interpretation of myth.
The Romantic conception of myth as ‘form’ takes the value of ‘con-
ferring sense’ as a legitimization of capitalistic forms (division of labour
and so on), which produces the ‘power of synthesis’.39 Here we can per-
haps find one of the ‘philosophical’ keys of Benjamin’s thought: the
Nietzschean root of his philosophy results not only from the ‘destructive
character’, from the ‘negative theology’, but above all from his ‘analogical’
thinking that does not include any ‘synthesis’. Benjamin’s thought, like
that of Nietzsche, is—stricto sensu—not ‘dialectical’. In Benjamin’s cri-
tique of Romantic thought emerges the definition of ‘synthesis’ as ‘mythi-
cal thought’. The ‘political nature’ of this definition consists in conceiving
the ‘power of synthesis’ as ‘giving sense’ to the forms of capitalism.
Neo-liberalism can be considered as the technological version of Adam
Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.40 Capitalism is indeed a mechanism of aimless
finality. The logical consequence of these notes of Benjamin is that to
overcome capitalism we need to escape from its religious dispositif and
look to the political theology. Benjamin draws on some ideas of Heinrich
Heine on the cult of money as the new God41 and bases his critique of
political theology on ‘very old conceptions of Judaism’. In his reflections
on the figure of the ‘true political’ he defines the laws of Moses as a ‘direct’
divine influence.42 When Witte insists that Benjamin refers to an ‘ancient
Jewish tradition’,43 he aims to emphasize the need to break the dispositif
guilt-debt and the run to indebtedness without salvation, referring to
‘Jubilee’, a sabbatical year that, according to Jewish tradition, meant the
liberation of slaves and the remission of debts. It occurred at the end of
seven cycles: every forty-nine years (seven times seven)44: ‘In the year of
this jubilee ye shall return every man unto his possession.’45 However,
beyond the concrete practices of liberation of slaves, property restitu-

tion and forgiveness of debts, this reference expresses the urgent need to
cancel the mechanism of indebtedness, to break that theological-political
dispositif of capitalism as religion. Even Roberto Esposito refers to the
Jewish jubilee in his philosophical discourse aimed at dismantling the
‘machine’ of political theology.46 It is, of course, a radical need to have
the liberating character of redemption, of rebirth, but one that must be
declared by a superior authority that ‘transcends’ the political ‘sovereign’.
It is difficult to reduce to a specific political position Benjamin’s con-
cept of history, because it oscillates between a metaphysical anarchism
(the utopia of a self-determining community)47 and the will to ‘organize
pessimism’ for the time that remains. If politics is ‘the fulfillment of the
non-intensified human’,48 then the laws of Moses do not belong to the
profane legislation, although this is claimed by religion.49 The ‘lawless
corporeality’, which looks like a counterpart of ‘holy materialism’, can
only be overcome in the community. And just the refusal of mythology
and the overcoming of ‘bare life’ in an, albeit improbable, perspective
of ‘happiness’, which produce an irreconcilable separation between the
profane and the theological, constitute Benjamin’s demarcation against
Nietzsche, his parting from a ‘perturbing guest’.
(Translated by S. J. Morgan)
Notes
1. See Hannah Arend, Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940, in Hannah Arend,
Men in Dark Times, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York 1970,
pp. 153–206.
2. See Werner Hamacher – Kirk Wetters, Guilt History: Benjamin’s
Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in ‘Diacritics’, vol. 32, Nr. 3/4,
(autumn-winter 2002), pp. 81–106; Dirk Baecker (Hg.), Kapitalismus
als Religion, Berlin 2003; Uwe Steiner, Kapitalismus als Religion, in
Benjamin Handbuch, hg. von Burkhardt Lindner, Metzler, Stuttgart
2006; Michael Löwy, Le capitalisme comme religion: Walter Benjamin
et Max Weber, in ‘Raisons politiques’, 23 (2006); Elettra Stimilli, Il
debito del vivente. Ascesi e capitalismo, Quodlibet, Macerata 2011.
3. SW 1, 288.
4. Sans rêve et sans merci is probably a wrong transcription by Benjamin.
The right quotation is sans trêve et sans merci, which Benjamin found
in Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens, namely in Le crépuscule du soir: ‘Et
les voleurs, qui n’ont ni trêve ni merci, / vont bientôt commencer
leur travail, eux aussi […]’ (OC, 91). See. Uwe Steiner, Kapitalismus
als Religion. Anmerkungen zu einem Fragment Walter Benjains, in
‘DVfL’, 72.1 (1998), p. 157. The idiom comes from the Middle Ages
and indicates the intention to fight ‘relentlessly and mercilessly’. See
Chad Kautzer, Walter Benjamin, Fragment 74: Capitalism as Religion,
in Eduardo Mendieta (ed.), Religion as Critique, p. 262.
5. SW 1, 288 (modified translation).
6. ‘There are no “weekdays”. There is no day that is not a feast day, in
the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each
day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper’ (ibid.).
7. See Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin, Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, p. 77.
8. ‘Have these genealogists of morality up to now ever remotely dreamt
that, for example, the main moral concept “Schuld” (“guilt”) descends
from the very material concept of “Schulden” (“debts”)? Or that pun-
ishment, as retribution, evolved quite independently of any assump-
tion about freedom or lack of freedom of the will?’ (GM, 39 [Second
Essay, § 4]).
9. ‘The debtor, in order to inspire confidence that the promise of repay-
ment will be honoured, in order to give a guarantee of the solemnity
and sanctity of his promise, and in order to etch the duty and obliga-
tion of repayment into his conscience, pawns something to the credi-
tor by means of the contract in case he does not pay, something that
he still “possesses” and controls, for example, his body, or his wife, or
his freedom, or his life […]—the pleasure of having the right to
exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure “de
faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire”, the enjoyment of violating’
(GM, 40 s. [Second Essay, § 5]).
10. GM, 45 [Second Essay, § 8].
11. ‘The awareness of having debts to gods did not, as history teaches, come
to an end even after the decline of “communities” organized on the
principle of blood relationship; just as man inherited the concepts of
“good and bad” from the nobility of lineage […], he also inherited,
along with the divinities of tribes and clans, the burden of unpaid debts
and the longing for them to be settled’ (GM, 61 s. [Second Essay, § 20]).
12. See: Walter Benjamin, On Concept of History, in SW 4, 391.
13. GM, 54 [Second Essay, § 14].
14. ‘Now those concepts “debt” and “duty” are to be reversed—but against
whom? It is indisputable: firstly against the “debtor”, in whom bad
conscience now so firmly establishes itself, eating into him, broaden-
ing out and growing, like a polyp, so wide and deep that in the end,
with the impossibility of paying back the debt, is conceived the
impossibility of discharging the penance, the idea that it cannot be
paid off (“eternal punishment”) […]’ (GM, 63 [Second Essay, § 21]).
15. ‘We have here a sort of madness of the will showing itself in mental
cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled: man’s will to find himself
guilty and condemned without hope of reprieve, his will to think of
himself as punished, without the punishment ever being equivalent
to the level of guilt, his will to infect and poison the fundamentals of
things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut
himself off, once and for all, from the way out of this labyrinth of
“fixed ideas”, this will to set up an ideal—that of a “holy God”—, in
order to be palpably convinced of his own absolute worthlessness in
the face of this ideal’ (GM, 64 [Second Essay, § 22]).
16. Karl Marx, Capital. A Critical Analysis of capitalist Production,
London 1887, in Marx-Engels, Werke. Gesamtausgabe, Berlin 1990,
Abt. II, Bd. 9, part VIII, Chapter XXVI, p. 619 s.
17. Karl Marx, Capital, p. 653.
18. See Siegbert Salomon Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature,
Oxford 1976; Marshall Bermann, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,
New York 1982.
19. See T. J. Clark, Should Benjamin have read Marx?, in ‘boundary’ 2,
30.1 (2003), pp. 31–49.
20. Karl Marx, Capital, p. 653 s.
21. See Elettra Stimilli, Il debito del vivente. Ascesi e capitalismo, Quodlibet,
Macerata 2011.
22. ‘The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle
[…]’ (Karl Marx, Capital, p. 619).
23. SW 1, p. 289.
24. See Golomb, Jacob – Wistrich, Robert (ed.), Nietzsche, Godfather of
Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy, Princeton University
Press, Princeton – Oxford 2002.
25. ‘On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythic forms of law, on
the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they
depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new
historical epoch is founded’ (SW 1, p. 251 s.).
26. See Bernd Witte, Politik, Ökonomie und Religion im Zeitalter der
Globalisierung, in Bernd Witte – Mauro Ponzi (ed.), Theologie und
Politik. Walter Benjamin und ein Paradigma der Moderne, Erich
Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 2005, p. 14.
27. GM, 20 [First Essay, § 10].
28. See: Mauro Ponzi, Die Kräfte des Rausches. Nihilismus und Politik im
Denken Benjamins, in Gerhard Richter-Karl Solibakke-Bernd Witte
(ed.), Benjamins Grenzgänge / Benjamin’s Frontiers, Königshausen u.
Neumann, Würzburg 2013, pp. 73–86; James McFarland,
Constellation. Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Benjamin in the Now-
Time of History, Fordham University Press, New York 2013.
29. See Nitzan Lebovic, Benjamin’s Nihilism. Rhythm and Political Stasis,
in Daniel Weidner-Siegrid Weigel (ed.), Benjamin Studien 2, Fink,
München 2011, S. 145–158.
30. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978–1979, Palgrave, New York 2008, p. 268 s.
31. See ibid., p. 278.
32. ‘The subject of interest is never called upon to relinquish his interest’
(ibid., p. 275).
33. See ibid., p. 277.
34. See Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly
Improbable, New York 2008. See also the different interpretation by
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, London 2010.
35. ‘Economic rationality is not only surrounded by, but founded on the
unknowability of the totality of the process. […] Economics is an
atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; econom-
ics is a discipline without totality […]’ (Michel Foucault, The Birth
of Biopolitics, p. 282).
36. See Mauro Ponzi, Naples as Topography of Spaces In-between: Walter

Benjamin and the Threshold between Old and New, in Alexis
Nuselovici, Mauro Ponzi – Fabio Vighi (ed.), Between Urban
Topographies and Political Spaces, Lexington Books, Lanham-
Boulder – New York – Toronto-Plymounth, UK 2014, pp. 69–85.
37. Walter Benjamin, GS, VI, p. 98 s. Own translation.
38. See Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, in SW 1, p. 236–252.
39. See Winfried Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde. Walter Benjamins
Passage des Mythos, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1986, p. 14.
40. See: Bernd Witte, Politik, Ökonomie und Religion im Zeitalter der
Globalisierung, p. 15 s.
41. Cfr. Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 16 Nachträge und
Korrekturen, Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1997, pp. 277–278.
42. GS VI, p. 99.
43. Bernd Witte, Politik, Ökonomie und Religion im Zeitalter der
Globalisierung, p. 17.
44. ‘And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven
times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall
be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet
of the jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the
day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all
your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty
throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a
jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession,
and ye shall return every man unto his family’ (Leviticus 25:8–10).
45. Leviticus 25:13. ‘At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a
release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that
lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it
of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord’s
release. “And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman,
be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year
thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out
free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt
furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of
thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed thee
thou shalt give unto him.’
46. See: Roberto Esposito, Due. La macchina della teologia politica e il

posto del pensiero, Einaudi, Torino 2013, p. 17.
47. See: Gabriele Guerra, Judentum zwischen Anarchie und Theokratie,
Aistheis, Bielefeld 2007.
48. GS VI, p. 99. Own translation.
49. ‘It should not mean: taken by the religion, but it must mean: by the
required legislation of the profane. The Laws of Moses do not belong
to it, probably without exception’ (GS, VI, p. 99). Own translation.
2
Organizing Pessimism
1 ‘Bare Life’
The ‘Italian school’ of Benjaminian studies is famous internationally
because it emphasized and developed the theological aspect of Walter
Benjamin’s work, perhaps not placing a great emphasis on philology, but
‘revitalizing’ the Berlin philosopher’s thought.1 It is now time to ‘rethink’
Benjamin in another way and to make an attempt to understand whether
it is possible to define an ‘order of the profane’. It is necessary to proceed
on a very slippery path, the end of which Benjamin himself did not reach,
but along which he has left very stimulating and meaningful traces of
his journey. We must—above all—rethink his concept of history, to see
whether it can provide a key to reading the most recent past and contain
elements that can help us construct a theoretical apparatus to understand
the present, this ‘space’ that is in continuous transformation, where old
categories are no longer required.
However, it is necessary to outline a brief precondition. Benjamin
tried to ‘snatch from the enemy’ some conceptual territories; evidently
he liked to play in partibus infidelium. From these raids arose a histori-
cal-cultural perspective and an attempt—which remains unfinished—at

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_2
a philosophical anthropology.2 Benjamin’s approach to the modern, no

matter how strongly unsystematic it is, undoubtedly has a theological
character: the little hunchback hidden in historical materialism. The
question is whether within this ‘weak’ (and perhaps desperate) messianic
waiting a political perspective is at all possible, and whether one can speak
of an order of the profane ‘here and now’. If history is a ‘pile of debris’, a
permanent catastrophe, the politics— the order of the profane—emerges
as an organization of pessimism. If in the ‘empty and homogeneous’ time
of history, in the ‘meantime’ between creation and the promised, but not
yet arrived, redemption, a space in which the profane becomes ‘orga-
nized’ exists, despite the ephemeral and ‘catastrophic’ prospect of the very
same profane. Only in this dazwischen (in-between) is a political perspec-
tive possible.
At the beginning of the new millennium, we find ourselves again in
a ‘state of emergency’; in fact, it becomes the norm. The West’s concep-
tual and institutional models are made in the midst of crises that stem
from both outside and within. Faith in rationality and progress is no lon-
ger able to provide adequate responses to new material and intellectual
needs. Nihilism really does seem to have become ‘world politics’.
Today the angel of history meets some melancholic and perturbing
spectres on the pile of debris. The ‘cultural heritage’ that Benjamin left
us has to be compared with the legacy—both heavy and ruinous—of
other thinkers who had considerable influence on the twentieth century.
A reflection on the concept of history is now, more than ever, necessary,
not only because the new millennium requires us to strike the balance of
the past, but because we are faced with a change of era. The new era has
been marked by the allegory of two collapses: the Berlin Wall and the
Twin Towers. The old mental orders do not work any more. Karl Löwith,
in trying to produce an analysis of the nineteenth century in relationship
to the modern era, quotes a sentence of Nietzsche’s that sounds timelier
than ever:
For when truth enters into battle with the lies of millennia, we shall have
convulsions, a spasm of earthquakes, a displacing of mountain and valley
the like of which has never been dreamed. The concept of politics will then
be completely taken up with spiritual warfare, all the power structures of
the old society will be blown sky high—they all rest on lies: there will be
wars like never before on earth.3
The storm ‘blowing from Paradise’ has taken the form of these unimagi-
nable upheavals.
As Irving Wohlfarth rightly notes,4 the ‘brief century’ has left us the ruins
of different conceptions of history that have turned out to be problem-
atic and disastrous: one is that of Communism, whose messianic waiting
went completely unfulfilled; and the other is that of Nietzschean nihil-
ism, which has generated a series of other nihilisms, completely different
to one another in their outcomes, but equally catastrophic. Benjamin’s
nihilistic messianism represents an antidote for those who dominate the
world scene.5 When Benjamin reclaimed a cultural and lexical heritage
from Marx in order to define history, the secularized messianic aspect of
it was brought to light, but it was destroyed, negating progress as histori-
cal necessity. However, Benjamin does not follow Nietzsche in either his
Darwinism or his vitalism. He does not confer on Nietzsche’s nihilism
a ‘natural’ or physical meaning, but rather he refers the ‘bare life’ to its
ephemeral character and its contrastive relation to the kingdom of God,
to eternity. Benjamin builds a ‘secret agreement’ between these two sys-
tems of thought, by extrapolating some elements from them—such as
the ‘pearl divers’ of Hannah Arendt—and then discarding them as empty
husks.6 Marx’s system does not work without the immanent necessity of
history; and the thought of Nietzsche without the centrality of the ‘bare
life’ loses all those creative (‘vital’, to be more specific) impulses that have
been incorporated by many thinkers and artists of the Jahrhundertwende
(fin de siècle).
Irving Wohlfarth establishes a parallel between Nietzsche’s ‘eternal
return’ and Freud’s ‘Uncanny’, since both figures evoke death.7 Freud
poses the question of whether humanity will survive the fight between
Eros and Thanatos. Nietzsche wants to overcome the impasse thanks to
a form of nihilism that puts in motion the force of Dionysus, which is
an erotic force.8 The spectre evoked by Marx in the Manifesto should be
compared to another, more perturbing spectre—the Uncanny, as Freud
would call it—evoked by Nietzsche: ‘Nihilism stands at the door: whence
comes this uncanniest of all guests?’9 This for Nietzsche is a rhetorical
question: he knows that his thought finds its roots in ancient philoso-
phy, exactly in that which he himself defines as ‘pre-Platonic’ philosophy.
He founded his conception of history on Heraclitus’ π áν τα ρ εî (pánta
rei), which rejects being, since in the flow of the tangible world there is
only the ‘becoming’ and then the ‘no longer’ or the ‘not yet’. In denying
the existence of the Platonic ‘idea’, of the noumenon or of the thing-in-
itself, Nietzsche puts the emphasis on the moment: ‘It is astonishing:
the moment, here in a wink, gone in a wink, nothing before and noth-
ing after, returns nevertheless as a spectre to disturb the calm of a later
moment.’10
When Nietzsche says that modern people confront the past in the
same way as a eunuch observes a woman, who to them represents the
‘eternally unapproachable’,11 he draws an insurmountable demarcation
between past and present—even if his discourse is then stretched to
assert the greatness of antiquity and the ‘weakness’ of the modern world.
However, he does not want to ‘identify’ with antiquity: ‘But even if we
could content ourselves with the vocation of being descendants of antiq-
uity […] we would nevertheless be constrained to ask whether it must
eternally be our destiny to be pupils of fading antiquity’.12 The upsetting
novelty of Nietzsche’s approach to antiquity consists of the deconstruc-
tion of an ‘Olympian’ view of Greek culture and of the consideration of
its Dionysian, chthonic aspect; namely, of a rupture that opens the way to
nihilism. This new perspective (in harmony with the studies of Bachofen)
was not understood or appreciated by the traditional academic world.
The ‘Untimely’ expresses an ‘eccentric’ critique of humanism. The
Untimely gathers ‘the secret seeds buried in pre-Christian antiquity’ in
order to connect the modern world ‘to the labyrinth that slowly emerges
from the tragic universe of the Greeks’, highlighting the figures ‘of excess,
of the abuse of power and of disgust’.13 For Nietzsche, modernity is the
reflection of a reinterpretation of the ancient world. In nihilism, then, one
focuses the disruptive and transgressive flow on a philosophy of transition
that searches the ‘subterranean labyrinths’ of ancient thought and the
roots of ‘the theological-morality system of the world, of science itself ’.14
Nietzsche argues that the ‘seeds of future greatness’ are already pres-
ent during the youth of an author, even if they are ‘in the form of an
exuberant thrust to existence’. The thoughts of an author are more easily
analysable in the writings of their youth, since these formative structures

are ‘raw, imperfect, but indefinitely rich’.15 Due to this, Nietzsche’s stud-
ies focus on Plato’s first dialogues. However, the writings of the young
Nietzsche regarding the tragic thought of the Greeks allow us also to
identify the genesis of his nihilism.
In distinguishing the authentic Platonic dialogues from those apocry-
phal ones, Nietzsche formulates a singular theory of the ‘copy’ that invol-
untarily connects itself to the discourse of Winckelmann—who based
his whole aesthetics on ‘copies’ and on the concept of ‘imitation’—but it
opens the way for a theory of the reproducibility of works of art and loss
of aura: ‘It is an unfounded pretension to want to distinguish authentic
works from those spurious ones on the basis of this ideality: because in
this case standard aesthetics would become sovereign!’16 Here is the phi-
lologist who refuses to determine the authenticity of the dialogues on
the basis of their conformity to the doctrine of ideas, but who seeks to
connect judgement to the philological analysts of text. The distinction
between ‘original’ and ‘copy’ (i.e. the ‘model’ of the Greek sculptors),
which in Plato serves to distinguish the ‘idea’ from the ‘phenomenon’,
but that here Nietzsche interprets as an ‘aestheticizing of politics’17 that
should be avoided, opens the way for focusing only on the ‘representa-
tion’ (only on the ‘copy’, to use Platonic terminology) and offers a start-
ing point for the theory of the technical reproducibility of the work of
art, given that the ‘original’ (the idea) is not knowable. Nietzsche does
not want to distinguish the original from the reproduction because the
original has been lost, but in recognizing only the ‘copy’, the theory of
the ‘loss of the aura’ is de facto inaugurated. Therefore, the ‘original’ work
of art and its ‘sacredness’ are engulfed by the reproduction. Benjamin
arrives at this definition of the loss of aura by following a Baudelairian
path, which also passes through the writings of Nietzsche on Plato, as is
clear from his ‘Epistemo—Critical Prologue’ to German Baroque Drama.
Nietzschean conjecture—moreover deriving from a passage by
Aristotle18—that the dualism between ideas and phenomena was founded
on the basis that Plato was first familiar with the π αν τα ρ ει (pánta rei)
of Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, and then learned from Socrates the
existence of fixed ideas, which have to be related to a reality that is differ-
ent to the tangible one, highlights the Heraclitean origins of Platonic
thought and identifies precisely the original nucleus of nihilism. The tan-
gible reality is not knowable because it is constantly changing; this is not
a question of ‘being’, but of ‘becoming’, then ‘no longer’ or ‘not yet’.
However, here one can find one of the roots of Benjamin’s actualism: the
Jetzt-Zeit (now-time) is the moment in time that we can truly know, like
an ‘image’ that ‘flashes up’,19 but vanishes immediately and can only be
‘recalled’ by the memory.
Knowledge, according to Nietzsche, occurs initially by means of the
‘astonishment’ that is immediately transformed into pathos; as soon as
one perceives that life is escaping, its inevitability dissolves into nothing-
ness. Only life, ‘that dark, driving, insatiably self-desiring power’,20 sits in
judgement of the past. Vitalism is immediately reversed in nihilism: ‘Only
he who is oppressed by some present misery and wants to throw off the
burden at all cost has a need for critical, that is judging and condemning
history.’21 Benjamin’s conception of history, despite the plurality of origins,
is one ‘that judges and condemns’ (one thinks of Blanqui, ‘called to the
tribunal of history as a judge’) and one that ‘saves from oblivion’. Nietzsche
writes: ‘He must have the strength, and use it from time to time, to shatter
and dissolve something to enable him to live: this he achieves by dragging
it to the bar of judgment, interrogating it meticulously and finally con-
demning it; every past, however, is worth condemning […].’22 It would be
redundant to emphasize the consonance of this meaning with Benjamin’s
concept of history, in which the ‘sentence’ does not involve forgetting cer-
tain images that leap forward or flash up from the past. The ‘critical way’
of conceiving of history consists of breaking up and dissolving the past.
Benjamin radicalizes this meaning of Nietzsche: the images of ‘what has
been’ have to be torn away from their context; have to be ‘quoted’.23
Löwith understands very well the duality of the meaning of nihilism, as
a symptom of decadence and the will to exist, perceiving it as the duplic-
ity of Nietzschean philosophy: a ‘residue of the primitive Greek world’
and the philosopher of the modern age.24 Nietzsche sees the overturning
of the modern, the fracture created by science and technology, but his
point of reference—that wisdom that often he evokes as a vital goal of the
‘new man’—is Greek philosophy. The aster that shines in the ‘atmosphere
without stars’ of his philosophical discourse is Plato, ‘read’ in the light
of Heraclitus. With great acumen, Löwith locates the contradiction as
an immanent element of Nietzsche’s thought, which he describes as the

‘philosophy of the will for annihilation and eternity’.25
The ‘limit’ of the thought of the young Nietzsche consists in his con-
ception of ‘people’ (Volk) as an organic unity and in his conception of
‘genius’ as being capable of expressing the ‘spirit’ of the ‘people’. Both
the conceptions are derived from Romanticism and conflict with his
nihilism.
In the Phaedrus, Plato theorizes about the μανία (manía) as one of the
forms of poetry. The status of the artist is described as a trance, as ‘divine
madness’ that becomes furor poeticus. Plato writes about the priestess of
Delphi and the Sibyls, who prophesied under divine influence (244b),
then of the purifying and therapeutic function of the orgiastic dance per-
formed by the sick (244c), and finally about a ‘third kind of madness
who are possessed by the Muses’ (245a). ‘But he who, having no touch
of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door [of poetry] is not
admitted’, writes Plato.26 It is very clear that this passage is the conceptual
source that will bring Nietzsche to re-evaluate the ‘Dionysian’ element in
its ‘creative’ aspect, even if it involves a destructive component.
Yet it is precisely this foundation of art in furor poeticus that opens
the way for the avant-garde, since this ‘vital energy’ corresponds to the
Dionysian ‘fury’ that seeks to destroy the language and continuously to
revolutionize the artistic forms. If the essence of art and thought must be
this vital energy, the expression of the ‘bare life’ emphasizing ‘primordial
impulses’, then we are dealing with a strange mixture of primitivism,
Darwinism and experimentalism, which was the characteristic of the
avant-garde of the beginning of the twentieth century.
The θ εια μαν ια (téia manía) also has a destructive nature, not only in
relation to tradition, but also towards ‘Dionysian’ artistic production.
The subject, ravished by creative fury, self-destructs, ‘burning’ itself with
any expressive materials, as soon as they are produced. Examining the
main examples, from the historical avant-garde to Pasolini, from Rainer
Werner Fassbinder to Heiner Müller, we can state that the furor poeticus
works when the θ εíα μαν íα (téia manía) uses a pre-existing tradition, in
order to revitalize it and, even if it will be burned, make it usable, although
it is subordinate to the Sinnumkehrung (reversal of meaning) mentioned
by Aby Warburg.
The theory of the emotional brain allows an approach that is a little

different to the problem of ‘bare life’, in that it puts the individual in the
foreground. However, the emotional brain is not a way to reconcile ‘feel-
ing’ and ‘reason’, and not even a neo-Romantic and intimistic approach
to the perception of reality, but a physiological and psychological analysis
of that process that leads us to formulate thoughts and try to establish a
link between the interior and the exterior worlds. The theory of the emo-
tional brain supports the hypothesis that strong emotions cause a chemi-
cal modification of the brain and determine the behaviour (or pathology)
of the individual, through the psyche. This very modern theory recalls the
foundational principle of the ‘theory of humours’: strong emotions pro-
duce a change in the chemical structure of the individual’s body (chang-
ing the balance between the four ‘humours’ with an ‘excess of black bile’),
resulting in the ‘sickness’ of the individual.27
The ‘strong emotions’ of which Joseph Ledoux and Antonio Damasio
speak28 are not the sensitivities or romantic feelings of the individual, but
mostly their ‘fears’, the anguish that causes traumas, the angst that brings
us back to the phenomenology of the ‘melancholic’ subject. The bare life
appears in the form of anguish, since in order to meet the ‘basic needs’
it is first of all necessary to be able to identify them; in other words, it is
necessary to depart from an identification of the self, from self-knowledge
of the subject, without which there are neither urges nor thought.
Ledoux and Damasio apply the latest techniques of analysis to the
human physiology and, based on these, have established a chemistry of
emotions that can provide a series of responses—and a series of therapeu-
tic strategies—to the pathologies of the subject in the perception of reality,
in the definition of a relationship between the external and the internal
worlds. They revise, from the point of view of the history of thought,
the pre-Socratic theory of humours, also developed in the medical field
for the treatment of a disorder affecting the subject’s perception of real-
ity. In the modern era this foundation of philosophical theory based on
natural sciences was inaugurated by Nietzsche, who in turn inspired the
title of Ledoux’s book (How Our Brains Become Who We Are). ‘Historical
philosophy […] can no longer be even conceived of as separate from the
natural sciences’, writes Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human.29 The unity
of opposites is given in nature: ‘All we require […] is a chemistry of moral,
religious, aesthetic conceptions and sensations […].’30 All ‘strong’ states

of mind bring with them a resonance of feelings and related moods: they
agitate and rouse the memory.31 Here, in addition to emphasizing the
redefinition of memory by ‘strong’ feelings (i.e. the emotions), Nietzsche
develops the theory of the emotional brain: the strong emotions ‘agitate’,
upsetting the memory register, the psyche and so on.
The world is fully in flux and should not be considered to have a fixed
magnitude. The idea of becoming, taken from pre-Platonic thought, is
that what we call the ‘world’, is the result of a number of errors and fan-
tasies that have arisen over time during the evolution of organic beings
and that are transmitted to us as ‘treasures’. Nietzsche therefore considers
‘cultural heritage’ to be like ‘a quantity of errors and fantasies’. Even if the
world is the result of this series of errors, the ‘value’ of humanity rests on
it; this is the life that is given to us. Sometimes ‘bare life’ imposes itself in
the form of pain, suffering or disease. And then, in this destructive form,
which emphasizes the frailty of the body, the fleeting nature of human exis-
tence, these primary needs become real priorities and urgent obligations.
Suffering humanity screams its need for life. In the end, Nietzsche and the
avant-garde stress the ‘furious’, productive and creative aspect of vitalism.
2 The ‘Secret Agreement’

‘The historian is a prophet facing backwards’,32 writes Benjamin in prepa-
ratory materials for the Theses on the Concept of History, echoing a famous
image of Schlegel. There is a sector of Benjaminian criticism, which is
only marginal, that would like to connect the entire direction of his
process to German Romanticism and considers his thoughts to be little
more than a tired repetition of what had already been said by the deutsche
Romantik in its many variants.33 Benjamin responds to this objection,
defeating it once and for all:
The saying that the historian is a prophet facing backwards can be under-
stood in two ways. Traditionally it has meant that the historian, transplant-
ing himself into a remote past, prophesies what was regarded as the future
at that time but meanwhile has become the past. […] But the saying can
also be understood to mean something quite different: the historian turns

his back on his own time, and his seer’s gaze is kindled by the peaks of
earlier generations as they sink further and further into the past. Indeed,
the historian’s own time is far more distinctly present to this visionary gaze
than it is to the contemporaries who ‘keep step with it’.34
The difference between the Romantic conception and that of Benjamin

lies in the identification of the historian, which he firmly rejects. The
intent to ‘clarify’ the past, to rebuild it in order to find the ‘key’ to under-
standing the present and the future in order to identify any kind of
‘golden age’, is the diametrically opposite method to Benjamin’s approach.
Someone ‘who pokes about in the past as if rummaging in a storeroom
of examples and analogies still has no inkling of how much in a given
moment depends on its being made present’.35 The conception of the his-
torian as a rearward-facing prophet (in the second sense indicated by the
author) is the key to understanding the modernization of the past and the
weak messianic hope, but also to understanding the secularized image of
the angel of history: ‘History, in the strictest sense, is therefore an image
that stems from an involuntary re-memorization, an image that imposes
itself suddenly on the subject of history in the moment of danger.’36
In the essay on surrealism, precisely when talking about the political
overturning of the ‘power of rapture’ and then his dealings with mythic,
oneiric and visionary materials, Benjamin puts forward a more clear
demarcation of Romanticism: ‘Any serious exploration of occult, sur-
realistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical
intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious.’37
The ‘secret agreement’ that Benjamin seeks to build between theology
and politics, between historical materialism and theology, was in need
of a theoretical apparatus: the Theses on the Concept of History were born
with the ambition of fulfilling this function. Here, that continuous over-
throw of one ‘force’ for the other is practised, which is described in the
Theological-Political Fragment, but the continuous overthrow of theologi-
cal language in politics and vice versa is also practised. In a note in the
preparatory materials for the Theses, Benjamin writes: ‘He [Marx] knew
that the history of the ruling classes could only be built within the impres-
sive steel armature of a theory.’38 This image is repeated in a letter of 22
February 1940 to Horkheimer, in which Benjamin said he had written

the Theses to provide a ‘theoretical armature’ of his work on Baudelaire.39
The preparatory materials of the Theses are very interesting, because they
allow the path that Benjamin took to formulate his concept of history to be
reconstructed. This stratification of his thought shines a light on the alle-
gories of the final draft, placing the deconstruction of the idea of progress,
the instantaneousness of time and the weak hope of being able to orga-
nize the pessimism all in the foreground. However, a clarifying light is also
shone on the structure of the preceding works. In the preparatory materials
a schedule can be discerned—also containing self-references, phrases from
his own essays and from his work concerning Paris—in which the figures of
Baudelaire and Surrealism emerge. The theses were conceived as a theoreti-
cal apparatus (the ‘armature’ of which he speaks in the letter to Horkheimer)
in order to reiterate the concepts expressed in his earlier work on Fuchs,
Baudelaire and Surrealism. The organization of the pessimism amounts to a
space of political action, but, in fact, the latter is embodied in the production
of a representation also destined to be instantaneous and fleeting, to flush up
and then to disappear: the representation of the forms of the modern world
in the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, the representation of destructive
nature, the representation of the ‘citation’ of the image of the past.
‘The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an
image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never
seen again’, writes Benjamin in the fifth thesis.40 The image of the past
is instantaneous, flashing in order no longer to appear, it is ‘fleeting’.
Benjamin projects this transience not only on the existing, but also on
what has already existed. There is no possibility of reconstructing the
continuum of what has been; it is only possible to recall it to memory in
order to ‘save it’ in snapshot images. In fact, in fragment B14 he writes:
‘The Messianic world is the world of universal and integral actuality.’41
This expression is recalled in the essay on Surrealism, which on close
examination shows a theological structure. The revolutionary moment,
the moment in which the messiah may come and fulfil this ‘universal and
integral actuality’, is one in which an interruption of the course of history
occurs, a break in the dialectic: ‘History is the subject of a construction
whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-
time [Jetzt-Zeit].’42
This conception of history is repeated in another fragment too: ‘A con-

ception of history that has liberated itself from the schema of progres-
sion within an empty and homogeneous time would finally unleash the
destructive energies of historical materialism which have been held back
for so long.’43 Freeing history from the idea of progress is indeed the centre
of Nietzschean philosophy, which seeks to ‘free’ the destructive energy.
However, the dismantling of the cause–effect relationship with the past
(and with the future) remains solely instant (the Jetzt-Zeit), which, because
of its ephemeral nature, may not be the place for political action. Benjamin’s
conception also ‘absorbs’ the Nietzschean nihilism and combines it with
the negative theology of Scholem.44 This catastrophic vision of the Dasein
(the experience of being) carries out, in its own way, a ‘tiger’s leap’, not
only in the direction of the past (to collect images that ‘flash up’, so as then
to disappear), but also towards the present in a ‘political’ attempt to ‘orga-
nize the pessimism’. Benjamin wants to release ‘the destructive energies of
historical materialism’ in order to ‘create space’ in the present, to use the
‘forces of rapture’, mentioned in his essay on Surrealism, ‘here and now’.
Nietzsche conceives his thoughts to be ‘untimely’; that is, in opposition
to his time.45 A ‘tension’ is heavily present in the man with respect to his
era. Even his interest in the ancient world is ‘untimely’, in perfect contrast
to the manipulation of the past by other ‘humanists’ of his time,46 but
this agonic relationship between Nietzsche and the century in which he
lived establishes itself as a model for Benjamin’s attitude towards history
and time: to struggle against time assumes the meaning of developing an
antagonistic attitude, of ‘going against history’, of overthrowing the nihil-
ism implicit in the denial of one’s own time ‘to the advantage of a coming
age’.47 The ‘materialism’ that Benjamin wanted to ‘save’ through theology is
also Nietzschean nihilism. And certainly, the schema of reasoning that the
future builds by fighting against the present, by recovering the past (in the
case of Nietzsche with classical philology), corresponds in Benjamin’s work
with messianic waiting. The coming of the messiah is untimely, for which
there remains but a weak hope, since he can arrive at any future moment.
From Nietzsche, Benjamin takes the conception of breaking with the
historical continuum: history is not a process held together by the idea
of progress. It is not the realization of a divine plan. Yet while Nietzsche
stops at this point of reasoning, Benjamin goes a step ‘beyond’. First there
is the problem of organizing the ‘here and now’: organizing the pessimism
of this immanent conception. Yet then, from this positive overturning
of the denial of progress, his ‘untimely’ qualities conceive of his agonic
relationship with time as a hiatus between historical time and messianic
time. This fracture coincides in part with the Nietzschean distinction
of history as an accumulation of data and history as a ‘precondition for
action and life’. Only then does Benjamin overrule Nietzschean vitalism
in a secularization of messianic waiting.48
Benjamin ‘absorbs’ Nietzsche’s unsystematic method like blotting
paper. One can read his work closely and uncover a series of Nietzschean
concepts, citations and explicit reminders. However, precisely because
it is unsystematic, Benjamin combines Nietzschean elements with those
from other heuristic systems that are completely different to each other.
Benjamin ‘exceeds’ Nietzsche, as he ‘exceeds’ Marx and Scholem, not
in the Hegelian sense of ‘aufheben’, but rather in the Nietzschean sense
of ‘hinübergehen’, of going beyond. He ‘passes through’ the thought of
Nietzsche, but destroys it, leaving behind only an empty shell. However,
he epistemologically reclaims Nietzsche’s approach: he does not search
for a synthesis, a Versöhnung, among all these source concepts that are so
heterogeneous, he rips apart the contradictions, accentuates the contrasts
and goes in search of the Sprengstoff (explosive material) inherent in these
thoughts, the ‘allegory’s destructive force’.
The heterogeneity of Benjamin’s sources of thought and his ability to
combine fragments of thought from disparate systems, which are very
often in stark contrast to one another, is often studied in depth. The
concept of revolution as a way of interrupting the course of the world,
central to his conception of history, has its origins without doubt in theo-
logical thought: it is a particular form of expressing messianic waiting,
typical of Judaism. This concept appears to emphasize the fracture that
Baudelaire instigated in the history of culture, as a result of his histrion-
ism and his desire to use ‘low’ languages and figures (the ragman, the
prostitute etc.) to express his discomfort with the modernization that
structurally modified the ‘forms’ of Paris:
To interrupt the course of the world—that was Baudelaire’s deepest inten-

tion. The intention of Joshua. [Not so much the prophetic one: for he gave
no thought to any sort of reform.] From this intention sprang his violence,
his impatience, and his anger; from it, too, sprang the ever-renewed attempts
to cut the world to the heart [or sing it to sleep]. In this intention he pro-
vided death with an accompaniment: his encouragement of its work.49
This concept is also drawn from Marx and from his theological-messianic
terminology in the Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, where
the revolution is defined as ‘an attempt by the passengers on this train—
namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake’50 on the road
of the continuum of universal history. Yet there is a third origin, material-
istic and disturbing, alien in comparison to messianism; namely, the con-
cept of revolution that can change the course of history for a moment.
Nietzsche opined that the Romans of the Imperial period abandoned
their Roman spirit, in respect to the world that they had subjugated,
degenerating in the midst of the cosmopolitan carnival of gods, so mod-
ern man is ‘brought to a condition which can hardly be altered for a
moment even by great wars and great revolutions’.51 The same Nietzsche,
a few pages later, speaks of the ‘once upon a time’ that will return in
Benjamin’s theses. And in another passage Nietzsche asserts imperatively
that ‘history is still a disguised theology’.52
Nietzsche pinpoints the difference between ancient and modern man:
‘This rattling betrays the most distinctive property of this modern man:
the remarkable opposition of an inside to which no outside and an out-
side to which no inside corresponds, an opposition unknown to ancient
peoples.’53 In the Greeks Nietzsche sees an ‘anti-historical spirit’; that is,
a perception of happening in one’s own modernity. This external/internal
contrast is deployed by Benjamin in a phenomenological sense, in the
analysis of the interieur of the city of Paris. It emerges significantly, very
much like a key to interpretation, in the essay on Surrealism, precisely
where he speaks of organizing the pessimism. However, this external/
internal opposition as a characteristic of modernity also emerges in the
definition of destructive nature vis-à-vis the ‘clamouring’ of the media,
where the distinction between the two ‘types of writer’ exemplifies this
separation.54
In the denial of the idea of progress that is present in Benjamin’s writ-
ings, a Nietzschean thought is echoed: ‘In reality every great development
also entails a huge crumbling and decaying: the pain, the symptoms of
decadence are part of the epochs of huge advancements; every fruitful
and powerful movement of humanity has also created a nihilistic move-
ment.’55 A parallel can be drawn between this Nietzschean fragment and
Benjamin’s seventh thesis: ‘There is no document of culture which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism.’56 It is very significant that
Benjamin paraphrases Nietzsche precisely where he speaks of culture as
the ‘heritage of the victors’. Nietzsche’s ‘struggle for life’, which creates
the ‘barbarity’ capable of rejecting progress postulated by the positivists,
becomes in Benjamin’s work the ‘class struggle’ of Marx, a sequence of
defeats able to establish a cultural heritage that should not be the prey of
the victors, but must be saved from oblivion. The memory of the past is
not the reconstruction of what has been as a continuum of cause–effect,
but the re-memorization of images that ‘save’ the defeated during the
act of modernization. This ‘citing’ of what has been is a ‘gesture’ that
attempts to interrupt the course of history, a revolutionary ‘gesture’ that
attempts to stop, for a moment, the triumphal procession of the always
‘victors’. The ‘weak’ messianic hope lies in this interruption: ‘The histori-
cal materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him
as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest
of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight
for the oppressed past.’57
The allegory of the little hunchback and the automaton, with which
Benjamin opens his thesis, runs at a subterranean level throughout his
work. The ‘dispute around the true concept of history takes the form
of a game between two contenders’,58 materialism and theology. And if
Benjamin is convinced that materialism can compete with any adversary,
if the services of theology are guaranteed, it is necessary to examine the
internal structure of the two contenders more closely. The ‘materialism’
of Benjamin’s thought is not a ‘crude materialism’. It is as if the ‘automa-
ton in Turkish clothing’ of the first thesis, through a system of mirrors,
had a chess player manoeuvred by the little hunchback sitting inside.
The materialism of Benjamin and the historical materialism of Marx are
manoeuvred by the little hunchback of Nietzschean nihilism.
The downside is illustrated by his conception of messianism: ‘The mes-
sianic world is the world of universal and integral actuality. Only in the
messianic realm does a universal history exist. Not as written history, but
as festively enacted history.’59 Here, the appearance of the term ‘feast’
is surprising because it derives directly from what elsewhere the author
defines as ‘mythical language’. The ‘feast’ is a term used by Bachofen,
Caillois and the Collège de Sociologie, by those supporters of mytholo-
gizing the modern, which Benjamin wanted to avoid at any cost. Perhaps
this is why he is quick to quantify his thoughts: ‘This feast is purified of
all celebration.’60 ‘Celebration is identification with catastrophe’,61 writes
Benjamin in another passage. The overcoming of Nietzschean doctrine
also consists of not submerging ourselves in catastrophe: organizing the
pessimism means finding space in the permanent disaster for political
action. Such action amounts to founding the tradition of the oppressed
through re-memorization.62 Organizing these images that ‘flit by’63 from
the past is the way in which Benjamin’s nihilism acts.
Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence is presented as the fulfil-
ment of the mythical concept of fate.64 Here is the ‘crossing’, the ‘going
beyond’ of Nietzschean thought. Nihilism without organization of the
pessimism becomes a ‘mythical’ thought. The absence of the ‘weak mes-
sianic force’ transforms the ‘new man’ into an Übermensch, whose ‘going
beyond’ just means ‘ins Nichts rollen’, a turn towards nothing.
3 The Tribunal of History

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche sets about criticizing the idea of
Adamite man and his creation of language, which admittedly distin-
guishes him from the animals, but does not entitle him to knowledge of
the world.65 Without ‘metaphysical interference’, according to Nietzsche,
any distinction between the ‘thing in itself and appearance’ ceases.66 In
spite of everything, Nietzsche attributes the artist with the ability to cata-
pult us back to our ‘wild’ state, to revive the oneiric-mythological mecha-
nisms, giving a ‘false’ but ‘primitive’ and interesting representation of
reality. The Platonic origin of this conviction is explicated in the following
fragment, in which Nietzsche writes: ‘The function of the brain that sleep
encroaches upon most is the memory.’67 In sleep, memory ‘is reduced to
a condition of imperfection such as in the primeval ages of mankind may
have been normal by day and in waking’.68 This book, written between
1875 and 1878, represents an intuition of Nietzsche, who anticipates the
psychoanalytic studies of the late century and inserts himself powerfully
into the attention being paid to the wild and the primordial, but also to
the unconscious and the dream, which has characterized the culture of
his time: ‘Thus: in sleep and dreams we repeat once again the curricu-
lum of earlier mankind.’69 This fragment is almost a ‘miniature model’
of Benjamin’s essay on Aragon and the dream-awakening relationship
that Benjamin describes in the example regarding Proust.70 The rejec-
tion of a ‘mythology of the modern’ amounts to a refusal to interpret
the modern world through myth; that is, via the ‘primitive’. The close
relationship between the dream and the ‘wild’, postulated by Nietzsche,
which implies a recovery of the mythical dimension, has been adopted
by Benjamin; but where the two thoughts diverge is over the function of
metaphysics. For Benjamin, metaphysical thought represents a response
to the ‘mythology of the modern’, but for Nietzsche, the ‘wild’, ‘primitive’
and ‘metaphysical’ are all the same.
When Benjamin approaches the ‘sacred’ and the studies of the
Collège de Sociologie and tries to ‘bend’ Klages and a certain branch
of psycho-anthropological studies to his cultural project, he realizes that
the divergence between planning and pathos, religion and myth becomes
so pronounced as to be irreconcilable. The anthropological writings of
Benjamin remain fragmentary, but reveal a very precise conceptual strat-
egy. Analysis of the Aragon work shows that Benjamin’s concern is wholly
directed at emphasizing the List, the cunning with which it is necessary to
venture into the labyrinth and manage oneiric materials without attempt-
ing to build a ‘mythology of the modern’.
The vital components of corporeity, the Dionysian, re-emerge in the
Benjaminian writings from a Nietzschean viewpoint, only because the
Berlin philosopher always tries to leave a small opening for the metaphys-
ical dimension. The sign that Benjamin sees in bare life and corporeality
is one of pain and disintegration:
Sexuality and spirit are the two vital poles of natural life that flows into our
physical being and becomes differentiated in it. […] The intrinsic value of
a life depends on the extent to which the living person manages to define
its nature corporeally. In the total decay of corporeality, an experience that

is thoroughly ‘Western’ currently, the last instrument of its renewal is the
anguish [Pein] of nature that can no longer be contained in life and flows
out in wild torrents over the body. Nature itself is a totality and the move-
ment into the inscrutable groundlessness [Unergründliche] of total vitality
is fate. But since total vitality has its conciliatory effect only on art, any
other form of expression can only lead to destruction.71
‘The movement into the inscrutable groundlessness of total vitality’ closely

resembles that ‘ins x rollen’—that is, that ‘turn from the centre towards
x’—of which Nietzsche speaks.72 Benjamin understands very clearly the
relationship between vitalism and nihilism, granting artistic production
a minimal space in which to signpost this race towards destruction. The
‘inscrutable’ total vitality has in itself that groundlessness and indeter-
minacy that Nietzsche locates in Plato’s απειρον (apeiron), taken from
Heraclitus and Pythagoras, used to define the external world, the world of
appearances, which, as it is ‘indistinct’, cannot be known. Life is ‘unfath-
omable’, it is removed from what can be known, it becomes a ‘space’ for
the storm of natural pain, of the suffering being. Methods that have no
‘sacred’ or ‘mythological’ output, which even today seem to be back in
fashion, find in Nietzsche and Benjamin merciless critics who are able to
identify theoretical weaknesses and ‘illusions’.
‘Every moment is a moment of judgment concerning certain moments
that preceded it.’73 This fragment opens with a quotation from the gos-
pels: ‘Where I meet someone, there will I judge him.’74 Here Benjamin
wants to emphasize the instant nature of redemption, which passes
through universal judgement. However, the source that he uses is one
that is foreign to both historical materialism and Jewish mysticism. And
yet, his method is to connect one concept to the other, placing them in
conflict with each other in order for them to interact, in order to make
them ‘explode’. History is seen as a continuous judgement of the previ-
ous moment; it is a political judgement. And it is exactly in this action of
‘judgement’, of redde rationem, that the subversion of Nietzschean nihil-
ism is put into action: an action of judgement that is actualized in the
production of images that imitate, in a philosophical sense ‘represent’,
and stage that final judgement evoked by a weak messianic hope.
The oppressed have always been asked to make sacrifices for the ‘com-
mon good’, which has in fact never been the ‘good’ of the ‘oppressed
classes’. Liberating the ‘power of rapture’ at the time of revolution also
means overturning this schema of sacrifice: ‘The Bolsheviks in their heroic
period, by their own admission, obtained great results to the contrary of
this: no glory for the victors, no mercy for the losers.’75
Benjamin’s process consists of constructing its theoretical apparatus, the
‘armature of steel’ of which he speaks in his preparatory materials to the
Theses, on the basis of a ‘montage’ of refunctionalized concepts torn from
the context of different heuristic systems, but the traces of this ‘extraction’,
which is alien to these concepts, should be erased, so that they have hardly
anything to do with the system of thought from which they originated.
There is no ‘romanticism’ in Benjamin’s image of the historian as a prophet
looking backwards, because such a Denkbild (‘thought image’)76 is inserted
into a completely different context and with a completely different func-
tion, as the author illustrates in the passage in which he distinguishes the
two interpretations of the image. Then, if in the final draft of the Theses the
traces of philosophical discourse are hidden, in the preparatory materials
they emerge more explicitly and make these notes extremely interesting. In
the passage just mentioned, contrary to the sacrifice of the working class,
the leitmotif of the social democrats and of neo-liberalism, the Nietzschean
origin emerges powerfully (‘no glory for the victors, no mercy to the los-
ers’). However, this is neither in the name of social Darwinism nor vitalism,
but in the name of the class struggle that wants to tear from the immutable
‘victors’ the cultural heritage of generations of losers. The Bolsheviks—for
a moment—interrupted the triumphal procession of the ruling classes.
‘The working class must not appear as the saviour of future genera-
tions, but must demonstrate proof of its redeeming strength in regard to
the generations that preceded it.’77 Here there is a further explanation of
the image of the historian as a prophet facing backwards: the generations
of ‘losers’ must be saved from oblivion. This act has a destructive nature:
it seeks to shine a light on the destructive forces that are the basis of the
idea of redemption.78
Discovering and exposing the image space (Bildraum) involves con-
ceiving of political action as part of the production of representations,
with the awareness that they themselves are destined to dissolve suddenly
into nothingness, but it also means that the identification of a space for
political action inside nihilism and the permanent catastrophe is possible,
not despite it, but thanks to it, due to the ‘destructive force’ inherent in
the idea of redemption. Organizing the pessimism means representing
the ‘destructive force’ of the ‘course of history’.79
The essay in which Benjamin incorporates Nietzsche more deeply, so
much so as to become an essay on nihilism, as Wohlfarth rightly notes,80 is
the essay on Surrealism. ‘To win the power of rapture for the revolution’81
means the conception of a revolution with strong Dionysian components.
The Dionysian and the messianic join together in a unique combination.82
Surrealism, according to Benjamin, must be ‘exploded’ in political
struggle or be nullified as such. Benjamin speaks explicitly of a ‘dialec-
tics of rapture’ and argues that Surrealism first noticed the ‘revolutionary
energies’ that appear in outdated objects: ‘The relation of these things
to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these
authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitu-
tion—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved
and enslaving objects—can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary
nihilism.’83 Here arises the problem of the relationship between ‘mar-
ginal’ and obsolete objects, and their reversing in ‘revolutionary nihilism’.
The Surrealists seek to explode the large forces hidden in these objects
through the ‘political view’.84 The ‘trick’ that they use returns in The
Arcades Project, in the part dedicated to Aragon, like the List of overcom-
ing the ‘mythical’ moment of the dream in the ‘awakening’. All of the
mythology, the esotericism, the dream state, the vision of the Surrealists
undergoes a slide, a ‘reversing’ in political action. Organizing the pes-
simism therefore means ‘to win the power of rapture for the revolution’.
The relationship between the ‘sphere of political action’ and ‘nihilism’
becomes explicit at the end of the essay: approaching the ‘“Communist
answer’ means putting in place absolute pessimism.85 Going beyond the
‘anthropological materialism’ of Nietzsche is possible ‘only in that image
space to which profane illumination initiates us’.86
In a brief written statement in 1931, Benjamin describes the psychology
of destructive character, which in a letter to Scholem refers to Gustav Glück,
but which, cum grano salis, can be considered as a sort of self-portrait:
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And
only one activity: clearing away. […] The destructive character is young
and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates because it clears away the traces of
our own age; […]. The destructive character has no interest in being under-
stood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunder-
stood cannot harm him. […] The destructive character sees nothing
permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. […] But
because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere.
Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees
ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know
what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble—not for the
sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.87
Benjamin gives us, indirectly, a further self-portrait in a short written

autobiographical statement of 1933, outlining the allegory of the Angelus
Novus. In this ‘absolutely hermetic’88 text, Benjamin fantasizes that his
parents attributed two other ‘unusual’ names to him: Agesilaus Santander.
Here he harks back to the Jewish habit of giving children a secret name,
for use in religious ceremonies, which is then revealed to them on reaching
puberty, during the feast of the bar mitzvah. This is the name by which the
faithful are called to read the Torah in front of the community gathered
in the synagogue. So Benjamin begins his autobiographical text with a fic-
tion, because he was not named Agesilaus Santander; however, he reveals
a truth hermetically, since he truly did have a secret name. This short bio-
graphical sketch constitutes a paradigmatic example of the ambiguous—
Scholem would call it ‘hermetic’—way forward for Walter Benjamin: he
alludes to and at the same time ‘hides’ what he desires to tell us.
Scholem interprets this text in a strictly biographical sense. It alludes
hermetically to love for a woman,89 but the images and concepts assume
a programmatic value in relation to the book on Paris. The allegory of the
angel may also have taken its inspiration from episodes that are quintes-
sentially biographical. However, it was transfigured theoretically into a
conceptual figure, capable of expressing the condition of an era, in which
the ‘personal’ does not mean anything any longer. Patience is the quality
needed to resist the modern world and progress, on which Benjamin bases
his effort90; it is the quality of Baudelaire and Blanqui also. It is the same
Benjamin who relates the allegory of the angel to another establishing
theme of The Arcades Project, ‘object’ analysis and the memory: ‘But the
angel resembles everything from which I have had to part: the people,
and especially the things. He dwells in the things I no longer possess.’91
The centrality of the German language and German culture in
Benjamin is also the cause of the failure of his conceptual operation.92
In the autobiographical work mentioned earlier he writes: ‘The Kaballah
relates that, at every moment, God creates a whole host of angels, whose
only task before they dissolve into thin air [ins Nichts zergehen] is to appear
before His throne for a moment and sing His praises.’93 The image of the
temporary angel is also a Benjaminian allegory of ephemeral nature, of
passage, of his actions and of his planned book on Paris.94
The destruction, the ‘clearing of space’, is a preliminary process needed
to build something.95 Nietzsche is concerned with the ‘creative instinct’,
Benjamin with ‘opening up the imagine space’. Yet both are convinced
that the action may only be a ‘representation’ of historical reality. The
sense of history is not in things, but is a Sinngebung, a conferring sense.
Nietzsche, more than Benjamin, is convinced that it is not possible to con-
fer a sense on the course of history; but only due to the fact that Nietzsche
wants to accelerate the catastrophe towards nothingness, while Benjamin
is concerned with ‘representing’ the instant interruption of the historical
continuum. The philosophical mainstream of the twentieth century aims
at the perception of reality being a representation of the human mind,
a representation of the thinking subject without any guarantee that this
representation corresponds to a concrete reality, to a ‘thing itself ’, existing
independently of the thinking subject. However, some thinkers radicalize
this subjectivism and claim that nihilism deriving from this insurmount-
able hiatus between representation and the ‘thing itself ’ is already present
in Kant and Hegel. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, claims that Hegel considers
the concrete reality to be ‘less than nothing’. In fact he writes:
Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates

antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in
things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked
and antinomic. It is true that one finds in Hegel a systematic drive to cover
everything, to propose an account of all phenomena in the universe in their
essential structure; but this drive does not mean that Hegel strives to locate
every phenomenon within a harmonious global edifice; on the contrary,

the point of dialectical analysis is to demonstrate how every phenomenon,
everything that happens, fails in its own way, implies a crack, antagonism,
imbalance, in its very heart.96
Nietzsche criticizes industrialization and the labour market because he

considers them to be a part of the race towards mediocrity, a wholly
utilitarian use of science. Also this aspect of his thought—certainly out-
dated—is due to his elitist view of culture. In his critique of the utilitar-
ian use of science and the levelling of the workplace playing field (the
establishment of the ‘masses’ as a characteristic of the modern world),
Nietzsche realized that harnessing nature in the name of utilitarianism,
thanks in part to technology, would lead only to the destruction of nature.
Here, the modernity of his thought is distinguished from the idealism
(one could justifiably say, from the illusion) of Marx, the theoretical
apparatus (the ‘armature’ of which Benjamin speaks) that is built on the
assumption that natural resources are ‘inexhaustible’. When one consid-
ers the increase in pollution from when these lines were written, one is
able to appreciate the meandering and paradoxical paths that Nietzsche
must have navigated in order to grasp, sometimes with extreme accuracy,
the developments of the ‘upcoming time’.
4 The Power of Rapture

Lukács sees in Nietzsche the ‘objective’ pseudo-revolutionary front of
the hegemonic logic of monopolistic capitalism, the ‘wicked’ aspects of
which would not in any way be concealed.97 The sociological schematism
of this interpretation is diluted not so much by the presence of ‘imperial-
ism’, of which the author speaks, but by the presence of neo-liberalism,
which seems to have adopted nihilism like world politics.98 If it is true
that Nazism used some aspects drawn here and there from the works of
Nietzsche, then it is equally true that the Naumburg philosopher pro-
vided a ‘tragic’ representation of the bourgeois ideological destiny, by
transferring it to a mythical and visionary dimension in which contradic-
tions are more evident.99
Ferruccio Masini speaks of the ‘grim rationalistic and historical defeats’

of those who insisted on superimposing a judgement, based on the think-
ers of the Enlightenment, on texts that are easily unattainable for their
own economic plan and of ‘a neutralisation of the danger of a thought
that is not easily resolvable in the schemata of systematic representation
and deduction’.100 Adorno also falls into this type of ‘grim rationalistic
defeat’ of Nietzschean nihilism. Moreover, it is wrong and dangerous to
dismiss Nazism as being merely an ‘irrationality’ by comparing it ideo-
logically to the thought of Nietzsche, first of all because Nietzschean phi-
losophy cannot be assessed on the basis of how the Nazis manipulated it;
and secondly because the label ‘irrational’ places the phenomenon out-
side the remit of political judgement and is therefore mutated into an
‘exception’. Instead, the authoritarian, dictatorial and repressive trend of
advanced capitalism is constant. Masini establishes himself as antagonist
to Adorno’s defeatist interpretation. The thought of Nietzsche is com-
pletely foreign to the dialectic. The destruction of metaphysics or the
genealogical-nihilistic deconstruction of the subject does not necessarily
coincide with materialism in a practical-revolutionary perspective.
As Masini writes that the cornerstone of Nietzschean philosophy con-
sists neither of materialism nor the dialectic, but from a transcript,
Umschreibung, that deeply amends the structure, breaking the intimate
connection. Materialism and dialectic are served up to Nietzsche in order
to overthrow the ‘text’ of the metaphysical, subverting the grammar, and
to register the text of the Umwertung, of the ‘transvaluation of all values’,
from a Dionysian viewpoint or an antagonistic and multifaceted view-
point in which the game of interpretations masks itself continuously. The
characteristic feature of the agon viewpoint101 is the crossing of the text
along a diagonal thread that joins the non-consecutive summits of the
polygonal figure; but the movement of the diagonal thread is the same as
the dispute and the struggle that are inscribed in the text, passing through
it (δ ιαγω ν íζεσθ αι[diagonízestai]). In this transcription, the figure is
‘complicated’ in materialism as a transfiguring function of the ‘will to cre-
ate’ (Wille zu Schaffen), which is still the will to generate (generating the
Übermensch); and the dialectic, beyond its undermining of the dissemina-
tion of the multiple and the negation, is hooked to the permanent tension
of an irresolvable contradiction that is not denied in the self-preserving
Aufhebung, but is exalted in an ecstatic overturning in the extreme of the

extreme opposite.102 Masini, in his interpretation of Nietzsche, relies heav-
ily on the term δ ιαγω ν íζεσθ αι[diagonízestai] δ ιαγω ν íζεσθ αι (to strug-
gle, to dispute, to be in debate). This is a struggle against time, against
history, against the ephemeral nature of representations; a fight destined
to failure, but also destined to use the ‘passion and distance’ that charac-
terize the entirety of his philosophy.
The ‘transcription’ completed by Nietzsche can also be read as an
attempt at secularizing messianic expectations within a materialistic and
‘natural’ panorama in which any perspective of salvation is lost. Nietzsche
brings humanity back to the harsh reality of matter and ephemerality, in
which the only possible way to rise above one’s own animalistic nature is
provided by this ‘rapture’, creative and destructive at the same time,
which combines θ εíα μαν íα (théia manía) with Dionysian fury.
It is at the end of this diagonal thread, of this ‘transcription’, in which
the possibility of dialectical ‘synthesis’ is in fact not considered, that it will
be interpreted latterly by the avant-gardes. The contradiction is not over-
come, or reconciled with the whole, but is ‘transfigured’ into a tension
between a ‘will to truth’ (Wille zur Wahrheit), made up of the expression
of vital instincts, and a ‘will to appearance’ (Wille zum Schein), comprised
of the artificiality of the same artistic process.
The diachronic rhythm of nihilistic writing is expressed as a historical
becoming of the body, a progressive intensification of the negativity of
the sign up to the extreme figure of the ‘eternal recurrence’, conceived
as an eternity of non-sense. Yet when this extreme gets turned upside
down by Dionysian affirmation (Bejahung) and the ‘will to appearance’
becomes ‘deeper, more original, more metaphysical’ than the ‘will of
truth’,103 the viewpoint of the prospect is turned around: it breaks into
the Dionysian effect, that double gaze or double truth that destroys, only
to return again to create. The key to understanding the historical avant-
garde of the twentieth century and the Dionysian effect is all in the ‘sus-
taining of the contradiction’,104 viewing it as a requirement of the agonic
viewpoint that both creates and destroys at the same time.
Masini rejects Lukács’ interpretation of the thought of Nietzsche,
which acts as an ‘indirect apology for capitalism’ (in part also made by
Benjamin), but he also rejects the interpretation of Heidegger, who sees

in the will to power the totalizing affirmation of technology: ‘The libera-
tion of mythical thought and its destabilizing powers thus do not have
as such an irrational-reactionary sense […], but it opens up the prob-
lematic space of a philosophy that has become a field of experimenta-
tion into what is possible and of eccentric tensions.’105 It is exactly this
‘imagine space’ that Benjamin wants to occupy with his ‘trials of the pos-
sible’ and his ‘eccentric path’ as a space for political action. Masini argues
that in Nietzsche’s conception of history, the past is ‘modelled and recre-
ated’ by someone who stands ‘outside and beyond’ the historical pro-
cess. Benjamin does exactly this when he says that writing history means
‘quoting’ images of the past and tearing them from their context.
When Masini speaks of an agonic component of the avant-garde’s pro-
cess, on the basis of a Nietzschean viewpoint, he means that the ‘fight’,
the ‘hand-to-hand combat’ of the author, through his Dionysian ‘poetic
fury’, is with life itself, but also with the expressive languages. In other
words, the artist puts himself into action, his corporeality also, in the
construction of an expressive device. The artist does not only relinquish
his subjectivity, his project, his ‘mind’, but also his body, his ‘life’, his vital
energy.106 However, if this bare life is the engine of the furor poeticus, is it
also a ‘value’, is it also the ‘sense’ of the artistic experience? Here we can see
at first hand one of the paradoxes of vitalism, based on scientism (ancient
and modern): the outcomes can be very different or even completely
opposite, but they still involve a certain connection between materi-
alism and spiritualism, at the centre of which there is always an emo-
tional ‘fury’. Sometimes the aesthetic sacralization of primary impulses
goes hand in hand with the sacralization and the intangibility of ‘bare
life’. This is a process that can easily be found in the works of Pasolini,
whose obsessive search for satisfaction of the primary impulses locates in
Catholicism (albeit in a pauperistic and populist form) the ‘tank’ of the
artistic tradition’s iconography and, ultimately, the ‘ideological’ (perhaps
‘ideal’ is more appropriate) foundation of the process.
Foucault speaks of ‘biopolitics’, because the modern state is respon-
sible for the survival of its citizens, writing the laws and providing an
infrastructure. The death of an individual is shared by the system as a
‘regrettable, but unavoidable event’. The state cannot and does not want
to intervene in this ‘private affair’. Thus, the death of an individual rep-

resents the insurmountable limit of the state’s biopolitics.107 Foucault
defines ‘biopower’ as ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic
biological features of the human species became the object of a political
strategy, of a general strategy of power’.108 The individual death is the
key that has led to a crisis not only in Foucault’s idea of ‘biopolitics’,
but also in regard to the safety of the West. The ‘martyr’ who sacrifices
himself in an attack was an unthinkable phenomenon in this form prior
to the events of 11 September 2001 and is an uncontrollable event. The
voluntary death of the individual interrupts the mental order and any
predetermined social hierarchies. Marxism presupposes the devaluation
of ‘life’ as the absolute value and the removal of the ‘sacredness’ of the
body (one’s own and others), but only to build a ‘new society’, only into
a class struggle, during the ‘revolution’ as collective action. To combat
‘martyrdom’ it is necessary to make life sacred once again, to ‘re-sacralize’
it, more so than the body (the corporeity). It is necessary to distinguish
the nihilistic elements present in ‘vitalism’ and to try to extract any ‘posi-
tive’ elements present in the exaltation of ‘life’. The crux of the matter lies
in the difficulty of making this ‘distinction’, since in the current crisis of
the ‘affluent society’ it is desirable to respond with a new ‘asceticism’ that
implies corporeal ‘mortification’ and ‘sacrifice’ (for the good of consumer
society).109
The possibility of intervening in the body—to ‘pilot’ the life of an
individual—forms a part of biopolitics, but also of the ‘insurmountable
limit’ at the moment in which an individual decides to ‘sacrifice them-
selves’ in the name of political and/or religious causes, and in doing so,
takes responsibility for determining the life (and death) of other people,
usurping the state and its sphere of influence.
‘The death of millions of people demanded another, higher justifica-
tion [than an economic one]—a justification whose ultimate aim is to be
able to offer the possibility of eternal life for all.’110 This clears the way
for the biopolitical utopia, in the sense both of racial homogeneity and
of the biological construction of the ‘new man’. This ‘philosophy of life’,
also developed by the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, represents a variant on Nietzsche’s thought and the ‘vul-
gar materialistic’ ambitions of the ‘liberators’ that are nothing more than
the ‘earthly’ overturning of messianic waiting. The religious-messianic

dimension is the complete opposite of the vitalistic-biological dimen-
sion.111 Within this contradiction is where the silence of Benjamin on the
anthropological option can be interpreted; he himself explored the issue,
but did not pursue it to its natural conclusion. For a moment he took
this vitalistic hypothesis regarding Nietzsche into consideration, perhaps
taking into account the Russian avant-garde and the studies on the myth
of the Collège de France, but then he dropped the idea.
(Translated by S.J. Morgan)
5 Notes
1. We have to see the Benjamin Studies in the context of the ‘Italian
Theory’: G. Borradori (ed.), Recordings Metaphysics. The New Italian
Philosophy, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1988;
P. Virno – M. Hardt (ed.), Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential
Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 1997;
S. Benso – B. Schroeder (ed.), Contemporary Italian Philosophy.
Crossing the Borders of Ethics, Politics and Religion, State University
of New York, New York 2007; L. Chiesa – A. Toscano (ed.), The
Italian Difference. Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, re.press,
Melbourne 2009; New Paths in Political Philosophy, in ‘New
Centennial Review’, 10 (2010), n. 2; Dario Gentili, Italian Theory.
Dall’operaismo alla biopolitica, Il Mulino, Bologna 2012.
2. See Leena A. Petersen, Poetik des Zwischenraumes. Zur sprachlichen
Kulturkritik und physiognomischen Historizität am Beispiel von
Walter Benjamin und ausgewählten Schriften seiner Zeit, Winter,
Heidelberg 2010.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Algora, New York 2004, p. 90 s.
4. Irving Wohlfarth, Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus. Walter Benjamins
„Weltpolitik’ aus heutiger Sicht, in Bernd Witte – Mauro Ponzi (ed.),
Theologie und Politik. Walter Benjamin ein Paradigma der Moderne,
E. Schmidt V., Berlin, 2005, pp. 107–136.
5. Ibid., p. 124.
6. See Hannah Arend, Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940, in Hannah

Arend, Men in Dark Times, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York
1970, pp. 153–206.
7. See Irving Wohlfarth, Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus, p. 109.
8. See Clare Connors, Force from Nietzsche to Derrida, London 2010.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transl. by Walter Kaufmann
and L. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, New York 1968, p. 7. See KG
VIII.1, p. 123. 2 [127]. Wohlfarth draws on the comparison by
André Glucksmann, Dostoevskij in Manhattan, Paris 2002.
10. ADHL, 8.
11. Ibid., p. 31.
12. Ibid., p. 46.
13. See Ferruccio Masini, Lo scriba del caos. Interpretazioni di Nietzsche,
Bologna, Il Mulino, 1978, p. 45. Own translation.
14. Ibid., p. 48.
15. See Nietzsche: Einleitung in das Studium der Platonischen Dialoge.
In: Gesammelte Werke. München 1921, vol. IV, p. 374. Own
translation.
16. Ibid., p. 48. Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, München,
Musarion, 1921, vol. IV, p. 372. Own translation.
17. Benjamin speaks of the ‘aestheticizing of politics’ in The Work of Art
in the Age of its Reproducibility, see SW 3, p. 121 and SW 4, p. 269.
18. Metafisica I, 6 and 8, 4.
19. See Walter Benjamin, On Concept of History, in SW 4, p. 390.
20. ADHL, 22.
21. Ibid., p. 18 s.
22. Ibid., p. 21 s.
23. Benjamin writes in One-Way-Street: ‘Quotations in my work are
like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle
stroller of his conviction’ (SW 1, p. 481).
24. See Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. In: Sämtliche Schriften.
Stuttgart 1988, vol. IV, p. 242. Own translation.
25. Ibid., p. 295.
26. Plato, Phaedrus, 245a.
27. See: Raymond Klibansky – Erwin Panofsky – Fritz Saxl, Saturn and
melancholy. Studies in the history of natural philosophy, religion, and
art, Nelson, London 1964.
28. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain, New York 1994; Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional
Brain, New York 1998; Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What
Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness,
New York 1999; Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic self: how our brains
become who we are, New York 2003.
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits.
Trans. by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
1986, p. 12 [1].
30. Ibid.
31. ‘All stronger moods bring with them a sympathetic resonance on the
part of related sensations and moods: they as it were root up the
memory’ (ibid., p. 19 [14]).
32. GS I. 3, p. 1250 [Ms 444] Own translation.
33. See Heinz Brüggemann – Günter Oesterle (Hg.), Walter Benjamin
und die romantische Moderne, Königshausen & Neumann,
Würzburg 2009.
34. SW 4, p. 405.
35. Ibid.
36. GS 1.3, p. 1243. Own translation.
37. SW 1, p. 216.
38. GS, I. 3, p. 1241. [Ms 447 and 1094]. Own translation. See also
SW 4, p. 402.
39. ‘Elles doivent, d’autre part, servir comme armature théorique au
deuxième essai sur Baudelaire’ (GS I.3, p. 1225).
40. SW 4, p. 390.
41. SW 4, p. 404.
42. GS 1.3, p. 1249 [Ms 443]. See also SW 4, p. 395.
43. SW 4, p. 406.
44. See Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the profane: the political theology of
Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Columbia University Press,
New York [u.a.] 2003; Daniel Weidner, Gershom Scholem: politisches,
esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben, Fink, München 2003;
Vittoria Borsò – Claas Morgenroth – Karl Solibakke – Bernd Witte
(ed.), Politics, Messianism, Kabbalah, Königshausen u. Neumann,
Würzburg 2010; Peter Fenves; The messianic reduction: Walter
Benjamin and the shape of time, Stanford University Press, Stanford

2011; James R. Martel, Textual Conspiracies. Walter Benjamin.
Idolatry and Political Theory, University of Michigan 2011.
45. ‘For I do not know what meaning classical philology would have
for our age if not to have an untimely effect within it, that is, to act
against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it
is to be hoped, of a coming age’ (ADHL, 8).
46. See in this regard Luciano Canfora, Politische Philologie.
Altertumswissenschaften und moderne Staatsideologien, Stuttgart
1995.
47. ADHL, 8.
48. See Peter Fenves, The messianic reduction: Walter Benjamin and the
shape of time, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2011.
49. AP, p. 318 [J 50, 2]. See also Walter Benjamin, Central Park [15],
in SW 4, p. 170.
50. SW 4, p. 402.
51. ADHL, 28.
52. Ibid., p. 45.
53. Ibid., p. 24.
54. In a note of 30 May 1928 Benjamin writes: ‘There are two types of
authors: one has, from the very beginning, a certain contact with
the audience: analysing the present social situation to determine
whose service in which to place his activity. The other does not free
himself from a closely defined internal world that regards only
itself, a kingdom which is born and dies with him and develops dif-
fering themes as narrative or as code of this internal world and
which cannot rely on audience participation until he is able to con-
fer a conceptual form on his world of thoughts and experiences.
[…] Reawakening this objective interest of the public not for the
person, but for the work is perhaps the most difficult thing of all’
(GS VI, p. 414. Own translation). The second type of author is a
description of Benjamin himself: that is to say, the characteristics of
his writing only follow the demands of his internal world and, so as
to then express himself in a ‘transverse’ manner, he leaves only traces
of a ‘hidden’ meaning. He prefers to search for the ‘true’ meaning;
that is, being allegorical about the message even at the cost of the
communicability of his writings, and the ‘readability’ of his critical

messages. He doesn’t claim to follow the expectations of a wide
audience, so he consciously runs the risk of being misunderstood.
However, he keeps on this eccentric track (this Umweg), an aspect
that is methodologically fundamental to his process, in order to
describe the meaning of the modern era in allegorical terms. It is
not enough just to recognize the source of his images and citations
to understand the true significance of his writings, since the use of
the allegorical apparatus often facilitates the destruction of the
‘conceptual-discursive’ form.
55. KS, VIII/2, p. 134. Own translation.
56. SW 4, p. 392.
57. GS I. 3, p. 1251 [Ms 451]. This concept is repeated in another pas-
sage of the preparatory materials: ‘The historical materialist
approaches the past only when it makes the encounter with this
structure, which is strictly identical to that of messianic modernity’
(GS I. 3, p. 1251 [Ms 450]). See also SW 4, p. 396.
58. GS I. 3, p. 1247 [Ms 466v]. Own translation.
59. SW 4, 404. GS, I.3, p. 1235 [Ms 490]. This assertion is also reiter-
ated in manuscript 470; GS, I. 3, p. 1239.
60. SW 4, p. 404 (modified translation).
61. GS, I. 3, p. 1246 [Ms 488]. Own translation.
62. ‘History has the task not only of stealing the tradition of the
oppressed but also of establishing it’ (GS, I. 3, p. 1246 [Ms 488].
Own translation).
63. See SW 4, p. 390.
64. ‘Thinking the idea of eternal recurrence once more in the nine-
teenth century, Nietzsche becomes the figure on whom mythic
doom is now carried out. For the essence of mythic happenings is
recurrence [Sisyphus, the Danaides])’ (SW 4, p. 404 s.).
65. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 16 [11].
66. Future innocuousness of metaphysics. ‘As soon as the origin of reli-
gion, art and morality is so described that it can be perfectly under-
stood without the postulation of metaphysical interference at the
commencement or in the course of their progress, the greater part
of our interest in the purely theoretical problem of the “thing in
itself ” and “appearance” ceases to exist’ (Friedrich Nietzsche,

Human, All Too Human, p. 16 [10]).
67. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 16 [12].
68. Ibid., p. 16 [12].
69. Ibid., p. 17 [12].
70. See Mauro Ponzi, Mythos der Moderne: Benjanin und Aragon, in:
Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm (ed.), global benjamin, Fink,
München 1999, vol. 2, pp. 1118–1134.
71. GS VI, p. 81. Own translation.
72. See KG, VIII.1, p. 125. Own translation.
73. SW 4, p. 407.
74. Ibid. It is not—as the author claims—a quotation from an apocry-
phal gospel. The passage is located in Justin, Dialogus cum Tryphone
Judaeo, 47. Traces of it can also be found in Mark 13:14–17;
Matthew 24:15–25 and Luke 17:31–34.
75. GS I. 3, p. 1245 [Ms 482]. Own translation.
76. ‘The thought-image [Denkbild]—a word used by Benjamin as a
kind of generic term for his own shorter text-pieces—can be seen as
lying at the heart of his work on thinking-in-images [Bilddenken].
[…] They are in the first instance linguistic representations of those
resemblances which conjoin the world with “figures of knowledge”’
(see earlier); that is, texts proceeding from those images and figura-
tions in which the act of thinking is performed and in which his-
tory, reality, and experience find their structure and expression […]’
(Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin,
Routledge, London- New York 1996, p. 44).
77. GS I. 3, p. 1245 [Ms 486]. Own translation.
78. See GS I. 3, p. 1245 [Ms 488].
79. See Marc Goldschmit, L’écriture du messianique. L’écriture secrète de
Walter Benjamin, Hermann, Paris 2010.
80. Iving Wohlfarth, Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus. Walter Benjamin’s
‘Weltpolitik’ aus heutiger Sicht, in Bernd Witte – Mauro Ponzi (Ed.),
Theologie und Politik., p. 122 s.
81. Walter Benjamin, Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia, in SW 2.1, p. 215. The term ‘Rausch’ used by
Benjamin includes the Nietzschean meaning of ‘euphoria’; indeed,

it can also be interpreted and translated as ‘rapture’.
82. See James McFarland, Constellation. Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter
New York 2013.
83. SW, p. 210.
84. ‘The trick by which this world of things is mastered—it is more
proper to speak of a trick than a method—consists in the substitu-
tion of a political for a historical view of the past’ (ibid.).
85. ‘Surrealism has come ever closer to the Communist answer. And
that means pessimism all along the line. Absolutely’ (ibid., p. 216).
86. Ibid., p. 217.
87. SW 2.2, p. 541 s.
88. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and His Angel, in Gary Smith
(ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, MIT
Press, Cambridge 1988, p. 54.
89. Benjamin speaks of the ‘feminine image’ that follows that of the
angel, which would ‘strike’ the author and cause his downfall.
Scholem writes in this regard: ‘The broad wording of the sentence
[in the second version] involves probably several women that
charmed him. He may be referring to the two that, after the break-
down of his marriage, played a role in his life: the “feminine image”
of the angel in the person of Jula Cohn and Asja Lacis, who from
1924 until 1930 had a great influence on the life of Benjamin, espe-
cially in his conversion policy to revolutionary thought’ (Gesholm
Scholem, Walter Benjamin and His Angel, p. 45). The curators of
the Gesammelte Schriften suggested that, in the plurality of female
figures expressed by the allegory of the angel, there might also have
been a woman in Ibiza with whom Benjamin was involved in the
summer of 1933, whose identity they do not want to reveal because
she could still have been alive at the time of publication of volume
VI of Benjamin’s works (1985). See GS VI, p. 809 s. This young
Dutch woman was a painter and translator. Benjamin met her in
Paris and also in Provence, where she lived with her husband.
Benjamin dedicated poems to this woman, who is indicated with
the letter B, and cryptically alludes to her in a series of letters.
Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings publish some of Benjamin’s

letters to Anna Maria Blaupot ten Cate, a ‘thirty-one-year-old
Dutch painter’ with whom he had a love affair in Ibiza. Heiland
and Jennings connect Benjamin’s autobiographical text Agesilaus
Santander with this ‘feminine image’ and with this love affair (see
Howard Eiland – Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical
Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)-London 2014,
p. 375 and 415 s.).
90. Gesholm Scholem, Walter Benjamin and his angel, p. 44.
91. SW 2.2, p. 715.
92. On the personal, professional and conceptual failure of Benjamin,
see Howard Eiland – Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A
Critical Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)-London
2014; James McFarland, Constellation. Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter
New York 2013, p. 14, 75, 135.
93. SW 2.2, p. 714 (modified translation).
94. Scholem captures the dual, indeed multiple, character of Benjamin’s
character when he writes: ‘This discourse also concerns, perhaps
above all else, his bond with mystical tradition, which nevertheless
was very far from being considered as an experience of God, in the
sense that many simplistic minds deemed to call it mystical.
Benjamin knew that the mystical experience has multiple layers,
and it was such multiplicity that assumes an important role in his
thoughts and his production’ (Gesholm Scholem, Walter Benjamin
and his angel, p. 55).
95. ‘If one does not destroy and clear away so that a future, already alive
in our hope, may build its house on the cleared ground, if justice
alone rules, then the creative instinct is enfeebled and discouraged’
(ADHL, 38 s.).
96. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism, Verso, London-New York 2012, p. 14.
97. See Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason, Merlin Press, London
1980.
98. See Iving Wohlfarth, Nihilismus kontra Nihilismus. Walter Benjamin’s
‘Weltpolitik’ aus heutiger Sicht, in Bernd Witte – Mauro Ponzi (Hg.),
Theologie und Politik, pp. 107–136; Karl Ivan Solibakke, ‘Die Achse

des Bösen’. Politik und Religion in den USA, ibid., pp. 181–194.
99. See Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, p. 303 s.; Mazzino
Montinari, Nietzsche lesen, De Gruyter, Berlin-New-York 1982;
M. Montinari, Nietzsches Nachlaß von 1885 bis 1888, oder Textkritik
und Wille zur Macht, Akten des V. Internationalen Germanisten-
Kongresses, Cambridge 1975, in: ‘Jahrbuch für Internationale
Germanistik’, Reihe A, vol. 2.1, pp. 46–47; M. Montinari, Vorwort,
in KG, XIV, 7–17.
100. Ferruccio Masini, Lo scriba del caos, p. 19. Own translation.
101. This concept returns in McFarland: ‘Both Nietzsche and Benjamin
are thinkers of the agon, which is to say, practitioners of antagonis-
tic reflection’ (James McFarland, Constellation. Friedrich Nietzsche
& Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History, p. 218).
102. See Ferruccio Masini, Lo scriba del caos, p. 27. Own translation.
103. See ibid.
104. ‘The sign released by the referent becomes the signifier [Dionysus]
that carries and supports in itself the contradiction’ (ibid., p. 54).
105. Ibid., p. 56.
106. See Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter
Benjamin, Routledge, London- New York 1996.
107. See Boris Groys, Unsterbliche Körper, in Die neue Menschheit,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 2005, p. 8.
108. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the
Collège de France (1977–1978), Palgrave, New York 2009, p. 16.
See also Michel Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1978–1979, Palgrave, New York 2008.
109. See Giorgio Agamben, Highest Poverty. Monastic Rules and Form of
Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2013.
110. Boris Groys, Unsterbliche Körper, cit., p. 9. Own translation.
111. See Daniel Weidner (ed.), Profanes Leben. Walter Benjamins
Dialektik der Säkularisierung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 2010.
3
Nietzsche: Editions and Interpretations
of His Works
1 Editions
Nietzsche’s thought was not just instrumentalized first by nationalist
and then by Nazi propaganda, but also manipulated through the fal-
sification of his texts. Nietzsche’s ideas can of course be interpreted in
the light of ‘nobility of spirit’ and ‘bare life’, but the use of some of his
concepts as slogans for political propaganda is a true falsification based
on taking his statements out of their philosophical context. A positive
result of Italian Germanic studies, recognized explicitly at the congresses
of the International Association for Germanic Studies in Basel in 1980
and Göttingen in 1985, is the production of a critical edition of the
works of Nietzsche thanks to the efforts of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari. They put the text of Nietzsche’s writings into chronologi-
cal and philological order and, in particular, gave a plausible sense to
the posthumous fragments. Previously, the editions of Nietzsche’s works
were based on the Grossoktavausgabe, published in Leipzig between
1894 and 1926. This publication was edited by the Nietzsche-Archiv,
founded in Naumburg in 1894 and then transferred to Weimar in
1896, always under the directorship of the philosopher’s sister, Elisabeth

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_3
Förster-Nietzsche. She managed to impose on the editors and publishers

her conception of the edition, which consisted of publishing fragments
written at different times according to a thematic criterion, literally put-
ting together works that the author had never written in that form. The
most resounding case of this manipulation was the publication of the
book The Will to Power, which Förster-Nietzsche defined as a ‘master-
piece of philosophical prose’ by her brother. In reality, however, it had
never been written in that form, but was ‘assembled’ by his unscrupu-
lous sister from various fragments taken from different contexts and
written in different eras.1
Colli and Montinari state that the criticisms levelled at the publication
of Nietzsche’s letters and writings were all too justified; but until his sis-
ter’s death it was impossible to access the manuscripts and therefore take
a step closer to solving the problem. Montinari told on several occasions
of how during their work on an Italian edition of Nietzsche’s writings,
he and Colli very soon noticed anomalies in the archive edition, which
included fragments from different periods in the same volume—as if it
were a single work—and, on the other hand, excluded fragments written
in the same period. These perplexities gave rise to the necessity (and the
plan) for a critical edition based on a precise philological analysis of the
manuscripts housed in Weimar.2
Perplexities regarding the criteria for the archive edition, above all the
edition of The Will to Power, had already been expressed at the beginning
of the twentieth century. Otto Weiss, co-publisher of volumes XV and
XVI of the Grossoktavausgabe, declares in a note from 1911 that he had
added plans and drafts from 1882 to 1888 to the publication of Ecce
Homo and The Will to Power. Montinari writes:
(the multiphariousness of these plans is the best refutation of the selection

in preference to one plan from the year 1887, on which foundation Peter
Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche based their compilation—but there is
more!); (2) notes to the text that, as Richard Roos has noted, betray a cer-
tain cynicism for an edition that had otherwise proved itself philologically,
as had Otto Weiss himself. In fact, they record an indeterminate number of
deletions, interpolations, and willful partitioning of unified texts. But there
is still more! Here, the remarks contradict the text.’3
The editors of the new early 1930s edition showed a certain embarrass-
ment with regard to the publication of fragments relating to The Will to
Power. In 1932 in the preface to the new edition, Hans Joachim Mette
wrote that the Nietzsche-Archiv had set out to restore the original form
to these posthumous fragments—and therefore indirectly admitted that
before their form had been arbitrary. In 1934 Walter Otto, member of
the scientific committee, wrote that the editors had the task of present-
ing the last writings belonging to Nietzsche’s thoughts on The Will to
Power for the first time without an arbitrary form of publication. Ernst
and August Horneffer had already demonstrated in 1906/1907 that it
was scientifically untenable to claim that The Will to Power was one of
Nietzsche’s philosophical works.4 However, Förster-Nietzsche was still
active and managed to block all attempts to publish a philologically cor-
rect edition of the works and to tone down the statements of the editors
of the 1933 edition.5 In the 1950s, Horneffer’s theories became the refer-
ence for the edition by Richard Roos and Karl Schlechta and constituted
the starting point for Colli and Montinari’s critical edition.
Among Nietzsche’s works, the posthumous fragments are of fun-
damental importance, because they constitute three-quarters of all his
writings. The archive and its director, Förster-Nietzsche, ideologically
instrumentalized the philosopher’s work without considering his real
intentions or the real value of the manuscripts. His sister’s manipula-
tion was at times so coarse as to become almost grotesque, such as in the
episode recounted by Georges Bataille, in which she publicly read one of
her husband’s letters to demonstrate Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism. Förster-
Nietzsche tended to liken the German philosopher’s thinking to a racist
and nationalist vision of the world, which rather corresponded to that of
her husband and was used by the German Chancellor and Nazi party’s
propaganda machine.
In his essay ‘Nietzsche and National Socialism’, Georges Bataille writes:
Before leaving Weimar to go to Essen,’ reported the Times on November 4,

1933, ‘Chancellor Hitler paid a visit to Mrs. Elizabeth (sic) Foerster-
Nietzsche, the sister of the celebrated philosopher. The elderly lady made
him a gift of a walking stick once belonging to her brother. She invited him
to visit the Nietzsche Archives. Mr. Hitler listened to her read from a
memorandum addressed to Bismarck in 1879 by Dr. Foerster, the anti-

Semitic agitator who protested against the incursions of the Jewish spirit in
Germany. Taking Nietzsche’s walking stick in hand, Mr. Hitler strode
through the crowd to great hurrahs.6
In his works, Bataille repeatedly underlines the fact that the 1930s image
of Nietzsche is the result of political instrumentalization by the archive
and Nazi propaganda. He defines M. Richard Oehler, Nietzsche’s cousin
and collaborator in the archive, as a ‘second traitor’ (more precisely a
‘second Judas’), owing to his attempts in his book Friedrich Nietzsche und
die deutsche Zukunft (Leipzig, 1935) to demonstrate the correspondence
between the German philosopher’s thought and Hitler’s book Mein
Kampf, even going so far as to cite those precise passages in which the
philosopher names anti-Semite writings, in order to criticize them as if
they were phrases written by Nietzsche, reflecting his thought. So Bataille
concludes: ‘It is not only a case of an “impudent hoax,” but of a crudely
and consciously fabricated falsehood.’7
Nevertheless, not only some philologists but also some German intel-
lectuals, who had carefully read the philosophical texts and related them
to their cultural context, understood Nietzsche’s thought in its true ‘alter-
native’ and ‘anti-bourgeois’ sense, and had long criticized the falsification
and instrumentalization of Förster-Nietzsche and her archive. Walter
Benjamin, for example, published an article entitled ‘Nietzsche und das
Archiv seiner Schwester’ on 18 March 1932 in Literarische Welt, in which
he radically criticizes the treatment of the philosopher’s manuscripts.8
As Montinari writes, when we speak of the ‘will to power’ in connec-
tion to Nietzsche, we are referring first of all to his definition of a concept
and then to a never-realized project. The preparatory fragments date from
1880 in connection to the drafting of Morgenröte (The Dawn), and the
topic was taken up again and developed in the second part of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, above all in the section ‘Von der Selbstüberwindung’ (Self-
Overcoming). So for Nietzsche, the will to truth is ‘this will itself, the will
to power—the unexhausted begetting will of life’.9
Nietzsche’s work is unfinished: it consists of fragments, notes, jottings,
projects, which were continually changed and added to. The fragmen-
tary and unsystematic nature of his thought, or, as Montinari writes, its
resistance ‘to any ambition of systematization’, can be seen in his post-

humous papers in particular. Hence it is vital to make a chronological
reconstruction of the text in order to understand the progression of his
thinking process. Isolating a thought or a project, taking it out of its con-
text, or even ‘mounting’ different fragments from different periods and
then ordering them under a single heading, is a philologically wrong and
philosophically absurd operation.
In the authentic Nietzschean conception, the ‘will to power’ is a sort
of ‘vital impulse’, an inner force that fights for the individual’s develop-
ment, corresponding in psychoanalysis to the subject’s strength of self-
determination. In a fragment from 1885, which was excluded from the
archive edition, Nietzsche defines this power ‘which transforms itself and
always remains the same’, a sort of ‘character type of Proteus-Dionysus’.10
The search for oneself and self-overcoming are theorized in the aforemen-
tioned chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche directly
identifies the ‘will to power’ in ‘life itself ’. However, this statement is
accompanied by his conviction of the coincidence of opposites: life and
death are two aspects of becoming, the struggle between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’
is an aspect of existence. And therefore decadence and decline are always
overcome again by the renewal of life.11 The ‘wise man’ is in harmony with
this life’s self-overcoming and tries to frame himself according to a concep-
tion of the world that sees self-annulment as the premise to pass to a higher
level. Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond-Man’ is the result of the effort of the single per-
son, the ‘chosen one’, to surpass, exceed himself, to ‘go beyond’ the human
condition; namely, to achieve a sort of immortality in nature. However,
this procedure implies the necessary step of the subject’s own self-annul-
ment, his ‘perishing’.12 The interesting aspect is that this Nietzschean ‘intu-
ition’ places this fight for life within every individual, in whom the strong
and the weak, life instinct and death drive (self-annulment)—conscious
and unconscious, Ego and Superego, to use the terminology of Freud,
Eros and Thanatos—fight among themselves. In this context, the ‘will to
power’ is nought but the subject’s vital impulse for self-affirmation. In the
next chapter, entitled ‘On the Sublime Ones’, Nietzsche clearly writes: ‘He
must also unlearn his hero’s will.’13 The individual’s self-affirmation only
takes place through contemplation of the life-force of nature. The highest
‘will to power’ is the ‘will to eternal recurrence’.
The nationalist interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought forgets to con-

sider that the ‘will to power’ in Nietzsche is always relativized, and in the
end denied, within a ‘Dionysian’ project of self-annulment. This is where
the ‘oriental’ component of his thought lies, his call to Zarathustra.14
According to Nietzsche, every major growth also involves ‘tremendous
crumbling and passing away’, every fruitful and powerful movement of
humanity ‘has also created at the same time a nihilistic movement’.15 The
nihilistic element is accompanied by the concept of decadence. In this
connection, in another fragment from 1886 Nietzsche speaks of the ‘will
to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct, the instinct of self-
destruction, the will to nothingness’.16
Nietzsche’s thought starts from a sort of Darwinism and rejects the
principle of equality in the name of the ‘fight for life’. The subject of
his polemic is Christianity and the principle that all people are God’s
children and therefore equal. He is an individualist. He has an elitist
conception of life and culture. However, his is an ‘anti-bourgeois’ and
‘anti-philistine’ stance; he opposes the principle of identity that governed
Hegel’s dialectic and disputes the constituted order with a singular and
aporetic stance that is anarchical and elitist at the same time. By detesting
the masses, he rejects conformism. In this he is opposite to the nationalist
and Nazi conception that wanted to frame the masses in a military man-
ner within the party.
The myth of Superman in the racist and nationalist sense contradicts
Nietzsche’s philosophy, which came about to fight conformism. Many
passages from his writings could be quoted to undermine the image of
an anti-Semite and racist Nietzsche. Two episodes from the year 1887
suffice: the editor of the journal Antisemitische Korrespondenz, Theodor
Fritsch (1852–1933), a racism theorist, sent the philosopher an issue of
the journal. In a letter dated 29 March 1887, Nietzsche informed him
that he no longer wanted to receive the periodical.17 In a note from the
same period, we can read: ‘Recently a Mr. Theodor Fritsch from Leipzig
wrote to me. There is no more impudent and stupid mob in Germany
than these anti-Semites! I gave him by thanks in a letter a real beating
[Fußtritt].’18 The author’s intention to differentiate his position from that
of the ‘impudent and stupid mob of anti-Semites’ is very clear. Instead,
just a few years later his sister circulated a very different image of his
thought; that is, a version of his writings in which the ‘will to power’
was interpreted as the prevalence of the strongest over the weakest. So
all the outsiders, the ‘alternative’ people who, according to the authentic
Nietzschean conception, did not want ‘fight in rank and file’19 and hence
were ‘Overmen’, should be wiped out, and this—the paradox of pro-
paganda—in the name of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The aforementioned
Theodor Fritsch, to whom Nietzsche had dealt ‘a real beating’ by letter,
wrote a review to Beyond Good and Evil in which he violently criticized
the book because it contained the ‘glorification of the Jewish people’ and
a ‘curt rejection of anti-Semitism’.20
Nazism’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s thinking was carried on by
Förster-Nietzsche through the foundation and directorship of the archive.
She found valid support in Alfred Bäumler, controller of the cultural
and philosophical formation of the Nazi party. As a scholar of Nietzsche,
Bäumler had set out to make the German philosopher’s ideas usable for
the party and to bend his thought to an authoritarian, racist and nation-
alist interpretation. In this process of instrumentalization, he attributed
great significance to the version of the posthumous fragments published
by the archive, and therefore gave disproportionate significance to The
Will to Power. He intended to place a political meaning on Nietzsche’s
philosophy and to ‘systematize’ his thought based on the fragments. This
cultural programme has nothing to do with Nietzsche’s convictions.
Indeed, in 1888, in the fragments for The Will to Power project, Nietzsche
wrote: ‘I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system
is a lack of integrity.’21
Bäumler based his whole interpretation on the archive’s manipu-
lated version and, even though he recognizes the book’s inauthenticity,
to the extent that he calls it ‘incomplete’, he nevertheless took on the
task of ‘completing’ Nietzsche’s work; that is, concluding the work in his
stead or, at least, drawing the theoretical-political consequences—some-
thing that the author had not done—and ‘rationalizing’ his thoughts.
Bäumler’s cultural programme fully matched that of Förster-Nietzsche
and consisted of compiling a book in Nietzsche’s place, considering him-
self the interpreter and guarantor of Nietzsche’s philosophy—without
accounting for the philological and conceptual plausibility of his inter-
pretation. The main aim of this falsification was to use this theory for
political propaganda.22 However, in the same period various German

intellectuals—from Hermann Hesse to Thomas Mann, Karl Jaspers to
Karl Kraus, Karl Löwith to Walter Benjamin—read Nietzsche in a com-
pletely different light from that put forth by the archive. Thomas Mann,
for example, maintained that the fascist instrumentalization of Nietzsche
was ‘the clumsiest of all misunderstandings’.23
2 Reception
Nietzsche bitterly criticized the educational system of his time, and per-
haps received more opposition from the academic world for this criti-
cism of the school system than for his nihilistic philosophy. In 1872 he
held five conferences, organized by the Akademische Gesellschaft in Basel
and then published under the title of On the Future of our Educational
Institutions. The privileged addressee of his philosophical discourse
was the historian Jakob Burckhardt, who attended all the conferences.
Alongside the polemics against the educational system, the theoretical
topic of the conferences was anti-historicism. Their structure was dia-
logical. Nietzsche illustrated a fictitious dialogue between a philosopher
(whom it is easy to identify as Schopenhauer) and two students (one of
whom is evidently the author himself ).24
Nietzsche hopes for a ‘rejuvenation, a reviviscence, and a refining of
the spirit of Germany’25 and ‘a completely rejuvenated and purified cul-
ture’,26 and acknowledges the fact that the most fatal weaknesses of his era
are linked precisely to its unnatural methods of education.27 He is refer-
ring in particular to the ‘German institutions’ and to the state education
policy, and criticizes Prussia for creating the ‘apotheosis of the State’ theo-
rized by Hegel.28 The consequence is that ‘the really independent traits
[…], in short, their individuality is reproved and rejected by the teacher
in favor of an unoriginal decent average’.29 This opposition between cul-
ture and state allows the young professor firmly to reject mass culture,
which he defines as a ‘barbarity’, and in his theories to make reference to
‘a true, aristocratic culture, founded upon a few carefully chosen minds’.30
Such an elitist and aristocratic conception of culture is only under-
standable if we consider the ‘defensive’ nature of the Nietzschean theses.
In reality he wanted to ‘defend’ the ancient from modern decadence; it

should be remembered that Nietzsche had just published The Birth of
Tragedy and that at Basel he taught classical philology. The opposition
between elitist culture and mass culture should be deciphered within a
catastrophist vision of the situation, as the defence of the ‘true’ culture
of the ancient against the presumed humanism of German nationalism.
Nietzsche’s book on Greek tragedy received bitter criticism from nation-
alist professors; that is, from supporters of an ‘Apollonian’ vision of the
ancient based on the equivalence between the values of classical antiq-
uity and those of the reborn German national spirit, which Nietzsche
repeatedly and disparagingly defined as the ‘State’: the ‘State’ tendency
finds itself ‘at war’ with ‘the real German spirit’.31 In these conferences
Nietzsche once again takes up the concept of ‘genius’ of Romantic deri-
vation, of he who is able to think in an original manner and who, owing
to this, stands apart from the masses and from their culture, which fos-
tered Prussian statism and its nationalism. So much so that it is true
that, after paying homage to the ‘authorities’, such as Schopenhauer and
Burckhardt, Nietzsche breaks away from them completely, opposing the
massified and homologated culture with ‘superior’ men, drawn from an
‘other’ alternative cultural context to the ‘Bonapartism’ of the Wilhelmian
state: namely, Zarathustra.32
The spiritual superiority of which Nietzsche speaks is not founded on
race, nor on a political organization, but on a cultural choice to ‘defend’
the formative values of Graeco-Roman classicism, even though he gave
an all-round interpretation of them, also highlighting their chthonic,
‘Dionysian’, creative and at the same time destructive aspects. Many
Nietzschean motifs influenced various intellectuals of his time. In On the
Future of our Educational Institutions, for example, Nietzsche launches
into a campaign in favour of the correct use of the German language
and lashes out against ‘journalistic jargon’ that causes ‘physical loath-
ing’.33 Both the apocalyptic tones and the centrality of the problem of
language (albeit with other connotations) and of communication can be
seen again in Karl Kraus, who in his own way had assimilated Nietzsche’s
‘doctrine’, as well as in theorizing communication by Walter Benjamin,
who had also adopted a ‘destructive’ conception of the modern and had
widely used the philosopher of nihilism’s anti-historicist vision. Yet the
most direct echo of this passage from Nietzsche’s conferences is found

in Steppenwolf, when Hermann Hesse uses his character to polemicize
directly against the ‘feuilleton era’, and the journalistic culture capable of
trivializing everything and using all means to attack those who dare to
get out of the ranks.
The masses from which Nietzsche wants to distinguish himself are
also the working masses, but above all the militarized masses of the
Wilhelmine period associations, whose ‘weaknesses’ he describes with
incisive strength, taking up the old image by Novalis of the ‘two ten-
dencies’ that lead to human science.34 For the intellectual, according to
Nietzsche, there are two routes in the current situation imposing a funda-
mental choice, a choice between two cultures (or rather, between a ‘true’
and a ‘false’ culture). And if you choose to enter the rank and file ‘your
age will receive you with open arms, you will not find it wanting in hon-
ors and decorations’.35 However, these homologated masses serving the
state structure (Prussian first of all, and later German) imposed behaviour
that demeans the individual:
And when the leader gives the word it will be re-echoed from rank to rank.
For here your first duty is this: to fight in rank and file; and your second:
to annihilate all those who refuse to form part of the rank and file. On the
other path you will have but few fellow-travellers: it is more arduous, wind-
ing and precipitous […].36
Nietzsche therefore opposes the ‘Philistine morality’. In Judaism, he sees

the core of Christianity. His aversion is not to the race, but to the ideol-
ogy: Christianity, insofar as it preaches the equality of all men before
God, is the true foundation of every democratic conception. When he
opposes the masses and mass culture, Nietzsche is not thinking so much
of the working masses, but of the Christian masses. Christianity’s ‘guilt’
consists—as he sees it—of the fact that the individual, inasmuch as the
‘son of God’, is raised so high that he cannot be ‘sacrificed’, which con-
tradicts the Darwinian principle of natural selection.
‘The most general form of culture is simply barbarism.’37 This affirma-
tion, which Nietzsche attributes to Schopenhauer in the first of the con-
ferences On the Future of our Educational Institutions, should be related to
the late Romantic context in which the conception of the ‘genius’ prevails
in contrast to the ‘masses’, which can easily be recognized as the source of
Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch. Yet if we are to take the assertion
out of its late Romantic context and apply it to the present—precisely
because it is ‘untimely’—it regains a surprising topicality: is mass culture,
that which is divulged by the mass media, perhaps not a sign of barbar-
ity, both owing to its contents, its ‘messages’ (which ultimately prove to
be merely for publicity), but also the dependence that it causes and the
habitual ‘lack of thought’ prompted in its users and their unquestioning
reception of those ‘messages’ (and probably purchase of those products)?
Nietzsche’s considerations (which are ‘untimely’, as the author claims
in the preface to the conferences) paradoxically prove to be ‘prophetic’,
even though the route followed to criticize, to ‘demolish’ the German
educational system, is an Umweg (a detour, a crooked route)—a com-
mon characteristic of other thinkers and men of letters who, more or less
openly, draw or ‘have well learned that art’ from Nietzsche; suffice it to
think of Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin (to name
just a few).
3 Nietzsche and the Avant-Garde
Nietzsche’s influence on fin-de-siècle artists and thinkers was so strong
that his thought was received on a level with that of Freud. Due to the
fragmentary nature of his philosophy, he was nevertheless interpreted in
a very different manner, with the only ‘common denominator’ between
the two being that they were both considered ‘alternative’. Within this
fragmentation and multiplicity, two great motifs can nevertheless be
identified that are constant to almost all the tendencies in the reception
of Nietzsche: the revolution in forms of expression that make any artistic
experiment possible, and the emphasis on the decline of Western civiliza-
tion, highlighting the feeling of the end of time. This last motif is defined
by Lukács as ‘decadence’ and today it is classified under the concept of
‘klassische Moderne’.38 The particular characteristic of Nietzsche’s recep-
tion lies in the fact that all the authors only extracted fragments from his
philosophy and placed them within their world vision, often changing
their function. As a result, the philosophical and artistic outcomes are

very different from each other.
In the battle of Italian futurism and all the artistic avant-gardes against
tradition, it is easy to trace splinters of Nietzsche’s thought and an implicit
nihilism that affects not just the past, but the very process of artistic pro-
duction. All the artists read and interpreted the German philosopher’s
writings in their own way—hence the ‘splinters’—but all the avant-garde
artists based their work on the ‘transvaluation of all values’. This aspect
is difficult to grasp not so much because of the fragmentary and contra-
dictory nature of this nihilism, but because of the theoretical and meth-
odological approach to Nietzsche’s thought. If we deal with Nietzsche
using the traditional categories—those of German Idealism—to measure
the ‘rationality’ or ‘irrationality’ of his thought, we run the risk of his
philosophical procedure escaping us, or even of us misunderstanding it.
Indeed, Nietzsche does not aim to ‘solve’ the contradictions, he does not
want to achieve any ‘reconciliation’; instead, he wants to ‘explode’ them.
He looks for them, highlights them, takes them to extremes, maintains a
tension between opposites within his thought. A similar method can only
lead to a deflagration, a deconstruction of the conceptual categories, of
the ‘ordering codes’ of thinking,39 and, ultimately, to the self-annulment
of the thinking subject.
Benjamin’s famous allegory of the angel gazing backwards was almost
incomprehensible to his contemporaries, because he had a unique con-
ception of history, ‘eccentric’. His way of arguing, his approach to moder-
nity, was in fact an Umweg—a crooked path, an eccentric one. Benjamin’s
work is mainly characterized by this kind of ‘sitting on the fence’, and
his method allows him to recognize the destructive traits of modernity
earlier and more clearly than his contemporaries. He draws the concept
of a cross-section from architectural terminology and uses it as a key with
which to interpret several artistic and social phenomena of his time, in
which it is at the same time possible to trace the end of the whole epoch.
In architecture, the cross-section is a schematic representation of a build-
ing, depicting it as if it were sliced down the middle. It shows the parts
used to construct the building (the structural components).40 The cross-
section does not reproduce the whole building, but gives a very particu-
lar view from an unusual angle, and is sometimes able to show aspects
that in other views would not be visible. Benjamin wanted to provide a

cross-section of his epoch, because he believed that only by doing this
would it be possible to represent modernity and its illusions. The work
of Benjamin is after all a cross-section of modern affluent society, and
from this perspective we can look at its neuroses, its uneasiness, its dark
and perturbing side. These ‘things’ are essentially cultural phenomena,
if not directly artistic. The way through the ruins of the history of prog-
ress (calling to mind the path of the angel of history, protagonist of his
famous thesis) mirrors to an extent the process that Benjamin uses in his
Arcades Project.
The destructive character ‘sees nothing permanent’, but thanks to his
pessimism ‘he sees ways everywhere’. Since he sees pathways ‘where oth-
ers encounter walls or mountains’, then ‘he has to clear things from it
everywhere’ and ‘reduce to rubble’ what exists, in order to find the way
leading through it.41 Here the affinity with Heiner Müller’s process is
clear: on the one hand, the permanent catastrophe of history ‘forces’ the
author to operate through debris; yet on the other, this montage of het-
erogeneous materials becomes a programmatic choice that extends to the
same conception of history. As is well known, Benjamin claims that the
historian has to become a collector of obsolete and seemingly marginal
things (or concepts) that nevertheless have great allegorical value. Finally,
history should not be seen as a chain of events linked by the principle of
cause and effect, it should be ‘broken down’, ‘quoted’.42
Modern culture came about as a perception of the crisis of traditional
values. From this point of view, Spengler’s book The Decline of the West
(1922) is of paradigmatic significance. The crisis and imminent decline
drove some authors to seek radical alternatives to Western culture and
to ‘displace’ the conceptual and social model to an unnamed ‘elsewhere’.
Tellingly, alongside ‘new’ technical and scientific discoveries, new theo-
ries, faith in ‘necessary’ and indefinite progress, in modern culture there
was always a critical consciousness that took on the nihilism connatural
to the era itself and always spoke of crisis, decadence, threats and the
imminent collapse of those same values constituting Western civilization.
In the name of ‘defending’ these ‘values’ of Western ‘civilization’ to the
bitter end, of which—from Hegel onwards—German culture was always
and no matter what seen as the ‘highest level’ ever achieved by humanity,
crimes and misdeeds of every kind were committed. While at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century most Germans were theorizing as to the
necessity of safeguarding these values and even relating them to Roman
virtues, with all the imperial and imperialist implications this involved,
some intellectuals, in the wake of Nietzsche, were instead theorizing the
inevitable decadence of all the values of Western culture, whose irrevers-
ible crisis would inevitably lead to the West’s decline. Consciousness of
the crisis in itself did not imply taking a stance, since it was theorized both
by the nationalists as a ‘threat’ requiring defence from the ‘barbarians’—
even through a preventative war, or work of ethnic ‘cleansing’—and by
the ‘apocalyptics’, who announced the catastrophe without pointing to
any remedies, in a nihilism that seemed to imply a voluptas dolendi or a
vague hope that this catastrophe would accelerate its course.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche quotes a painting by
Raphael, The Transfiguration (1518–1520), as a paradigmatic example of
the representation of the dualism between reality and dream, between
Vorstellung (representation) and the illusion of a ‘thing-in-itself ’, between
the Dionysian and the Apollonian:
Raphael, himself […] has depicted for us in a symbolic painting the reduc-
tion of semblance to semblance, the primal process of the naive artist and
also of Apolline culture. In his Transfiguration the lower half of the picture,
with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, and the frightened, helpless
disciples, shows us a reflection of the eternal, primal pain, the only ground
of the world; […].43
Nietzsche’s interpretation overturns the Platonic schema of the painting

and makes it a representation of his particular interpretation of Plato:
pathos exalted as pain resulting from consciousness of the caducity of
human nature and confinement of the ideal to a rarefied oneiric place
that is all illusion and semblance of semblance.
The top part of the picture represents the idealization, the dream.
According to Nietzsche, the ‘Apolline’ beauty depicted therein is only
an illusion. His attention shifts to the bottom part of the painting that
depicts a ‘possessed boy’, in a trance, attracting the disciples’ interest
more than the miracle of the ascension. The ‘transfiguration’ of which
Nietzsche speaks lies in this ‘Dionysian’ representation of pathos that

provokes ‘rapture’, stupefaction, stupor, through which we see the trag-
edy of the human condition.
Here, however, Nietzsche also defines the form of artistic expression
in the allegory: art represents the ‘eternal contrast’, man’s tragic condi-
tion in the best of cases, the Dionysian rapture that leads to pain and
self-destruction, in a ‘transfigured’ form. Art ‘transcribes’ the primordial
condition into a figurative language that is to be received without meta-
physical illusions, with pathos and distance—as he writes in another pas-
sage. However, this is also a declaration of poetics: Nietzsche ‘transcribes’
into the modern era a series of concepts stemming from the philosophy
of the tragic epoch of the Greeks. Even when he uses very figurative and
allegorical language in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he ‘masks’ with elements
and ideas drawn from Eastern philosophy the doctrine of Heraclitus and
Cratylus, ‘corrected’ by his interpretation of Schopenhauer.
If only representation exists, if the continual transformation of being
does not allow us to formulate any judgement since we can only seize
the moment between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’, then the sense
of producing representations, also destined to disappear into nothing-
ness, can only be of an aesthetic character. The Nietzschean ‘new man’,
both in the form of the ‘blond beast’ and in that of the ‘Übermensch’
(Overman—Beyond-Man) in search of eternal recurrence, produces
depictions of the instant based on self-gratification, in order to express
his will to power as the will to produce images; namely, instantaneous
depictions of an ungraspable reality. Yet this will to representation (and
self-representation) very soon proves to be the will to destroy the repre-
sentations themselves and, ultimately, the will to self-annulment. In the
end, it is an obsessive representation of the caducity of human nature, of
that ‘being-toward-death’ of which Heidegger speaks.
The core of Nietzsche’s thought does not lie either in materialism or
in dialectic, but in the transcription of one into the other, which pro-
foundly changes their structure precisely insofar as it throws out their
internal coherence. Nietzsche ‘transcribed’ the ‘text’ of metaphysics into
a materialism that unhinges the ‘grammar’ of traditional thought into an
alchemy of extremes in which the agon (competition) of interpretation is
in continual disguise.44 This ‘competing perspective’ entails the playful
level of the production of signs, which results in the ‘unsolvable contra-

diction’ of a ‘will to create’ reversed to the opposite extreme; namely, the
will to self-destruction.
However, with his codification of artistic language Nietzsche provides
the basis for a theory of avant-garde movements: representation, with its
intrinsically aesthetic value, in the absolute overturning of all values, can-
not simply describe man’s condition but transfigure it, express it through
allegorical images, continually find new forms of expression. At the same
time, Nietzsche’s philosophy is also a production of images, a produc-
tion of figurative language that is quite unusual in philosophical argu-
ment. The same conceptual images that form the pivots of his thought
are indeed representations, icons that are to be deciphered.
Walter Benjamin tried to define the character of modernity. While
other German emigrants put all their hope into the concept of progress,
Benjamin conceived a book project, The Arcades Project, which centred
on a strong critique of the modern and its social and cultural structure.
The thought of Nietzsche is the experimental workshop of this transmu-
tation (Umwertung) that forms the basis of Lebensphilosophien by Klages
and Simmel. The agonic element—the struggle for life—is translated, or
transfigured, into a Dionysian fury that acts as both creator and destroyer
at the same time.
Most artists whom we have classified under the definition of klassische
Moderne45 (‘classical modern’) have attempted—each in their own way
and with their own writing strategy—to make this transfiguration of the
conflict between ‘bare life’ and work of art into an artificial apparatus,
precisely to underline the distance between the two. The tendency to ‘rev-
olutionize’ the expressive forms and to consider art as ‘bare life’, with all
its nihilistic and self-destructive components, locates in the avant-garde a
series of variations on the theme of a connection between constructivism
and self-destruction. Yet this strange mixture of constructivism and nihil-
ism is the characteristic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. In
other words, the awareness of having to produce new languages and new
artistic codes on the basis of a ‘scientific’, almost ‘mathematic’, planning
process, devoid of any sentimentality, despite the clear awareness that these
codes are not able to change the reality of ‘life’, may not be able to provide
a response to the primary impulses and is not even able to decipher the
dynamics of the present. This fundamental contradiction between the

construction of a large expressive apparatus and its inherent inadequacy
regarding ‘vital energy’ brings with it the ‘dark side’, an intrinsic negativ-
ity, which the avant-garde sometimes dispelled with self-deprecation, the
parody of the heroic approach, and with the deconstruction of the writing
subject.46 Owing to the pathos, the stupor towards the caducity of human
nature, it is necessary to don the ‘evil mask’ and to produce representa-
tions that can separate pathos from sentimentality and translate it into the
euphoria of destruction or even of creation. Some authors exalted ‘bare
life’, primary instincts, in order to try out a new poetic language.
From Nietzsche’s thought the avant-garde movements absorbed this
conception of crossing the heritage of the artistic and cultural tradition
along a ‘competing diagonal’ that unhinges the order of thought and
discourse to transcribe or ‘transfigure’ the distance between art and life in
a representation of allegorical images. However, this oscillation between
pathos and distance produced quite different artistic outcomes in the
avant-garde movements, and above all generated different paths accord-
ing to whether more emphasis was given to the element of ‘vitalism’ or
‘planning’. To transfigure the pathos, the dismay before the caducity of
human nature, is to don the ‘evil mask’ in the production of representa-
tions that can separate pathos from its sentimentalism and ‘translate’ it
into the euphoria of destruction or construction (depending on the case
in point). Some authors, however, focused on ‘bare life’, on emphasiz-
ing the primary instincts, to test forms of expression that have remained
eccentric and marginalized in the history of Western culture.
4 The Feeling of the End of Time

Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann represent two different but in some
ways complementary aspects of Nietzsche’s reception and the liter-
ary transposition of his philosophical theories. In this sense they were
strongly linked, in this sense they were read by the public of their time, in
this sense they felt themselves to be ‘akin’. The works of the two authors
are two different responses to that crisis of all values that characterized the
turn-of-the-century culture and was bringing German cultural identity
under discussion. The last novels by these two authors, written during the
Second World War and known to the public after the end of the conflict,
claim to rise to the problem in an epoch-making manner. They are the
cultural and intellectual evaluation of an entire era, the ‘modern’ era, the
era born from the decline of the world of yesteryear, of the missed secu-
rity, characterized by technology and the masses; in short, that ‘modern’
era from which Nietzsche wanted to save ‘they, who are able to think’.
When Thomas Mann received a copy of Hesse’s book Glass Bead Game,
he jotted in his diary that he felt ‘astonished’ at noting the novel’s like-
ness to what he was writing at that time and that the prose was so close
to him it was as if it were his own.47 Doktor Faustus therefore, according
to its author, presents surprising likenesses to the Glass Bead Game owing
to the same idea of fictional biography—with the dashes of parody that
this fiction entails, the same union with music, the same criticism of
civilization and the period, the same dramatization of our tragedy. The
singular Hesse–Mann–Nietzsche constellation appears again in the Glass
Bead Game not just because in the novel both Mann is represented in the
character of magister ludi Thomas von der Trave, and Nietzsche in the
person of Tegularius, but because the novel itself strives to be the overall
appraisal of a whole era, seen in a Nietzschean light. Both writers, who
had always upheld anti-historicist notions, here deal with history, with
the ‘terrible events’ that had involved and conditioned single individuals.
When Mann wrote that he had read Glass Bead Game as if he had written
it himself, he not only wants to allude to the apocalyptic tone that bound
Hesse’s novel to his Doktor Faustus, but in Hesse’s prose he evidently also
recognizes a vaguely Nietzschean basis.
The affinity between these two writers lies in the Endzeitgefühl, the
feeling of the end of time, and the explicit claim to want to formulate
an appraisal of the modern epoch. However, the likenesses between the
two writers end here: each followed his own path in stylistic and literary
terms. When Mann wrote The Magic Mountain he was still immersed in
the deutsch-national problem, he was still, with all the doubts and second
thoughts innate to his character, a defender of German Kultur.48 In those
same years, Hermann Hesse had already understood that German nation-
alism would lead to catastrophe: he had already written Siddhartha, he
was writing Steppenwolf, he had taken Swiss citizenship some time before.
In 1947, on the occasion of Hesse’s seventieth birthday, Mann pub-

lished an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in which he wrote ‘in some
way we are travelling companions and brothers—or confrères’,49 and
he indicated as a concrete example the similarity and complementarity
between Glass Bead Game and Doktor Faustus. In this context, it is sig-
nificant that in a letter dated 8 April 1945, in which he thanks Hesse for
sending him a copy of Glass Bead Game, Mann informs him that he is
writing Doktor Faustus and explicitly declares that the protagonist shares
Nietzsche’s fate. The protagonists of the two novels are outsiders who ‘go
beyond’ the masses, since they follow their own destiny, because they are
able to find themselves and their own way; that is, they achieve, even if
only for a short instant, the wisdom of immortals. They achieve this state
by paying the price of loneliness and pain. And their path ends with self-
annulment, as the precondition to having an effect, to being socially use-
ful, inasmuch as they are a paradigmatic example or producers of a work
of art. They are ‘Beyond-men’ in the sense that they are able to transform
their ‘will to power’ into a ‘will to life’ within the eternal creative process
of nature. While in Mann the events are more tragic, in Hesse the peda-
gogical element dominates—so much so that in his novel we clearly per-
ceive the echo of the Goethean utopia of the ‘pedagogical province’. On
several occasions in his letters Mann mentions the ‘symmetry’ between
the two novels and interprets them as an attempt to take stock of a whole
era, as a confrontation with history, as a representation of the contrast
between politics and morality. On his part, on 12 December 1947 Hesse
writes in a letter to Mann that the part of Doktor Faustus that analyses the
music of Adrian Leverkühn reminds him of the character of Tegularius—
therefore once again Nietzsche.
Both authors are thus perfectly aware of the affinity between their nov-
els, regardless of their differences in style and conception of art. And
they identified as their common denominator the reception of Nietzsche,
whose philosophy formed the background to their representation of the
modern age as the era of the end of time. Within this singular constellation
an important role is also played by Jakob Burckhardt (1818–1897), not
just because in the Glass Bead Game he is represented in the character of
Pater Jakobus, but also because the leitmotif that continually returns in
the correspondence between Hesse and Mann is without doubt history.
Both novels deal with an era that seems to be the concrete example of the
inadequacy of the late Enlightenment and progressive conception of his-
tory. In their novels both writers depict a cyclical conception of history—
in Nietzsche’s sense, to be clear—in which the eternal recurrence of the
same is not always the ‘best possible of worlds’. So the comparison with
Burckhardt appears like that with a ‘dear, most dear master’, to whom
homage is paid, while taking a step back from his notion of history; just
as Nietzsche had done in his turn.
First in Washington on 29 April 1947 and then in Zurich on 2 June
1947 on the occasion of the PEN-Club session, Mann gave a speech
entitled ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events’.50
While taking into account all the historical circumstances—that is, the
attempt to ‘restore’ Nietzsche’s philosophy after some decades of propa-
gandistic instrumentalization by the right wing and Nazism—the writer
gives us some important indications to his reading of Nietzsche, even
though—obviously—he does not reveal to us the complex ways in which
he assimilated and used the philosopher’s thought in drafting his novels.
Mann defines the figure of Nietzsche as ‘fascinating’, possessing the same
charm that Shakespeare attributed to the prince of Denmark, and the
two figures are linked by an ‘affinity’ that causes a mixture of ‘venera-
tion and pity’.51 It is telling that this ambiguity of sensations is expressed
through a minimal variation of the formula used by Lessing in the the-
atre, which, according to Aristotle, should provoke ‘fear’ (Furcht) and
‘pity’ (Mitleid) in the public. Genius, Mann says, also has another side
to it: disease, meant indeed in the clinical sense.52 He traces an outline
of the philosopher that fits perfectly with his poetics, as if Nietzsche’s
fate were at the basis of his novels. Mann’s characters are always geniuses
in their way, since they represent that ‘nobility of spirit’ that Nietzsche
also pursued. Yet what is significant here is that, in the official speech to
his colleagues in the PEN-Club, the author gives us a key to reading his
epoch-making novel Doktor Faustus, which is in part the ‘transfigura-
tion’ of Nietzsche’s fate, but in substance he indicates to us his ‘elective
affinities’ with the philosopher. This is something that can be useful in
deciphering his cultural position.
Mann draws on the Nietzschean definition of ‘historical disease’ to
indicate the modern as a ‘diseased’ era of historicism, which has forgotten
aesthetic value. He identifies life and art: ‘Life is art and semblance, no
more, and therefore higher than the truth (which is a matter of mor-
als)’,53 and therefore he stands against ‘Philistine’ morality. Mann invites
us not to take Nietzsche’s statements ‘literally’, but to consider them a
metaphor; he traces his thought to the ‘spiritual ideal’ of Novalis and
considers it a ‘defence of instinct against reason’.54 He considers that the
German philosopher foresaw in the future the arising of ‘religious forces
[that] might still be strong enough to produce an aesthetic religion à la
Buddha’.55 Between art and life, Nietzsche—like Mann—chooses life,
and precisely this ‘Dionysian aestheticism’ makes Nietzsche the ‘greatest
critic and psychologist of morals’ known to the history of culture.56
Mann sees ‘two mistakes’ in Nietzsche’s philosophy: the first is the fact
that he does not recognize the power relationship between instinct and
intellect, and the second the totally wrong relationship that he establishes
between life and morality.57 The true contrast is between ethics and aes-
thetics. Mann calls Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde ‘rebels in the name of
beauty’. Nietzsche exalts barbarity and simply abandons himself to his
own aesthetic rapture, underlining the affinity between aestheticism and
barbarity. The fascist and Nazi use of Nietzsche’s thought was ‘the clum-
siest of all misunderstandings’.58 Mann is of the opinion that Nietzsche
did not create fascism, but that fascism created the legend of the fascist
Nietzsche, using him for its propaganda.59 Mann knew the controversy
between Förster-Nietzsche, the Weimar archive and the Basel scholars,60
and had read the book by Ernst Friedrich Podach, which is one of the
main sources of his speech.61
At the beginning of the 1930s, a debate was sparked in Germany
around the interpretation of Nietzsche because of not only the afore-
mentioned edition of works controlled by Förster-Nietzsche, but also a
series of publications that provided very contrasting interpretations of
the philosopher’s thought and figure. In 1930 Podach published a book
entitled Nietzsches Zusammenbruch (The Madness of Nietzsche), which
quoted records from the mental asylum in Jena where the philosopher
had been admitted for the first two years of his illness. Furious polem-
ics ensued after the publication of these medical records, guided by the
matchless Förster-Nietzsche who wanted to safeguard ‘her’ image of her
brother. In 1932 Podach published another book on the people who had
surrounded the philosopher, which, naturally, bitterly criticized his sister

for her manipulations. Benjamin’s previously cited article on Nietzsche
and his sister’s archive is, in substance, a review of this second book by
Podach. Instead, in 1931 with his book Nietzsche, der Philosoph und
Politiker, Alfred Bäumler had provided his interpretation, drawing on the
Romantic spirit and moving in the same direction as Förster-Nietzsche’s
interpretation of the philosopher.62 In his diary on 29 November 1945,
Mann defines Bäumler’s interpretation as ‘dangerous for the Germans’.63
In his 1932 book, Podach dwells above all on the figures who marked
Nietzsche’s life, starting with his mother who conditioned his personal-
ity. However, he also dwells on his brother-in-law Bernhard Förster, who
had a significant function in ‘founding the philosophy and phraseology
of political anti-Semitism’.64 In substance, Podach demonstrates in bio-
graphical terms that first Förster and then Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche used
sentences taken from the philosopher’s works to build an anti-Semite and
then Nazi ideology and terminology. ‘Bernhard Förster was an agent of
Bayreuth,’ writes Podach, ‘and he wrote and said worthless things, whose
circulation Nietzsche singled out as the greatest hindrance to the process
of German identification’.65 Podach cites some letters in which Nietzsche
‘bitterly reprimands his sister for her spiritual community with Förster’.66
This clearly demonstrates that Nietzsche himself was fully aware of the
fact that both his sister and Förster did not understand and manipulated
his thought and his writings. Podach claims that Nietzsche’s thought was
‘falsified’ and that it was ‘mistaken for the opposite intellectual world to
him by his very sister’.67
Both Mann and Benjamin used the book by Podach to criticize
the Weimar archive directed by Förster-Nietzsche, the falsification of
Nietzsche’s works and the instrumentalization of his thought by Nazi
propaganda. In his review, Benjamin examines the book by Bernouilli,68
explicitly quotes both of Podach’s books, and speaks of ‘arbitrary acts in
the publication and management of Nietzsche’s unpublished works’.69
Therefore, in the 1930s too, albeit without a critical edition of the
philosopher’s works, it was nevertheless possible to see the manipulation
and instrumentalization of Nietzsche’s thought, as did Mann, Podach,
Bernouilli and Benjamin. Even in the American reception of Nietzsche,
Walter Kaufmann criticizes the manipulation of the Nietzschean texts
by Förster-Nietzsche and the archive, and quotes Podach’s books.70 In

his article, published in Literarische Welt in 1932, Benjamin also deals
with the problem of the edition—and the manipulation—of Nietzsche’s
works: ‘During the Wilhelmine period, in no place was the mobiliza-
tion of the provincial pétit bourgeoisie, which today shows its political
fruits, so carefully prepared as it was in the archive.’71 The conclusion he
reached is that Nietzsche’s philosophy is separated by an ‘abyss’ from the
‘Philistinism that dominates in the archive’.72
5 The Destruction of Reason

The inherent ambiguity of Nietzsche’s thought caused an often irrec-
oncilable diversity of interpretations. Not only was Nietzsche’s thought
interpreted and used differently by German and Western culture in the
early twentieth century, even today there is a multiplicity of interpre-
tations.73 Benjamin’s interpretation, which does come to some politi-
cal conclusions, is clearly different from that of those who assimilated
Nietzsche into Nazism. If one starts from a political judgement of the
slogans and does not consider that Nietzsche was not a ‘precursor’ but
a ‘victim’ of Nazi manipulation, one risks not understanding the central
core of his philosophy, and above all not understanding the meaning of
his influence on many twentieth-century writers and thinkers. Followers
of the Hegelian school classify Nietzsche’s philosophy as ‘irrational’,
as the ‘denial of reason’, and therefore they exclude it from the field of
knowledge as a ‘deviation’ from the Hegelian paradigm. However, by so
doing they fail to perceive the alternative character of his positions, which
instead move from rejection of the principle of non-contradiction and,
above all, rejection of the idea of progress. Nietzsche cannot be anal-
ysed on the basis of Hegelian philosophy, just as non-Euclidean geom-
etry cannot be explained by Euclidean principles. Nietzsche’s, as well as
Benjamin’s, is an ‘elliptic’ thought, where two parallel lines meet, where
contradictions become a productive, albeit ‘explosive tension’, without
any possibility of ‘synthesis’.
In Nietzsche, Lukács sees an ‘objective’ pseudo-revolutionary cover for
the assertion of the hegemonic logic of monopoly capitalism, whose ‘evil’
aspects would in no way be dissimulated.74 The core of his interpretation

is the concept of ‘decadence’ (Dekadenz/Verfall), into which he relegates
all of Nietzsche’s thought. In this connection, it needs to be noted that
Thomas Mann also uses this concept, but that he gives it a totally differ-
ent worth to that of Lukács. Lastly—and this is also a singular aspect—it
needs to be underlined that the concept of Verfall does indeed derive from
Nietzsche’s thought, prompted by the observation of an irreversible deca-
dence in Western culture that, contrary to Mann, he does not want to
‘save’ and, contrary to Lukács, he does not want to change or ‘revolution-
ize’. Nietzsche aims instead to ‘accelerate’ the West’s decline. In substance,
Lukács takes Nietzsche’s philosophy back to the sphere of the ‘conserva-
tive revolution’. However, when he underlines that this revolution wants
to maintain the privileges of the bourgeoisie and goes against the masses,
he is obviously alluding to fascism and Nazism, and considers Nietzsche’s
thought to be in line with these reactionary political movements. By start-
ing from an ideological and political presupposition, Lukács is not able to
perceive the differences in theoretical positions, although without doubt
it is true that Nietzsche has an elitist vision of life and culture that makes
him distant from or contrary to the masses. Mann himself states that
Nietzsche knew nothing of the masses, nor did he want to.75
In this treatment of Lukács it is rather interesting to observe that the
‘conservative revolution’, the reactionary thought, makes use of a ‘veil’ of
vitalism to prevent the ruling class from losing its political, social and cul-
tural privileges.76 It is known, may I add, that Lukács bitterly criticizes all
the ‘decadent’ because they do not offer a ‘complete’ or total representation
of the historical era. With one exception: Thomas Mann. Lukács always
tried to ‘save’ Mann from the ‘damnation’ of ‘decadence’, since he was
convinced that he was a world-class writer. So he claimed that Mann had
managed to represent the decadence of the bourgeoisie of his time in a
‘complete’ or ‘perfect’ manner (vollkommen in German has both meanings)
and that the writer himself was a representative of that same decadent bour-
geoisie. Although this admiration and positive judgement contradict all of
Lukács’ theory of the novel, perhaps the circumstance can be explained by
the fact that in the two authors some elements of Nietzsche’s interpretation
coincide. Indeed, it is surprising that Lukács uses almost the same words as
Mann to underline Nietzsche’s importance as a psychologist.77
Nevertheless, Lukács gets to the heart of the problem when he states

that Nietzsche displaces his criticism of ‘philistinism’ to a mythical dimen-
sion.78 This observation corresponds to that of Benjamin: Nietzsche’s
thought—and the theory of eternal recurrence—provide a mythical
interpretation of the modern in which the inexpressible, the inevitable,
the inexplicable have a central role. And Benjamin always tried to fight
against this interpretation of the modern; that is, against the ‘mythologie
du moderne’. After pointing out Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche
and underlining the ‘anti-dialectical’ nature of this system, its ‘duality’,
due to the denial of metaphysics and attributable to Eastern philosophy,79
Lukács puts a ‘systematic value’ on Nietzschean thought. He attempts to
retrace Nietzsche’s philosophy to a unitary principle of interrelations,80 to
a ‘totality’, a ‘systematization’ that Nietzsche instead always denied.
In Lukács we find a singular combination of a ‘Hegelian’ and a ‘politi-
cal’ treatment of Nietzsche’s philosophy, whose only outcome can be to
relegate it to the category of ‘irrationalism’ or ‘denial of reason’, and the
pre-eminence of the political dimension means that he is defined as the
‘precursor of Nazism’. Lukács’ thesis is not new. Two fundamental trends
had already appeared in the interpretation of Nietzsche’s works at the end
of the 1920s. One considered the philosopher a ‘victim’ of the nation-
alists and fascists who had manipulated and falsified his thought and
even his writings so that they could be used for anti-Semite and Nazi
propaganda. Belonging to this line of interpretation were, among others,
Podach, Mann and Benjamin. The other tendency, whose main repre-
sentatives were Förster-Nietzsche, Förster and Bäumler, did everything
possible to spread an image of Nietzsche as the ‘precursor’ of Nazism and
exponent of anti-Semitism. And still today in Nietzschean studies there
are different lines of interpretation that in substance reflect these two fun-
damental trends whose arguments are laid out here. Indeed, it is evident
that Podach’s book was also an essential source for the interpretation by
Colli and Montinari. We need to be aware that if Nietzsche is interpreted
as a ‘precursor’ of Nazism, we are using precisely the thesis of Bäumler
and the propaganda machine of the national-socialist party.
Lukács’ way of dealing with Nietzsche’s philosophy nevertheless enables
us to verify that the application of Hegelian categories to his thought in
the end proves to be a dead end that only results in the dismissal of his
work as ‘irrational’. And in Lukács this is particularly evident, because

he is very radical and consistent in applying his theory of totality. Other
thinkers (such as Heidegger and Löwith), who fought equally dog-
gedly against Nietzsche to defend metaphysics, nevertheless used much
more refined lines of argument and had a much better understanding
of the inner complexities of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Lukács’ manner of
dealing with Nietzsche shows some analogies with that of Adorno and
Horkheimer, because he shares with them the reference to the Hegelian
dialectic.
According to Lukács, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a reaction against
socialism and the workers’ movement. He considers Nietzsche’s polemi-
cal attitude an anti-revolutionary struggle and does not manage to deci-
pher its vitalistic aspects.81 Nietzsche’s fight is a fight for survival, in a
positivist mould that dismissed Christian egalitarianism once and for
all. Perhaps the greatest difficulty of Nietzsche’s Marxist critics who start
from enlightened theoretical premises consists in the fact that they con-
sider religion the opium of the people and the source of all obscurantism.
And yet Christianity is also one of the theoretical sources of the principle
of equality: the equality of rights can be founded on nature, but also
on the fact that all people are God’s children. Nietzsche’s fight against
Christianity coincides with the fight against this principle of equality.
His elitist vision of culture makes him an enemy of the masses and all
egalitarianism; this ethical and philosophical position can have a politi-
cal consequence, but that is not what drives it. The attempt to reduce
Nietzsche to ‘reason’—namely, to assess and measure him in the light of
the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic—is not to understand the essence of his
method and his positions, which may indeed be reprehensible, but they
cannot be traced back to the principle of Vollkommenheit or totality that
obsessed Lukács from the outset.82
Lukács finds it hard to understand the starting point of Nietzsche’s
philosophical discourse—that is, ‘bare life’, vital impulses—because
he believes in the existence of a set harmony of reason to achieve or be
restored. Here Lukács explicitly reduces Nietzsche’s philosophy to the
social utilization of barbarian instincts that become a ‘contest’, agon,
a fight for life. However, in modern civil society these are the ‘devil
incarnate’.83
While Nietzsche criticizes the capitalism and conformism of bourgeois

society, Lukács categorizes this criticism under the concept of ‘Romantic
anti-capitalism’. Nietzsche’s exaltation of the individual is traced back
to the exaltation of the single man in bourgeois theory. Nietzsche is the
representative of the apologetics of the affirmation of egoism.84 Foucault’s
studies demonstrate that it is precisely the ‘British economists’, quoted
here by Lukács and drawn on by Marx in Capital, who are the theorists
of capitalism in its most deleterious aspects, having nothing heroic or
revolutionary about them. They hide the anarchical nature of capitalism
behind the faith of market self-regulation and the individual’s freedom.
The figure of the Beyond-Man (Übermensch) thus corresponds to that
of the criminal who disputes capitalist society because he rues the elitist
privileges of feudal society.85
Nevertheless, instead of listing the misunderstandings in which Lukács
was caught in his interpretation of Nietzsche’s works, it seems more pro-
ductive to underline and further develop his exact intuitions; that is, that
Nietzschean thought is a mythical or mythicizing interpretation of the
modern. Nietzsche’s thought is conservative and reactionary, it is an apo-
logia of capitalism, his Overman is—stricto sensu—a criminal, as Hesse
had clearly understood in Demian. However, this political-sociological,
or we could say ideological, analysis perhaps does not help to under-
stand Nietzsche’s effect on twentieth-century philosophy and art, how his
thinking was interpreted, used and at times instrumentalized; nor does it
very much help to understand the coordinates of Nietzschean thought.
Nevertheless, the Hungarian philosopher reaches the same conclusions as
Löwith and Heidegger when he criticizes Nietzsche’s ‘false atheism’; that
is, when he accuses him of reintroducing a metaphysical dimension into
the ‘mythical’ defence of capitalism.86
6 Ambiguity
Karl Löwith, whose positions were very distant from those of Nietzsche,
nevertheless understood the mechanisms and inner workings of his phil-
osophical reasoning better than many others. He speaks of an ‘overcom-
ing of nihilism’,87 a thesis then also taken up by Massimo Cacciari.88 This
overcoming consists of transforming nihilism into action, insofar as the

subject continues to produce representations in spite of being perfectly
conscious of their transience, that Dasein is a ‘being-towards-death’.
Löwith claims that with his theory of eternal recurrence of the same and
with the figure, which we could define as ‘mythical’, of the ‘Beyond-Man’
(Übermensch), Nietzsche expresses a will to self-annulment and eternity,
thus again paving the way for a metaphysical dimension. Benjamin knew
Löwith’s book on Nietzsche and eternal recurrence, seeing that he quotes
it in his Arcades Project.89
Löwith underlines the untimely in Nietzsche’s philosophy; indeed, if
we uphold that Nietzsche is a philosopher ‘of our time’, we need first to
ask ourselves what he means by time. In this connection, Löwith wants to
specify that Nietzsche is the first philosopher of our era, by this meaning
that he is the first philosopher of the modern age, that as such he is timely
and untimely at the same time, that he is the last supporter of the ‘truth’
and therefore of eternity.90
In the preface to the book The Will to Power edited by the Nietzsche-
Archiv, Nietzsche writes: ‘For some time now, our whole European cul-
ture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension
that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like
a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid
to reflect.’91 In this preface we can find, at the metaphorical level at least,
images that present a surprising affinity to those used by Benjamin in the
Theses on the Concept of History: history as the place of permanent catas-
trophe, the backward-looking gaze, the storm that wants to reach the end.
It remains to be established if this is just an analogy of the metaphor, or
if in Benjamin’s materialism there are also some splinters of Nietzschean
nihilism. The main merit of Löwith’s analysis consists of the fact that he
clearly highlights the contradictory nature of Nietzsche’s thought without
attempting to resolve it in favour of one of the two poles. Contradiction
is an integral part of Nietzschean thought:
Nihilism, as such, can have two meanings: it can be a symptom of final and
complete downfall and aversion to existence, but it can also be a first symp-
tom of recovery and a new will for existence—a nihilism of weakness and
of strength. This ambiguity of nihilism as at the origin of modernity is also
that of Nietzsche himself. […] This ambiguity of Nietzsche’s philosophical

existence also characterizes his relationship with time: ‘he is of yesterday
and today,’ but also of ‘tomorrow and the next day and time to come’.92
The will to power or to eternal recurrence of the same is the result of a

reversal of the will to nothingness, the will to self-annulment in action;
that is, in the production of representations. This reversal (or conversion,
semantic spectres of the German term Umkehrung) is a key concept for
understanding the problem of eternal recurrence and the Beyond-Man
in Nietzschean philosophy,93 but also for fully understanding the reversal
that Benjamin implements when he transforms eternal recurrence of the
same into a weak messianic power. The whole difference between tragedy
and melancholy lies in this reversal.
Nietzschean thought is difficult to take in: you need to follow its ‘tortu-
ous’ route that keeps its contradictions inside itself, makes them explode,
but does not seek to resolve them in an impossible ‘synthesis’. It certainly
escapes the ‘rationalism’ of German Kultur precisely because it strives to
be an alternative. A very effective image of this thought is given to us by
Giorgio Colli in the preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he writes:
I drank the kykeon—said the one initiated in the mysteries of Eleusis,

declaring himself worthy of the supreme vision. A mixture of ground bar-
ley, water and mint, kykeon is the drink that restores Demeter when she is
searching for her kidnapped daughter, hence in Eleusian ritual it alludes to
identification with the goddess, assimilation of a mass of shattered pieces in
the divine unity. But kykeon is also the name given to the filter that Circe
uses to try to bewitch Odysseus.94
Nietzsche’s work is therefore like a kykeon, ‘a conglomerate of tiny par-

ticles, drowned in the honey of the myth of Zarathustra’, and ‘it is the
drinkers’ inner selves […] that decide whether it is Demeter or Circe’, if
it has a liberatory or intoxicating effect.95 This image gives a very good
explanation of how Nietzsche’s thought can be interpreted in very dif-
ferent ways, and how the authors and philosophers who have referred
to Nietzsche have reached very different conclusions and very different
results.
(Translated by Karen Whittle)
Notes
1. ‘Of the 347 fragments numbered by Nietzsche for the purpose of
Will to Power, 104 were not taken into the compilation; of these 84
were not published at all […]. Of the remaining 270 fragments, 137
are reproduced incompletely or with intentional alterations of the
text (deletion of headings or often of whole sentences, dismember-
ment of texts that belong together, and so on).’ (Mazzino Montinari
(1982) Reading Nietzsche, trans. and introd. Greg Whitlock,
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago 2003, p. 92).
2. See: Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsches Nachlaß von 1885 bis 1888, oder
Textkritik und Wille zur Macht, Akten des V. Internationalen
Germanisten-Kongresses, Cambridge 1975, in: „Jahrbuch für
Internationale Germanistik’, Series A, Vol. 2.1, pp. 46–47; Mazzino
Montinari, Vorwort, in KG, XIV, pp. 7–17.
3. Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, p. 16.
4. See ibid., p. 17. See also: August Horneffer, Nietzsche als Moralist und
Schriftsteller, Jena 1906; Ernst Horneffer, Nietzsches letztes Schaffen,
Jena 1907.
5. See Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, p. 18.
6. Georges Bataille (1973), Nietzsche and National Socialism, in On
Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, Continuum, London-New York,
2004, p. 164. This short text, written in 1945, is also found in
Nietzsche and the Fascists, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings
1927–1939, ed. and intro. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl
R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Manchester University Press,
Manchester, 1985, pp. 182–3, with Bataille’s observation, ‘On
November 2, 1933, receiving Adolf Hitler at Weimar, in the
Nietzsche-Archiv, Elizabeth Förster testified to Nietzsche’s anti-
Semitism by reading a text by Bernhard Förster.’ Here it seems that
Hitler’s visit took place on 2 November and that it featured in the
newspaper on 4 November. Nevertheless, Bataille provides no fur-
ther details on his sources.
7. Georges Bataille, Nietzsche and the Fascists, pp. 183–4.
8. GS III, pp. 323–6.
9. TSZ, p. 88.
10. KG, XI, 540. See also ibid., p. 610.
11. TSZ, p. 89.
12. Ibid., p. 94.
13. Ibid., p. 92.
14. See Andrea Orsucci, Orient-Okzident. Versuch einer Lösung vom
europäischen Weltbild, de Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1996.
15. KG, VIII/2, p. 134. Own translation.
16. KG, VIII/1, p. 219. Own translation.
17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.
G. Colli and M. Montinari. Continued by N. Miller and A. Pieper.
De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1984, vol. III/5, p. 51.
18. KG, III.7/1, p. 87. Own translation.
19. OFEI, 111.
20. See Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche lesen, p. 169. Own translation.
21. KG, XIII, [18 [4]]. Own translation.
22. See Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche lesen, pp. 169–206.
23. Thomas Mann, Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary
Events, in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress,
1942–1949, Wildside Press 2008, p. 95.
24. In Zarathustras Wiederkehr [Zarathustra’s Return] Hermann Hesse
also draws on the dialogical form, with its didactic function, not only
of Thus Spoke Zarathustra but also of these conferences, which had a
great influence not only on his critical attitude towards the educa-
tional system, but also on his re-evaluation of ‘life experiences’, which
led to his exaltation of the individual and theorization of the ‘chosen
spirits’.
25. OFEI, p. 9.
26. Ibid., p. 4.
27. Ibid., p. 11.
28. ‘It would perhaps be no exaggeration to say that, in the subordina-
tion of all strivings after education to reasons of State, Prussia has
appropriated, with success, the principle and the useful heirloom of
the Hegelian philosophy’ (ibid., p. 87).
29. Ibid., p. 53.
30. Ibid., p. 92. ‘The education of the masses cannot, therefore, be our
aim; but rather the education of a few picked men for great and last-
ing works. We well know that a just posterity judges the collective
intellectual state of a time only by those few great and lonely figures
of the period, and gives its decision in accordance with the manner
in which they are recognized, encouraged, and honored, or, on the
other hand, in which they are snubbed, elbowed aside, and kept
down’ (ibid., p. 75).
31. See ibid., p. 85.
32. So in speaking of Zarathustra’s ‘return’, Hesse makes explicit refer-
ence to the Nietzschean figure, but his reference is more to the con-
ferences On the Future of our Educational Institutions and the criticism
of an educational system that tends to repress students’ personalities
and dampen the inner flair of German youth. The élite, the aristoc-
racy of spirit, of whom both Hesse and Nietzsche speak, is no differ-
ent from that ‘nobility’ of which Mann speaks, serving to create a
cultural confrontation in which different models clash, not so much
in their historical origins, but in their ends and their internal
structure.
33. See OFEI, p. 41.
34. See Novalis, Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel, Stuttgart
1960, vol. I, p. 208.
35. OFEI, p. 110.
36. Ibid., p. 111.
37. Ibid., p. 83.
38. See Mauro Ponzi (ed.), Klassische Moderne. Ein Paradigma des 20.
Jahrhunderts, Königshausen und Neumann, Würzburg 2010; see also
Thorsten Valk (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche und die Literatur der klas-
sischen Moderne, De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 2009.
39. See Michel Foucault, Order of Things, Routledge, New York 1989, p.
XXIII.
40. ‘Still, insofar as Simmel was a philosopher, one can venture ahead
in his work until one comes upon a core idea that is located in a
conceptual sphere and serves as the anchor for most of his works.
This would simultaneously provide a cross section of his philoso-
phy which, however, would admittedly not reveal all aspects of his
conceptual edifice. […] All expressions of spiritual/intellectual life are

interrelated in countless ways. No single one can be extricated from this
web of relations, since each is enmeshed in the web with all other such
expressions’ (Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays,
ed. by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
(Mass.)-London 1995, p. 232).
41. SW 2.2, p. 541.
42. ‘The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes
part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in
invisible ink. The history which he lays before the reader comprises,
as it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these cita-
tions that occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus
means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however;
that the historical object in each case is torn from its context.’ [N 11,
3]. AP, p. 476.
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Raymond Geuss and
Ronald Speirs, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, p. 26.
New York 2013, p. 218.
45. See Mauro Ponzi (ed.), Klassische Moderne. Ein Paradigma des 20.
Jahrhunderts, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010; Silvio
Vietta – Stephan Parombka (ed.), Ästhetik—Religion—Säkularisierung
II. Klassische Moderne, Fink, München 2008.
46. See Mauro Ponzi, Die ‘marginale’ Avantgarde. Die dispositio der
Revolution der Formen, in Mauro Ponzi (ed.), Klassische Moderne. Ein
Paradigma des 20. Jahrhunderts, pp. 57–76.
47. See Thomas Mann, Reden und Aufsätze, in Gesammelte Werke, Fischer,
Frankfurt a. M. 1974, vol. XI, p. 193.
48. See Klaus Scherpe, Stadt—Krieg—Fremde. Literatur und Kultur nach
den Katastrophen, Francke, Tübingen 2002.
49. Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, vol. X, p. 515, own translation.
50. The conference was repeated in English in New York, London and
San Francisco and in German, with a slightly modified title, Nietzsches
Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung, in Bern and Basel.

Events, in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress,
1942–1949, Wildside Press 2008, p. 69.
52. Ibid., p. 71.
53. Ibid., p. 79.
54. Ibid., p. 101.
55. Ibid., p. 102.
56. Ibid., p. 83.
57. Ibid., p. 88 f.
58. Ibid., p. 95.
59. Ibid., p. 93.
60. See Thomas Mann, Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe. Werke—
Briefe—Tagebücher, Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2009, vol. 19.2, Essays,
VI, p. 202.
61. Ernst Friedrich Podach, Gestalten um Nietzsche, Weimar 1932.
62. Alfred Bäumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker, Leipzig 1931.
63. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1944–1946, hg. von Inge Jens, Fischer,
Frankfurt a. M. 1986, p. 279 s., own translation.
64. Ernst Friedrich Podach, Gestalten um Nietzsche, Weimar 1932,
p. 125, own translation.
65. Ibid., p. 127, own translation.
66. See ibid., p. 128, own translation.
67. Ibid., p. 131, own translation.
68. See Carl Albert Bernouilli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche,
Jena 1908.
69. GS III, p. 323, own translation.
70. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist,
Princeton University Press, Princeton 1950. ‘One of Kaufmann’s vir-
tues was to document the scale of Nietzsche’s contempt for the racist
anti-Semites of his generation, such as the schoolteacher Bernhard
Förster (his sister’s husband), Theodor Fritsch, Paul de Lagarde, and
Eugen Dühring. If Nazism conceived of Jewry as an inferior race of
“subhumans” marked for annihilation, then Nietzsche’s own writ-
ings show, as both Yirmiyahu Yovel and Robert Wistrich have argued,
that the Jews represented for him a kind of spiritual crystallization of
what he understood by the Übermensch (Overman) of the future’
(Jacob Golonb – Robert Wistrich, Introduction, in Jacob Golonb –

Robert Wistrich (ed.), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses
and Abuses of Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton-
Oxford 2002, p. 6).
73. See Jacob Golomb – Robert Wistrich (ed.), Nietzsche, Godfather of
Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy, Princeton University
Press, Princeton-Oxford 2002; Mazzino Montinari, Reading
Nietzsche, trans. and intro. Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois
Press, Urbana and Chicago 2003; Woodward, Ashley (ed.),
Interpreting Nietzsche. Reception and Influence, Continuum, London-
New York 2011; Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche. A
History of an Icon and his Ideas, University of Chicago Press, Chicago-
London 2012.
74. See Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason, Merlin Press, London 1980,
chap. III.
Events, p. 83.
76. ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy performed the “social task” of “rescuing” and
“redeeming” this type of bourgeois mind. It offered a road which
avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with
the bourgeoisie. It was a road whereby the pleasant moral feeling of
being a rebel could be sustained and even intensified, whilst a “more
thorough”, “cosmic biological” revolution was enticingly projected
in contrast to the “superficial”, “external” social revolution. A “revo-
lution”, that is, which would fully preserve the bourgeoisie’s privi-
leges, and would passionately defend the privileged existence of the
parasitical and imperialist intelligentsia first and foremost. A “revolu-
tion” directed against the masses and lending an expression com-
pounded of pathos and aggressiveness to the veiled egotistic fears of
the economically and culturally privileged’ Georg Lukács, Destruction
of Reason, Merlin Press, London 1980, chap. III, p. 14. See https://
www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.
htm.
77. Ibid. p. 13.
78. Ibid. p. 15.

79. Ibid., p. 16.
80. Ibid., p. 19.
81. Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Luchterhand, Darmstadt
1973, Vol. II, p. 40.
82. See Tom Rockmore, Marx after Marxism, Blackwell, Oxford 2002,
pp. 1–37.
83. Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Luchterhand, Darmstadt
1973, Vol. II, p. 23.
84. Ibid., p. 40.
85. Ibid., p. 42.
86. Ibid., p. 56.
87. See Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in
Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green, New York-
Chichester, Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1964, pp. 188 ff. See
also Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft des
Gleichen, Berlin 1935.
88. See Massimo Cacciari, Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da
Nietzsche a Wittgenstein, Feltrinelli, Milan 1977.
89. AP, p. 116 [D8a, 4] and p. 118 [D 10, 1].
90. See Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in
Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green, London:
Constable, 1965, p. 186.
91. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, a new translation by Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, New York 1968,
p. 3.
92. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, p. 188.
93. Ibid., p. 193.
94. Giorgio Colli, Distanz und Pathos. Einleitungen zu Nietzsches Werken,
EVA, Frankfurt a. M. 1982, p. 91, own translation.
95. Ibid., own translation.
4
The Cry of Marsyas: History as a Place
of Permanent Catastrophe
Heiner Müller, Benjamin Scholar
1 Subjectivity and History
In November 1991, Heiner Müller attended an international congress
on Walter Benjamin in Rome. His speech was very specific: he read two
of his own fragments, written in two different periods, and an old poem
by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Every form of Pasolini’s cultural activity had as
its ultimate goal a radical critique of the modern. He was one of the
few intellectuals who expressed the slightest faith in progress. He exalted
the ‘popular’ identity of Italian culture and rejected the facile optimism
towards science and technology. He basically refused from the very
beginning any notion of the American way of life, in which he glimpsed
the danger of homogenizing language and behaviour, and the loss of all
values.
In Italian culture Pasolini was an isolated case of an intellectual who
affirmed the cultural tradition and folk identity at a time when all intel-
lectuals, on both the left and the right, exhibited an unshakable faith in
progress. However, it should be stated that he was not the only European
writer to show a certain scepticism towards the false promises of happi-
ness that have characterized the modern era since its beginning. Here I

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_4
am not alluding to the conservative thinkers who regret the past, with
whom Pasolini had nothing to do. Rather, I mean those isolated and
eccentric intellectuals who tried to follow an original—and utopian—
path, criticizing those false illusions, sending out a cry of alarm towards
modernity. Intellectuals who did not refuse the technological novelties
of the modern world, but rather who knew how to use them in a better
way, who built theories of progress, who were masters of communica-
tion and nevertheless blamed the destructive and nihilistic character of
this modernity: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Fernando Pessoa and
Benjamin, to name just a few. Pasolini’s international dimension is per-
haps better appreciated in foreign countries (especially in Germany and
France) than in Italy, because there it is easier to relate his theories to the
other European writers.1
Benjamin, Pasolini and Müller can all be traced back to a single con-
stellation via a very eccentric path; in fact, the artistic areas in which they
worked and the artistic languages that they used are very different. What
unites them is their pessimistic conception of history, their critique of faith
in progress, their sceptical view of modernity and—last but not least—an
artistic procedure based on a montage of different materials in sharp con-
trast with one another. All these authors use allegories and images drawn
from marginal materials to which they submit the ambitious task of
expressing the crisis of their epoch. Their method does not follow conven-
tional logic, but moves instead via conceptual ‘jumps’, through ‘illumina-
tions’ in which the image, the allegory, plays a fundamental role. In his
essay on Surrealism, Benjamin writes: ‘For to organize pessimism means
nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover
in the space of political action the one hundred percent image space.’2
‘To organize pessimism’ could be the motto that unites the three authors.
Müller defines ‘the duel between industry and the future’ as ‘the cry of
Marsyas that breaks the strings of his divine flayer’s lyre’.3 According to
mythology, Marsyas, a Phrygian shepherd, was the inventor of the double
flute. According to a variant on the myth he merely picked it up when
Athena had thrown it away, horrified by the grotesque way her cheeks
bulged when playing the instrument, having caught sight of her reflec-
tion in a pool of water. Marsyas dared to challenge Apollo, arguing that
the sound of the double flute was much more gentle and harmonious
4 The Cry of Marsyas 95
than that of the lyre. The two agreed that the Muses would judge the con-
test and that the winner would be able to punish the loser however he saw
fit. Victorious Apollo hung Marsyas from a tree and flayed him alive. Yet
immediately afterwards he regretted his actions, smashed his lyre against
a boulder and transformed Marsyas into a river.
The myth of Marsyas is very useful in describing, allegorically, the con-
dition of these three intellectuals who ‘invented’ new artistic languages
(both ‘found’ in tradition and re-adapted to the present). They defied the
sacredness of the work of art and accentuated the self-destructive charac-
ter of modernity in their challenge to the established order. Pasolini there-
fore arises in the wake of critical thinking that contains, either directly or
indirectly, a legacy that reworks forms in its own way and adapts them to
the Italian situation. This is typical of such critical thinking, at the ori-
gins of which there is Nietzsche’s thought and its nihilistic component.
Pasolini draws from Nietzsche a need to ‘build’ a new language to express
a new meaning and also his ‘eccentric’ method—that is, the tortuous and
mediated approach through which art becomes its expression—and this
involves the necessity of expressing meaning through allegories.
The author’s striving to modify the situation, to oppose the continu-
ous catastrophe of history, is destined to fail; it is the desperate cry of
Marsyas. We have to acknowledge that since the beginning of the 1960s
Pasolini had expressed, in literary and cinematic form, his scepticism
towards progress and modernization, and had formulated his critique of
industrialization and modernity through allegories and using prophetic
tones.
The tension between subjectivity and history is the leitmotif of Müller’s
work, wherein the subject is always torn to pieces by passions and delu-
sions, while history is set up as a permanent catastrophe. Pasolini’s poem,
which Müller read at the Rome conference, may have a value of revela-
tion (to use the theological language of Benjamin), as it is, in both name
and fact, a prophecy. In a series of images with a strong allegorical value
and in a climate of impending disaster, Pasolini announces a series of
events that then occurred on time, not because the Italian poet had any
particular mystical powers, but because his critical analysis of the mod-
ern and of industrialization perhaps presented the situation in terms that
were more accurate and closer to reality than many coryphaei of progress
had managed to do at the time. The North–South contrast (understood

as a metaphor of the affluent society and the misery of agriculture with-
out markets and without means) was identified by Pasolini himself as the
main problem of our era, and he criticized the myths about welfare that
had infected everybody, even the working class.
The prophecy, as recalled by the title of the poem, concerns the great
migrations of peoples from underdeveloped countries to the countries of
Northern Europe; and it is expressed by Pasolini in terms so vivid as to
assume the effect of enlightenment. In this context, it does not matter
that the foretold migration has not taken place in the liberating sense
prophesied by Pasolini, nor that waves of immigration have not come
from Algeria, but from other parts of Africa or from the Middle East.
Instead, the biblical tones and allegorical images are important because
they are linked to a symbolic chain of which traces are found in contem-
porary European culture. Alì dagli occhi azzurri (Blue-eyed Alì) can, in
fact, be considered as the Southern variant of the melancholic angel of
Benjam (and Müller).4
It is as if Müller had wanted to provide an interpretative, esoteric and
‘Benjaminian’ key to understanding his work: he has basically provided
us with a path to define the leitmotif of his dramaturgy and of his whole
work; that is to say, his pessimistic conception of history as a place of per-
manent catastrophe. In an interview, the same Müller defines the terms
of his ‘Benjaminian’ enlightenment, reached when he was in Rome: ‘If
you wanted to use a metaphor, then I would think of the comparison
made by Benjamin between bourgeois society and hell. […] This came
to mind some time ago in Rome during a congress on Benjamin at the
Goethe-Institut, while a speaker spoke of the Benjaminian conception of
bourgeois society as hell.’5 Müller relates not only the modernization of
the ex-Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) but the whole faith in
progress and technology, in the constructive power of the modern, to that
‘storm blowing from Paradise’ of which Benjamin wrote.6
The thin bond that unites these authors can be found in the common
search for political action within the ‘image space’.7 Benjamin’s thought
proceeds, in fact, in the limited space that is set up between the ‘pile
of debris’ at which the angel of history’s eyes are staring and ‘the time
that remains’ before the coming of the Messiah. The suspended moment
inherent in the wait for redemption, the eternity present in the empty
and homogeneous space, fills up with a completely ‘profane’ project to
organize the pessimism. Although such work cannot mitigate the wind
‘blowing from Paradise’ or prevent the catastrophe continuing to unravel,
nevertheless, as we wait for redemption, the order of the profane has
to be ‘organized’ both in practical terms—that is, politically—and in
theoretical-ideological terms. The regulatory principles of intellectual
and artistic practices have sprung forth from this organization. Müller—
going through a tortuous path, along that Umweg that Benjamin valued
so highly—provides us with the very interesting prospect of being able
to penetrate the thoughts of the Berlin philosopher. Reality can be only
a representation, but in the absence of transcendental schemata, or—in
the case of Benjamin—in the face of the non-deductibility of these sche-
mata, the representation ceases in order to ‘nullify’.8 The inapplicability
of Kant’s schematism and of his transcendental intuitions leaves space
only for the formalism of reason. It is a negative formalism, insofar as it
‘nullifies’ the representation, as Cacciari writes: ‘Its impotence reverses
itself ideologically in activity.’9 Slavoj Žižek claims that Hegel aims to
demonstrate ‘how every phenomenon, everything that happens, fails in
its own way, implies a crack, antagonism, imbalance, in its very heart’,10
that the Real is unknowable, it is ‘less than nothing’.
‘Organizing the pessimism’ consists finally in this ‘reversing in activ-
ity’ of nihilism. Benjamin does not question the ‘nullifying’ character of
representation nor the ephemeral nature of ‘forms’, but he raises the issue
regarding deciphering the ephemeral and understanding the meaning of
expressive images in the short space of time in which they represent their
dissolving and the way in which they are produced. Of course, in this
permanent catastrophe, the ‘meaning’ of the images cannot be anything
but allegorical: a depiction of ‘something else’. Benjamin attributes a spe-
cific quality to the destructive character of representation: the only reality
(and beauty) is in representation,11 in its inability to represent if not the
fantasmata, which consists of referring through an ‘other’, but the very
expressive image of this inability. However, this system of signs has to be
somehow defined and the production of signs must be organized—in the
short time that remains.
2 ‘A tree is best measured when it is down’

Müller, with a taste for the coup de théâtre and to support his technique of
breaking down languages and images as a critique of the existing, said in a
public debate: ‘A tree is best measured when it is down.’ Now that his par-
able has concluded, an attempt to ‘measure’ his dramaturgy can be made,
but not without as a preliminary addressing two considerations. First, it
should be pointed out that Müller, who after his death was celebrated,
especially in Germany, as a ‘national poet’, was appreciated by ‘insiders’
during his lifetime, but undervalued by critics (especially Western critics),
the media and the general public. The second preliminary observation con-
cerns that which Müller himself could have defined as being ‘the art of the
interview’. In fact, his statements should be taken cum grano salis as they
rarely strive for theoretical consistency, but rather seek an image effect.12 In
his statements—like so many other directors—Müller pays attention not so
much to the coherence of his theory, but to the dramatic effect of his joke.13
Throughout the 1996 season, a video was continuously screened in the
foyer of the Berliner Ensemble, showing an interview with Müller that
had been recorded in December 1995. Against the background of ‘no
man’s land’, that empty space where once there was the Wall, with ruins
and shipyards on the horizon, he speaks about his work, his theatre and
about life and death, which is also a recurring theme in his dramaturgy.
The video had a strong impact on audience members waiting for the
Müllerian staging in ‘his’ theatre, because, in spite of the author’s ‘poetic’
images and fighting words, the interview, recorded a few weeks before his
death, is a genuine passo d’addio, a final farewell.
Drafting a profile of Müller’s character is not a simple task, since he
skilfully hides himself in a subtle and cruel play of disclosure and mas-
querades that shocked the more naive theatrical critics, but increased his
authority among ‘theatre people’. Müller always appeared in public liter-
ally ‘playing’ the part of the poète maudit (cursed poet), with a cigar in one
hand and a glass of whisky in the other. Yet this provocative image, which
after all drew on consolidated stereotypes, served in reality first to carve
out a space and a role within the multitude of artists and politicians in the
DDR and, secondly, then to defend an area of (artistic and scenic) action
for the forgotten sector workers who had been overwhelmed by German
unification. Still today anonymous followers place Cuban cigars, bottles
of liquor or red roses on Müller’s unmarked grave at Dorotheenfriedhof
as a sign of admiration. The extraordinary manifestation of affection in
the Berliner Ensemble (the ‘marathon’ of readings of his works to com-
memorate his death) that gave way to the phenomenon of the Müller cult
was caused not only by artistic admiration, but also by the recognition of
his political-cultural role, which the author performed (especially in the
final part of his life) as a representative of a geo-cultural area. This is an
area that no longer exists on the map, but still exists sociologically and
is marginalized. He especially performed the role of a representative of a
political-cultural and artistic area that did not want to accept damnatio
memoriae (damnation of memory), but wanted to continue to produce.
The cultural phenomenon of united Germany called ‘Ostalgia’ is not a
political nostalgia for the DDR, but exactly this search for a cultural
identity, for rewriting the past.
Müller always considered the whole world as ‘material’ that could be
used in a scene; and his plays are therefore the result of a ‘montage’ of
‘fragments’ taken from the most disparate realities. However, the author
always showed a propensity for troubling, disturbing and provocative
effects, having always preferred corporeality, the physicality among these
fragments, favouring autopsy, vivisection and death. The macabreness
and self-destruction of the subject were the mediums with which the
author intended to strike a blow at the audience, in order to place a dis-
turbing reality right in their face and force them to reflect. This abstract
preference for the theme of death and for the figure of the corpse, starting
from 1994, took on a subjective component as he added new dramatic
values to his final work, enhancing its nihilism. Besides the repeated and
provocative assertions to being Brecht’s heir, Müller took upon himself
the unforeseen practical and organizational values that arose after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, when he directed the Berliner Ensemble, first in col-
laboration and then ultimately alone. Günther Rühle writes:
So in the end he was everything: author, and director of both stage and
theatre. Each one of these three dreamed the same dream, to make this
theater along with a theater of Shakespeare and Brecht also a theater of

Müller. He loved this trio: his land of the future. Heiner Müller com-
mented on the political events of the time during and after the turn of
1989 through his Berlin productions: Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the
Deutsches Theatre and then his own Mauser, prohibited during the DDR,
and finally—already suffering from terminal illness—his version of Brecht’s
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire of Adolf Hitler, staged at the Berliner
Ensemble. These are concerted attempts to frame the past, through the
creation of persistent, yet concise, images. It was a political, powerful and
unforgettable showdown.14
During the DDR, Brecht was a model for many writers because he was
able to carve out a space for autonomous production and was able, in part,
to escape from the constraints of the state’s political apparatus thanks to
the fame and success (and money) that he achieved in the West. Müller’s
undisputed authority in the latter part of his life is based on the public
success of ‘his’ Berliner Ensemble. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the-
atres in the East emptied, so the crisis of unification and that of spectators
added to one another. Under Müller’s direction, the Berliner Ensemble
once more became a point of reference for the intellectuals of the left.
When Müller referred to the legacy of Brecht, he meant, broadly speak-
ing, his model of theatre (forcing the spectator to reflect through scenic
provocation, the estrangement effect and so on), but he meant especially
Brecht’s character of point of reference being able to break free from the
pressures of the regime with a mix of artistic force (not negotiating with
the political power) and small, everyday compromises on practical issues.
However, above all he meant the charismatic power of the intellectual
figure who, by operating within the specific characteristics of theatre and
art, acts politically and culturally, ‘directing the masses’, to use the old
Marxist terminology ironically, and becomes an opinion maker. After
the fall of the Wall and the collapse of real socialism, Müller remained
the only prominent intellectual who, without changing a single letter
of his ‘poetry’, became the representative of the ‘defeated’, the ‘losers’.15
Yet his approach is an anti-heroic one, apocalyptic, sporadically melan-
cholic. In an interview with Alexander Kluge, posthumously released,
Müller recounts the parable of the frog: if a frog is thrown into boiling
water, it will try to jump out of the pan, ‘but what happens if it is thrown
into warm water and the temperature is increased gradually? Surprisingly
nothing happens. The frog does not perceive any danger and begins to
boil alive without even realizing it. […] Man is not heroic, but heroism
is against his nature, as the story of the frog shows us.’16
After his throat operation, Müller started to write poems in which sub-
jective melancholy is wedded with both Brecht’s model of the Buckower
Elegien and Nietzschean nihilism, taking on the character of a tangible
threat. The production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui at the Berliner Ensemble
(with Martin Wuttke in the main role) was an unexpected hit, being
hailed by critics as the ‘Inszenierung des Jahres 1995’, and was sold out
until the autumn of 1996. Arturo Ui (and the historical character to
which the part alludes) is depicted as a docile puppet in the hands of
political and economic powers defending their interests. Brecht’s text is
revitalized by a spectacular production and by the acting force of Martin
Wuttke in one of his best performances. The drama strives to make it
clear that the success of Hitler was, in part, achieved thanks to his power-
ful relationships and the support of capitalism, but was also won through
the manipulation of language and the media, which distorted reality
and fascinated the public. Ui–Wuttke attends a drama school in order
to ‘improve’ his image. And then the usual critique of Nazism is updated
to the extent that it becomes a critique of the media’s manipulation of
language and images. Yet in essence, the choice to stage a production of
a text that is very politically ‘orientated’ is not without significance, since
it represents a stage on the Müllerian path that is within contemporary
German history.
In an interview with Peter von Becker in December 1995, Müller
speaks about his production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in Bayreuth,
but he speaks especially about theatre, art and death, up to pinpointing
the latter two: ‘Reading Hebbel, Schiller, Kleist, Shakespeare, it is indeed
a dialogue with the dead.’17 Writing a play, then, consists of dealing with
material that is already present in usage, elaborating on it, and recasting
it in the light of the new reality that is nonetheless ‘intolerable’.18
3 The Melancholic Angel

Dimiter Gotscheff, in his production at Düsseldorf ’s Schauspielhaus
(March 1996), also used the two texts that Müller read at the Rome con-
ference. The first text, written in 1958 and entitled Der glücklose Engel,
was defined by the same Müller as a form of reception of the work of
Benjamin:
THE LUCKLESS ANGEL Behind him swims the past, shaking thunder
from wing and shoulder, with a noise like buried drums, while before him
the future stagnates, penetrating his eyes, his pupils explode like stars, the
word wound up into a vibrating mouth-gag, strangling him with his
breath. For an instant one can still see his wings beating, in the roaring one
hears the hail of stones fall above behind in front of him, the vain move-
ment more loud than violent, sporadic, gradually slower. Then the moment
closes in on him: standing, in that quickly filled place, the melancholic
angel rests, waiting for history in the petrifaction of flight view breath.
Until the renewed noise of mighty wing-beats reproduces itself in waves
through the stones and announces his flight.19
The image of the melancholic angel, as an allegory of the lack of hope

of any progress, accompanies Müller’s whole work and reconnects in an
explicit way with Benjamin’s allegory of the angel of history.20 In fact,
Müller admits to having read Benjamin’s Schriften around 1958 and to
being shocked by the image of the angel. In his Theses on the Concept of
History, Benjamin uses the famous allegory of the angel, of which one can
recognize the essential traits in Müller’s short fragment:
There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who

seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide,
his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history
must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events
appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreck-
age upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that
the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into
the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.21
A simple comparison between the two texts clearly shows how far
Müller has been influenced by Benjamin’s image, but even more deci-
sively, for the purposes of analysis of his theatrical works, is the fact
that his lack of faith in progress demonstrates that he completely shares
Benjamin’s conception of history. Müller’s enlightenment, which took
place towards the end of the 1950s, allowed him to find an allegory
capable of expressing that pessimism, that Ausweglosigkeit (no way out)
that characterizes all his work: the storm that ‘we call progress’—again
the words of Benjamin seem appropriate—brought only disasters, des-
tined to pile ruins on top of ruins. If one considers the historical-cul-
tural context in which Müller formulated the allegory of the luckless
angel, characterized by images of construction (Aufbau des Sozialismus,
building socialism) and promises of a ‘radiant future’, it is easy to
understand the transgressive character of the allegory, which assumes
the position of going ‘against the tide’ and ‘brushing history against
the grain’. These were factors that, on the other hand, characterized the
work of Benjamin as well.22
In fact in 1939, Benjamin writes, in an exposé of his Arcades Project23:
The century was incapable of responding to the new technological possi-

bilities with a new social order. That is why the last word was left to the
errant negotiators between old and new who are at the heart of these phan-
tasmagorias. The world dominated by its phantasmagorias—this, to make
use of Baudelaire’s term, is ‘modernity’.24
The unease of the subject in the face of tremendous changes causes a sort
of chronic crisis, which is a characteristic of the new times:
There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be ‘modern’ in the
sense of most eccentric, and suppose itself to be standing directly before an
abyss. A desperately clear consciousness of gathering crisis is something
chronic in humanity. Every age unavoidably seems to itself a new age. But
the ‘modernity’ that concerns men with respect to the bodily is as varied in
its meaning as the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope.25
In short, massive technical progress and the transformation of everyday

life have produced a sort of ‘disorientation’ of subjectivity. If the era of
great certainties and once and forever defined values has waned, then the
bewilderment of the individual finds no point of reference, even more so
on a political-ideological level. Benjamin’s critique of the faith in progress
is explicit and indeed became a programmatic characteristic of his work.26
So the ‘reifying’ representation of reality and of its production base is
accompanied by the annulment of the concept of progress, which, in
short, has a destructive nature within itself.
The ‘feeling of vertigo’27 should be related to the ‘phantasmagoria’ of
‘forms’, in which the objects appear as ‘goods’ on the market.28 They
display neither their origin nor their ‘use value’ with any transparency,
but they are pure Schein, pure phantoms. Benjamin aims to extract their
allegorical meaning from this ‘forest of symbols’. The objects—or at least
some of them—contain a petrified historical awareness.
It is no coincidence that the part of The Arcades Project entitled
‘Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’ is almost filled with quotes
from Marx. Yet it is precisely in these materials where one under-
stands how Benjamin’s Marxism was reworked and avails itself of
the contaminatio of other theories, in apparent contradiction with
Marxism itself. In fact, in a letter written in French to Scholem on
20 January 1930, Benjamin states that ‘to provide a solid scaffold-
ing’ for his work, he needs ‘some parts of Marx’s Kapital’.29 The fact
that Benjamin writes to Scholem in French is very significant, since
he writes at a time when he has refused his friend’s pressing invi-
tation to take a trip to Palestine and learn Hebrew; this linguistic
choice becomes a statement and a life choice. He aims instead to
‘recréer la critique littéraire comme genre’.30 His ambition of wanting
to be considered ‘the foremost critic of German literature’ involved a
deep rootedness in European culture and the German (and French)
language. His ambition excluded, a priori, emigration to the United
States or to Palestine; hence the study of ancient Hebrew was made
infeasible. This cultural programme would later prevent Benjamin
from recognizing the seriousness of political events and postponing
his flight from Paris, and would lead, in a sense, to the tragic conclu-
sion to his life.
Precisely in that part of the Convolutes that contains quotes from

Marx, Benjamin writes: ‘Method of this project: literary montage.’31 Yet
his montage does not refer only to the compositional technique of the
avant-garde, which he will make into a theory, it also involves the meth-
odological and theoretical sources of his work: it is the demonstration
of a historical materialism that has annihilated within itself the idea of
progress. So the ‘reifying representation of reality’ and of its produc-
tion base is accompanied by the annulment of the concept of progress,
which, in short, contains a destructive character. The modern era has
provided an illusion of progress and has produced a quantity of object-
goods, but has not been able to provide a better quality of life.32 It, in
short, produced illusions, at the root of which there is the contradiction
between the promise of happiness and the mode of production based on
reification.
Benjamin writes in the ‘First Sketches’ of his Arcades Project:
Modernity, the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest
thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that ‘the same thing
happens over and over’ (much less is it a question here of eternal return),
but rather that the face of the world, the colossal head, precisely in what is
newest never alters—that this ‘newest’ remains, in every respect, the same.
This constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s delight in innovation.
To determine the totality of traits which define this ‘modernity’ is to repre-
sent hell.33
This aspect of Hölle (hell) denotes that one must dig beneath the surface
to perceive the true meaning of epoch-making transformations.34 And
it is here, in the use of such mythological elements as the labyrinth and
Hölle (which recall the topos of Novalis’ Höhle or cave), that Benjamin’s
literary process resides: the forest of symbols must be interpreted from
beyond mere appearances. Nevertheless, a theological representation
of Hell does not consist only of pinpointing the ephemeral, but also of
an apocalyptic vision of the future. And Benjamin found it in Blanqui.
The difference between the disaster of the present and a utopian escape
into materialistic metaphysics is the aspect of the French revolutionary’s
thought that he found the most striking.
4 The Duel Between Industry

and the Future
Nietzschean nihilism can be considered to be the common ground
between Benjamin and Müller, which makes the aforementioned ‘eccen-
tric’ constellation less problematic. As Emmerich notes:
In the same interview—and even more clearly in two others—Müller

explains the reason why the myths of antiquity fascinate him so intensely
and so constantly. One recognizes ‘primary formulations of collective expe-
riences’ that ‘unfortunately’ are still valid since the condition humaine has
changed very little in the last few centuries. The development of man as the
subject of anthropology is absolutely minimal.35
Müller’s assertion is disillusioned and immediately recalls the Nietzschean

conception of ‘eternal recurrence’, a model of philosophy of history that
has expelled from history itself not only the idea of progress, but also
any teleology. Furthermore, the connection with Nietzsche emerges in
another interview that Müller gave in 1985 to Ulrich Dietzel for Sinn
und Form. Here Müller specifies a fundamental point of his interest in
antiquity, revealing a glimpse of his repeated contact with myth through
a new perspective. He sees the classical Greek tragedy with its mythologi-
cal plots as set in ‘a turning point in history’ and ‘in the transition from
a society based on the clan, to a society based on class-difference, in the
transition from the family to the state, the polis’.36
Müller finds myth interesting because it represents the eternal recur-
rence of a ‘collision’ and makes possible the reintroduction of ‘those old
conflicts in a whole new way’.37 And still: ‘My interest in the recurrence
of the same aims to break the continuity, literature becomes a disruptive
and potentially revolutionary power.’38 Then Müller continues:
I have also had the same delusions regarding our politicians and the rapid-
ity of change in the world. I even believed that everything was proceeding
too quickly. But then we realise that the revolutionary process lasts more
than one’s own life, and we are adapting; and the disillusionment leads to
another aporia, which lies between the individual life’s duration and
rhythm of history, between the time of the subject and historical time. And
this contradiction has increasingly become a decisive factor in the texts.
Now we live within this contradiction, within this difference between sub-
jective time and historical time. And one can react to this situation in vari-
ous different ways: one way is the way of Nietzsche, an author who for me
was very important.39
Müller’s brief ‘Benjaminian’ text, because of its origin, has to be related

in a contrastive connection to an unfinished project of Brecht’s: ‘Journeys
of the God of Happiness’.40 Müller himself, in the introduction to the
Glücksgott fragment, details the history of its composition: ‘Around 1958,
Paul Dessau asked me if I could extract enough material from Brecht’s
Journeys of the God of Happiness fragment in order to produce a libretto.’41
Müller presented a text entitled Der glücklose Engel (The luckless angel) at
the end of the materials for the failed project, Glücksgott. So his image of
the unhappy angel can partly be seen as a response to that of the god of
happiness. The inability to develop Brecht’s project is due to the fact that
Müller’s conception of history is totally different from that of the play-
wright born in Augsburg.42 Müller, in contrast to Brecht, fails to produce
a text that has a progressive, optimistic and positive vision of the world
as its foundations. Additionally, it is always left to Müller to explain the
reasoning behind the impracticality of such a revision of Brecht’s text:
Brecht’s poetic idea—an angel with burned wings fleeing from a land torn
apart by wars, disturbs the god of happiness—that leads the treatment of
the problem back to a predetermined range, is based on a conception of the
world as an already finished thing. From my point of view, it seems still
impossible to represent the reality of 1958 in such a closed way; my world
was composed of fighting segments, that in the best cases were united by
their clinch.43
Even if the use of the figure of the angel can therefore be genetically
related to the failed project to redevelop Brecht’s text, it is certainly
deeply rooted (and a context in which it assumes relevant meanings)
in the Benjaminian allegory.44 In a discussion on the post-modern in
1979, Müller relates the production of (theatrical and literary) good texts
with the degradation of advanced industrial society: ‘Good texts always
develop in a dark environment, there cannot be a better world without

the shedding of blood, the duel between industry and future is not cel-
ebrated by songs in front of which one can take a comfortable seat. Its
music is the cry of Marsyas that breaks the lyre’s strings of his flaying
god.’45 Therefore, the art of the modern era is, according to Müller, the
desperate cry of Marsyas when faced with the degradation and pollution
of industry, the cry of an artist at the extreme limits of his expressive
possibilities.
5 History as a Place of Permanent

Catastrophe
From various heuristic systems Benjamin extracts only those elements
that are capable of being re-functionalized within his theoretical project,
‘demolishing’ the system from which he draws such materials. The work
of Benjamin consists not so much of collecting quotes, but of collecting
concepts from the most different interpretative systems, often in sharp
contrast to one another. Such a process leads to the dual goal of radically
criticizing such systems on the one hand, and on the other of extrapolat-
ing from them a few conceptual ‘pearls’ that must be ‘mounted’ in an
entirely different context. The analogy of this process with that of the
avant-garde is evident, since both are based on the montage of hetero-
geneous materials. Furthermore, the method to which Müller works is
based on a montage of the most varied of materials. The playwright in
fact theorizes this compositional choice, only to consider superfluous the
character’s cues, understood as current language. ‘How does one under-
stand a text?’ he claims in an interview in 1987, continuing:
I do not believe that the spectator […] has understood a Shakespearean

text in the sense of following it conceptually sentence by sentence; it can’t
be done this way. […] In a drama school in the DDR, a scene from Der
Bau was used in an exercise and the students found the text to be extremely
intellectual, but not at all understandable. Then the director proposed that
they should read it simply, blah blah blah. And then they suddenly experi-
enced no more difficulty.46
The text does not have a central role in Müller’s dramaturgy; the strength
of his dramatic construction consists in the montage of materials that dif-
fer greatly to one another. In Germania. Tod in Berlin (Germany, Death in
Berlin, 1978), the montage of different materials becomes a Zeitomnibus,
a sort of time machine; that is, the overlap of scenic situations drawn
from different eras of German history. In a letter in 1975 regarding the
staging of Schlacht/Traktor, Müller writes:
No theatrical literature is so rich in fragments as Germany’s. This depends

on the fragmentary nature of our (theatre-) history, on the always inter-
rupted literature-theatre-audience-(society) relationship […]. The frag-
mentation of a proceeding emphasizes his character of process, prevents the
loss of production in the product, the commercialization, and turns the
image’s deconstruction into the experimental field in which the spectator
can participate as co-producers. I do not believe that a story which has
‘rhyme and reason’ (a story in the classical sense) is still close to reality.47
In the drama Der Auftrag, written in 1979, performed for the first time
in 1980 and published in 1981, the figure of the angel of history returns
overbearingly, accentuating those connotations of despair:
I am the angel of despair. With my hands I provide rapture, confusion,

oblivion, pleasure and pain of the body. My speech is silence, my song is
the cry. In the shadow of my wings terror dwells. My hope is the last breath.
I am the knife with which the dead man opens his coffin. I am he who will
become. My wings are the revolt, my heaven is the abyss of tomorrow.48
The lack of historical perspective makes the image darker: the cry being the
song of the angel of despair reminds us of the cry of Marsyas, evoked by
the same author. In other words, the luckless angel acquires satanic traits.
Müller, following the example of Benjamin, realizes that he has reversed the
traditional image of the angel, in order to use this allegory in a catastrophic
sense. In fact, in an interview in November 1991, he says: ‘Angels always
appear when it is no longer possible to imagine the realization of hopes.
These figures then become necessary; with Benjamin this is true also. Angels
are figures that go beyond hope and despair.’49 The figure of the angel acts
as an extreme allegory to express the dramatic effort of those who seek to
combine lucid desperation with the desire to change that which exists. The
true analogy between Benjamin and Müller lies completely in this singular
state of despair, free of any illusion, dictated by a concrete analysis of the
facts, in which the ‘weak hope’ that these continuous disasters will be inter-
rupted assumes the allegorical aspect of the angel. And such an allegory,
in turn, cannot express anything but the contradictions of this condition,
cannot express anything but the melancholy and the despair, and the weak
hope that remains is only a matter of wishful thinking.
Indeed, Karol Sauerland had noticed these Benjaminian topoi in the
theatre of Heiner Müller and—especially on the basis of The Origin of
German Tragic Drama—the poetic analogy between the two authors in
the use of the allegory.50 However, while in Benjamin figures such as
death, destruction and melancholy are functional towards the utopian
goal, which takes on the values of the (albeit weak) hope of redemption,
of which precisely the angel expresses the promise allegorically, in Müller
that hope is almost completely absent.51 His luckless angel often assumes
the tone of despair.
Benjamin is obsessed with the destructive character of the modern and
performs all his analysis of the time ‘in front of our eyes’, with the only
(utopian) goal of establishing the conditions for its overcoming. The new
‘forms’ that replace that which was quickly exhausted through use are des-
tined to be, in a short time, replaced themselves by the ‘still more new’:
the urban restructuring of the city of Paris; Baudelaire’s poetic reflections
on these transformations are shown as a paradigmatic example of this
changing era. In short, Benjamin seeks to show the absolutely temporary
nature of the forms of modernity. Müller invokes this aspect of Benjamin’s
thought when he relates the modern to the acceleration of working time,
living time and, ultimately, also to the succession of shock experiences:
Between Marx and Benjamin there is the acceleration of technological

development. You will undoubtedly be familiar with the photo of the loco-
motive leaving the station in the wrong direction, ultimately towards a
wall. This belongs to the infernal aspects of modernity. […] Speed,
acceleration, are an attempt to escape the prison of the continuity.
Acceleration perhaps produces destruction and frees elements, with which
you can build something new.52
This ‘Benjaminian’ approach to reality and artistic process, which involves

a ‘cross’-montage of images reached via an eccentric path, is not limited
to the 1950s, it has accompanied the whole of Müller’s production. In
fact, in 1991 he published another fragment entitled Glückloser Engel 2:
Between city and city
After the wall the abyss
wind at one’s back The foreign
hand on the lonely flesh53
The angel I still hear him
yet he no longer has a face but
Yours that I don’t know.54
Here the much-heralded catastrophe of history seems to have been
accomplished: words and images are rarefied up to the limits of compre-
hensibility. The melancholic angel, the angel of despair, has become an
angel of the unknown face, a solitary angel who no longer has anything
to announce, wandering among the rubble of history. The wind pass-
ing through his wings ‘between city and city’ only carries the historical
memory of what has been.55 It is significant that this wall between city
and city, which has played a great part in post-war German literature, is
related to the ‘abyss’. The last flight of the solitary angel seems to be the
very one that will carry him into the abyss—which, incidentally, was
evoked in Auftrag by the angel of despair (‘my heaven is the abyss of
tomorrow’). The author gives us an explanation in the aforementioned
interview, regarding the actualization of the image of the luckless angel:
Here, occurs a very Benjaminian experience: this connection of future and

past, this employment of an absolute present that has not worked here.
And now, for people that are the same age as me, suddenly the future is the
past. The shock that comes from a collision or a shift in time is very impor-
tant in the work of Benjamin.56
In Landscape with Argonauts (1982), history is represented as a place of

permanent catastrophe. Müller writes in the notes on direction:
As Mauser presupposes a society of transgression, in which a person sen-

tenced to death could transform their real death into a collective experience
on the stage, so Landscape with Argonauts presupposes the catastrophes that

humanity is currently readying. The landscape could be a collapsed star,
where a research team from another time and another dimension hears a
voice, and finds a dead man. As in any landscape, in this part of the text the
‘I’ is collective.57
Müller’s approach to both the allegory of the angel and the conception of
history demonstrates a perfect affinity with Benjamin’s conception. It is
essentially a matter of ripping out from the winners the cultural heritage
of the vanquished.58
The shock produced by the montage of images is the process through
which the author constructs his plays. The experience of modernity is
an experience that is actualized through a continuous series of shocks;
and it is finally this ‘Benjaminian experience’ to which Müller alludes in
his interview: ‘Every step outside the house is a shocking experience and
every walking on the street causes thousands of shocks. Therefore now
the shock is an obvious precondition to every perception.’59 And yet:
‘This is a shock, simply due to the fact that the intermediate term is omit-
ted. Omitted passages, connections, or contrasts, produce speed.’60 This
shocking vision of experience is just one of those traits d’union (hyphens)
that bind the eccentric constellation of authors such as Benjamin, Pasolini
and Müller. In fact, Pasolini represents an artistic and intellectual experi-
ence, interesting precisely because it expresses, through perturbing alle-
gories, that unease towards the modern that is also a leitmotif of Müller’s.
The playwright says in this regard:
I am interested in the case of Althusser in his material, not in the phenom-

enon. I am interested in Althusser in the same way I am interested in
Pasolini, in the Pasolini case, or—and this may seem at first glance surpris-
ing—the Gründgens case, in the failure of intellectuals in determined his-
torical phases, perhaps even the necessary failure of the intellectuals.61
His interest in these intellectuals is not only due to the ‘material’ that
their stories can perform in a play, but also to the fact that he sees their
intellectual ways as paradigmatic: they express the failure of any effort to
improve the situation, they are the other face of the luckless angel.62
6 Art as a ‘Warning Signal’

Müller’s effort to change the situation, to oppose the continuing catas-
trophe in history, is an effort doomed to failure. To use an image of his
already mentioned: it is the desperate cry of Marsyas. Pasolini expressed,
in literature and in film, his scepticism regarding progress and modern-
ization, formulating his critique of modernity through allegories and a
prophetic tone. In this sense, his work can be considered to be one of
the points of reference of Müller’s poetry and at the same time one of the
sources of its allegorical images. The bizarre constellation of Benjamin,
Pasolini and Müller only has meaning when it is employed as a critique
of the modern and as a use of allegorical language based on the montage
of heterogeneous materials. Indeed, Müller states in the repeatedly cited
interview: ‘In Rome I read a rather long poem by Pasolini that was writ-
ten in 1961, entitled Prophecy. The poem ends very surprisingly with a
Benjaminian tone. […] I mean that at this time Benjamin, just because
he emphasizes the theological element, is more important than, for exam-
ple, Adorno.’63 Such a statement, uttered by an author who is a well-
known atheist, should be understood as an enhancement of the essential
value of the production of allegories, with all the melancholy that this
entails, in an, albeit disastrous, attempt to sound a warning against the
facile optimism and naive faith in technology, in progress, in industry, in
modernization; basically, in the modern.
Pasolini and Benjamin, on different levels, also denounce the manipula-
tion of language that modern society carries out in order to highlight faith
in progress and its false promises. Müller, from his point of view, more or
less implicitly, uses these models to decompose the official language and
reuse it in an alienating and ironic way. It is tragically ironic, of course.
The similarities between Müller and the cited authors end here, since
his theatre productions find their allegories within myth, re-functioned
into a critique of modernity. In Müller’s work, myth is merely a source of
images—a Bildraum (an image space), to use Benjamin’s terminology—
however, it is viewed and used as a language. It would be useless to scour
Müller’s plays for a ‘mythology of the modern’, in an irrational or magi-
cal sense. He—and here the affinity with Benjamin is more profound
than Müller is willing to admit—sees in mythical images the rational and

expressive possibility of developing a language from strong artistic abili-
ties, which moves the spectator and persuades them (using a ‘Brechtian’
method, albeit through an Umweg) to reflect on their present condition.
In a letter to a Bulgarian director about Philoctetes, Müller writes: ‘Like
Jason, the first colonizer, who on the threshold between myth and his-
tory is overwhelmed by his vehicle, Ulysses is the figure who exceeds his
boundaries. With him the history of people becomes the politics of the
powerful, destiny loses its face and it becomes the mask of manipula-
tion.’64 The rationality expressed by the character of Ulysses in Philoctetes,
not unlike that in Christa Wolf ’s Cassandra (1983) and Medea (1996), is
the rationality of modernity and progress that only produces destruction.
Benjamin draws images for his allegories from the Bildraum that popu-
lates the dreams of the individual, due mainly to experiencing the mod-
ern in the great metropolis. Pasolini’s source of images is instead linked
to the striking contrast between development and under-development,
and his allegories derive their origin from a peasant world that has disap-
peared (or never even existed in that form) and from Catholic iconogra-
phy, which in turn is connected to this vanished peasant world. Müller,
because of his secular upbringing, instead draws his images from the
world of myth, which he reuses as an anthropological topos. With this in
mind, the allegory of the luckless angel within his mythical image space
surprises the reader or the spectator because of its alien character. Yet it is
just this diversity and heterogeneity, in respect to the other images, which
confer on the allegory of the angel of history an expressive power, inside
Müller’s image space.
Müller does not consider myth and history to be in opposition to one
other, he simply treats them as materials that have to be assembled, to
be ‘quoted’, as Benjamin used to say. According to the playwright, the
way to bring politics into the theatre is to address the fundamental prob-
lems precisely, using mythological images. In an interview, released in
Hamburg in 1986 at the international congress of the Pen-Club, Müller
says:
Firstly, it should be said that these myths are the paradigmatic formulation
of collective experiences that can be reinterpreted in ever new ways. And
the theatre is structurally suitable to represent preformed materials. It has

always been this way. And in any case, one can always work from the
assumption that these myths— especially the Greek myths—are the com-
mon basis of European culture and therefore can be understood every-
where, in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Germany etc. For this reason, they
have a communicative function.65
However, myth as a universal language, according to the conditions of

Müller’s dramaturgy, does not seek to escape from history; indeed it finds
its basis in historical analysis: it becomes the ‘cry of Marsyas’. Müller
says in his interview that his interest in myth derives ‘from the precise
feeling that an era has come to its end—and perhaps not just an era—so
it is a feeling of a final era; for there is a need to remember the origins,
the beginning, and to summarize historical experience, starting from the
feeling that carries you toward the end’.66 To make the negativity (the
destructive character) of the modern in some way productive, according
to both Benjamin and Müller, thus means producing texts constructed
in such a way as to represent this negativity, through fragmented materi-
als, and to accentuate the contradictions of language and thought of the
century. Most times the author speaks of an ‘explosion of remembrance’
or ‘explosion in the image’ within the structure of his texts.67 In the same
interview, Müller defines his vision of art in synthetic terms, without hav-
ing forgotten the paradox:
The main function of literature is anthropological: namely, it consists of

researching in order to understand how this ‘animal-man’ was made, how
it functions. It is evident that in this machine there is a flaw, a manufactur-
ing error: one of the tasks of art is to discover this flaw. There is an interest-
ing field of research. I know of the situation in Berlin, but it will be the
same in other parts. There is work being carried out on finding a language
that will still be understandable in ten thousand years time, to signpost
contaminated areas so that nobody goes into them. You know that the
halving time of some radioactive substances is between ten thousand and
twenty-five thousand years. But who will still be alive after ten thousand
years, let alone twenty-five thousand? None of the current languages will
still exist at that time. They are searching for a language for any eventual
survivors.68
As evidenced, modern art cannot be viewed as intended if it is not placed

against the background of an apocalyptic vision. The search for a univer-
sal language, which can be understood beyond time and space (and can
be determined through the use of the mythical image space), only has the
function of warning the survivors of the upcoming apocalypse that there
are still a number of contaminated ‘territories’. Müller’s theatre is there-
fore a montage of images that express the desperate attempt to ‘signal’
defects in the function of the ‘animal-man’, in the weak hope that poster-
ity does not make the same mistakes. Müller, connecting the search for
new artistic languages and the negative character of history, claims: ‘As
the apple of the tree of knowledge must be eaten once again so that man
might rediscover the state of innocence, the tower of Babel must once
again be constructed so that the confusion of languages can be halted.
A tree is best measured when it is down.’69 The luckless angel, the angel of
despair, increasingly assumes the traits of the angel of destruction.
7 End Times
Müller’s last works have what he himself called ‘the aporia between indi-
vidual time and historical time’, or rather the contrast between the dura-
tion of individual life and the (historical, political, artistic) ambitions
that the individual wants to accomplish.70 It is not by chance that his
last drama, Germania 3 Gespenster am toten Mann (Germany 3. Ghosts
at Dead Man), has German history as its central theme. The main figures
are Stalin, tragically represented, and Hitler, depicted as a grotesque, in
the manner of Chaplin’s Great Dictator and Brecht’s Arturo Ui.71
Admittedly, his final play, performed after his death, is in reality the
re-processing, partly sarcastic, partly melancholic, of a previous work,
Germania. Tod in Berlin (Germany. Death in Berlin), of which there are
two versions, one from 1958 and one from 1971, in which the socialist
state is represented as the protagonist of a proletarian tragedy. However, it
is also true that the prevailing tone of Müller’s last play is ironic and that
the real theme is the attempt to produce a representation of German his-
tory from Hitler’s rise to power to the fall of the Berlin wall. This theme,
incidentally, also returns in Müller’s autobiography, whose very title, Krieg
ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen (War without a Battle. Living in

Two Dictatorships), alludes to these two events that have characterized the
author’s life and work. The protagonists of the last half-century of history
are represented on the stage (Stalin, Hitler, Rosa Luxemburg, Ulbricht,
Thälmann), alongside the protagonists of the Berliner Ensemble (Brecht,
Wekwerth, Helene Weigel), as well as some literary characters (the prince
of Homburg, Gudrun, Hagen, Macbeth). However, the real stars are the
two great dictators (Stalin and Hitler), because they conditioned this
half-century of German history. Instead, Gerhard Stadelmeier interprets
the whole production as a trivialization of Nolte’s doctrine (‘Nolte for the
stupid’), thus inaugurating an interpretation of the play that will often
be repeated in the following years. If it is true that we are not required
to look for theoretical consistency in Müller’s play, whose main concern
was producing something that could work on stage, it is equally true that
we are not required to seek out coherence in the media that critique his
work: Stadelmeier accused him first of being a Stalinist, nostalgic for the
DDR, and of agreeing theories of historical revisionism that put Hitler
and Stalin on the same plane.72
For the first performance of Germania 3 at the Berliner Ensemble,
Helmut Schödel wrote in Die Zeit an article in the form of a diary,
describing the production as a ‘parade in front of the room of the hor-
rors of history’. He argues that ‘in Wuttke’s staging, the characters have
completely lost the relationship with their actions’, that ‘Müller’s literary
references, from Kleist to Kafka are cut or cancelled out by the fact that
they are spoken at twice the speed as normal’.73
And so, with regard to the posthumous play, the old accusations of
Stalinism return, facilitated by the simple fact that the protagonist of
the first part of play is Stalin himself. Once again, the German theatre
critics climb over one another to interpret Müller’s work in the light of
political ideology, in the light of the fact that he lived in the DDR until
the very end. However, the most profound reasons that have moved
Müller’s choices into this montage of linguistic and theatrical materials
have always been its expressive and artistic nature. His goal was always
to build an efficient representation on stage. His interest in the figure
of Stalin is theatrical, since he sought a large, tragic figure. At the time
of one of his last interviews Germania 3 was still neither published nor
performed, but since it is a rewriting of Germania. Tod in Berlin, one

could foresee its content and structure. Müller says: ‘Something Stalin
himself said, which Marshall Zhukov quoted in his last talk with Stalin,
is central to my representation of Stalin. He would have said: “Zhukov,
I am the unhappiest man on Earth. I am afraid of my own shadow”. In
this way Stalin is also a Shakespearean character.’74 The figure of Stalin in
Müller’s last play should not be interpreted in political-ideological terms,
but seen for what it is: historical material, a large dramatic figure, a mon-
tage of quotes, an actualized Macbeth. After the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the losers, the ‘Ossis’, ‘those of the East’, tried to find a new cultural iden-
tity, tried to recover the ‘cultural treasures’ of the losers, rewriting history,
giving a new meaning to the past. Müller was among the first to practice
this new ‘semanticization’ of the past, in a tragic, melancholic and some-
time even macabre way.
The infernal elements of the modern return overwhelmingly in ironic
contrast to the great hopes of wealth promoted by real socialism:
Mayor: We indeed want to build, here on earth, the

kingdom of heaven.
The mayor’s son: No paradise without hell. No heaven without
hell. And capitalism is the purgatory in which
money is recycled.
Schumanngerhard: In blood.75
The play ends with the macabre and desperate cry: ‘Dark, friends, the
space is very dark.’76
Hans Mayer uses a verse of Brecht’s from the prologue to his remake of
Lenz’s Der Hofmeister to define Müller’s last play: ‘Das ABC der deutschen
Misere’ (‘The ABC of German misery’).77 However, it is not only German
misery that is present in Germania 3, but a vision of history as catastro-
phe without hope. By now Müller’s Weltanschauung, in the moment at
which it deals with the past, has lost any utopian perspective, remaining
without any way out, without a future. His ‘dialogue with the dead’ only
enhances the present, which is tragically and desperately ephemeral.
Nevertheless, the dead mentioned in the title, around which the phan-
toms will gather, are quintessentially Brecht, to whom the ‘three widows’
cry at the same moment at which they decide to continue the manage-
ment of the Berliner Ensemble. However, everything that is said on the
stage about Brecht has a clear reference to Müller, who wrote the play
(once again reworking a pre-existing text and a series of historical events
that he reinterprets and ‘dismantles’ through critical and caustic analysis)
practically on his death bed. In a tragic, and perhaps even macabre, way,
historical time and subjective time reunite with one another at the point
of death and send a signal, now deprived of all hope, in which ferocious
and desecrating irony becomes the driving force of all scenic action, an
alarm signal, that last desperate ‘cry of Marsyas’.
Notes
1. See Mauro Ponzi, Pasolini and Fassbinder: Between Cultural Tradition
and Self-Destruction, in Fabio Vighi-Alexis Nouss (ed.), Pasolini,
Fassbinder and Europe. Between Utopia and Nihilism, Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, Newcastle 2011, pp. 6–19.
2. Walter Benjamin, Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia, in SW 2.1, 217.
3. ‘Good texts always develop in a gloomy environment, there cannot
be a better world without the shedding of blood, the duel between
industry and future is not accompanied by songs to which you can
abandon yourself. His music is the cry of Marsyas that breaks the
strings of his divine flayer’s lyre’ (Heiner Müller, Material, ed. by
Frank Hörnigk, Leipzig 1989, p. 22) own translation.
4. ‘Blue-eyed Alì / one of many sons of sons, / shall descend from
Algiers / on sailboats and rowboats. With him / shall be thousands of
men / with tiny bodies and the eyes / of wretched dogs of the fathers
/ on boats launched in the Realms of Hunger. With them they shall
bring little children, and bread and cheese wrapped in the yellow
paper of Easter Monday. / They shall bring their grandmothers and
donkeys, on triremes stolen in colonial ports. / They shall land at
Crotone or Palmi, / by the millions, dressed in Asian / rags and
American shirts. / The Calabrians shall say at once, / as ruffians to
ruffians: / “Here are our long-lost brothers, with their children and
bread and cheese!” / From Crotone or Palmi they’ll go up / to Naples,
and from there to Barcelona, / Salonika, and Marseille, / to the Cities
of Crime. / Souls and angels, mice and lice / with the seed of Ancient
History, / they shall fly ahead of the willayes’ (Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Poesie, Garzanti, Milano 1975, p. 419). Own translation.
5. Heiner Müller, Jetzt sind eher die infernalischen Aspekte bei Benjamin
wichtig, in Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her. Texte zu Walter
Benjamin, edited by Michael Opitz and Edmut Wizisla, Leipzig
1992, p. 352. Own translation. See also “Studi Germanici”, n.s., a.
XXIX (1991), n. 83–85, in which lectures of the Rome conference
are published.
6. In fact, it is the same Benjamin who in preparatory materials for his
Arcades Project compares the modern era to hell when he writes:
‘Modernity, the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the
newest thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that “the
same thing happens over and over” (much less is it the question here
of eternal return), but rather that the face of the world, the colossal
head, precisely in what is newest never alters—that is the “newest”
remains, in every respect, the same. This constitutes the eternity of
hell and the sadist’s delight in innovation. To determinate the totality
of traits which define this “modernity” is to represent hell’ [G°, 17]
(AP, 842 s.).
7. Benjamin’s concept of Bildraum is now translated in Benjamin stud-
ies by ‘image space’ and means the space in which images, drawn
from everyday reality, communication and advertising, and even
from the dream world, arise. However, it also means the reservoir of
imagines from which one draws to formulate metaphors, allegories
and Denkbilder (thought images) in modern communication. See
Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin,
Routledge, London- New York 1996; Howard Heiland – Michael
W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge (Mass.)-London 2014.
8. See Massimo Cacciari, Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da
Nietzsche a Wittgestein, Feltrinelli, Milano 1976, p. 56.
9. Ibid., p. 57. Own translation.
10. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism, Verso, London-New York 2012, p. 14.
11. See Walter Benjamin, Epistemo-Critical Prologue in The Origin of
German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, New Left Books,
London 1998, p. 31 s.
12. See Sascha Löschner, Geschichte als persönliches Drama: Heiner Müller
im Spiegel seiner Interviews und Gespräche, Lang, Frankfurt a. M.
[u.a.] 2002.
13. In an interview in 1985 he stated: ‘First of all, interviews are a nuisance,
but it would be much more tiring for me to conceive a theoretical appa-
ratus, should I force myself to write; for this reason I am occasionally
able, against my conscience or even against my will, to engage myself.
In addition, interviews also offer the possibility of formulating thought
in a much more concise way than writing, released from the responsi-
bility of writing, the day after one can assert an opinion to the contrary.
Of course, the statements that come out in conversations and meet-
ings—even those intended for print, which I never seek to revise
because it makes no sense, a completely different type of text would be
the result of this—are very dependent on the situation or interviewer
and on the relationship that is established, etc. In this respect, they are
more performances than anything else, they have perhaps more aspects
in common with theatre than literature. There, one performs as if on
the stage’ (Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer. Interviews und
Gespräche, Frankfurt a. M. 1986, p. 125). Own translation.
14. Günther Rühle, Am Abgrund des Jahrhunderts. Über Heiner Müller—
sein Leben und sein Werk, in “Theater heute”, 2/96, p. 10. Own
translation.
15. See Klaus Welzel, Utopienverlust: die deutsche Einheit im Spiegel ost-
deutscher Autoren, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998.
16. Episches Theater und postmodernes Management. Heiner Müller im
Gespräch mit Alexander Kluge—ein posthum veröffentlichtes Interview,
in “Theater heute”, 9/96, p. 1. Own translation.
17. Peter von Becker, “Die Wahrheit, leise und unerträglich”. Ein Gespräch
mit Heiner Müller, in “Theater heute”, Sondernummer 1995, p. 9.
Own translation. See Mit den Toten reden: Fragen an Heiner Müller,
ed. by Jost Hermand, Böhlau, Köln [u.a] 1999.
18. Müller insists that his theatrical works are a result of the assembly of
different materials. The stories that he tells are fragments of reality:
‘At the beginning of the fifties I spent whole nights in pubs and in
that time I have heard stories incessantly. For example, in Germania,
the scene with the soldier in Russia that reconstructs the siege of
Stalingrad with beer, I took, almost to the letter, from a story I was
told by a drunken man in the Nord café on Schönhauser Allee’ (Peter
von Becker, p. 9). Own translation.
19. See: Heiner Müller, Material, edited by Frank Hörnigk, Leipzig
1989, p. 7. Own translation. ‘Der glücklose Engel’ literally means ‘the
luckless angel’, but in a Benjaminian context the image expresses the
mood of the angel (and of man) reflecting on his unhappy fate to
have been created in order to dissolve into thin air. Therefore, ‘Der
glücklose Engel’ can be interpreted and translated as ‘melancholic
angel’.
20. See Katharina Ebrecht, Heiner Müllers Lyrik: Quellen und Vorbilder,
Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001.
21. SW 4, p. 392.
22. Müller often repeated the claim that he was not interested in produc-
ing allegories (see Brood Schulz, Der zersetzte Blick. Sehzwang und
Blendung bei Heiner Müller, in Heiner Müller, Material, cit., p. 165).
However, one must show care when using any statements issued by
Müller in interviews, since on other occasions he admitted to ‘theat-
ralicalizing’ his responses in order to challenge the interviewer.
23. In March 1939, Benjamin wrote an exposé in French of his Arcades
Project. Horkheimer had pleaded with him to do so, because he
hoped to get the New York banker Frank Altschul interested in
Benjamin’s work (see GS V, p. 1255). Benjamin used most of the
1935 German version, translating it into French, but the introduc-
tion and the conclusion were written there and then. Tiedemann
argues: ‘These two texts surely represent the most concise, perhaps
the most lucid, presentation of what Benjamin envisaged for his
Arcades Project’ (GS V, p. 1255) own translation.
24. AP, 26.
25. AP, 846 [I°, 1].
26. ‘It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this

work to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated
within itself the idea of progress.’ AP, 460 [N 2, 2].
27. AP, 14.
28. Benjamin writes in the Introduction: ‘Our investigation proposes to
show how, as a consequence of this reifying representation of civiliza-
tion, the new forms of behavior and the new economically and tech-
nologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century
enter the universe of a phantasmagoria’ (ibid., p. 14).
29. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. M. R. and E. M.
Jacobson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994, p. 359.
30. ‘The goal I had set for myself has not yet been totally realized, but I
am finally getting close. The goal is that I be considered the foremost
critic of German literature. The problem is that literary criticism is
no longer considered a serious genre in Germany and has not been
for more than fifty years. If you want to carve out a reputation in the
area of criticism, this ultimately means that you must recreate criti-
cism as a genre’ (ibid.).
31. AP, 460 [N1a,8].
32. Everything new it could hope for turns out to be a reality that has
always been present; and this newness will be as little capable of fur-
nishing it with a liberating solution as a new fashion is capable of
rejuvenating society (AP, p. 15).
33. AP, 482 s. [G°,17].
34. See Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Infernalische Aspekte der Moderne.
Anthropo-theologische Elemente in Benjamins Geschichtsbegriff, in
“Studi Germanici”, XXIX (1991), nr. 83–85, pp. 9–26.
35. Wolfgang Emmerich, Der vernünftige, der schreckliche Mythos. Heiner
Müllers Umgang mit dem griechischen Mythologie, in Heiner Müller,
Material, p. 142. Own translation.
36. Ibid. Own translation.
37. Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, p. 133. See Michael Ostheimer,
“Mythologische Genauigkeit”: Heiner Müllers Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie der Tragödie, Königshausen & Neumann,
Würzburg 2002.
38. Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, p. 168. Own translation.

40. See Bertolt Brecht, Reisen des Glücksgotts, in Arbeitsjournal
1938–1955, Berlin u. Weimar 1977, p. 193.
41. Heiner Müller, Glücksgott, in Heiner Müller, Theater-Arbeit, Berlin
1975, p. 7. Own translation.
42. See Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Das Theater des “konstruktiven
Defaitismus”: Lektüren zur Theorie eines Theaters der A-Identität bei
Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht und Heiner Müller, Nexus, Frankfurt
a. M. [u.a.] 2002.
43. Heiner Müller, Glücksgott, Stroemfeld Theater-Arbeit, p. 8. Own
translation.
44. See Frank Hörnigk, “Texte die auf Geschichte bitte warten…” Zum
Geschichtsbegriff bei Heiner Müller, in Heiner Müller, Material,
pp. 123–137.
45. Heiner Müller, Material, p. 22. Own translation. The author uses
almost the same words in his Glücksgottfragment; see Heiner Müller,
Theater-Arbeit, p. 8.
46. Heiner Müller, Material, cit., p. 161. Own translation.
47. See Vlado Obad, Zu Müllers Poetik des Fragmentarischen, in Heiner
Müller, Material, p. 157. Own translation. Obad mentions in his
essay a series of assertions by Müller, recorded during an interview on
17 May 1985.
48. Heiner Müller, Der Auftrag, in Heiner Müller, Herzstück, Berlin
1983, p. 46 s. Own translation.
49. Heiner Müller, Jetzt sind eher…, cit., p. 350. Own translation.
50. See Karol Sauerland Notwendigkeit, Opfer und Tod. Über Philoktet, in
Heiner Müller, Material, p. 189.
51. See Corinna Mieth, Das Utopische in Literatur und Philosophie: zur
Ästhetik Heiner Müllers und Alexander Kluges, Francke, Tübingen
2003.
52. Heiner Müller, Jetzt sind eher…, cit., p. 355. Own translation.
53. Here Müller plays on the ‘estranged’ montage of two different
German expressions that refer to a series of images in a chain. ‘Fleisch’
(flesh) in biblical symbolism refers to ‘man’, ‘body’, to being weak
and ephemeral, material essence—which, when describing an angel,
is strange, but does indeed get back to the whole series of Benjaminian
connotations on the conception of history. In the Bible the expres-

sion ‘am Fleisch’ is always used when circumcision is described: ‘Am
Fleisch geschnitten’ (‘circumcised in the flesh’, Genesis 17:14; 17:24;
17:25). In common language the use of ‘sich ins eigene Fleisch schnei-
den’ (‘cutting one’s own flesh’) means damaging oneself, shooting
oneself in the foot, having to make sacrifices—but the image of ‘cut-
ting one’s own flesh’ is accentuated. Müller’s estrangement consists of
the use of the adjective ‘einsam’, which introduces a series of literary
themes. In the Bible there is a verse, ‘Denn einsam und elend bin ich’
(‘because I am miserable and alone’, Psalms 25:16), and the adjective
is obviously a reference by the playwright to his catastrophic vision
of history. However, the phrase ‘einsam bin ich, nicht alleine’ appears
in the play Preciosa (1821) by Pius Alexander Wolff (1782–1828),
based on a short story by Cervantes, La Gitanilla (1613), music
composed by Carl Maria von Weber. The same concept—and this is
probably Müller’s direct source—is expressed by Goethe in Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship when the harpist sings the verses: ‘Und kann
ich nur einmal / Recht einsam sein / Dann bin ich nicht allein’ (‘And I
can only once / right to be lonely / Then I’m not alone’). Here,
Müller seeks to submit, in an elliptical manner, the contrast between
einsam and allein, in order to demonstrate that being abandoned and
destitute does not automatically mean being alone, but can mean
sharing the fate of many people.
54. See Heiner Müller, Glückloser Engel 2, in “Sinn und Form”, 5, 1991.
Own translation.
55. See Yasmine Inauen, Dramaturgie der Erinnerung: Geschichte,
Gedächtnis, Körper bei Heiner Müller, Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2001.
For the concept of das Gewesene (‘what has been’), see Sigrid Weigel,
Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin, Routledge,
London- New York 1996, p. 32, 99, 126, 143 s.
56. Heiner Müller, Jetzt sind eher…, p. 351. Own translation.
57. Heiner Müller, Landschaft mit Argonauten, in Heiner Müller,
Herzstück, S. 101. Own translation. Concerning the relationship
between subject and history in Müller, see Heiner Müller, Gesammelte
Irrtümer, p. 88; J. Reichmann, Ein „Tableau Vivant“ jenseits des Todes,
in Heiner Müller, Material, p. 211.
58. In fact, Benjamin writes in his Theses: ‘The nature of this sadness
becomes clearer if we ask: With whom does historicism actually sym-
pathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are
the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor
invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows
what this means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this
day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over
those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the
spoils are carried in the procession. They are called “cultural trea-
sures’”’ (SW 4, p. 391).
59. Heiner Müller, Jetzt sind eher…, p. 356. Own translation.
60. Ibid.
61. Heiner Müller, Material, cit., p. 25. Own translation.
62. See Stéphane Symons, Walter Benjamin. Presence of Mind, Failure to
Comprehend, Leiden-Boston 2013.
63. Heiner Müller, Jetzt sind eher…, p. 352 s. Own translation.
64. Heiner Müller, Material, p. 64. Own translation.
65. Heiner Müller, L’arte dell’impossibile. [The Art of the Impossible].
Interview by Mauro Ponzi, in “L’Unità”, 22/8/1986, p. 11. The
interview was published in full, in German, in ‘Links. Rivista di let-
teratura e cultura tedesca’, III (2003), pp. 19–22. Now in Heiner
Müller, Auf der Suche nach dem Unmöglichen. Ein Gespräch mit Mauro
Ponzi, in Heiner Müller. Gespräche 1. (Werke vol. 10), ed. by Frank
Hörnigk, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. Main 2008, pp. 477–485. Own
translation.
67. See Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, Frankfurt a. M. 1986,
p. 133.
68. Heiner Müller, Auf der Suche nach dem Unmöglichen. Ein Gespräch
mit Mauro Ponzi, in Heiner Müller. Gespräche 1. (Werke vol. 10),
p. 479. Own translation.
69. The text is the transcription from a public reading by the author. See
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Theater der Blicke, in Dramatik der DDR, ed.
by Ulrich Profitlich, Frankfurt a. M. 1987, p. 188. Own translation.
70. It is amazing the number of Müller’s plays that were performed in
1996 in German theatres: Frank Castorf staged Wolokolamsker
Chaussee (May) in Berlin’s Volksbühne and Der Auftrag (June) in the

Berliner Ensemble. Dimiter Gotscheff staged at Düsseldorf ’s
Schauspielhaus a collage of Müller’s texts (Schlaf Traum Schrei.
Bruchstücke) taken from his plays, short prose and poems recited in
monologues by six actors, in an atmosphere inspired by Pirandello.
Germania 3. Gespenster am toten Mann (Germany 3, Ghosts at Dead
Man), written by Müller in the last months of his life and published
after his death in April 1996, was represented in two different stag-
ings (Bochum in May and the Berliner Ensemble in June).
71. See “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, May 18, 1996, p. 32. The
Berliner Ensemble performed throughout the season, in addition to
the productions already mentioned, Der Bau and Zement. However,
the ‘event’ of the German theatrical season was the posthumous pro-
duction of Müller’s final play, Germania 3. Gespenster am toten Mann.
On 18 May Ulrich Mühe performed the entire play on the radio
(Deutschlandfunk, Cologne) and the transmission was repeated on
20 May (Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg).
72. See G. Stadelmeier, Gespensterwunschkonzert, in “Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung”, 28th May 1996, p. 33.
73. See Helmut Schödel, Aus meinem BE-Tagebuch, in “Die Zeit”, 28th
June 1996, p. 41. Own translation.
74. Peter von Becker, “Die Wahrheit, leise und unerträglich”. Ein Gespräch
mit Heiner Müller, in “Theater heute”, Sondernummer 1995, p. 21 s.
Own translation.
75. Heiner Müller, Germania 3, p. 77. Own translation.
77. See “Theater heute”, Sondernummer 1996, p. 140. In fact Hans
Meyer is referring to Germania. Tod in Berlin, but the citation works
just as well for Müller’s last play, which is—as previously stated—a
reworking. See also Hendrik Werner, Im Namen des Verrats: Heiner
Müllers Gedächtnis der Texte, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg
2001.
5
Hidden Refusal
Ursprache and Sprachmagie in Benjamin’s
Theory of Language
1 The Hidden Refusal

I would like to borrow an image used by Irving Wohlfarth a few years
ago, which quoted the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, also mentioned by
Benjamin in a letter with regard to his lack of habilitation.1 According
to Wohlfarth,2 the naughty witch is the academic world that rejected
The Origin of German Tragic Drama and denied Benjamin habilitation.
However, now Sleeping Beauty has to protect/defend herself from the
prince. We are the prince, the current academic world, that rehabilitates
Benjamin, but it interprets his writings in its own way and pro domo sua,
often softening their provocative and ‘revolutionary’ elements. A part
of this ‘rehabilitation’ process tends to place Benjamin inside a philo-
sophical constellation that was completely antipodal to him.3 Since his
thoughts were to be found at the crossroads of so many currents, from
which he extracts conceptual ‘pearls’ and then uses them in his own way
in his philosophical discourse, it is easy to bring Benjamin back inside
this or that heuristic system on the basis of the simple presence of a con-
cept deriving from Romanticism, from mythical thinking and so on. One
should ask the question of what role this concept or hypothesis plays

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_5
within his philosophical discourse, and then realize that very often it is
not the same role that it played in the system from which it was taken,
but that it was very different or even opposing. Therefore, paradoxically,
we can state that in Benjamin frequently the use of a specific concept is
a ‘hidden refusal’. The use of a mythical image or a concept taken from
Romanticism does not mean adhesion to the ‘mythology of modernity’
or ‘empathy with Romanticism’, but the opposite: refusal of the mythical
thought, of ‘romantic identification’.4 In the same way, in writings on the
philosophy of language a whole range of assertions need to be untangled,
often contrasting with each other, originating from several traditions, but
not connecting Benjamin solely and exclusively to one of them.
2 The Task of the Translator

The Task of the Translator was written in 1921 and published in 1923 as
the introduction to a German edition of several poems by Baudelaire of
the Tableaux Parisiens (Parisian Scenes). Even though it was based on
a theoretical justification of translations, the essay does not theorize a
translation practice, but represents a true treatise on the philosophy of
language. The theses expressed should be compared with other works by
Benjamin on this topic, and in particular the larger work On Language
in General and on the Language of Men, written in 1916 and never pub-
lished while the author was alive, from which it collects the essential
parts. Therefore, we are participating in the paradox that in ‘The Task of
the Translator’ Benjamin briefly supports the theses illustrated on a much
wider level in On Language in General and on the Language of Men and
forces us constantly to refer to this much more articulate and longer essay.
The allusive nature of his work is not only a question of style or method,
it is also the practical consequence of constant reference to an essay that,
in that period, was not in the public domain.
Many literary critics say that it is an esoteric and hermetic essay, on the
limit of understanding5; an essay that had a very strange destiny. Literary
critics at the time of Benjamin barely took him into consideration. I was
not able to find even one comment in the apparatus of the Gesammelte
Schriften. However, in the fields of the philosophy of language and the
theory of translation, in more recent years this essay has been quoted
often and interpreted in many different ways. First of all it is important to
understand Walter Benjamin’s method and contextualize his assertions,
which are often radical, eccentric and provocative.6 We should then ask
ourselves what this writing has to say, apart from the explicit assertions:
what it implies, what cues it has to offer, beyond its literal meaning.
Benjamin’s thought includes desired ambiguities and contradic-
tions. This cannot be attributed to Hegelian logic, but to a Nietzschean
approach: it does not ‘resolve’ the contradictions, it does not search for a
‘synthesis’, it rather searches for ‘tension’ between opposing poles without
any ‘conciliation’. Therefore, from these constant displacements we need
to find a radical solution. In this essay Benjamin refers to two differ-
ent main sources, both mentioned explicitly. However, identification of
the sources is not enough to clarify his position. Considering that these
sources clash with one another, it is totally wrong to attempt to attribute
his theory to one, excluding the other. From here comes Benjamin’s pro-
verbial ambiguity: both trends, with all of the tension and contradictions
that they include, co-exist within his philosophical discourse.
Benjamin’s theory of language (and of translation) is not new, but it is
individual and even eccentric. He uses sources that are all extremely dif-
ferent, combining them in an original way without even worrying about
the tensions and the ambiguities that the montage of such conceptually
different materials causes within his theory. He speaks of Ursprache as
an original language, a ‘pure language’, referring to the Romantic theory
that has characterized the birth of linguistics. There are specific refer-
ences, such as to Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt,
but perhaps the philosopher on whom he draws most (also the source of
that esoteric tone to which many critics refer) is Johann Georg Hamann,
who played a very important role in the formation of Benjamin’s thought.
Within the Romantic context, reference to Ursprache means Indo-
European, as the mother of all languages, as a common language that
has always historically existed. We know that this ‘original language’ was
a discovery of German Romanticism, a form of discovery in a general
linguistic sense, identified as Indo-European. Now, beyond attested lan-
guages, it is common opinion, even among today’s linguists, that Indo-
European has always been a historical language, even though not an
attested one, but a language spoken by a community that has always his-
torically existed, from which other languages have derived. However, the
fact that Indo-European is not an attested language has also resulted in
another hypothesis (frankly, less validated): that it was a kind of common
language, a common denominator among several languages spoken by
different surrounding communities—as if it were an abstract language.
The second level of identification of Ursprache—in this essay and also
in On Language in General and on the Language of Men—refers to the
Bible, the divine language and therefore not to an Indo-European field.
The theoretical consequence is that Benjamin’s thought only works if the
biblical narration is accepted; that is, the existence of a divine language,
of an Adamite original language, the banishment from Eden, the differ-
entiation of languages with the tower of Babel.
If the Romantic origin of his concept of Ursprache is without doubt,
the way in which Benjamin uses and radically modifies this value is
paradigmatic.7 All in all, even the Romantics have idealized a mythical
‘original language’ spoken by a meta-historical community; Benjamin
‘transports’—and in German übertragen (to transfer) is a synonym of
übersetzen (to translate)—this Ursprache into a metaphysical or meta-
historical dimension, finally in an Edenic dimension. Epistemologically,
this operation is similar to that of the German Romantics, but substan-
tially it is very different, because Benjamin’s original language can be
identified with Adamite language and therefore with divine language. In
other words, this reference to the Bible results in a change from a mythi-
cal context to a religious context, where the philosophy of the language
changes its implications completely. Indeed, in his philosophical reason-
ing Benjamin refers to the method of debating of Hebrew culture, not
only constantly referring to the Torah, but also to the oral tradition.
The divine language is the language that creates. God names heaven
and earth, light and water, and, just by naming them, they are created.
The pure language is therefore the language of God and, as such, is inac-
cessible. However, once again in Genesis we find an Adamite language
that is a kind of imitatio Dei. God himself, in fact, asked Adam to give a
name to animals and things that, at that time, were called by the name
given by Adam: ‘Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the
beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man
to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each liv-
ing creature, that was its name’ (Genesis 2:19). This ‘naming’ in German
is Benennung: the ability to name, to grant a name. From here stems the
priority of the name compared with other linguistic forms in Benjamin’s
philosophy of language. Adam does not create human beings, but he
gives them a name, as a kind of second maker, a linguistic demiurge, who
translates the language of things into the language of men. This is the
original translation that lies at the basis of the power to speak; but it is a
metaphysical ability or, even, a meta-historical ability.
Duplication of the linguistic act as an original act (the divine language
and the Adamite language) is exactly the typical characteristic of the
Hebrew tradition that Benjamin undertakes as a paradigm not only for
his philosophy of language, but also for all of his philosophical reasoning.
Even this duplicity, this dual step, is a characteristic that Benjamin inher-
ited from the Torah. According to the Bible, the ten commandments were
revealed by God to Moses twice: the first time verbally8 and the second
time written by fire on a stone.9 Yet when Moses descended from Mount
Sinai he threw the tablets of the law against the golden calf and then
once again transmitted the law to the population verbally. Moses finally
returned to Mount Sinai and God dictated the ten commandments and
other rules to him.10 This biblical story became a rule of Hebrew tradi-
tion: the law is based on the Torah, on written tradition, but also on the
Talmud, on the verbal tradition that represents the interpretation and
discussion of the Torah that, in turn, became a written tradition, once
again communicated verbally.11 The consequence is that human writing
is always a comment on law, a rewriting of the Word of God expressed in
the Torah, all in all a rewriting of the Great Code.
Throughout the procedure of Benjamin’s philosophical discourse, we
can find this double step of a dual tradition that communicates itself
in an entirely unusual version, as the theological element is commu-
nicated and contradicted by the political element and vice versa, in a
contrast full of tension. This traditions results in Benjamin considering
the Ursprache of a Romantic nature as a ‘language without content’; in
other words, ‘the language of God’. He differentiates between ‘word’
and ‘name’ and focuses his attention on the passage in Genesis that
tells the story of Benennung, in which God names heaven and earth
and these, due to the fact that they have been named, come into exis-
tence. This ‘naming’ also occurs twice: God created things and animals
and then told Adam to give them a name in his presence, imitating
the divine gesture of creation limited to the creation of language.
The Adamite language is a vital gesture based on the attribution of a
name to things and animals: a gesture that is defined by Benjamin as
‘Übersetzung’, a translation from the language of things to the language
of men. Therefore the translation is very important in Benjamin’s phi-
losophy of language, but in its theological context it contains some
radical implications. The nomination of things and animals excludes
completely the possibility of pronouncing the name of God. In the
Hebrew religion, simply pronouncing the name of ‘He who is’ is pro-
hibited, it is a sin. Therefore, the cornerstone of Benjamin’s philosophy
of language is the impossibility of translating the name of God, one of
the basic concepts of monotheistic religions.12
The activity of translation is an Umkehrung, a ‘U-turn’, a change in
direction from original sin. The explusion from paradise on Earth caused
the loss of the Adamite language and the birth of language confusion
(the tower of Babel). However, translation revitalizes the ‘splinters’ of the
Ursprache that have been caught up in the various languages: ‘Translation
thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relation-
ship of languages to our answer. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this
hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embry-
onic or intensive form.’13
With original sin, history invades the theory of language (even in the
meta-historical form of the expulsion from paradise on Earth and the
tower of Babel). The translation, in which the ‘method of thinking’ itself
becomes a single thought, works to complete the languages with the ‘pure
language’. This completion should generate a kind of ‘compensation’, a
‘convergence’ of the two languages. Translating means tuning these frag-
ments between the languages. Translation highlights the splinters of the
pure language hidden in communicative languages.
The arbitrary ‘human word’ that undermines the ‘purity of name’ in
paradise ‘arouses’ the ‘judging word’ of God, which ‘expels the first men
from paradise on earth’ and, through this, has an ‘immediate’, there-
fore ‘magical’ effect. The ‘language magic’ consists in the ‘immediacy’

of ‘correspondence’ between name and named on the one hand, and
‘nominating’ and name on the other. The language as a ‘sign’ that pre-
sumes a ‘judgement’ is, initially, the consequence of original sin and the
expulsion from Eden. The ‘arbitrary human word’ is functional to com-
municative language.
Translation highlights the common feature of all languages: namely,
their derivation from Ursprache, from the pure language that Benjamin
intends as a divine language. However, the pure language is inaccessible
to each single language, which only contains its splinters.14 This results
in admitting that each translation is only a method, even if temporary,
of dealing with the strangeness of languages. Therefore, Benjamin claims
on the one hand the irreducible strangeness of languages (and the impos-
sibility of translating names), but on the other the presence of something
in common that consists in splinters of the divine language. The transla-
tion should passionately, and right down to each fine detail, recreate in
one language the form of meaning of the other language, so that both
versions appear to be fragments of a larger language, just like the shards
of the same vase.15 The true translation is transparent, it does not cover
the original, it does not provide shade, it does not drop the light of pure
language on the original as reinforced by its own meaning.
Benjamin defines the unsaid as a ‘symbol’, perfectly in line with the
Romantic tradition. In every language and in its creations, it remains
beyond communication, something that cannot be communicated,
according to the situation in which it is found, something as symbolizing
or symbolized.16 Yet immediately after he adds: ‘To relieve it of this, to
turn the symbolizing into the symbolized itself, to regain pure language
fully formed from the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity
of translation.’17 Pure language, this Ursprache, is a language without con-
tent, it is self-referential, it is a language (of which the Adamite language
represents the parodic repetition or representation) that ‘nominates’ and
its names cannot be translated. However, this relationship between trans-
lation and pure language is very weak, very ‘marginal’.18 The ideal topos
of the pure language is the Holy Scripture. The interlinear version of the
Bible is the ideal archetype of every translation.
3 ‘Language Magic’
The first and most obvious point of reference of this ‘language magic’ is
given by Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens, of which German translation
the essay we are discussing was the preface. Among the many paradoxes
of Benjamin’s prose is the fact that in this text Baudelaire is never men-
tioned, so that the reference to the French poet is indirect, hidden. The
young Benjamin, author of essays on language and scholar of Hölderlin,
was still very much influenced by Romantic thought, and was still trying
to fully utilize mythical-magical elements. His ‘guide’ within this path
was, in fact, the figure of Baudelaire. Indeed, the French poet crossed the
‘natural magic’, the ‘living temple’ of nature, to reach the ‘big city’ and
its transformations. From this point of view, ‘natural magic’ becomes a
‘language magic’, endowed with the potential to represent the metamor-
phosis of modernity and especially to ‘found’ means of expression able to
clarify the underlying causes of modern phenomena. This process is para-
digmatic to understanding Benjamin’s method: by using a basic concept
of Romantic and pathetic thought, Benjamin sets in motion a mecha-
nism for knowledge and clarification that goes in the opposite direction
to the mythology of modernity. He uses pathos to establish a distance
from the magical elements and ‘hidden’ forces of nature through a hid-
den refusal of mythology.
The hallucinatory, often oneiric visions in Parisian Scenes, evoked by the
imagination—by the volupté (sensual pleasure) and volonté (will) of the
poet—are used to build an urban landscape through the expressive ability
of poetic language. And all the characters represented in these poems (old
men and women, prostitutes, a passer-by, gamblers, beggars) become alle-
gories of the ephemeral—of the brevity of life as well as of an impossible
search for eternity (‘The great skies that make you dream of eternity’).19
The melancholy arising from this awareness of the ephemeral, which looks
so much like the ‘astonishment’ of discovering the ‘being there for death’
that Nietzsche mentions, is an active melancholy, insofar as it produces
language (expressive capacity) as well as the images of the city.
The Parisian Scenes are a true representation of the city of Paris with
its buildings, with its inhabitants, with their nightlife. Baudelaire’s
poems are an urban landscape. In the dedication to the reader that opens
The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire assumes that an identity exists between

author and reader (‘Hypocrite reader,—fellowman,—my twin!’)20 in the
descent to hell (‘Each day we’re one step further into Hell’),21 character-
ized by ‘folly and error, stinginess and sin’.22 In an essay on Théophile
Gautier, published in the weekly review L’Artiste on 13 March 1895,
Baudelaire wrote: ‘Using skillfully a language is to practice a sort of
evocative sorcery.’23 The city of Paris, which is the focus of The Flowers
of Evil, is represented by a ‘sorcellerie évocatoire’ (evocative sorcery) of
poetic language, which brings out the correspondences between nature
and the artificial landscape of the city, where the ‘living columns some-
times breathe confusing speech’.24 And so the poet—and with him the
reader (his ‘fellow man’, his ‘brother’)—must walk through a ‘grove of
symbols’ to decipher the signal of nature and, most importantly, the
signals of the city that is the artificial replacement of the natural land-
scape. The ‘language magic’ of which Benjamin speaks is this ‘evocative
sorcery’ on which Baudelaire’s poetry is based, which does not evoke a
metaphysical language but rather a material reality. In the same essay on
Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire writes: ‘There is in the word, in the verb
something sacred which forbids us to make a game of chance.’25 This
‘something sacred’ is the ‘evocative sorcery’ that allows to express the
fundamental things, the ‘correspondences’, and to achieve or remember
a ‘former life’, the ‘straight pillars’, a ‘voluptuous calm’,26 an artificial
paradise dreamed and lived at the same time. According to Baudelaire,
the ‘language magic’ is the ability, the power of poetic language to evoke
moods that are able to represent the reality of present time. Benjamin is
fascinated by this expressive power that captures the allegorical core of
the epoch, the nineteenth century, through metaphor, through a series
of images.
The sources of Benjamin’s theory of language start with Jacob Böhme
and pass through Hamann and Romanticism and kabbalistic mysti-
cism, although the use of such elements is never historical but rather
systematic-functional.27 In the reinterpretation of Genesis and original
sin, in the distinction between the divine language and the Adamite
language, ‘translation’ can be found (from the language of things to the
‘language of men’), but the Adamite language is almost a ‘parody’ of the
divine language.
In the 1916 essay Benjamin is very explicit:
‘All language communicates itself.’ […] ‘That which in a mental entity is

communicable is its language.’ On this ‘is’ (equivalent to ‘is immediately’)
everything depends.—Not that which appears most clearly in its language
is communicable in a mental entity, as was just said by way of transition,
but this capacity for communication is language itself. In this it communi-
cates itself. Or: the language of a mental entity is directly that which is
communicable in it. Whatever is communicable of a mental entity, in this
it communicates itself. Which signifies that all language communicates
itself. Or more precisely: all language communicates itself in itself; it is in
the purest sense the ‘medium’ of the communication. Mediation, which is
the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem
of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then
the primary problem of language is its magic. At the same time, the notion
of the magic of language points to something else: its infiniteness.28
Without the practice of translation, Romantics would probably not have

been able to formulate the theory of Sprachmagie, since the expressive
non-instrumental dimension of languages becomes explicit in the cae-
suras that open up between languages.29 Translation expresses the total
mediality of the language, which contains fragments of the pure lan-
guage.30 If the affinity of languages is expressed in translation, this does
not occur for a vague similarity of reproduction and original. Every meta-
historical affinity of languages consists in a science of them, pure and as
a whole, being understood as one and the same thing, which however is
not accessible to any of them individually, but only in the totality of their
mutually complementary intentions: the pure language.
Yet in the reinterpretation of original sin Benjamin introduces a ‘lin-
guistic element’ (Sprachelement) that is not a ‘translation in name’, since
the ‘knowledge of bad’, which the snake promises together with the
knowledge of good, happened without any object to be ‘translated’.31
In the meantime this ‘linguistic element’ is not introduced through
the instant practical subjectivity of the name of God, but through a
‘parody’32: the radical arbitrary (‘spontaneous’) communicative ‘human
word’, a ‘simple sign’.33
There is a dual ‘magic’ between he who nominates and the name on the
one hand, and the name and the nominated on the other; a dual division
in judging and the subject of the judgement on the one hand, and the
logical subject of the judgement and predicate on the other. Regardless of
how it is justified in the history of original sin, in this ‘reuse’ of the time
polarity of Adamic nomination and divine judgement, the analogy with
theological events allows Benjamin to attribute to the ‘abstract linguis-
tic elements’, to the arbitrary ‘word’, a ‘simple sign’, a non-instrumental
dimension, an ‘immediacy in abstraction’ together with a specific ‘magic’.
Benjamin does not provide any reasons for this assertion or any clarifica-
tions. This conception of the arbitrariness of the sign appears to be the
presupposition of the abstract arbitrariness of the allegory. Despite its
arbitrary nature, this is not only a ‘simple way of naming’, it represents an
‘expression’34 of itself and is immediately non-instrumental (this means
the discourse of a specific ‘magic’ of the ‘abstract linguistic elements’). It
is the core of various theories of Benjamin’s allegory.35
Giorgio Agamben excludes Benjamin’s concept of language coincid-
ing with that of the Kabbalah, because he is convinced that it has ‘forced
the chains of writing’ and it is a ‘not written but joyfully celebrated’ lan-
guage.36 Yet, as Menninghaus indicates, the many sources of Benjamin’s
thought on the theory of language also include Jakob Böhme and his book
Mysterium Magnum oder Erklärung über das ertse Buch Moses (Mysterium
Magnum: An Exposition of the First Book of Moses called Genesis),
of which an edition dating back to 1730 exists that was distributed in
Germany. In the ‘explanation’ of Genesis a large part is dedicated to the
‘pure language’ and the Adamic language in terms on which Benjamin
draws, almost literally. The tetragrammaton of which Böhme speaks does
not include only the writing, but the name of God as such, his evocation;
it is the reply of the ‘voice’ to the question of Moses on Mount Sinai, in
line with the dual tradition of law: verbal and written.
The story of Genesis in Christian and theosophical terms almost
becomes a morphology of creation.37 The Platonic and Gnostic layout
from which Böhme starts is the common denominator that bonds it to
kabbalistic speculation. Böhme speaks indeed of the separation of one
and the whole in the act of creation, but also of an implicit promise
of apocatastasis. Here, opposing the Scholastic philosophy, the evil, the

‘nothing’, is not declared ‘non-existent’ or ‘insubstantial’, but identified
as a self-limitation of God, his ‘withdrawing’ in the act of the world’s
creation, which implies a ‘recomposition’ as mentioned. Böhme starts
with the canonic distinction between the visible and the invisible world,
between the verifiable materiality and the spirituality of souls. However,
he constantly uses metaphors: ‘Licht’ (light) and ‘Feuer’ (fire) correspond,
with regard to the theory of similarity, to that of Erklärung (explanation)
evoked in the title, contrasted by the Finsterniss (darkness) of ‘nothing-
ness’.38 God is ‘hidden’ in the visible world. Therefore, ‘revealing’ the
‘mystery’ means recognizing its presence in nature. The word and power
of God are hidden in the sensitive and visible elements, they ‘live’ in these
elements and affect the sensitive life and essence of things. The creation
is therefore a Wirkung (effect) of the ‘invisible power of God’. The ‘rever-
sal’ of invisible into visible reminds us of the reversal of theological into
political of Benjamin’s Theological-Political Fragment of 1920.
The creating ‘power’ of God is in some way transmitted to man as a
language:
Thus man has now received ability from the invisible Word of God to the
re-expression: that he again expresses the hidden Word of the divine sci-
ence into formation and severation: in manner and form of the temporal
creatures; and forms this spiritual Word according to animals and vegeta-
bles; whereby the invisible wisdom of God is portrayed and modellised
into several distinct forms: as we plainly see, that the understanding of man
expresses all powers in their property, and gives names unto all things,
according to each thing’s property […].39
Man, repeating the gesture of God, gives a name to things and pro-
nounces the ‘hidden word’ in the forms and in the determination of
things. Therefore, the imitatio Dei is a parody, but it ‘highlights the God
hidden in the world of things’, at least in terms of language, of ‘nomi-
nation’. The name of God, beyond time and nature, creates time and
nature because outside of him there is nothing. Böhme speaks of the
‘Auge des Ungrundes’ (the eye of the groundless) in the self-reduction of
God that, by similarity, reminds us of the tsim-sum of the Kabbalah.40
Yet it also reminds us of the absence of grounds, the ‘groundlessness’ of

which Benjamin speaks in his autobiographical fragment.
However, Agamben touches a decisive point in Benjamin’s theory of
language that makes his concept problematic, at least in this young phase.
It is, in fact, that ‘joyfully celebrated’ that reminds us of a ‘mythical’ con-
cept that clashes with the religious vision.41 It is difficult to understand
of what that ‘magic’ of language actually consists. The fact that God cre-
ated the universe only by naming it may be a ‘mystery’, but defining it
as ‘magic’ means bursting into theology with a whole range of mythical
(or mythical-magical) components that belong to a heuristic system that
clashes with the religious one. As Scholem writes:
The philosophers and theologians were concerned first and foremost with
the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest of all mythical
and anthropomorphic elements. But this determination to defend the
transcendent God against all admixture with myth […] tended to empty
the concept of God. […] The price of God’s purity is the loss of His living
reality. […] The history of Judaism, perhaps to a greater degree than of any
other religion, is the history of the tension between these two factors—
purity and living reality—a tension which has necessarily been heightened
by the special character of Jewish monotheism.42
If, in light of Scholem’s theory, we can state that one of the crucial char-
acteristics of Kabbalists was ‘passing down’ and commenting on a tradi-
tion, which they ‘never wearied of affirming’,43 with the language of the
myth to provide a certain pathos to the religious discourse—in summary,
to pronounce with passion and with ‘warmth’, also with a mystic touch,
the name of God—the worrying aspect of the texts on language written
by the young Benjamin is that they refer explicitly to a ‘Sprachmagie’
(language magic) that is no longer just a question of style. And this
‘magic’ emerges in the definition of the Adamite language too. Adam,
by ‘naming’ animals and objects, translates the language of nature into
the language of men and this is defined by Benjamin as ‘Sprachmagie’.
Böhme in his Mysterium Magnum also refers to magia divina and magia
naturalis, which appear to correspond to the ‘pure language’, therefore to
the divine language and to the Adamite language.44 It is true to say that
Kabbalah as well as theosophy have in common the ancient sources, and

especially Gnosticism, but the special role to be assigned to magic and to
the mythical world (a purely metaphorical or a substantial role) makes
these philosophical discourses drastically different. The ‘divine magic’ of
which Böhme speaks refers to theurgy and the Gnostic doctrine, of neo-
Platonic origin, in particular the Chaldean Oracles by Julian the Chaldean
(second century), also known as the Theurg, which emphasizes the mystic
nature through ‘holy fire’. Böhme sees the operating power of the will
of God (defined as the ‘expressed word’ or ‘engrafted word’, or simply
‘God’s word’) as a ‘magical power’.
Böhme narrates the creation according to the theosophical layout for
which God had created the universe through the four main elements.45
In the act of ‘nomination’ by Adam, Böhme sees a ‘Gleichnis’ (parable),
even if internal to a neo-Platonic concept, but interpreted as a metaphor,
as a vital layout of linguistic expression. That becomes, in the eyes of
Benjamin, the grounds of the allegory.
The divine language, which is able to create, is inaccessible to man and
unexplainable—from here stem the ‘mystery’ and the ‘magic’ to which
the Kabbalists, the mystics and the Romantics refer. It is a deployed lan-
guage and not an exploited one. Therefore the language, representing
the instrument of knowledge, is paradoxically based on the abyss on the
Ungrund, the absence of grounds, the medial ‘immediacy’ of all mental
communication.46 Schweppenhäuser emphasizes the fact that, through
this procedure, Benjamin transforms the paradox not only into a work-
ing method, but also into a theological gesture. Benjamin’s paradoxical
approach to theoretical questions is a method to highlight what appears
to be hidden.47 The ‘magic’ of language is therefore ‘the power of appear-
ance’, the adialectic refusal of the paradox.
What bonds Benjamin to kabbalistic mysticism and theosophy is not
the question of the tetragrammaton as a written or pronounced word,
but the ‘language magic’, which refers to the ‘divine magic’ and ‘natural
magic’ left as ‘splinters’ in the philosophy of language. The echo of this
‘magic’, which is not explained or illustrated but simply ‘evoked’, places
Benjamin once again on the threshold of ‘hermetic’ thought (as defined by
Scholem), but always in the field of religious tradition. Even if Benjamin
sometimes uses mythical and ‘figurative’ language in his writing, he never
aims to claim a mythical or magic interpretation of the world. He draws

on Scholem’s kabbalistic mysticism and uses a mythical language to claim
a theological truth.48 In the same way, his use of Romantic concepts has
to be interpreted as a ‘hidden refusal’. The ‘dual’ step of Benjamin’s think-
ing, which plays with mythical-magical terms, must return to the ‘analog-
ical’ methods of Gert Mattenklott49 and be read in light of the ‘dialectics
of the paradox’ of which Schweppenhäuser speaks.50 The ‘mythical’ words
that emerge in his writings are a ‘metaphorical epithet’,51 an expressive
form to ‘enhance’ the religious discourse, but they do not intend to open
the way to a ‘mythology of modernity’.
Benjamin modifies his reflections on a theory of language by dealing
with the sociolinguistic theories of his time and considering the psycho-
analytic implications of language, so that some critics speak of a first
phase of language theory, tied to a theological conception, and a second
phase, linked to a conception of sociolinguistics and psychoanalysis.52
Sigrid Weigel claims that Benjamin rewrites the concept of language
magic in an anthropological-psychoanalytic context. In fact, Benjamin
writes in 1922–1923 in the Fragment ‘Schemata zum psychophysischen
Problem’ (Schemata on the Psychophysical Problem):
For all living reactivity is bound to the faculty of discrimination

[Differenzierung], the foremost instrument of which is the body. This attri-
bute of the body should be seen as fundamental. The body as a discrimina-
tory instrument [Differenzierungsinstrument] of vital reaction, and only the
body, can simultaneously be understood in terms of its psychic animation.
All psychic activity can be differentiatedly localized in the body, as the
anthroposophy of the ancients attempted to set out, for example in the
analogy of body and macrocosm. One of the most important determinants
of the body’s differentiatedness [Differenziertheit] is perception.53
The transformation of existence into writing can be understood as a kind

of translation brought about through the figure of reversal. Baudelaire’s
approach to the metropolis in the Parisian Scenes becomes a key to ‘read-
ing’ the city, in which translation has a central role. The literary repre-
sentation of the urban landscape and its continuous changes, according
to the model of Baudelaire, imposes the need to write a ‘pre-history of
the modern’, but also to write the story of the origin of those images
that were used to write this changing of the modern city, and then to
use the Bildraum (image space) and also write a story of dream images.
The analogy between Freud and Benjamin consists in writing dreams,
‘whereby the readability and decipherability of this writing are conceptu-
alized in analogy to the language of the unconscious as conceived in psy-
choanalysis’.54 As Weigel claims: ‘This model of writing corresponds to a
topographical concept of memory which sees the visible signs as mnemic
symbols, as the products of a psychic process [Bearbeitung], and as dis-
torted representations—as a form of writing, then, in which the memory
traces are never visible unmediatedly and in their entirety.’55 Therefore
The Arcades Project, the representation of Paris as model of modernity, can
be understood as a translation into the ‘language of men’ of the fictive
language of urban things and of anthropological figures springing from
image space; namely, ‘mnemic symbols’, memory traces that are never
visible unmediatedly.
In both the phases of formulating his theory of language, Benjamin
considers translation, in both the theological and the ‘profane’ sense, as a
central act. Weigel and McFarland emphasize the provisional nature and
inadequacy of translation, which is always doomed to fail.56 McFarland
stresses the historical distance between original text and translation,
and speaks of anachronism, which makes impossible a perfect reversal
to another language and forces an updating of the text that is always
an interpretation.57 So it seems that in the mature phase of Benjamin’s
thinking, his theory of language was subjected to secularization. In this
context, Weigel’s thesis that links Benjamin’s theory of language to the
body seems very interesting. The language magic consists in no immedi-
ate visibility of unconscious elements in the linguistic formulation, in
the production of symbols (in a Lacanian sense) that make it necessary
to decipher the language that refers to something else, to something
extra-linguistic ‘written’ into the past of the speaker, in its physicality,
expressed through dream images. It is a translation from the language
of impulse into the language of consciousness, from the language of
dreams into the language of awakening. The writings of a philosopher
become critical thinking, whose task is ‘the differentiation of truth from
myth’.58
(Translated by Alessia Pandolfi)
Notes
1. GS, I.3, p. 901 s.
2. See: Irving Wohlfarth, Riabilitazione di Benjamin? Per un’autocritica,
in, Lucio Belloi – Lorenzina Lotti (ed.), Walter Benjamin. Tempo,storia,
linguaggio, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1983, pp. 239–243.
3. See Gerhard Richter (ed.), Benjamin’s Ghosts, Stanford University
Press, Stanford 2002.
4. See on this topic: Mauro Ponzi, Hidden Refusal. Name and
Sprachmagie in Benjamin’s Theory of Language, in ‘Rivista Italiana di
Filosofia del Linguaggio’ ISSN: 2036-6728, vol. 8, n. 2. (2014)
http://www.rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/article/view/234.
5. ‘It is presented to the translator as a sealed treasure chest (the theo-
retical papers of Benjamin are difficult, sometimes even impossible
to understand) that may even contain a magical key. On the other
hand, for those examining the most influential document that states
the final defeat of the translator’ (Johann Drumbl, L’idea di traduzi-
one in Benjamin, in Johann Drumbl, Traduzione e scrittura, LED,
Milano 2003, p. 29) Own translation.
6. Hermann Schweppenhäuser insists on the paradox as a typical pro-
cedure of Benjamin’s. See: Hermann Sweppenhäuser, Nome / Logos /
Espressione. Elementi della teoria benjaminiana della lingua, in Lucio
Belloi – Lorenzina Lotti (ed.), Walter Benjamin, p. 53.
7. Ulrich Welbers, Sprachpassagen. Walter Benjamins verborgene
Sprachwissenschaft, Fink, München 2009.
8. Exodus 20:1–17.
9. ‘When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave
him the two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed
by the finger of God’ (Exodus 31:18).
10. ‘Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accor-
dance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with
Israel”’ (Exodus 34:27).
11. See: Bernd Witte, Jüdische Tradition und literarische Moderne, Hanser,
München 2007.
12. See Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, Hanser, München-
Wien 2003.
13. Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator in SW 1, p. 255.

14. SW 1, p. 259.
15. Ibd., p. 260.
16. Ibd., p. 260.
17. Ibd., p. 261.
18. ‘Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point—estab-
lishing, with this touch rather than with the point, the law according
to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity—a transla-
tion touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point
of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the
laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux’ (ibid., p. 261).
19. ‘Les grand ciels qui font rêver d’éternité’ (OC, 1, 82). In the English
version of the Oxford World’s Classic there is no reference to ‘eter-
nity’, a concept that is instead present in the original French text:
‘The great, inspiring skies, magnificent and vast’ (FE, 167).
20. FE, 7. ‘Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon ‘frère’ (OC, I, 3).
21. FE, 5.
22. Ibid.
23. OC, II, 18. Own translation. This term is used once more in the
Journaux intimes. Ibid., vol. I, p. 658.
24. FE, 19.
25. ‘Il y a dans le mot, dans le verbe quelque chose de sacré qui nous
défend d’en faire un jeu de hasard’ (OC, II, 117 s.). Own
translation.
26. See OC, 31.
27. Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1980, p. 44.
28. Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,
in SW 1, p. 64.
29. Winfried Menninghaus, p. 52.
30. See SW 1, p. 261.
31. See SW 1, p. 71; see also Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, Verso, London-New York 2003, p. 233 s.
32. Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,
in SW 1, p. 71.
33. See: Winfried Menninghaus, p. 52.
34. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 31.
35. See: Winfried Menninghaus, p. 47.
36. ‘While the mystic and insignificant character of the name of God is
connected, in the Kabbala, as in the grammar version, his being con-
stituted in pure letters, Benjamin specifically affirms that the lan-
guage of redeemed humanity “has forced the chains of writing” and
is a language “not written but joyfully celebrated”. Writing this that
has never been written of the kabbalistic method is contrasted with
reading something that has never been written’ (Giorgio Agamben,
Lingua e storia. Categorie linguistiche e categorie storiche nel pensiero di
Walter Benjamin, in Lucio Belloi – Lorenzina Lotti (ed.), Walter
Benjamin, p. 77), own translation. See also Giorgio Agamben,
Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience, Verso, London-
New York 1993.
37. Jacob Böhme, Mysterium Magnum. An Exposition of the First Book of
Moses called Genesis (1656), trans. by John Sparrow, reissued London
1960, part I, Author’s preface 6, p. 2.
38. ‘When we consider the visible world with its essence, and consider
the life of the creatures, then we find therein the likeness of the invis-
ible spiritual world, which is hidden in the visible world, as the soul
in the body; and see thereby that the hidden God is nigh unto all,
and through all; and yet wholly hidden to the visible essence’ (Jacob
Böhme, Mysterium Magnum I, 1).
39. Jacob Böhme, Mysterium Magnum I, Author’s preface 6, p. 2.
40. ‘Perhaps there is no other more significant example of this same dia-
lectic than the religion of Jacob Böhme, whose affinity with the
world of Kabbalism was noted by his earliest adversaries but, strange
to say, has been forgotten by the more recent writers on Böhme’
(Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Schocke
Books, New York, 1965, p. 99).
41. ‘The original religious impulse in Judaism, which found its valid
expression in the ethical monotheism of the Prophets of Israel and its
conceptual formulation in the Jewish philosophy and religion of the
Middle Ages, has always been characterized as a reaction to mythol-
ogy. In opposition to the pantheistic unity of God, cosmos and man
in myth, in opposition to the nature myths of the Near-Eastern
religions, Judaism aimed at a radical separation of the three realms;

and, above all, the gulf between the Creator and His creature was
regarded as fundamentally unbridgeable. Jewish worship implied a
renunciation, indeed a polemical rejection, of the images and sym-
bols in which the mythical world finds its expressions’ (Ibid., p. 88).
42. Ibid., pp. 88–89.
43. ‘In its first and crucial impulse the Kabbalah was a mythical reaction
in realms which monotheistic thinking had with the utmost diffi-
culty wrested from myth. Or in other words: the lives and actions of
the Kabbalists were a revolt against a world which consciously they
never wearied of affirming. And this of course led to deep-seated
ambiguities’ (Ibid., p. 98).
44. Jacob Böhme, Mysterium Magnum, II, chap. 35, 3, p. 6. ‘Divine
magic’ and ‘natural magic’ in the English translation.
45. See: Raymond Klibansky – Erwin Panofsky – Fritz Saxl, Saturn and
melancholy. Studies in the history of natural philosophy, religion, and
art, Nelson, London 1964.
46. See Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man, p. 64.
47. ‘Benjamin leads us to the edge of this abyss—a paradox that is mis-
interpreted. The immediate is mediation (the “medium”) and (dia-
lectically) unrecognised as such (not dialectically) “magic”. This
phenomenon of communication leads us right to the paradox, unless
we undertake the following point of view, intricate and distorted:
there is nothing for us that is so paradoxical that through this para-
dox does not become perfectly clear. The power of appearance that
can only be broken with difficulty reigns: the magical power that
determines that logic’ (Hermann Sweppenhäuser, Nome / Logos /
Espressione, p. 53). Own translation.
48. ‘The first point to be mentioned in this connection is the conflict
between conceptual thinking and symbolic thinking, which gives the
literature and history of the Kabbalah their unique character.
Beginning with its earliest literary documents, the Kabbalah
expressed itself essentially in images, often distinctly mythical in
content’ (Gershom Scholem On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism,
p. 96).
49. See: Gerald Funk – Gert Mattenklott – Michael Pauen (ed.), Ästhetik
des Ähnlichen. Zur Poetik und Kunstphilosophie der Moderne, Fischer,
Frankfurt a. M. 2001.
50. See: Hermann Sweppenhäuser, Nome / Logos / Espressione, in Lucio
Belloi – Lorenzina Lotti (ed.), Walter Benjamin, pp. 49–64.
51. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl. by
John Osborn, Verso, London-New York 1998, p 31. John Osborn
translates ‘metaphor’, but Benjamin wrote ‘methaphorisches
Epitheton’; see: GS I.1, p. 211.
52. Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin,
Routledge, London- New York 1996.
53. GS VI, 81–2. See Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space, p. 23.
54. Ibid., p. 117.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., p. 112.
New York 2013, pp. 211–218.
58. Howard Eiland – Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical
p. 166.
6
The Dream Space
1 Aragon: Myth and Modernity

Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris acted as a model for Walter Benjamin’s work
on Paris, a veritable template on which to build his Arcades Project. It is
known that Benjamin read the novel in the mid-1920s and that he was
very impressed by it.1 In a letter to Adorno that accompanied his exposé
(31 May 1935), Benjamin describes the chain of events that led him
to working on his new book on Paris: ‘I believe I did so in the way I
persevered with this project. It opens with Aragon—the paysan de Paris.
Evenings, lying in bed, I could never read more than two to three pages
by him because my heart started to pound so hard that I had to put
the book down.’2 However, it should be noted that the influence of this
novel does not limit itself to indicating the arcades as an allegory of the
modern era, but goes well beyond this fact. All (or almost all) the themes
that Benjamin lists in the various exposés of The Arcades Project are pres-
ent in Aragon’s book. Moreover, Benjamin quite frankly states that it is
a reference point for his work. If we add to this the fact that Benjamin
indicated that Surrealism was one of the paradigmatic examples of the
art of the ‘modern’, then we find in Aragon’s novel not only the starting

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_6
point for Benjamin’s final work, but a real model on which he built part
of the Project itself.3
In Pariser Passagen II, which represents the more developed phase of
the schema on which the book would have been based, Benjamin writes:
The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade. Dada, when
the two first met, was already old. At the end of 1919, Aragon and Breton,
out of antipathy to Montparnasse and Montmartre, transferred the site of
their meetings with friends to a cafe in the Passage de l’Opera. Construction
of the Boulevard Haussmann brought about the demise of the Passage de
l’Opera. Louis Aragon devoted 135 pages to this arcade; in the sum of these
three digits hides the number nine—the number of muses who presided as
midwives at the birth of Surrealism. These stalwart muses are named
Ballhorn, Lenin, Luna, Freud, Mors, Marlitt, and Citroen. A provident
reader will make way for them all, as discreetly as possible, wherever they
are encountered in the course of these lines. In Paysan de Paris, Aragon
conducts as touching a requiem for this arcade as any man has ever con-
ducted for the mother of his son. It is there to be read, but here one should
expect no more than a physiology and, to be blunt, an autopsy of these
parts of the capital city of Europe, parts that could not be more mysterious
or more dead.4
It is as if Benjamin wanted to provide a conceptual and ‘critical’ struc-

ture of what Aragon had largely written in novel form. In fact, rereading
Le paysan de Paris reveals the correspondences between the processes of
Aragon and Benjamin. The part of Aragon’s novel entitled ‘Le passage de
l’Opéra’ is, of course, the part that contains the most obvious elements,
having influenced Benjamin in his formulation of the ‘phantasmagoria
of the arcades’. The experience of the ‘passage de l’Opéra’, represented
by Aragon in this part of the novel, is of course a prototype of expe-
rience, which Benjamin used widely in his book on Paris. However,
the correspondences between the processes of Aragon and Benjamin are
deeper precisely because of the common poetological assumptions (of the
avant-garde) that united the two authors. These deeper similarities are,
of course, more interesting and decisive than the simple (and all in all,
predictable) ‘discovery’ of the passages as an allegorical place or epochal
‘signal’ of the modern.
It is true, as Lindner notes, that some of the differences are observable

in this particular field (first of all is the conception of ‘myth’).5 However,
it is equally true that the similarities, in particular the productive impli-
cations, are very deep. For example, both authors sought to provide the
‘experience of modernity’ with a ‘response’: a literarily productive response
that departs from the phantasmagorical image of reality, in order to ‘over-
come it’ in a ‘surreal’ and fictitious vision. The ‘passage’ that links the two
authors is therefore attributable to the utopia/avant-garde pairing. Even
if Benjamin tried—through an effort that is decidedly Nietzschean—to
provide a representation of the passages and the metropolis that contains
in itself their ephemeral character, that as an allegory of continual change
is destined to dissolve into nothingness. And the arcade represents exactly
this change, this ‘transition’ into something else, while maintaining the
memory of the ‘has-been’.6
These ‘Aragonian’ elements, of which we can see glimpses in the work
of Benjamin, are mainly in the Préface à une mythologie moderne, precisely
where Aragon illustrates his ‘mythological’ interpretation key of the era,
which ultimately differs from that of Benjamin. In the first pages of the
book, Aragon questions the nature of the certainty of reality, based on
Cartesian evidence, and speaks of ‘fugitive reality’.7 This ‘dark side’ of
reality could be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms, as Aragon partly
does at the end of the novel, but could also be interpreted as a ‘hidden
cause’. There is no doubt that Benjamin pulls together the phantasmago-
ria of the objects, present in the arcades, in order to grasp the ‘dark side’,
to shine a light on the mysterious and ‘hidden meaning’ that the presence
of these objects ‘reveals’ only to the eye of the collector, to those who are
not fooled by deceptive appearances.8 This assumption of Aragon that
the principle of evidence is deceptive is partly the start of the discovery of
the ‘civilization of images’ that was first explained in the ‘images of cities’,
which will then locate a systematization (as an attempt at epochal repre-
sentation) of the Benjaminian ‘phantasmagorie chosiste’ concept.9
In the chapter entitled ‘Le passage de l’Opéra’, we find a series of
themes that will be picked up on (and developed) by Benjamin, starting
from the same ‘place’ as a highly significant topos. Aragon in fact writes
that in the passages ‘regne bizarrement la lumière moderne’ (modern light
reigns oddly), therefore anticipating the concept of phantasmagoria and
the epochal value—as a place in which the trends of the time appear alle-
gorically—of Parisian buildings made of iron and glass. The Aragonian
journey within the arcades is almost a guide to Benjaminian themes: fash-
ion, prostitution, attention to labels and inscriptions, objects stacked in
shops, the shouting of the crowd, the pleasure of the promenade and so
on.10 Even the underlying relationship between Paris and Berlin, which
was certainly developed more widely by Benjamin regarding memory and
the childhood urban experience, is present in Aragon as an indication of
the analogy of rooms as ‘places of passage’.11 The ‘maison de passe’ is also a
synonym for brothel; so results a further analogy with the motif of pros-
titution that in Benjamin is closely connected with that of gaming. Then
the analogy of the room as a ‘place of passage’ is also linked in Aragon’s
work to memory and the recall of a structural analogy between the two
big cities, which of course in Aragon remains ‘exterior’ (two manifesta-
tions of modernity), while in Benjamin it becomes ‘interior’: his Berlin
‘experience’ is loaded with memories and implications that cannot be
compared to those of a short ‘passage’ of Aragon.
Aragon tries to interpret the signals of the arcades starting with their
exterior forms, which are fashion, objects, billboards, hidden secrets in
the shops and the apartments. All of this corresponds individually with
the desire to ‘lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a for-
est’, which Benjamin mentions in Berlin Childhood.12 Indeed, one might
say that Le paysan de Paris is nothing other than a ‘manual’ with which
to orient oneself in the arcades, not so much as an architectural struc-
ture, rather more as a topos of modernity. Aragon’s narration strays into a
mythology of modernity, which leads directly to the dream space. Even
if the ultimate goal of the two authors is no longer as symmetrical as
the introductions—Aragon wants to achieve a literary effect through the
erosion of the boundaries between dream and reality, while Benjamin
wants to search for the remote causes of phantasmagoria, and to write
its ‘prehistory’—nevertheless we can find a similar impact with this topos
of the arcades, which is combined with the labyrinth archetype, and, of
course, with its direct (and allegorical) relationship with the metropolis.
In fact, Aragon sees the metropolis as a labyrinth of signals and talks of
a ‘labyrinth’, of the ‘error’ of an ‘eternal fall’, in euphoric prose in which
Nietzschean tones are echoed.13 As Weigel emphasizes: ‘The labyrinth
thus is a dialectical image par excellence. In the medium of recollection—

in the retrospective view of the has-been, in reversal as the direction of
study—the transformation of existence into writing is accomplished.’14
The end of the first part of the novel contains a whole series of concepts
and keywords—the modern, the labyrinth, the fall, the threshold and so
on—which Benjamin would then go on to use in his Arcades Project. It
should be noted, however, that in this hallucinated vision, Aragon identifies
himself with the spirit of modernity up to becoming a part of the phantas-
magoria, which is the most complete and significant expression of himself.
Although Aragon clearly understands the destructive aspects of his topos, he
allows himself to be carried into a state of euphoria that is at the same time
self-destructive and productive from a literary point of view. This ultimately
can be attributable to Nietzsche’s Dionysian element. In doing so, Aragon
accepts the oneiric implications of the vision of the arcades, up to making
an interpretative parameter through the creation of a new mythology.
Now it is true that in his project Benjamin strives to differentiate
himself from Aragon and the Surrealists, because he does not accept the
oneiric dimension as result of the phantasmagorical epiphany, nor does
he want to use myth as an interpretative key to understand the mod-
ern era. However, Benjamin tries to ‘unearth’ the hidden meanings in
appearances by fully utilizing the Aragonian ‘places’. One could argue, by
applying Scholem’s famous thesis to this problem, that Benjamin episte-
mologically performs the same operation that the Kabbalists had tried to
achieve by way of Jewish mystique: namely, wanting to define (and here is
the problem of the ‘word’ having a decisive role) the mystical experience
with the language of myth. The Kabbalists’ intention therefore consists
of using pagan language to describe the vision of God.15 Similarly, in
his own way, Benjamin seeks to capture the spirit of the modern era,
by using surrealist language and experiences; however, without accepting
it, without stopping himself within the oneiric element, without recog-
nizing himself in modernity, but by trying to overcome it in a utopian
escape through radical criticism. So Benjamin has taken on the inherent
tension in Jewish mystique (particularly Kabbalah) and included it in
his own methodological apparatus. More precisely, he has addressed the
‘conflict between conceptual-discursive thought and figurative-symbolic
thought’, bringing it to its extreme consequence.16
Benjamin describes the experience of modernity with the language of

the modern, with the language of those who are more sensitive to the
significant ‘signs’ (i.e. the language of the authors of the avant-garde and
in particular the Surrealists), although without sharing in the euphoria.17
He seeks to criticize the modern through its language; and thereby high-
lights especially the centrifugal tendencies of modernity and its destruc-
tive character. His process is above all a ‘passage’ from a phantasmagorical
vision to an, all in all, exhaustive and definitive representation of the
experience of ‘modernity’. And this is why he is involved in analysing its
‘prehistory’, that time in which the instruments and ‘forms’ of modernity
were formed and determined, from both a conceptual and a structural
point of view. Tearing out the contradiction and making it ‘explode’ in
its radicalism means for Benjamin, making use of Nietzsche’s thinking,
‘dealing with things at the root, and understanding them at their source’.
It would therefore be in vain to give priority to one of the poles of the
contradictions at the heart of which Benjamin is placed. He did not wish
to carry out a process of synthesis, but instead sought a risky conceptual
process played out through the tension between elements in extreme con-
tradiction to one another. Benjamin’s ‘enlightenment’ is really ‘profane’:
his is not a mystical experience, a moment of contact, albeit instanta-
neously, with God; his is an experience that is completely material, a
contact with the phantasmagoria of objects; it is an experience with the
objects of the modern. And his effort is directed at grasping the epochal
meaning of this phantasmagoria. Benjamin cannot and does not want to
escape from the underlying contradiction, which consists of wanting to
provide a full and exhaustive interpretation of the modern at the moment
in which it is recognized that its characteristic consists of presenting just
fragments of reality; indeed, in fragmenting reality up to such a point that
it is destroyed. Hence there is a need for a ‘conceptual-narrative’ form
that makes use of an essentially allegorical apparatus, which, in turn, can
only express itself through ‘enlightenments’. The modern can be under-
stood only if its destructive nature is highlighted.18 This can be evidenced
by the conceptual production of a work that uses the ‘appearances’ of
modernity, uses its own language, but in such a way as to undermine its
communicative ability, or better, in such a way as to highlight the crisis of
its expressive capabilities. This crisis can only be highlighted by increasing
the tension between contradictions, taking them to their extremes; that

is, making the most of the expressive capabilities of language itself. For
the communicative system, this means the expressive capacity implied
in objects. This entire process accelerates the destructive characteristic of
the modern, up to the point of a complete interruption and the apoca-
lyptic explosion that ‘anticipates’, only slightly, the catastrophe to which
modernity leads.
From this point of view, it is certainly true that Benjamin differenti-
ates himself from Aragon and the Surrealists, but it is equally true that he
fully utilizes language; that is, the entire allegorical-figurative apparatus.
In this sense, underlining the ‘capture’ of an expressive apparatus is more
important than underlining the differences in perspective, as the two
processes are substantially different. It should be remembered that, from
a formal and technical-compositional point of view, both The Arcades
Project and Le paysan de Paris are founded on the principle of a montage
of heterogeneous materials. Indeed, paradoxically for Benjamin, there we
have almost exclusively these heterogeneous materials that should have
been ‘mounted’ between them. The technique of montage is the artistic
avant-garde’s technique par excellence; Benjamin also uses the system of
signs of the highest artistic expression of the modern era.
Aragon, for example, tries to ‘see’ in the daily life of the arcades those
signals that can be traced to an interpretative epochal parameter.19 He is
against the rationality that presides over the modern world—and in this
he is himself an exponent of the internal contradiction of the ‘modern’.
On the one hand Aragon is the expression of constructivist euphoria, in
this case with strong ‘futuristic’ components, but on the other he goes
in search of myth, of the archetype, which is stretched to fit the experi-
ence of modernity, with its psychological and psychoanalytic implications.
Aragon’s process shows an analogy, on a literary level, with what Benjamin,
although pursuing other goals, wanted to achieve on a critical level.
That Le paysan de Paris, as the author states, is in some way a ‘thresh-
old’ is demonstrated by Aragon’s attitude towards machinery, an attitude
loaded with ambivalence, which exceeds futurist euphoria and casts a
shadow over the exaltation of progress, underlining that ‘dark side’ to
which he alluded at the beginning of the book: ‘Man has delegated his
activity to machines—he writes—and he has separated himself from
the faculty of thinking.’20 Here Aragon’s paradox goes well beyond the
Surrealist claim that machines are capable of thinking and imposing
their thoughts on humans, in a kind of tragic automatism that causes the
control of modern society’s development to get out of hand. In the era
of computer science, Aragon’s affirmation has lost every one of its para-
doxical and provocative aspects. Yet his comments regarding speed as a
threshold, as a tangible limit between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, are reflected
in Stefan Zweig’s statements. The acceleration imposed by the ‘modern’
was significant enough to change structurally the relationship with the
‘world of yesterday’.21 In other words, the increase in the speed of every-
day life is a characteristic of the modern, inextricably linked to machines.
This involves imposing a sudden acceleration on an individual’s lifetime,
in order to ‘bend’ the same time, to overcome the continuum.
Moreover, as Jacques Leenhardt says, Benjamin unites Aragon with
Surrealism in the course of his general critique, by sometimes compro-
mising his position to that of Breton’s.22 Aragon perceives the destructive
element of modernity, grasping the apocalyptic promise, albeit in a vision-
ary context: ‘A taste of disaster was in the air. It wetted he dyed the life:
in this modern time, this function of duration took an accent that will
soon seem singular, and somehow inexplicable.’23 Aragon halts himself
on the threshold of this inexplicability, of this ‘dark side’, limiting him-
self merely to grasping the literary worth of stupor, of shock, of mystery;
while Benjamin instead seeks to explain what is apparently inexplicable.
The last part of the novel, ‘Le songe du villain’, addresses, albeit in para-
doxical terms, the problem of metaphysics. The advanced hypothesis—
namely that Benjamin’s project had Aragon’s novel as its ‘template’—is
confirmed by the fact that, by examining the various exposés, it can be
seen that Benjamin at least follows the basic ‘topographic’ path of Le
paysan de Paris. The arcades can be viewed as a phantasmagoria of the
most disparate objects: fashion, prostitution, gambling, which can all be
interpreted as allegories of the modern era, as phenomena from which
a sense of the whole epoch can be gained, confrontation with the very
notion of modernity and its destructive and catastrophic character, and
finally ‘metaphysical’ escape, which in Aragon is a refusal of philosophi-
cal tradition and in Benjamin is the utopian construction of ‘passages par
les astres’.
2 Awakening
Benjamin obsessively tried to distinguish his own work from that of the
Surrealists. In The Arcades Project there often appears the same annotation
(with small differences in tone), on which literary criticism has focused.24
Collected under the heading ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of
Progress’, the following is noted:
Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon:

whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to
find the constellation of awakening. While in Aragon there remains an
impressionistic element, namely the ‘mythology’ (and this impressionism
must be held responsible for the many vague philosophemes in his book),
here it is a question of the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of his-
tory. That, of course, can happen only through the awakening of a not-yet-
conscious knowledge of what has been.25
As usual, Benjamin’s annotation is ambiguous, in the sense that he criti-

cizes Aragon’s position and proposes alternatives in opposite and con-
tradictory directions. However, this is not entirely surprising. Benjamin
wants to overcome Surrealism by increasing its internal tension. The
‘insufficiency’ of Aragon’s position (and Surrealism’s in general) is identi-
fied in the mythological element, defined as being ‘impressionistic’—for
an author of the avant-garde this is verging on being insulting—and in
the oneiric element.
The mythological key is, according to Benjamin, an insufficient inter-
pretative key, because it is linked to the oneiric element and because it
is not capable of resolving the ‘inexplicability’ of visible phenomena in
current society. Then on the one hand, there is a recall of a sort of histori-
cal consciousness of the past, that desire to shed light on remote causes,
which leads him to take an interest in the ‘prehistory’ of the already exist-
ing (the Paris of the Second Empire, more precisely); on the other hand,
the critique of the oneiric element is motivated by highlighting expres-
sive weaknesses, so by a critique of that allegorical-formal apparatus that
underpins the artistic process. Aragon’s error—that ‘erreur’ evoked in Le
Paysan de Paris—consists in stopping within the forest of oneiric sym-
bols, allowing oneself to be carried away by the euphoria of the visions

and accepting that they are inexplicable, without searching for the origin:
Energies of repose (of tradition) which carry over from the nineteenth cen-
tury. Transposed historical forces of tradition. What would the nineteenth
century be to us if we were bound to it by tradition? How would it look as
religion or mythology? We have no tactile [taktisch] relation to it. That is,
we are trained to view things, in the historical sphere, from a romantic
distance. To account for the directly transmitted inheritance is important.
But it is still too early, for example, to form a collection. Concrete, materi-
alistic deliberation on what is nearest is now required. ‘Mythology’ as
Aragon says, drives things back into the distance. Only the presentation of
what relates to us, what conditions us, is important. The nineteenth cen-
tury—to borrow the Surrealists’ terms—is the set of noises that invades our
dream, and which we interpret on awaking.26
However, the opposition that Benjamin very clearly makes between

dream and awakening opens the way for a series of very indicative values,
which in turn move in different directions to one another. In fact, it is
clearly an allusion to Proust and to the topos with which La Recherche du
temps perdu begins; that is, waking from sleep and considering the causes
of dreams. This allusion also takes into account the complex problems
of memory, which introduces in turn the theme of childhood, the past
that has to be saved from oblivion, and the Paris–Berlin relationship. The
theme of awakening also arises in relation to a linguistic constellation
(even then an allegorical-formal apparatus) taken from Jewish mysticism.
Benjamin means that mythology can be the language of art and criticism,
the allegorical expression of a philosophical discourse, but not an inter-
pretative key of modernity. This awakening is also an act that throws light
on the ‘dark side’, an act undertaken by those who seek to understand
that which seems inexplicable, by those who wish to go beyond appear-
ances, to the root of things. On the one hand there is a reminder of the
awareness of the past and on the other, a programme of destruction of
the historical continuum. Benjamin basically wants to deny that vaguely
Jungian relationship between the dream space and the archetype; that
is, he seeks to reject the mythologizing of oneiric forms as an epochal
interpretative key.
His specific proposal seems, at least from this fragment, to consist of

the binding of the dream, the Traumbild (dream image), firstly to the
memory (with all the implications of childhood that the psychoanalytic
components reintroduce) and secondly to the social, the Traumkitsch
(oneiric kitsch), to the fact that even the collective imagination is popu-
lated by objects, forms, imaginaries, which come from the market, from
the phantasmagoria of wares. It is noteworthy, however, that the note
immediately following the one quoted, in which Benjamin distances
himself from Aragon, is a reminder of the technique of montage, which
then acts as a reminder of the avant-garde process.27
In another note on the theme of dreams, Benjamin reiterates his differ-
ence of opinion in regard to Aragon:
The doctrine of natural dream of Freud. Dream as a historical phenome-

non. Opposition to Aragon: permeate all this with the dialectics of awak-
ening, and not to be lulled, tired, into ‘dream’ or ‘mythology’. What are the
sounds of the awakening morning, we included in our dreams? ‘Ugliness’,
the ‘old-fashioned’ are merely distorted morning voices talking of our
childhood.28
Benjamin’s ‘correction’ moves in different directions: on the one hand

there is the relationship between dream and infancy, inspired by Freud,
but integrated by a strong ‘Proustian’ element, which in turn develops a
double significance: that of the ‘memoire involontaire’—which will play a
vital role in the shock of the urban experience (Stadterfahrung)—and that
of a literary reduction of this theme, which involves differences in the
process of montage towards the Surrealists’ solutions. On the other hand,
it is an explicit critique of the mythology of the modern.29
A synopsis of Benjamin’s annotations on the problem of the dream
gives us clear indications about the development of all of the elements
that would have facilitated the drafting of the book, including the
‘overcoming’ of the Surrealist position, mired in oneiric hallucination.
In the crucial chapter of the materials for The Arcades Project entitled
‘Erkenntnistheoretisches’ (On the Theory of Knowledge), Benjamin
resumes his reflections regarding the dream–awakening–memory group
of problems, specifying his conception of the past, of the ‘has-been’: In
the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always,
simultaneously, “what has been from time immemorial”. As such, how-
ever, it is manifest, on each occasion, only in a quite specific epoch;
namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this
particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian
takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation’.30
The direction of Benjamin’s critique of Surrealism therefore becomes
clear: the desire to interpret the meaning of dreams within an oneiric
context is not sufficient to grasp the meaning of a historical era. To
achieve this, it is necessary to shed light on the origins of the past and
on the ‘social’ implications of dreams. Only at the moment in which ‘the
interpreter of dreams’ asks how those oneiric forms are determined does
he become a ‘historian’.
Benjamin does not interpret das Gewesene (the has-been) as the tradi-
tional historical process of understanding, as we would say today in ‘his-
toricist’ terms, but rather as a complex process that revealed, in ‘the era
that is before our eyes’, those objects, those images, that populate both
everyday reality and the imaginary.31
In summary, the dream is firstly connected to the subject’s history,
its individual past, hence the importance of childhood, as the epoch in
which the structures of experience originate; secondly, it is linked to the
origins of the current historical era, to the ‘prehistory of the modern’. In
an article published in the Neue Rundschau in 1927 under the title ‘Gloss
on Surrealism’, but entitled Traumkitsch (Dream Kitsch) in the manu-
script, Benjamin argues that ‘the history of the dream remains to be writ-
ten’.32 The Arcades Project was therefore intended to be an archaeological
reconstruction of the origins of the ‘forms’ of the modern, not only of
material forms, but also of the forms of the image space (Bildraum); and,
in this sense, it was intended to be a history of the origins of oneiric
images. These are linked to social issues not only in economic terms, but
also in expressive terms. In Pariser Passagen I Benjamin in fact writes:
The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always

identical and always new. The sensation of the newest and most modern is,
in fact, as much a dream formation of events as the ‘eternal return of the
same’. The perception of space that corresponds to this perception of time
is superposition. Now, as these formations dissolve within the enlightened

consciousness, political-theological categories arise to take their place. And
it is only within the purview of these categories, which bring the flow of
events to a standstill, that history forms, at the interior of this How, as
crystalline constellation. The economic conditions under which a society
exists not only determine that society in its material existence and ideologi-
cal superstructure; they also come to expression. In the case of one who
sleeps, an overfull stomach does not find its ideological superstructure in
the contents of the dream—and it is exactly the same with the economic
conditions of life for the collective. It interprets these conditions; it explains
them. In the dream, they find their expression; in the awakening, their
interpretation. (See S2, 1 and K2, 5)33
The images that populate the oneiric world are thus partly linked to the
Gewesene (has-been) of the individual and partly to the social process. The
medium between these two poles is provided by the collective imagina-
tion, even if this is determined by social forms. The figures of the dream
are neither abstract nor eternal—from this stems the rejection of myth
as the interpretive key—but are in some way historically determined.
Dream images have their bodily component; that is, they come from the
experience and from the imaginary of the ego, from the lived or desired
impulses by the subject.34 Yet that reservoir of images from which arise
oneiric images is also populated by collective images, which are common
to the social and cultural community in which the dreaming subject lives.
The dream space is full of images derived from advertising and new media
(at the time of Benjamin, the cinema). The difficult readability of dreams,
the need to decipher their system of signs, is caused by the fact that they
use a language partly deriving from the experiences and impulses of the
dreaming subject, partly from the collective heritage of images. This dual
origin makes the language of the unconscious increasingly enigmatic.
Writing a history of dreams means writing a grammar of oneiric images.
In this sense we can see a parallelism between the procedures of Benjamin
and Freud: both want to decipher the symbolic language of dreams, Freud
for a therapeutic purpose, Benjamin to understand the mechanisms of
language in cultural and artistic communication and in the general com-
munication of modernity.
So the ‘has-been’ cannot just be used as a phantasmagoria in which

one loses oneself, but should be interpreted, or ‘read’, in some way.35 In
the course of this ‘browsing through the book of what has happened’,
of this reading of the past in order to understand the present reality,
Benjamin favours—allegorically—the moment of ‘awakening’ rather
than ‘sleep’ itself. Proust’s experience then returns to be the focal point of
his discourse. These annotations are included and classified by Benjamin
himself, by means of that complicated system of letters and numbers that
characterizes his collection of notes and materials. The annotations fol-
low on from one another, in a way emphasizing the need for continuity
of discourse in order to develop a central theme.36
On the one hand Benjamin’s intention to take on the role of the ‘histo-
rian’, his aim to write a history of the modern age, becomes ever clearer;
on the other, he pinpoints his methodological premise. Writing history
means waking up, overcoming appearances and getting rid of the past.
So interpreting the key trends of ‘the era that is before our eyes’ means
reconstructing its prehistory, not to remain prisoners in it, but to get rid
of it. Hence the allegorical function of the awakening situation preferred
largely to the (passive) dream situation. This ‘getting rid of the past’, in
which the echo of Goethe’s maxim can be heard,37 does not yet mean
removing what has happened; rather, it assumes the meaning of ‘sav-
ing’ the past. This saving of what has been is only obtained by making
its hidden meanings productive. This entails knowledge of the processes
that have determined the past, recognizing the places and the images that
have characterized early childhood, leaving the ‘forest of symbols’ behind
and ‘awakening’ to a cognitive process. There is no doubt that Benjamin’s
process was intended to have a gnoseological value. In order to under-
stand the present, its ‘prehistory’ must first be known. Therefore, if the
nineteenth century is undoubtedly the century in which the ‘modern’ was
born and formed, this complex and differentiated gnoseological process,
which Benjamin wants to put in motion, has as its main goal the under-
standing of the modern era’s mechanisms and ipso facto throws away any
presuppositions in order to highlight its destructive nature.38 The archae-
ology of Benjamin can be defined as an archaeology of the imaginary of
and in history.39 Epistemologically this process, which Benjamin wants
to put in motion, is not very different from the Freudian one: to be able
to live in the present time the subject must discover the causes, the pro-
found reasons that have determined their images, as well as their oneiric
images—the Traumbilder. So the past, what has been (even in the form
of trauma), should not be removed or forgotten, but clarified, discovered,
unearthed; it is only in this way that an understanding of the present can
be made productive.40 It is no coincidence that this entire series of obser-
vations on the dream and the ‘awakening’ are collated by Benjamin in the
section pertaining to materials on the gnoseological and methodological
character. In fact, they are a series of preliminary observations that give a
sense of his entire project. Thus the Freud–Aragon contrast, apparently
inexplicable, can acquire its own meaning only if it is read within an epis-
temological context. And it is precisely in this context that it is important
to stress both the radical differences in perspective between the processes
of the Surrealist avant-garde and Benjamin, and the similarity between
the allegorical-expressive heritage and in the technique of montage.
As already noted, Benjamin’s convolute marked with the symbol ‘N4’
constitutes a corpus that is much more compact and connected than
might appear on first reading. He emphasizes his position as a ‘historian’
in relation to the key element of the ‘awakening’: ‘The realization of dream
elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradig-
matic for the thinker and binding for the historian.’41 The emergence of
the term ‘dialectic’ is a quite evident sign of one of the sources of thought
to which Benjamin refers in this ‘gnoseological’ chapter. In the same way
that the image of the city of Naples is in some sense the ‘prehistory’ of his
work on the city of Paris and the capital of the nineteenth century,42 so
the attention to the origin of the social forms that inhabit the modern is
based on a certain interpretation of Marx. A book could be written on the
subject of Benjamin’s Marxism, since his position vis-à-vis Communism as
a political movement and Marxism as a heuristic system is both complex
and full of the usual ambiguity that characterizes his thought.43 However,
it remains a fact that most of the quotes and information gathered in the
‘gnoseological’ section are drawn from the writings of Marx and Engels.
It is true that Benjamin tries to differentiate himself from the linear posi-
tions of dialectical materialism, but it is equally true that his work can be
in fact compared with them. He uses Marxism only partially, combining it
with other systems that he uses simultaneously to formulate an approach
to reality. This is part of his working method. As well as using the tech-
nique of the avant-garde and the criterion of the compositional assembly
of heterogeneous materials, at the same time he criticizes Surrealism for
remaining the prisoner of appearances without having valued the moment
of awakening as a cognitive reflection of the past. Benjamin uses a Marxist
position in this section, insofar as it is easy to expand the contradiction to
its most extreme limits; that is, the relationship between base and super-
structure, which in the 1920s, when he had first-hand experience of it in
the Soviet Union, was considered in a manner that was too mechanical.
Benjamin conceives of the superstructure as an ‘expression’ of the base, so
that the languages of this expression assume a key role.44 The focal point
of his interest was in fact artistic production, the production of ‘expres-
sions’ and the bond that they had with the complex reality of his time. The
Marxist theory of art—or at least the ‘official’ theory as it appeared at the
time of writing these notes—could never completely satisfy Benjamin: ‘The
Marxian theory of art: one moment swaggering, and the next scholastic.’45
Even here Benjamin seeks to extrapolate from Marxist theory what
he believes to be a positive element, allowing him to provide an over-
all description of the historical era. In fact he is not interested in the
formulation of a ‘norm’ in which it is possible to subsume the basis of
social relations in every epoch; on the contrary, he is interested in under-
standing the mechanisms that have determined the ‘expressions’ them-
selves, both social and artistic ones, of the age in which he lived. And in
doing so he seeks to clarify the processes that have determined the past
(das Gewesene). It is very indicative that, within section ‘N4’, Benjamin
cites a passage of Max Raphael’s book Proudhon Marx Picasso (the com-
bination of these different authors is already the route that The Arcades
Project would have followed).46 Raphael wanted to correct the Marxist
conception of Greek art’s normative character. However, here it is inter-
esting to see how in this position a kind of methodological programme
for Benjamin’s work on Paris is found. Only a historical analysis can indi-
cate the moment at which the appearances, and the objects, processes and
abstract rules, that determined the modern era were formed. This need
to draw on an overall and radical historical analysis is the methodological
indication that Benjamin obtained from Marxism—corrected of course,
removing all ‘scholastic’ mechanisms of its art theory.
The field of application of these methodological presuppositions is

immediately reduced by Benjamin to the topos par excellence: namely,
the metropolis’s topography, which must be ‘read’ as a text, and which is
the allegorical synthesis of the epoch that he wants to analyse. The anno-
tation that follows the quote from Max Raphael is: ‘It is the peculiarity
of technological forms of production (as opposed to art forms) that their
progress and their success are proportionate to the transparency of their
social content. (Hence glass architecture)’.47 And here is the crux of the
matter. The transparency of the technical forms is linked to their social
content; that is, it is necessary to go back to the historical origins and the
social function of the phenomena of the real (of the phantasmagoria of
objects) in order to establish their meaning. Not so for the artistic forms.
They are not linked to the social forms by a cause–effect relationship,
but continue along more complicated and convoluted paths. They are
the ‘expression’ of the basic structure, but also of the Bildraum (image
space). Benjamin aims to rebuild these complex and convoluted passages
of ‘expressions’ (both technical and artistic) starting from their source.
He thereby takes on the task of the historian. Of course, his conception
of this role can neither be flattened by the concept of ‘dialectical material-
ism’, nor by that of the ‘mystical vision’, nor by the sociological research
of the ‘Frankfurt school’. This involves an entirely original process, the
methodological and gnoseological bases of which are exposed in frag-
ments (in part quotes, in part observations) collected in this chapter of
preparatory materials.
Both in this process and in the contemporary use of different cogni-
tive and interpretative systems, Benjamin can certainly not be accused
of eclecticism, because his specific usage of different heuristic systems is
neither indifferent nor interchangeable. He uses only those elements of
different systems that can be ‘refunctionalized’ into his project, and in
doing so he ‘disassembles’ the gnoseological system from which he wishes
to extrapolate an element; he ‘destroys’ it. The interpretative systems are
deconstructed, dismantled, treated as material ‘to be quoted without
marks’. This is the reason why Benjamin’s process will never be ‘under-
stood’ by using the ‘old’ conceptual categories, bringing it back into the
context of one of those systems that he ‘disassembled’ and rendered use-
less. The element of risk that this process involves is also evident: wanting
to provide the conceptual ‘objects’ with a function, reassembling them in

quite a different composition, brings with it the risk of being accused of
‘illogicality’ and ‘inconsistency’; in other words, the risk of being accused
of contradiction. However, as has already been mentioned, this is not the
result of the Benjaminian process, but its precondition. The contradic-
tions must burst without seeking a ‘synthesis’, exacerbating the conflict
and avoiding a Versöhnung (reconciliation).
3 ‘Cunning’
Benjamin seeks to maintain an emotional and conceptual distance from
the interpretative systems that he in turn ‘disassembles’, so it is necessary
for him to treat them with a certain level of detachment. This detachment
is defined by Benjamin as ‘cunning’ (‘List’). He writes: ‘We construct an
awakening theoretically—that is, we reproduce, in the realm of language,
that trick that is decisively psychologically in awakening, for awakening
operates with cunning. Only with cunning, not without it, can we work
free of the realm of the dream.’48 Surrealists can therefore be accused
of being naive, as they have not sought to understand the causes of the
dream images (Traumbilder). Yet even more interesting is the highlight-
ing of the distance with which the entire process is carried out. Cunning
is required to escape the range of the dream and to provide this environ-
ment with an interpretative system. However, it should be noted that
while on the one hand Benjamin uses this argument to criticize mythol-
ogy as a heuristic system in order to understand the present time, on the
other he introduces the concept of ‘cunning’ in order to escape from the
mythical-oneiric dimension, which is a concept that belongs to the myth
of the labyrinth.49 The image of the labyrinth emerges, in connection
with the metropolis and with the urban experience, both in Aragon and
in Benjamin. The labyrinth as a mythical topos also exhibits ambiguous
traits: it can be a place from which one cannot exit, but it can also be a
‘place’ from which—like Theseus—one can actually escape. The process
that Benjamin wants to carry out with regard to the mythological-oneiric
system used by the Surrealists displays interesting interpretative keys,
which can also be explained through the metaphor of the labyrinth.
Benjamin emphasizes the aspect of the ‘threshold’ of the Parisian

passages, by explicitly connecting their transitional character to a ritual
origin:
Rites de passage—this is the designation in folklore for the ceremonies that

attach to death and birth, to marriage, puberty, and so forth. In modern
life, these transitions are becoming ever more unrecognizable and impos-
sible to experience. We have grown very poor in threshold experiences.
Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. (But
together with this, there is also waking up). And, finally, there is the ebb
and flow of conversation and the sexual permutations of love-experience
that surges over thresholds like the changing figures of the dream. ‘How
mankind loves to remain transfixed;’ says Aragon, ‘at the very doors of the
imagination!’ Paysan [de Paris (Paris, 1926)], p. 74. It is not only from the
thresholds of these gates of imagination that lovers and friends like to draw
their energies; it is from thresholds in general. Prostitutes, however, love
the thresholds of these gates of dream.—The threshold must be carefully
distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle [threshold] is a zone.
Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and
etymology ought not to overlook these senses. On the other hand, it is
necessary to keep in mind the immediate tectonic and ceremonial context
which has brought the word to its current meaning. (Dream House)50
The labyrinth is a Gang (gallery, passage) that emphasizes the passage

from one situation (life) to another (death, Hades or the Underworld).
According to the Greek conception, this passing did not occur automat-
ically, but needed a rite. Entering the labyrinth meant going to meet
death. The purpose of every movement made in the labyrinth was to
arrive at its centre. And at the centre of the labyrinth was the Minotaur,
an allegory of death, the exact opposite of life. The centre of the labyrinth
is a sacred place, a place of knowledge in which a mystery is revealed, a
place where death becomes known. As Kerényi highlights,51 in order to
enter the labyrinth it is necessary that one possesses the quality of μητιϚ
(mêtis), a Greek term denoting the ability to adhere to reality in a cha-
meleonic, ductile and, at the same time, detached manner. It is the qual-
ity par excellence of Odysseus, the ‘cunning’. Solving the enigma of the
labyrinth means introducing life into it and, as a result of this act, causing
its death. The essence of the labyrinth is not dictated by its construction,
it is not a physical location, an architectural structure, but a place of exis-
tence, a psychological location. In fact, in the Palace of Knossos in Crete
it becomes clear that what makes impossible the exit from the labyrinth is
not its architectonic structure, but the magical power of the queen, often
represented as a goddess in contact with the Great Mother, fighting the
bull—that is, in mythical terms, the encounter with the Minotaur and
human sacrifice.
Kerényi stresses that in antiquity the labyrinth was marked on the
ground with stones arranged in a concentric shape. The labyrinth is
movement that tends towards the centre and its very being lies in its
fulfilment as movement. In the centre, in the place of knowledge, of
revealing the mystery, there is the Minotaur, the monster that is àrre-
ton, ineffable, indescribable, inexplicable, but not invincible. In fact, this
ritual movement towards the centre only has sense if it is able to exorcise
death. Despite appearances, there is always a way out of the labyrinth.
The ritual dance, which always accompanies the myth of the labyrinth,
consists of a turning point, a crossing, precisely because the mythologem
of the labyrinth expresses this ‘transition’. The mêtis is cunning, the abil-
ity to give a turning point to the movement: turning it back from death
towards life. After all, the myth of Theseus celebrates the defeat of the
Minotaur. Reaching the centre entails unravelling the enigma, but it also
means causing a death. And death is necessary because it gives birth to
life. As Kerényi notes, the myth of the labyrinth is linked to the myth of
Persephone, which symbolizes kidnapping, return, death and the fruit-
fulness evoked by this ritual sacrifice. The enigma unravels when the cen-
tre is reached and it is realized that there is in fact no labyrinth, and that
the secret lies in the passage, in accepting the necessity of death, in the
connection between death and life. So, if entering the labyrinth means
introducing into it a life, which in turn leads to a death, at the same
time it means crossing the threshold, causing the death of the labyrinth,
revealing its mystery.
In relation to this topos, Benjamin’s process could also be interpreted in
a mythological sense: he enters the labyrinth of the metropolis with the
cunning of wanting to identify its prehistory and as a result he proclaims
the end of it, the ‘crossing’. The enigma of the modern is resolved when
one understands that there is no mystery and that the modern is made
up of empty promises of non-existent progress, which in reality does not
produce wealth, but leads only to destruction. However, this mythologi-
cal interpretation is only partly applicable to Benjamin’s process. Once
again, it must be noted that he has extrapolated from the interpretative
system only those elements that serve his particular conceptual construc-
tion. From mythology he took only the labyrinth topos, whose mystery
is solved with the destruction of the labyrinth itself, and the mêtis, the
cunning necessary in order to enter and traverse the labyrinth. Benjamin,
like the famous angel of history, leaves behind him only conceptual ruins
when he extrapolates some concepts from a system. So with that concept
of cunning, derived directly from the myth of the labyrinth, Benjamin
unravels the mystery of the labyrinth itself, causing its death, but at the
same time renders the entire dream-mythological apparatus unusable. It
is a ‘trick’ to escape from the realm of dreams.
The cunning of Benjamin is to overthrow the concept of the ‘dream’ in
favour of the ‘awakening’, with all the critical reflection on the has-been
(Gewesene), which in this case is also the dreamed. In a way, Benjamin
‘corrects’ Aragon and the Surrealists, prisoners of the labyrinth of the
dream, with Proust and—in an epistemological sense—with Freud.
In the section of the First Sketches entitled ‘Dream City’, Benjamin
writes:
It is one of the tacit suppositions of psychoanalysis that the clear-cut antith-

esis of sleeping and waking has no value for determining the empirical
form of consciousness of the human being, but instead yields before an
unending variety of concrete states of consciousness conditioned by every
conceivable level of wakefulness within all possible centers. The situation of
consciousness as patterned and checkered by sleep and waking need only
be transferred from the individual to the collective. Of course, much that
is external to the former is internal to the latter: architecture, fashion—yes,
even the weather—are, in the interior of the collective, what the sensoria of
organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are inside the individual. And so
long as they preserve this unconscious, amorphous dream configuration,
they are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing, and the like.
They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes
upon them in politics and history emerges.52
The ‘awakening’ is also a time that allows the connecting of the social
element to the individual element, and the linking of historical reasons
for the production of goods to personal reasons relating to the childhood
experience. In fact, Benjamin has this to say on this matter: ‘Therefore:
remembering and awaking are most intimately related. Awakening is
namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance.’53 This ‘awak-
ening’ corresponds to Theseus’s crossing of the labyrinth’s centre. In
the labyrinth of modernity, there is no Minotaur—as Aragon writes.
Furthermore, Benjamin’s process differs substantially from that of the
mythological, because he does not search for a centre, with or without a
monster, but rather assumes that the centre has already been lost to us.
One of the characteristics of the modern era, also of the prehistory of
the modern, consists of the loss of the centre, of the loss of any politi-
cal, moral, economic or psychological centrality. This ‘eccentricity’ of
modernity radicalizes the isolation of the individual and of his subjective
contradictions. The more he looks for the reasons for his existence in
his individual history, the more they result from being based on social
issues, on the processes that he, as an individual, is not able to manage
and sometimes not even to understand in their real dynamics. Here, one
witnesses the radical destruction of the labyrinth mythologem, despite
the apparent similarities. Benjamin astutely refuses to search for the cen-
tre, not even to cause the death of the Minotaur—the centre does not
exist, not since the modern era sprang forth and left it; Benjamin merely
seeks to escape from the trap that wants to ensnare him (according to
the Surrealists) in a dream vision. The ‘Copernican revolution’54 entails
liberating oneself from the aesthetic contemplation of dream visions, in
order to wonder how they arose. And in this process, social issues re-enter
the realm of the dream.55
Then the point of divergence truly becomes the correct interpretation
of the origins of the images that populate individual dreams. They are,
according to Benjamin, influenced by images that each individual derives
from advertising, from the simple presence of the objects in the phantas-
magoria of the market. This fact radically changes the situation, not in
an archetypical-mythological sense, but in a more ‘reifying’ sense. The
collective imagination is historically and socially determined. Benjamin
writes in his notes: ‘We conceive the dream: 1) as historical phenom-
enon, 2) as collective phenomenon. Efforts to shed light on the dreams

of the individual with the help of the historical doctrine of dreams.’56
The historical contextualization of the dream, or the research of collec-
tive elements, which are also the historical causes of the dream images,
is obtained through the ‘awakening’, the reflection on the past, the ‘col-
lection’ of everyday life materials. The concept of the ‘collective dream’ is
the basis of the critique of Surrealism and the ‘key’ that makes the mytho-
logical path impractical. In an annotation taken from the First Sketches,
Benjamin is very explicit in this regard:
It is not only that the forms of appearance taken by the dream collective in
the nineteenth century cannot be thought away; and not only that these
forms characterize this collective much more decisively than any other—
they are also, rightly interpreted, of the highest practical import, for they
allow us to recognize the sea on which we navigate and the shore from
which we push off. It is here, therefore, that the ‘critique‘ of the nineteenth
century—to say it in one word—ought to begin. The critique not of its
mechanism and cult of machinery but of its narcotic historicism, its pas-
sion for masks, in which nevertheless lurks a signal of true historical exis-
tence, one which the Surrealists were the first to pick up. To decipher this
signal is the concern of the present undertaking. And the revolutionary
materialist basis of Surrealism is sufficient warrant for the fact that, in this
signal of true historical existence, the nineteenth century gave supreme
expression to its economic basis.57
Escaping from the historicist narcosis of the nineteenth century basically

means searching for the material causes of the production of the dream
forms, which can be traced neither to archetypes nor mythologems, but
to ‘mechanisms’, through which modernity is determined. And in this
regard Benjamin specifies the existence of a symmetry between ‘classical’
mythology and the mythologizing of machines. The mythology of the
modern is machines. In this regard, one thinks of Aragon’s use of ‘place’
in Le paysan de Paris. Once again the use of the expressive-allegorical heri-
tage does not coincide with the use of the conceptual-theoretical heritage,
but rather, the former becomes Benjamin’s prerequisite for dismantling
and undermining the latter. In the famous ‘gnoseological’ section of the
Convolutes, he writes:
Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play
between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of
mythology. Of course, initially the technologically new seems nothing more
than that. But in the very next childhood memory, its traits are already
altered. Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for
humanity. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curi-
osity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood
binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol. There
is nothing in the realm of nature that from the outset would be exempt from
such a bond. Only, it takes form not in the aura of novelty but in the aura of
the habitual. In memory, childhood, and dream. (Wakening [N2a, 1])58
The mythical is dislocated in childhood and related to technology.59 On

the one hand, Benjamin introduces a precise distinction between the sym-
bolism of myth and the allegory of forms in which the modern manifests
itself. Yet on the other, he limits the mythical approach to forms sym-
bolized by technology in childhood, by forcefully connecting them with
memories and with the world of the dream. In other words, the symbol-
ization of the forms of the real has its origin in the individual’s childhood,
an era in which reality itself meets us in the mythologized form of oneiric
experiences. The child perceives reality through his fantasy world, which
is indeed crucial and functions as a heuristic system for new experiences,
which cannot be anything but experiences of the new. However, this
world of symbols, which looks on amazed at every new shock of knowl-
edge, must first be interpreted as a text. Rather, once one has entered the
labyrinth of signals and symbols, one must ask oneself where the origin
of these signals can be found. It is here that the interpreter of dreams
becomes a historian. It is here that Benjamin’s process can be found. At
the moment at which one ‘brings light’ and discovers the historical and
social origin, the ‘material’ origin of symbols, one escapes from the world
of dreams and ‘de-mythologizes’ the symbols themselves. Therefore, the
things of modernity are only objects without use value and loaded with
allegorical meaning, so the privileged place of historical analysis (in the
Benjaminian sense) can no longer be the place of dreams, but is now the
allegory of the century of modernity; that is, the arcades.
All of these annotations, scattered throughout the various prepara-
tory materials, are the many bricks with which Benjamin would have
been able to build the complex structure of the dream–childhood–myth

relationship. These annotations, precisely because they move in multiple
directions, may seem different or conflicting, but they possess their own
internal compactness that, indeed, exhibits a certain repetitiveness. All of
these materials are fused together in a single and expressively synthetic
exposition in a passage of the so-called Paris Arcades II.60
Neither Adorno’s obsessive research on the consistency of these writ-
ings,61 nor his hunting for contradiction, could accelerate the composition
of Benjamin’s work, which instead was composed of founding principles
that were light years away from the Frankfurters’ rationality. Benjamin’s
Nietzschean positioning of himself at the centre of contradictions perplexed
Adorno. A parallel reading of the letters between Benjamin and Adorno, and
between Benjamin and Scholem, emphasizes, more than any other analysis,
Benjamin’s discomfort vis-à-vis the supervision of his work by the Institute
for Social Research. When he writes to Scholem complaining about the dif-
ficulties that the Institute imposes on his work, he seeks to emphasize the
root misunderstanding of the Frankfurters along both general and eccen-
tric lines, on which he wanted to expand in The Arcades Project. None of
the exposés that he sent overseas could provoke anything other than a gen-
eral interest from the Institute members; but as soon as he began to elabo-
rate on his work, discussions and requests for clarifications immediately
began. Posthumous marks of respect do not greatly alter the situation. Even
Scholem, who for his part was well aware of the methodological differ-
ences that distinguished him from Benjamin, fully understood the sense of
unease between his friend and the Frankfurters. Moreover, the contrasted
and discussed history of the edition of Benjamin’s complete writings, and of
The Arcades Project in particular, finds one of its remote motives in this root
misunderstanding, which the Institute initially tried to mask by publish-
ing Benjamin’s selected writings and then attempted to deny its misunder-
standing with the justification that the contradictions were only apparent
due to the fragmentary and unfinished nature of the writings themselves.
However, this passage from Paris Arcades II is a synthesis of the various
debated themes (dream–childhood–myth), which arises as an intermedi-
ate moment: on the one hand the result of the ‘distillation’ of a series of
annotations and citations, on the other the starting point of reflections
and insights into a number of differing areas. Benjamin writes:
Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous
and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We
are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored
and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of
what he dreamed, he communicates, by and large, only this boredom. For
who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside?
Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can one
deal with the arcades-structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life
of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life
of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent, like the
events in dreams. Flânerie is the rhythmics of this slumber. In 1839, a rage
for tortoises overcame Paris. One can well imagine the elegant set mimick-
ing the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boule-
vards. Boredom is always the external surface of unconscious events. For
that reason, it has appeared to the great dandies as a mark of distinction.62
From this passage, the literary tone with which Benjamin sought to write
the book on the passages can clearly be seen. The book’s literary model
was practically lifted from his One-Way Street. His way of arguing does
not proceed through deductive reasoning and he does not refer back to
the ‘Frankfurter’ essays, because there is no theoretical or methodological
premise. Rather, he proceeds on to mixing conceptual bundling.63 Just
as the objects in the arcades are presented one after another, in a random
form, without losing their allegorical value, so Benjamin stacks, one after
the other, the themes that in this case must lead the reader on a promenade
from the dream world to the ‘awakening’ of the passages themselves, pass-
ing through the ‘recent past’ and crossing through childhood. The appar-
ent randomness of how the concepts, figures and themes are arranged is
of course a trick. This is the famous ‘cunning’ that is needed to produce
his work. ‘Recounting dreams’ is meant to explain the sense of the epoch,
to deal with childhood, to be in the arcades that are the prehistory of
modern subjectivity, the architecture of our parents. The walk, which was
begun with the critique of Surrealist poetry (and of Aragon in particular),
leads directly into the arcades. It started from the ‘Passage de l’Opéra’, the
central chapter of Le paysan de Paris, in order to lead into the arcades as
an epochal allegory of the individual past (childhood) and the collective
past (prehistory of the modern). We must escape from the ‘trap’ of the
dream and the mythology of technology, but we cannot escape from the
arcades as a ‘place’ of modernity. They are a labyrinth through which one
can walk, from where one can make endless deviations, but one does not
escape from the labyrinth of the arcades, since to overcome this ‘archi-
tectural form’ one must ‘go beyond’ the modern. This walk among the
themes and objects of modernity that Benjamin proposes to us is the
prerequisite for addressing the hidden causes of the past and for then
overcoming the present. At the moment at which one reaches the centre
of the labyrinth, it unveils its mystery and the labyrinth ceases to be. The
fact remains that the arcades, like the labyrinth, do not have a centre.
(Translated by S. J. Morgan)
4 Notes
1. In 1928 Benjamin published in Literarische Welt the translation of
some of the passages from Le paysan de Paris. Furthermore, in his
Pariser Tagebuch between 1929 and 1930 he speaks often of Aragon.
See GS IV, p. 568. The parts of The Arcades Project denoted by the
letters P (The streets of Paris), Q (Panorama), R (mirrors) and S
(painting, art nouveau, innovation) are full of references to Aragon.
2. C, 488.
3. See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination. Walter Benjamin and
Paris of Surrealist Revolution, University of California Press, Berkeley-
Los Angeles-London 1993; Josef Fürnkäs, Surrealismus als Erkenntnis,
Metzler, Stuttgart 1998.
4. AP, 883 [h°, 1].
5. ‘The keyword myth, or more exactly “liberation” from the fascina-
tion of myth, seems to designate the vanishing point of reconstruct-
ing the critical vision of The Arcades Project. The era that saw itself as
the epitome of modernity, of technical and scientific progress and
universal historicist history, must be represented, ultimately, as a
place of catastrophe of a missed emancipation. But the currently very
popular concept of myth is good only to confusion if it is used as a
historical universal key to the decipherment of the modern (or post-
modern)’ (Burkhardt Lindner, ‘Das Passagen-Werk’, die ‘Berliner
Kindheit’ und die Archäologie des ‘Jüngstvergangenen’, in Passagen:

Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des XIX. Jahrhunderts, edited by
Norbert Bolz and Bernd Witte, Munich 1984, p. 39). Own transla-
tion. See also Burkhardt Lindner, Le ‘Passagen-Werk’, ‘Enfance berli-
noise’ et l’archéologie du ‘passé le plus recent’, in Walter Benjamin et
Paris, ed. by Heinz Wisman, Paris 1986, p. 25.
6. See Josef Fürnkäs, Surrealismus als Erkenntnis, Metzler, Stuttgart
1998; Mauro Ponzi, Mythos der Moderne: Benjanin und Aragon, in:
Klaus Garber – Ludger Rehm (Hg.), global benjamin, Fink, Munich
1999, vol. 2, pp. 1118–1134; Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination.
Walter Benjamin and Paris of Surrealist Revolution, University of
California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1993.
7. Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, Paris 1926, p. 11. ‘It is a black
kingdom that the eyes of men avoid, because this landscape does not
attract them at all. This shadow, which he calls for in order to describe
the light, is the error with its unknown characters, the error that,
only, may prove to him who has been taken into consideration as
such, the fugitive reality.’ Own translation.
8. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.)-London 1989.
Uta Beiküfner, Blick, Figuration und Gestalt. Elemente eines aisthesis
materialis im Werk von Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer und
Rudolf Arnheim, Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2003; Markus Bauer,
Farbphantasien, Dingallegorese und Raumzeit. Studien zur Melancholie
bei Walter Benjamin, Lit, Zürich-Berlin 2008.
9. In the Introduction to his exposé of 1939, Benjamin speaks of a ‘phan-
tasmagoria’, of ‘répresentation chosiste’ (‘reifying representation’) of a
‘série illimité de faits figés sous formes de choses’ (‘an endless series of
facts congealed in form of things’). GS V, 60. AP, 14.
10. The idea of destiny in Aragon reconnects with the tone used by
Benjamin in his notes on gambling. See Louis Aragon, Le paysan de
Paris, p. 139.
11. See ibid., p. 23. Here the relation between the theme of gambling
and prostitution connected by the motif of money should be
emphasized.
12. SW 3, p. 344.
13. See Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, p. 135 s. ‘The spirit is lost in the
trap that is this maze, which keeps it without returning, toward the
conclusion of one’s own destiny, the labyrinth without the Minotaur,
where, transfigured like the Virgin, the error with its radium fingers
reappears, my singing mistress, my pathetic shadow [...].’ Own
translation.
14. Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin,
Routledge, London- New York 1996, p. 126.
15. See Valérie Baumann, Bildnisverbot. Zu Walter Benjamins Praxis der
Darstellung: Dialektisches Bild—Traumbild—Vexierbild, Ed. Isele,
Erringen 2002.
16. See Gershom Scholem, On Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Schocken,
New York 1969, especially chapter 3: Kabbalah and Myth,
pp. 87–116.
17. For the relationship between Benjamin, the modern and the German
avant-garde, see Michael Trabitzsch, Moderne, Messianismus, Politik,
Berlin 1985.
18. See Stephanie Polsky, Transit. A destructive tour of modernity, Palo
Alto (CA) 2010.
19. See Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, p. 140.
21. See Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, London 1964, p. 27.
22. See Jacques Leenhardt, Le passage comme forme d’expérience: Benjamin
face à Aragon, in Walter Benjamin et Paris, p. 163 s.
23. Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, p. 162. Own translation.
24. See ‘With the Sharpened Axe of Reason’. Approaches to Walter Benjamin,
ed. by Gerhard Fischer, Berg, Oxford 1996.
25. AP, 458 [Nl,9].
26. AP, 831 [C°, 5].
27. ‘This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing with-
out quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of mon-
tage’ (AP, 458) [N 1, 10].
28. GS V, 1214. [Ms 1126r]. Own translation.
29. See David Frisby, Fragments of modernity, Cambridge 1985.
30. AP, 464 [N4,1].
31. Valérie Baumann, Bildnisverbot. Zu Walter Benjamins Praxis der

Darstellung: Dialektisches Bild—Traumbild—Vexierbild, Ed. Isele,
Erringen 2002.
32. SW 2, 3.
33. AP, 884 s. [M°, 14].
34. See Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter
Benjamin, Routledge, London- New York 1996, p. 88.
35. ‘The expression ‘the book of nature’ indicates that one can read the
real like a text. And that is how the reality of the nineteenth century
will be treated here. We open the book of what happened’ (AP, 464
[N 4, 2]).
36. Benjamin in fact writes on the same page: ‘Just as Proust begins the
story of his life with an awakening, so must every presentation of
history begin with awakening; in fact, it should treat of nothing else.
This one, accordingly, deals with awakening from the nineteenth
century’ (AP, 464 [N4,3]).
37. ‘History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past’ Goethe, Werke,
Berliner Ausgabe, Aufbau, Berlin 1972, vol. 18, p. 493. Own
translation.
38. See Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin’s
Theory of Literary Criticism, Ithaca, New York 1987.
39. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque, De Baudelaire à
Benjamin, Edition Galilée, Paris 1984, p. 31.
40. See Elizabeth Stewart, Catastrophe and survival. Walter Benjamin and
psychoanalysis, Continuum, New York-London 2010.
41. AP, 464 [N 4, 4].
42. See Willi Bolle, Paris on the Amazon? Postcolonial Interrogations of
Benjamin’s European Modernism, in Rolf J. Goebel (ed.), A Companion
to the Works of Walter Benjamin, Cadmen House, Rochester-
New York 2009, pp. 216–245. See also Ralph Buchenhorst – Miguel
Veddah (Hg.), Urbane Beobachtungen. Walter Benjamin und die
neuen Städte, Transcript, Bielefeld 2010; Rolf J. Goebel, Benjamin
heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den
Kulturen, Iudicium, München 2001; Mauro Ponzi, Naples as
Topography of Intermediate Spaces. Walter Benjamin and the Threshold
Between Old and New, in Alexis Nuselovici, Mauro Ponzi, Fabio
Vighi (ed.), Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces,

Lexington Books, Lanham-Boulder- New York- Toronto-Plymounth,
UK 2014, pp. 69–85.
43. See Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a revolutionary criti-
cism, London 1981; Chryssoula Kambas, Walter Benjamin im Exil.
Zum Verhältnis von Literaturpolitik und Ästhetik, Tübingen 1983;
Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals
between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, Berkeley 1997; Uwe Steiner,
The True Politician: WB’s Concept of the Political, in ‘New German
Critique’, 83 (2001), pp. 43–88; Daniel Azuelos (ed.), Les penseurs
allemands et autrichiens à l’épreuve de l’exil, Hermann, Paris 2010;
Stephanie Polsky: Transit. A destructive tour of modernity, Palo Alto
(CA) 2010; James R. Martel, Textual Conspiracies. Walter Benjamin.
Idolatry and Political Theory, University of Michigan 2011.
44. ‘On the doctrine of the ideological superstructure. It seems, at first
sight, that Marx wanted to establish here only a causal relation
between superstructure and base. But already the observation that
ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely and invidi-
ously goes beyond this. The question, in effect, is the following: if the
base in a certain way (in the materials of thought and experience)
determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reduc-
ible to simple reflection, how is it then—entirely apart from any
question about the originating cause—to be characterized? As its
expression. The superstructure is the expression of the base. The eco-
nomic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the
superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach
finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams,
which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to “condition”. The
collective, from the first, expresses the conditions of its life. These find
their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awaken-
ing’ (AP, 392 [K2,5] translation modified). Indeed, Benjamin speaks
of Überbau (superstructure) and Unterbau (base), which is a synonym
for Basis. Marx in fact uses the terms Überbau (superstructure) and
Basis (base). It is amazing that Unterbau was translated here as ‘infra-
structure’: it does not belong to Marx’s terminology and without the
base–superstructure contrast Benjamin’s discourse does not work.
45. AP, p. 465 [N4a,2].

46. ‘For the totality of Greek art never possessed a normative character
[...]. Only a historical analysis can indicate the era in which the
abstract notion of a “norm” […] of antiquity was born’. AP, 465 [N4,
5].
47. AP, 465 [N4, 6].
49. See Friedrich Voßkühler, Kunst als Mythos der Moderne, Königshausen
& Neumann, Würzburg 2004.
50. AP, 494 [O 2 a, 1].
51. See Karoly Kerényi, Labyrinth-Studien, Zürich 1950.
52. AP, 389 s. [K 1, 5].
53. AP, 389 [K 1, 3].
54. Ibid.
55. Benjamin writes in the annotation immediately following the one
cited: ‘The nineteenth century a spacetime [Zeitraum] (a dreamtime
[Zeit-traum]) in which the individual consciousness more and more
secures itself in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks
into ever deeper sleep’ (AP, p. 389. [K, 1, 4]).
57. AP, 391 [K1 a, 6].
58. AP, 461 [N 2 a, 1].
59. ‘Task of childhood: to bring the new world into symbolic space
[Symbolraum]. The child, in fact, can do what the grownup abso-
lutely cannot: remember the new once again. For us, locomotives
already have symbolic character because we met with them in child-
hood. Our children, however, will find this in automobiles, of which
we ourselves see only the new, elegant, modem, cheeky side’ (AP, 855
[Mo,20]).
60. Under this name a series of writings are collected that act as a proto-
type for the Passagen-Werk. Written by Benjamin between 1929 and
1934, they are the passages that he read to Adorno and the group of
Frankfurters, which provoked many misunderstandings regarding
the real scope and compositional technique of his work. In particu-
lar, Adorno’s effort to ‘rationalize’ Benjamin, to render his work more
similar to that of the Frankfurt scholars, can only be problematic.
For more on the complex relationship between Adorno and

Benjamin, see Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of
Redemption, New York 1982, pp. 163–212; Jean Michel Palmier,
T. W. Adorno et Walter Benjamin, Paris 2003.
61. Eiland and Jennings speak on ‘Adorno’s increasingly dictatorial atti-
tude toward what could and could not be said regarding the arcades’
(Howard Eiland – Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical
p. 477).
62. AP, 881 [e°, 2]. The same extract can be found in section D, albeit
with small differences [Boredom, eternal recurrence] of the Notes
and Materials of the Passagen-Werk. See ibid., 156 s. GS V, 161 s. [D
2 a, 1].
63. See Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit. W. Benjamins theoretische
Schreibweise, Frankfurt a. M., Fischer, 1997; Ästhetik des Ähnlichen.
Zur Poetik und Kunstphilosophie der Moderne, edited by Gerhard
Funk, Gert Mattenklott e Michael Pauen, Fischer, Frankfurt a. M.
2000.
7
Baudelaire
The spleen is the feeling that corresponds to catastrophe in permanence.1
1 The Loss of Aura

The forms of the modern appear fragmented, and if ‘historians’ want to
interpret the fragmented phenomena of the modern, they have to give a
meaning to the ‘confusion’,2 they must assume the role of the ‘scribe of
chaos’. With this approach, the distant echo of Nietzsche’s thought can
be heard—Benjamin often quotes him in relation to Baudelaire—as well
as an underground polemic regarding those who are imprisoned on the
threshold of the phantasmagoria of the images of modernity, without
wanting to reach their roots. This involves a polemic, brought forward
against the Surrealists and against those who spoke of a ‘mythology of
the modern’, since Benjamin, in this last phase of his life, had gained
the desire to radicalize his observations, in order to compile a ‘decisive’
work, an epochal criticism of the modern. Within Benjamin’s discourse,
Baudelaire becomes an allegory of modernity that is defined through
images and icons that assume a decisive role in deciphering the whole

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_7
epoch. Benjamin sees the essential characteristics of modernity in the

French poet. He considers Baudelaire to be the key figure of his era,
because the French poet consciously lived through the great changes of
the modern and because in his poems he expressed the unease of the
individual caused by these great transformations.3 Baudelaire put explic-
itly the problem of poetry’s audience and treated his verses as commodi-
ties. He positively fronted up to the literary market. His poetry contains
certain devices in order to defeat the competition: with his choice of the
Alexandrine metre he discredits the free verse of the Romantics, but with
his use of spoken language and what one could describe as ‘lowbrow’
vocabulary (in addition to popular characters) he discredits classicism.
Baudelaire is aware that the social function of the poet has undergone
a transformation. His ‘antics’ are partly a provocation, but are also the
manifested reaction to this new social role.
Baudelaire wanted to interrupt the course of the world, like Joshua.4
However, his intention was not a prophetic one, but an attack against the
transformation of modernity. In this image Benjamin briefly summarizes
his intention to outline Baudelaire as an author who had understood
the destructive characteristics of the modern and had tried to oppose
the dominant trends of his time. Baudelaire means that he is able to
counteract the course of the world with his mocking histrionic approach.
He is not a hero, but he mimics the attitude of the hero.5 The histrionic
and self-destructive representation of himself was the way by which the
poet could épater le bourgeois (shock the bourgeois) and gain an audience,
but it was also a way to defeat sentimental and romantic writing, and to
introduce a cruel new way of communicating. The new era requires a
new writing strategy and, even more significantly, a new figure of a poet,
who sometimes takes on the role of fencer, sometimes of hero, and some-
times appears to be a poète maudit. Baudelaire-represented modernity was
meaningful to Benjamin, because it implied the representation (in part
tragic, in part self-ironic, but all in all self-destructive) of the figure of
the poet. Baudelaire stages himself. ‘Baudelaire’s allegory bears traces of
the violence that was necessary to demolish the harmonious façade of
the world that surrounded him’, writes Benjamin in his Arcades Project.6
The production of allegories is, in essence, the heroic act with which the
French poet tries to counteract the great transformation of the modern.
7 Baudelaire 187
And since the new can neither be stopped from a technical point of view,
nor from the point of view of the permanent catastrophe that it produces,
it needs a certain kind of heroism (and a certain kind of histrionicism) to
oppose the modern through an allegorical production.
At the centre of Baudelaire’s poetry is the city of Paris, which is certainly
what made the Fleurs du mal such a great success. However, in Baudelaire’s
verses the temporary nature and fragility of this great metropolis are tan-
gible. Baudelaire’s experience with the modern is at one with his experi-
ence of social change. And these social changes consist of the fact that
the character of commodity in the work of art and of the crowd in the
audience is manifested in a brutal manner.7 Benjamin emphasizes the
changing nature of the French poet’s Paris: ‘Baudelaire is the first to have
conjured up the sea of houses, with its multistory waves. Perhaps in a con-
text with Haussmann.’8 He sees the movement in the metropolis, not only
the movement of the flâneur, but also the more radical movement of the
physiognomy of the city itself: he describes Paris through its transforma-
tions.9 In this century Paris retained the form that Haussmann gave it. Yet
this new Paris was born on the back of the destruction of entire neighbour-
hoods of the old city. If what Baudelaire says is true regarding the modern
city that is ever-changing, this observation has proved to be particularly
evident in the Paris of the Second Empire. Whole neighbourhoods disap-
peared to make room for the boulevards. The transformation of the city
was radical insofar as the forms of the modern were imposed on it.
Benjamin wrote the German version of Paris, the Capital of the
Nineteenth Century in 1935, as an exposé with the intention of sending
it to the Institute of Social Research and thus receive the funding nec-
essary to continue his research. The relationship between Benjamin and
the Institute was complex, as each valued different methods of analysis.
Benjamin’s publishers, in some way the heirs to the so-called ‘Frankfurt
School’, tend to consider the Berlin critic as a collaborator of the Institute
and to claim The Arcades Project as one of the works chosen and financed
by the Institute itself. However, the Berlin magazine alternative and a
handful of scholars tend to emphasize the contrasts of method and inter-
ests between Benjamin and the Institute.10 Polemic, which made up the
editorial method of the Gesammelte Schriften, occupied much of German
cultural debate towards the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Now
polemic seems to be motivated more by themes, which one could describe

as being ‘extra-Benjaminian’. It constitutes a part of contemporary
German culture’s history and the editorial strategy of Suhrkamp. In fact, it
is fairly irrelevant to establish how far the directors of the Institute of Social
Research believed in Benjamin’s project and whether Benjamin himself
trusted Horkheimer enough to reveal his real intentions. The material con-
ditions of life in Paris between 1935 and 1940 were particularly difficult.
As such, it is difficult to believe that it was possible to convey exactly the
methods and purposes of the book on Paris to Horkheimer and Adorno.
The two could only have had a rather vague idea about it, since it is true
that Horkheimer asked Benjamin to write a French version of his exposé
in 1939, in order to solicit financing from a New York banker. Four years
after the German exposé, Horkheimer supposed that the book was in its
initial stages. After all, Scholem, who perhaps had understood more than
anyone else Benjamin’s real intentions regarding The Arcades Project, could
not share his hypothesis about him, because the entire project was rooted
in the culture and language of Germany (and France), while Scholem’s
cultural and linguistic choice had already been made in 1924. Benjamin’s
project was so sui generis, so original, so transverse in respect to all the ide-
ologies and all the analytical methods before it, that neither Horkheimer
nor Adorno could have had a precise idea about it. And therefore their
position with respect to the project was rather ‘open’ and problematic as
well. On 13 April 1937 Horkheimer wrote a letter to Benjamin in which
he asked him to begin writing his planned book, starting with the chapter
on Baudelaire.11 Benjamin described the essay on Baudelaire in a letter to
Horkheimer on 16 April 1938, defining it as a Miniaturmodell (miniature
model) of his book on Paris.12 We know, quite precisely, the structure of
the book on Baudelaire. Yet such a project should not be considered sepa-
rately from the book on Paris: the book on Baudelaire and The Arcades
Project are basically the same thing, insofar as the figure of Baudelaire was
intended to play a central role in the planned book on Paris.13
Benjamin compares—even if only regarding its size—his work on
Baudelaire and his essay on the work of art in the era of its technical
reproducibility.14 It must be recognized that this is also in some way an
indication by which the author suggests that his book on Baudelaire
wanted to place the French poet in the socioeconomic context of his
7 Baudelaire 189
time, considering the problems of literary production. He aims ‘to show

how Baudelaire lies embedded in the nineteenth century. The imprint he
has left behind there must stand out clear and intact, like that of a stone
which, having lain in the ground for decades, is one day rolled from its
place’.15 After all, Brecht, who hosted Benjamin at Svendborg, writes in
his Work Journal on 25 July 1938: ‘Benjamin is here. He’s writing an
essay on Baudelaire. […] He is basing the essay on something he calls the
aura, which is connected to dreams.’16 Benjamin’s conception of the ‘loss
of aura’ in fact derives from the French poet: according to Baudelaire, the
image of the poet encircled by a halo is antiquated. At the end of the essay
entitled On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin translates a passage of
Baudelaire, called ‘Perte de l’auréole’:
‘What do I see, my dear fellow? You-here? I find you in a place of ill repute—
a man who sips quintessences, who consumes ambrosia? Really! I couldn’t
be more surprised!’
‘You know, my dear fellow, how afraid I am of horses and carriages. A
short while ago I was hurrying across the boulevard, and amid that churn-
ing chaos in which death comes galloping at you from all sides at once I
must have made an awkward movement, for the halo slipped off my head
and fell into the mire of the macadam. I didn’t have the courage to pick it
up, and decided that it hurts less to lose one’s insignia than to have one’s
bones broken. Furthermore, I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining.
Now I can go about incognito, do bad things, and indulge in vulgar behav-
ior like ordinary mortals. So here I am, just like you!’17
The modern poet loses his aura by the traffic of the big city (so by the
transformations of the modern) and immerses himself in the crowd, he
acquires a ‘low-brow’ language and his poems become populated with
‘popular’ characters (prostitutes, tramps, drunks etc.). The new era needs
a new poetic language. The words with which Benjamin comments on
this passage are yet more significant, since they reveal the interpretative
strategy with which he wanted to interpret the modern; namely, the fig-
ure of the French poet:
This is the nature of the immediate experience [Erlebnis] to which

Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience [Erfahrung]. He named
the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disinte-
gration of the aura in immediate shock experience [Chockerlebnis]. He paid
dearly for consenting to this disintegration—but it is the law of his poetry.
This poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as ‘a star without
atmosphere’.18
This last image is a quote from Nietzsche—taken from On the Advantage

and Disadvantage of History for Life19—and is made up of an ulterior (and
perhaps stronger, since it is indirect) interpretative indication of charac-
ter: Baudelaire should be ‘read’ in the Nietzschean light of his cyclical
conception of history, in the light of his ‘pessimism’.
The figure of Baudelaire and his poetry display all the themes that
are interwoven in the book on Paris, so much so that the French poet
truly becomes the ‘central park’ in the ideal topography of the urban
experience, as an allegory of the experience of the modern. The urban
experience, which in this way is exemplified in the poetry of Baudelaire,
is at the same time the allegory of the experience of the modern and its
destructive character. The individual is constantly subjected to the shock
of the new, which assert itself as a destroyer of the already existing. The
‘pile of debris’, on which the melancholic look of Klee’s famous angel
falls, is also the result of continuous renewal, which the modern brings
with it, and corresponds to the systematic destruction of the already
existing. Baudelaire, aided by his memories, looks at the old Paris before
Haussmann; Benjamin thinks back to the old Berlin around 1900; both
turn their attention not to the continuous changes, but to the permanent
shock of experiencing the great metropolis. Progress, so much exalted by
the modern, has catastrophe, the total destruction of the existing, just
that pile of debris, as a prerequisite. The renewal of the modern is an
illusory renewal, since the new product is designed to be immediately
destroyed in order to make room for something that is even newer. The
renewal of the modern is in reality, like fashion, the return of the always
same, the recurrence of the same pattern of destruction.20
The French poet’s allegories (and also those of Benjamin) are compre-
hensible only if related to the epochal situation, in close contrast to the
modern. And in this sense, the allegories express that radicalism and that
destructive nature of which Benjamin talked regarding the ‘productive
7 Baudelaire 191
impulse’ unleashed by the same modernity.21 This process is directly

connected to the conception of expressive means. The poet is far from
being spontaneous, but—as Poe said (echoed by both Baudelaire and
Benjamin)—he operates programmatically through the process of mon-
tage and ‘splicing’, in order to achieve his purpose: ‘Baudelaire regards
art’s workshop in itself (as a site of confusion) as the appareil de la destruc-
tion which the allegories so often represent.’22 Producing art therefore
requires the systematic destruction of the modern world’s culture.
‘Allegory holds fast to the ruins. It offers the image of petrified unrest’,23
writes Benjamin in Central Park. It is the Medusa’s gaze, which turns to
stone what it looks at. The image harks back to the ‘pile of debris’ of the
Angelus Novus. Insofar as the figure of Baudelaire is a ‘miniature model’
of his work on Paris (and thus of his critique of the modern), it takes
on the allegorical traits of an angel fallen from heaven. Thus, the infer-
nal aspects of the modern, present in The Arcades Project, are somehow
anticipated and Baudelaire becomes the ‘announcer’ (αγγελος [ángelos]
in Greek originally means ‘messenger’), the precursor to the angel of his-
tory. The characteristics that Benjamin attributes to Baudelaire also apply
to the modern era as a period of transition. The modern is represented,
in fact, as the end of a long historical period, but at the same time as a
place where there is a catastrophe, as a crucial period, as an era that is on
the brink of the abyss. Within Benjamin’s discourse Baudelaire becomes a
figure of the destructive character of the modern, as a time of change. The
iconic figure of the angel fallen from heaven, the cursed poet, carries out
the function of explosive material within Benjamin’s reasoning, in order
to express, allegorically, the destructive character of the modern both in
the field of the cultural market and in the field of artistic production, as
well as in the field of the imaginative space.
2 The Alchemists of the Revolution

In his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin uses some of the writings of Marx
and Engels, in particular The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850
and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (which indeed are repeat-
edly cited in The Arcades Project), as an interpretative basis on which to
contextualize the age in which the poet of the Flowers of Evil lived and
worked. Indeed, one could argue that the identification of the Second
Empire as an epoch in which the forms of the modern were born, so as
to constitute its ‘prehistory’, derives from Benjamin’s reading of these
writings of Marx. From this reading, he derives the conviction that it is
necessary to take a radical position in order to produce a critique of an
entire epoch. In these writings on France between 1848 and 1850 and in
the Second Empire, Marx lampoons all the tactics of the various political
parties and figures who were neither able to understand nor change the
course of events.
The chapter of Benjamin’s book project on Baudelaire entitled ‘La
Bohème’ begins with a quote from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, in which the German philosopher describes the crowd
that brought Napoleon III to power as ‘la bohème’.24 Benjamin also means
that Baudelaire was, in a sense, a member of the ‘indefinite, disintegrated
mass’ about which Marx talks, since during his time in Belgium he was a
spy for the Bonapartist police; but more significantly, he claims that the
French poet made the bohème the object of his poetic work. Benjamin
quotes Baudelaire’s statements regarding the revolution, according to
which one must revolt but then also assume the role of the executioner,
in order to see the revolution from both sides. Benjamin defines these
paradoxes of Baudelaire as ‘the metaphysics of the provocateur’. The
crowd, which in the essay On Some Motifs by Baudelaire is shown to be a
constant presence in the poems, is here portrayed as la bohème, a crowd
intent on putting up barricades. It is not a coincidence that the first part
of this essay is full of quotations from Marx. Yet the Paris that Baudelaire
describes is devoid of any barricades: the poet searches for the magic of
lost places in tones that greatly resemble those of Blanqui.
The most important ‘head’ of the barricades, Louis Blanqui, was incar-
cerated in Toureau prison and Marx considered him to be the true leader
of the proletarian party. Marx, speaking about Blanqui and his compan-
ions, writes: ‘They are the alchemists of the revolution and are character-
ised by exactly the same chaotic thinking and blinkered obsessions as the
alchemists of old.’25
In The Class Struggles in France from 1848 to 1850, Marx labels the tax
on wine as harassment of the working classes, in particular the labourers
7 Baudelaire 193
in the big cities.26 It is remarkable that as Baudelaire in his poem ‘The

Ragman’s Wine’ writes ‘One sees a ragman who walks shaking the head/
who Staggers against the walls, as poets do’27, he describes the phenom-
enon of proletarians getting drunk in the suburbs of town, the same phe-
nomenon on which Marx, albeit more prosaically, reflected. The ragmen
to which Baudelaire refers in this poem are precisely those chiffonniers to
which Heine refers in his Parisian Account, who would have had a deci-
sive role in the spread of cholera.28 Baudelaire writes a series of couplets
in which he distinguishes the descendants of Abel from the descendants
of Cain (thus reproducing the biblical curse). Granier de Cassagnac had
published in 1838 a Histoire des classes ouvrières et des classes bourgeoisies
(History of the Working Classes and of the Bourgeois Classes), where he
indentified a proletarian class of sub-men, the descendants of thieves and
prostitutes. Benjamin asks whether Baudelaire knew of this text; Marx
certainly knew of it because he mentions it in Das Kapital.
Adorno criticizes Benjamin’s essay in a radical manner.29 He par-
ticularly does not approve of its method; but, aside from the misun-
derstandings deriving from the fragmented nature of the writing and
the lack of information, he perceives perfectly Benjamin’s aversion for
progress and modernity. He accuses Benjamin of a lack of mediation,
by which he means a lack of synthesis in the Hegelian sense. In fact,
when Benjamin means ‘I would like to speak clearly’ he writes ‘Let me
express myself here in as simple and Hegelian manner as possible’.30
Adorno’s critique is focused on those parts in which Benjamin pinpoints
the destructive character of the modern and the illusory nature of the
idea of progress, while showing a certain scepticism towards the parts
in which Benjamin’s ‘eccentric’ approach to social and cultural reality
emerges more clearly.
Benjamin responds to Adorno in a letter of 9 December 1938, in
which, even with its tone of ‘Chinese tact’, he accuses him of having
not understood his essay on Baudelaire.31 He argues that the relation-
ship between Poe and the crowd element is fundamental to his analysis.
Benjamin then attempts to explain the structure of his essay with obvious
references to the structure of The Arcades Project. Yet his methodological
issue is so distant from the mentality of Adorno that its results are almost
incomprehensible. Benjamin writes, ‘The concept of the trace will find
its philosophical determination in opposition to the concept of aura.’32

Here, it seems that he almost wants to emphasize the connection between
his work on Baudelaire and his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility’. Benjamin strongly refuses to follow
that Hegelian logic to which Adorno alluded in his letter. After having
confirmed the centrality of the theme of the flâneur, which Adorno also
strongly criticized, Benjamin returns to his methodological objectives,
which are in essence the source of his fundamental disagreement with this
representative of the Frankfurt School: ‘The missing theoretical transpar-
ency to which you rightly refer is in no way a necessary consequence of
the philological procedure prevailing in this section. Rather, I see it as the
consequence of the fact that this procedure is not made explicit as such.’33
Benjamin plays on the implicit, precisely because it operates through alle-
gories. In the case of Baudelaire, the references to a series of implications
are quite considerable, due to the fact that the essay was written as a
miniature model of the book on Paris.
The use of Marx recalls the schemata with which Benjamin uses his-
torical materialism throughout The Arcades Project. Many citations inte-
grate perfectly with those of the ‘Konvolut N’, the chapter on the theory
of knowledge and the theory of progress. Marx is used in an instrumental
sense, to draw the epochal socioeconomic context within which Benjamin
wanted to place the figure of Baudelaire. Benjamin’s use of historical
materialism is what causes the perplexity that Adorno expresses in his
letter. Sometimes (not always), Benjamin uses materialism as a pretext.
The connection of the figure of the ragman, in Baudelaire’s poems, to the
wine tax, on which Marx and Engels linger in their writings on France,
seems truly problematic. A superficial reading of Baudelaire’s essay, which
Adorno partly makes, suggests that Benjamin, in his analysis of objects
with allegorical meaning, wants only to understand the period of the
Second Empire. Instead, Benjamin is convinced that Marxism is the only
possible system that allows the economic phenomena of the nineteenth
century to be understood; however, his analysis of the ‘prehistory of the
modern’ does not want to limit itself just to economic production. The
‘discomfort’ and ‘goose bumps’ of which Adorno spoke in his letter are
evidently referring to the perception of this instrumental use of historical
materialism.
7 Baudelaire 195
However, this emphasizing of marginalized figures, such as the rag-

man, the ‘cursed poet’, the bohème and the unstructured artisans, allows
Benjamin to identify a social subject that goes beyond the classifications
of Marx and has a ‘revolutionary’ potential, at least in nineteenth-century
Paris. These ‘eccentric’ figures, which Marx labels ‘an underclass’, or better,
a Lumpenproletariat, are instead perceived by Benjamin—in their ambi-
guity–to be the origin of ‘precarious’ social figures, forced to ‘wander’ the
job market in search of a ‘customer’. In the modern era, capitalism under-
goes a metamorphosis—prefigured in Paris in the nineteenth century—
and produces a precarious intellectual, of which the author himself had
first-hand experience, forced to accept any type of work without the least
bit of ‘hope’ of being ‘saved’ from a regular existence. The ambiguity of
these precarious figures is provided by their apoliticality, by their being
‘outside’ any schemata. These precarious figures are also made up of arti-
sans and independent workers who cannot find common interests within
the traditional concept of ‘class’, so their revolutionary potential can also
be used for reactionary purposes. However, it is precisely this ‘eccentric’
position, this being ‘outside’, which detracts from the capitalist logic of
guilt-debt. The dispositif is not applicable to them because they have no
hope of being able to ‘repay’ a debt. And exactly in this consists their sub-
versive character. The centrality of the figure of Baudelaire is also loaded
with a ‘revolutionary’ and subversive component, which in particular
recalls the figure of Blanqui and of the ‘alchemists of the revolution’.
However, Benjamin fully uses the writings of Marx and Engels on post-
Napoleonic France, also relating them to his Marxist analysis of capitalist
production, with particular regard to the process of reification. With his
‘pearl fishers’ technique Benjamin uses only those aspects and concepts
of Marx that are functional to his discourse on Paris, omitting the rest.
He sees in the commercialization of any object one of the characteristics
of the modern era and in describing it, uses the observations of Marx.
The metropolis of modernity is populated by goods and places such as
large department stores, the boulevards and the Parisian passages, which
are precisely the places where the crowd (another typical element of the
modern) most easily gathered.
The commodity aspect of the objects that populate the spaces of moder-
nity determines fashion and réclame (advertising). For this reason, the
large cities are populated with images that then remain in the dreams of
the masses, passing as Bilder (pictures) into the culture and being handed
down in objects that subsume the sense of the whole epoch. The phe-
nomenon of the penny dreadful is linked to the high volume of Parisian
newspapers. In taking into consideration the dissemination of Parisian
newspapers, Benjamin reuses a series of analyses on the changed quality
of experience transmitted through communication and the new role of
advertising and fashion, which will then go on to have a central role in
the theme of the flâneur.34 In fact, on the boulevards each object presents
itself as a commodity—and here Benjamin uses Marx to emphasize the
reification of any phenomenon in modern civilization and to explain eco-
nomically the phenomenon of prostitution, which he will try to explain
as the reification of physicality, as the production of male fantasies and as
a monetary relationship.
There are privileged places in which this phenomenon appears more
obviously. Large department stores are a product of modern civiliza-
tion and the large city that take on the value of an allegorical place. The
stores give the flâneur a sort of euphoria, as intoxicating as if it were a
drug. In fact, Baudelaire was a connoisseur of drugs and certainly knew
of their effects. The euphoria of the goods is also projected, according
to Baudelaire, onto the prostitutes and the poet himself.35 Yet there
are places in which this process is even more evident: the streets of the
metropolis and the arcades. Here the exposure of commodities and the
reduction of everything to commodities takes the extreme tones that give
these places the allegorical characteristic of the modern era. The extreme
case of prostitution can shed light on the process of reification of relation-
ships, in which even the body becomes a commodity.
Benjamin finds some of the central themes of his book project on
Paris already developed in Baudelaire: the places where the modern is
more evident (the streets, the department stores, the arcades) are also
the places of the ‘exhibition’ of goods and at the same time the places
where prostitutes are available as commodities among the other goods.36
In Central Park, Benjamin reiterates this concept: prostitution in the big
cities has made women into not only a commodity, but also an item of
the masses, of which make-up is the most striking aspect.37 Additionally,
the analogy of the prostitute returns in Baudelaire regarding the role of
7 Baudelaire 197
the poet, obviously linked to the commercialization of poetry. Prostitutes

turn their bodies into a commodity, and Baudelaire sees in this a certain
affinity with the existential condition of the poet.38
Benjamin explains in a letter to Horkheimer of 16 April 1938, signi-
fying his intention to relate the reification of every relationship in the
modern, with prostitution as an allegory of this process:
The third part treats the commodity as the fulfilment of Baudelaire’s alle-
gorical vision. It turns out that which is new, which explodes the experi-
ence of the immutable under whose spell the poet was placed by spleen, is
nothing other than the aureole of commodity. Two excursuses properly
belong here. One pursues the extent to which Jugendstil appears as pre-
formed in Baudelaire’s conception of the new; the other deals with the
prostitute as the commodity that most perfectly realizes the allegorical
vision.39
The concretely perceivable thing appears as advertising, as the beauti-

ful appearance of goods. This appearance falls into disuse when fashion
changes. What remains is the memory. Objects that go out of fashion
are like the dead. And the memory that remains is like the awareness of
transience, that the only certain thing is death. It is the only truly radical
experience that we continually expect from the continuous changes of the
perceptible world.40 The illusory novelty of goods imposed by capitalist
production is the eternal recurrence of the same. All of the motifs present
in the convolutes of The Arcades Project lead in some way to Central Park;
that is, to Baudelaire’s poetry.
3 ‘The form of a city is changing’

The great transformations of the modern may be observed in the big city,
thus reiterating its character as an allegory for the whole epoch. In the
1850s and 1860s, the city of Paris underwent radical transformations
that made it functional within the new age. Baudelaire was the first to
perceive these radical epochal changes, but he was also the first to observe
how these great transformations were based on the systematic, constant
and necessary destruction of the already existing.41 He perfectly captures
the destructive character of the modern in his poetry, and Benjamin, for
his part, picks up this veiled accusation of nihilism as one of the imma-
nent characteristics of modernity. The production of the modern, not
only in relation to fashion but also (as Marx explains in the Manifesto)
in relation to the production of any goods, has an inherent need to pro-
duce new objects in ever new ways (the continuous revolution of the
means of production), marking goods up at ‘well below the market rate’
and destroying the ‘hitherto product’ and the old production techniques.
This destructive character of the modern finds a way to manifest even in
the great metropolis, which assumes a modern physiognomy (the large
boulevards) thanks only to the destruction of the old districts.42 Modern
times no longer have need of poetry: Baudelaire responds to this moder-
nity with a poem in Alexandrine metre (hence its heroic manner).
The superiority of Baudelaire’s poetry with respect to modern poetry
lies in the fact that he treats the poetic subject with detachment and scep-
ticism: he puts Paris at the centre of his work, but without idolizing it as
an expression of progress. Benjamin writes: ‘Baudelaire’s opposition to
progress was the indispensable condition for his success at capturing Paris
in his poetry. Compared with this poetry, all later big-city lyric must be
accounted feeble. What it lacks is precisely that reserve towards its subject
matter which Baudelaire owed to his frenetic hatred of progress.’43
The transformation of the city was radical, in that the forms of the
modern were imposed on it. After 1848 Paris had become uninhabit-
able. It had grown completely out of proportion, forcing people to live in
small, dark, damp and dank alleyways. In the 1850s there were large-scale
rehabilitation projects and then in 1859 Haussmann began his radical
demolition work to realize the concept of the new modern city. If it is
true what Baudelaire writes about the city in his poems—namely, that it
is changing faster than the heart of an individual—it is equally true that
this claim can be proved especially by analysing the ‘capital of the nine-
teenth century’. Several buildings were demolished to create a new space
for boulevards. The old Paris panoramas of Meryon44 greatly impressed
Baudelaire, since they were to a certain extent the archaeology of the mod-
ern. Meryon’s Paris etchings were carried out between 1852 and 1854.
Benjamin sees a certain parallel between Meryon and Baudelaire: both
were born in the same year, dying just a few months after one another,
7 Baudelaire 199
Baudelaire in a clinic, suffering from paralysis and aphasia, Meryon in

an insane asylum at Charenton. Meryon’s views of bridges, of ripped-up
streets and transformed palaces, are, according to Benjamin, the record-
ing of work, the continuous change of what ‘has been’ and ‘what will
soon be’.
Baudelaire’s work must be read as one would read ancient poetry.
His research on classicism must be understood in its double meaning,
in that he turns to a bygone era, showing nostalgia for the Paris before
Haussmann, but at the same time he writes in anticipation of times to
come, for a time in which the modern will already have been expressed
in all of its vigour. This is doubly ‘untimely’. Benjamin correlates the col-
lected materials on Baudelaire to the motif of the flâneur. The experience
of the world occurs through the experience of the metropolis (in this
case Paris as a paradigmatic example) and Benjamin reads the work of
Baudelaire as a promenade through the themes of the modern.
In the poem ‘The Swan’, which Benjamin cites several times, Baudelaire
writes about the transformation of the city: ‘The old Paris is gone (the form
of a city is changing/More quickly, alas, than does the mortal heart)’.45
And in the second part of the poem he opposes the memory of the great
transformations of the modern: ‘Paris may change, but in my melan-
choly mood/Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,/
Old neighbourhoods, are allegorical for me,/And my dear memories are
heavier than stone’.46 The memories become allegories of change, regard-
ing not only the psychological situation, but also the topography of the
city, the memories of squares and palaces. Here Benjamin found the key
to interpreting Baudelaire, subsequently developed as an interpretative
key for the big city. In ‘The Little Old Women’, the transformation of
the city is expressed through the allegory of the old women who ‘were
women once’.47 They go ‘quaking from the riot of an omnibus’48 now
under the weight of their transformation, ‘through the chaos of living cit-
ies’.49 In ‘The Taste for Nothingness’, Baudelaire writes ‘The Spring, once
wonderful, has lost its scent!’,50 which Benjamin takes to mean that the
great transformations of the metropolis have also changed the perception
of nature. The city has surreptitiously replaced the experience of nature.
The renewal of the modern is in reality, like fashion, the return of the
always same, the recurrence of the same pattern of destruction. Benjamin
reiterates this meaning clearly: ‘The concept of progress must be grounded

in the idea of the catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastro-
phe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.
Strindberg’s idea: Hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here
and now.’51 The modern era is the era of broken promises of happiness.
Benjamin locates in Baudelaire an intellectual journey that resolves itself
in a critique of the idea of progress. The new in Baudelaire never identi-
fies itself with progress.52 He criticizes progress and faith in it. Blanqui,
however, does not show hatred for faith in progress, but instead derides it.
The critique of the idea of progress emerges in almost all of Benjamin’s
body of work.53 These position is not new: it finds its origin in the
Romantics and is proliferated throughout German culture. Once again,
we are faced with a substantial difference between the Romantic critique
of progress in the name of a golden age, identified in the Middle Ages,
and Benjamin’s critique of the modern era: in Benjamin there is no nos-
talgic element, but rather the use of ‘positivistic’ elements, as Adorno
defines them; that is, the Marxists. It is not in the name of a golden
past, nor in the name of an unspecified idealism, that Benjamin criticizes
the modern, but in the name of a revolutionary principle that wants to
interrupt this continuous catastrophe. His critique of progress assumes
a messianic/revolutionary tone that distinguishes it radically from the
Kulturpessimismus of Klages and George.54 Benjamin builds the famous
allegory of the angel of history against blind faith in progress. ‘To brush
history against the grain’, as he writes in his seventh thesis, means to lib-
erate oneself from the illusion of progress and to recover those aspects of
thought that are in the process of ‘being lost’, or are already ‘lost’ to the
predominating culture of the victorious classes.
Baudelaire remains equidistant from the literary trends of his time by
criticizing them all equally: he distances himself, as we know, with partic-
ular vehemence from Romanticism, but also criticizes the so-called école
vertueuse and the Parnassians.55 This attack on the virtuous for glorifying
virtue, as well as the critique of the Parnassians for exalting the beauty of
form, criticizing the duplicity of the modern world in order to interpret
the different roles of the ‘cursed poet’, must have impressed Benjamin,
who in essence was carrying out a similar process with his Arcades Project.
Baudelaire reveals himself to be not only a good example of the criticism
7 Baudelaire 201
of progress and the modern, not only a significant example of allegorical

poetry with the metropolis as one of its thematic centres, but also a con-
vincing example of the negative path method.
To understand Baudelaire’s ‘negative path’, one must read his essays
on Madame Bovary and Les liaisons dangereuses. Baudelaire is interested
in the artistic description of evil and immorality, because it is through
this that he seeks to overcome the lure of evil. In short, the indecent, the
immoral, the transgressive, the evil in literature have a cathartic value:
describing evil in order to overcome the fascination with sin. In this pro-
cess, Baudelaire follows the pattern of classical tragedy: the ‘fear’ of Greek
tragedies had somehow to exorcise any evil (hybris, the arrogance that
caused the wrath of the gods) and somehow ‘purify’ the spectator from
the fear of death. Baudelaire’s classicism lies much more in this cathartic
conception of art, which must describe that which is evil and the horren-
dous, rather than in the use of ‘classical’ Alexandrine verses. In Baudelaire
there is always something that goes beyond classification.
Benjamin finds in Baudelaire a radical critique of faith in progress,
which he uses as the paradigmatic example of scepticism towards the
naive optimism of the idealists and the ‘positivists’. He cites in the convo-
lutes of The Arcades Project those passages in which Baudelaire lampoons
the theory on progress: ‘Transferred into the sphere of the imagination
[…], the idea of progress looms up with gigantic absurdity […].’56 The
modern thus appears as a series of catastrophes and assumes a hellish con-
notation. The metaphor of hell is also appropriate to the description of
the big city, given the presence of underground sewers, deep excavations
and all those innovative aspects related to modernization. Yet of course,
Benjamin uses this image also in a figurative sense: hell is the condition
of the individual, who is subjected to a series of shocks related to the
experience of the new, and who feels increasingly dislocated from nature
and isolated in this labyrinth of the metropolis. Hell, for Benjamin, is the
allegory that condenses the essential traits of the modern.57 A worse hell
is the underworld of Greek mythology, in which some of the protago-
nists are sentenced to carry out the same tasks for all eternity (Sisyphus,
Tantalus etc.).58 This is the fate of the assembly-line workers, which
Benjamin, citing Engels, relates to these ancient heroes, drawing paral-
lels between the mechanical nature of their tasks and the repetitiveness
of their gesture. From here stems the analogy with the Dantean topos of
the gates of hell, another theme that Benjamin drew from his reading of
Marx.59
The great metropolis is populated by masses who, in the streets,
assume the physiognomy of the crowd. This crowd of consumers, which
has to be related to commodities, consistently appears in Baudelaire’s
poetry. Losing oneself in the crowd means experiencing the metropolis
and, therefore, experiencing modernity as well: the flâneur is the allegory
of a fragmented experience of the modern. Benjamin finds a surprising
similarity between the description of the London streets produced by
Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844/1845) and
Baudelaire’s Parisian experience. The forms of the modern in the great
city are the common denominators. Engels speaks of the brutal indif-
ference, the unfeeling isolation of each individual in his private interest,
and Baudelaire depicts the pleasure of being in a crowd as a mysteri-
ous expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of number. Baudelaire
considers the multiplication of shock in relation to gambling (or, in any
case, Benjamin uses him in this way); Engels, on the other hand, is used
in relation to the comments of Freud: the isolation of the individual in
the crowd is one of his reactions to the chain of shocks. Victor Hugo
also considers the crowd, but in a different, political manner. Hugo
acknowledges the crowd and he places his characters in it, and in turn
the crowd recognizes Hugo. Not so in Baudelaire. Hugo, as citoyen, gets
mixed up in the crowd; Baudelaire, as hero, becomes detached from it.
Not by chance does Benjamin write that the flâneur is the prototype of
the figure of the hero of our days. Yet this figure, as Benjamin writes,
would be unthinkable without the architectural structure of the arcades:
‘Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the
arcades.’60 In the passages, the flâneur is at home. The flâneur wants to
avoid boredom and, according to Baudelaire, it is impossible to become
bored in the crowd. The arcades are a space between the inside and the
street. The street becomes the home of the flâneur. Also in this section on
flânerie, Benjamin drew extensively on the notes for The Arcades Project:
the street as the dwelling place of the collective, the flâneur and the art
of the detective and so on, even using quotes from Balzac. Baudelaire
views the appearance of a pedestrian as a shock, but in a positive sense.
7 Baudelaire 203
Baudelaire lived in the clubs and coffee shops of Paris, had several private
homes and often slept away from home to escape his creditors. Between
1842 and 1858, fourteen different addresses are recorded for the poet.
In this way, he physically lived in the city as a flâneur. Benjamin cites a
story by Poe, The Man of the Crowd, in the translation of Baudelaire, as an
example of the suspicion and criminalization that the flâneur experiences
in the crowd.
The flâneur is a disturbing, suspected figure—a notion that Kracauer
also supports.61 The phenomenon of the lighting of the city streets, which
was a huge development in the Paris of the Second Empire, is another of
the signs of the changing times. During Baudelaire’s childhood the streets
were not lit, and as such the evening stars could still be seen. The modern
metropolis became safer at night, thanks to the gas lighting, but it was a
profound transformation for the city’s inhabitants.62
Many critics noted how Baudelaire was an instinctual poet, but one
who was almost completely devoid of culture. Benjamin sees in Baudelaire
the prototype of the bohémien and connects this lack of culture to lack of
means: Baudelaire would be a proletarian poet, full of debts, homeless,
no access to a library, without sustenance. Benjamin once again mentions
Marx on labour power: Baudelaire would thus be a proletarian in pos-
session only of his labour power, which in this case is his poetic ability.63
The mass that Baudelaire, as a flâneur, encounters is a mass of workers
and citizens submerged in their work and the ecological damage that the
job involves. This mass, so tormented, is the mass of the modern. And
the modern needs a hero: an individual has to assume a heroic attitude
to survive the modern. The hero is the true subject of modernity. This
means that in order to live in the modern, a heroic attitude is necessary.
Baudelaire sees in the modern proletariat the figure of the gladiator, with
all the aesthetic and poetic components that this entails.
Baudelaire defines Dandyism as a melancholic and fascinating phe-
nomenon, which is comparable to a sunset.64 He sees in it the allegorical
figure of an era whose time is coming to an end, expressing the best of
itself in its death, in its final passing away. Benjamin detects almost in
toto this attitude, in order to apply it to the modern era, which appears
to be in the midst of its final sunset (the catastrophe). Almost his entire
conceptual approach on tackling the epochal problem of the modern is
taken from Baudelaire, whom Benjamin mentions in an excerpt from

L’art romantique:
Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element […] and of a relative,

circumstantial element, which will be […] the age—its fashions, its morals,
its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as
the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element
would be beyond our powers of digestion.65
Baudelaire emphasizes the importance of painters in fashion, in that

they set the taste of the time. In fact, fashion records the oscillations of
the temporary. These are exactly the observations that Benjamin inserts
into The Arcades Project. Those observations were already anticipated in
relation to goods and réclame, for which fashion, the new that is always
offered on the market, is here once again repeated, but concerning the
crowd. The continuing newness of images that the flâneur meets in the
crowd is an illusory newness.66
The crowd is at the same time both different and uniform, but the
organization of modern society caused it to turn into a mass. So the
crowd is made up of lonely individuals who behave in a uniform way.
Baudelaire is ahead of his time, and this trait is a characteristic of the
figure of the flâneur; indeed, he needs the crowd to be his audience and
the source of his very existence, deluding himself that his continuous
movement takes him to ever new experiences. The crowd, in fact, only
provides him with the experience of change, of transition from the old
city to the new metropolis, acting as a sign of the caducity of things, as a
reminder of the quick passage of time and as an emblem of ever-present
death. However, the delusion of the flâneur to see in the crowd something
new and uniform, as if it were an organic unity, anticipates the desire to
see a community, a people, in the agglomeration of individuals that the
modern has brought into the big city. Now, it is evident that this denial
of the concept of people, nothing more than the crowd, which empowers
the very origins of the modern community, finds its roots in the analy-
sis of a figure like Baudelaire and locates its field of application in the
definition of the modern era and of its destructive character. Moreover,
one of Benjamin’s motivations is the dismantling of the Nazi concept of
7 Baudelaire 205
Volk. This deriving of the concept of ‘people’ from the great changes that
the modern caused in society is a political consequence of Benjamin’s
analysis, which has been repeatedly emphasized,67 linked as it is to the
‘politicization of art’ project, expressed in his famous essay The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility. It is in this sense that his let-
ter to Horkheimer should be understood, when he agrees to extrapolate
an essay on Baudelaire from The Arcades Project, and states that his work
on the French poet should be understood both in relationship to and as a
continuation of his essay on the work of art. This relationship consists in
the fact that both works focus on the loss of aura and the consequences
that the modern has had for artistic production.68 In The Work of Art,
Benjamin analyses the contemporary situation and the consequences of
the loss of aura regarding new media as well; in the essay on Baudelaire,
he instead analyses the origins (the ‘prehistory’, as he would say in The
Arcades Project) of this phenomenon of the commercialization and mas-
sification of the work of art. In the two works, Benjamin’s main inter-
est is focused on the possibility of producing art in the modern era and
analysing the major changes that have occurred in this process of artistic
production. However, the author is trying to clear away any major mis-
interpretations (or illusions, as he calls them); that is, the fascist concep-
tions of art (the poet-prophet, people as an organic unity, the fatherland
as blood and soil etc.).
4 Memory
Baudelaire claims in Salon de 1845 that an author has to write for the
following era. And, although he seeks to say that one must construct
poetry from all the oneiric and confused visions, he never abandoned this
rational and calculated programme, even in the worst stages of his illness.
In Baudelaire there is always a ‘healthy’ core.69
Baudelaire’s poetic working presents itself as a corporeal labour. It
is the metaphor of the fencer: according to Baudelaire, the poet must
fight against himself and against his own time, and that ‘fencing’, which
this metaphor involves, has an inherent aesthetic gesture. Benjamin
once again finds similarities between Baudelaire’s satanism and a series
of observations that Marx made in The Eighteenth Brumaire.70 In the

essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin notes just at the begin-
ning that the poet addresses a particular type of audience, a careless and
disenchanted reader—afflicted by spleen—who resembles the author
(‘mon semblable, mon frère’). In this way, he seems to condemn himself
to having a small audience, but in reality Baudelaire wanted, accord-
ing to Benjamin, to direct his work towards the following era, and
this was only possible because the poet understood the deep epochal
changes and that the beginning of a new epoch was on him. Now, if
this observation can to a certain extent facilitate the understanding of
Baudelaire’s poetry, it is vital to the comprehension of the meaning that
Benjamin wanted to assign to his book on Paris: it too is addressed
to readers of the following era. Ironically, Benjamin’s work has been
almost exclusively read, commented on and discussed by the genera-
tion that followed his. This is in part due to the troubled history of his
unpublished manuscripts, and partly because of his intention to write
a book that would be ‘untimely’, all projected to the following era. The
other remark that Benjamin made in regard to Baudelaire was that the
modern audience no longer appreciates poetry, and that in the modern
era poetry can no longer rely on being a mainstream success. In other
words, artistic production underwent structural changes in the modern,
so that it imposed a change of the communication medium. This is not
only a matter of loss of aura and the ‘reproducibility’ of the work of art,
but also a matter of poetic language, that to reach an audience must use
images taken from the collective imagine space and modify one’s own
expressive code.
With the introduction of the machines and automation in the produc-
tion process, a loss of experience occurred (Erfahrung). Modern men have
almost no experience, only lived experience (Erlebnis), and in particular
the Erlebnis of shock: ‘Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in col-
lective existence as well as private life. It is the product less of facts firmly
anchored in memory [Erinnerung] than of accumulated and frequently
unconscious data that flow together in memory [Gedächtnis].’71 This defi-
nition of experience is clearly taken from a reading of Bergson, but is in
some way ‘burdened’ with the Benjaminian concept of memory. Above
all, the observation that unknown information flows into the memory,
7 Baudelaire 207
turning it into a sort of template with which the subject undergoes new
experiences, constitutes the explicit emergence of a concept that Benjamin
develops throughout the rest of his work: it is on the axis of memory
that the urban experience is constructed and the changes instigated by
the modern (the memory of ‘no more’) are verified. Lastly, it is on the
axis of the memory of detail, of obsolete and marginal objects, that one
becomes aware that one era is ending and another is beginning. It seems
that Proust takes his inspiration from Bergson, transforming the mémoire
pure of Bergsonian theory into the mémoire involontaire that Benjamin
completely accepts.72 Involuntary memory is the interface that connects
the collective memory to the individual one; thus Proust’s account of his
childhood comes to be seen as the narration of the past epoch.73
Benjamin uses the Freudian definition of memory, taken from the
essay of 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, combining it with Proust’s
notion of mémoire involontaire. In Freud, memory and consciousness
seem to clash with one another: that which emerges in the conscious
is subtracted from the memory, but the traces of memory that emerge
in the psyche are nothing to do with the consciousness; rather, they are
residue left over from the unconscious. Translated into Proustian termi-
nology, this signifies that mémoire involontaire mainly concerns collective
events, rather than individual experience. Benjamin illustrates his theory
of experience through the use of shock, referring back to a quote from the
father of psychoanalysis:
In Freud’s view, consciousness as such receives no memory traces whatever,

but has another important function: protection against stimuli. ‘For a liv-
ing organism, protection against stimuli is almost more important than the
reception of stimuli. The protective shield is equipped with its own store of
energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion
of energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work
in the external world—effects that tend toward an equalization of potential
and hence toward destruction.’ The threat posed by these energies is the
threat of shocks.74
Shock is therefore an eruption of external energy within the psyche.

According to Valéry,75 memory is an elemental phenomenon that tends
to give us time to organize the reception of stimuli. Such reception can
be facilitated by dreaming or by memory. The shock experience was the

focus of the artistic work of Baudelaire, the analysis of which was becom-
ing key to Benjamin’s work on the French poet. In the psychic economy
of the collector, memories are connected together with ‘correspondences’
to form a chain. Baudelaire can be an allegorical poet inasmuch as he is a
collector and a fetishist. The experience of shock is principally linked to
the experience of great changes, which occur in the metropolis and make
it difficult for memories to be placed. Shock is connected to the modern,
the crowd and the massive transformations carried out in the city.76
The crowd and the large concentration of people in the big city con-
stitute one of the phenomena of the modern that shocked the intellec-
tuals who were studying it: starting with Baudelaire, in poetic terms,
and finishing with Marx, who, as Benjamin recalls, analysed the massive
concentration of people in London in political-philosophical terms. The
swarming of the big cities’ crowds was here interpreted as having great
political and economic potential, but at a high cost: the crowd loses many
of its traces of humanity, starting from its solidarity. Moving through a
mass of strangers with the nonchalance of the flâneur is the first thing
that the intellectuals of the modern learn, since they are well aware of the
changes occurring around them.77
Baudelaire has his own model when it comes to the theme of the
crowd, and that model is Edgar Allan Poe. Benjamin cites Poe’s The Man
of the Crowd to emphasize the similarity between the description of the
story in English and Baudelaire’s perception of the crowd. Yet it is clear
that Poe’s story also served as one of Benjamin’s many models for describ-
ing the crowd and the flânerie on the streets of Paris. Poe’s description of
the crowd can be compared, in contrast, to one that, a few years before
him, E.T.A. Hoffmann had produced in My Cousin’s Corner Window.
However, the difference between them lies in the fact that Hoffmann
describes the crowd before the great transformations of the modern
occurred. Benjamin cites a letter of a friend of Varnhagen, who in 1838
describes Heine’s impression during a walk along the Parisian boulevards:
Heine ‘was having a bad time with his eyes in the spring’, wrote a corre-
spondent in a letter to Varnhagen in 1838. ‘On our last meeting, I accom-
panied him part of the way along the boulevard. The splendor and vitality
7 Baudelaire 209
of that unique thoroughfare moved me to boundless admiration, while,

against this, Heine now laid weighty emphasis on the horrors attending
this center of the world.’78
Benjamin is clearly aware of the fact that Heine, even before Baudelaire,
had recognized the destructive character of the modern, having perceived
the ‘horrible’ elements of the metropolis and of the crowd. This ‘pre-
history’ of the modern epoch, which Benjamin sees in the Paris of the
Second Empire, can actually find its origins a few years before it, in an
era that the ‘old Heine’ (as Karl Marx used to define him) lived through
and subsequently described. Paul Valéry writes: ‘The inhabitant of the
great urban centres reverts to a state of savagery—that is, of isolation.’79
Benjamin uses the French poet’s quotation to introduce the theme of the
loss of the centre: isolation within the crowd is attributable to the loss of
the centre, to the loss of any centrality, which can be experienced in all its
shock value in the large metropolis; in the words of Heine, at the ‘centre
of the world’.
The continuous series of shocks that the new introduces to the metrop-
olis invests the individual with the characters of the phantasmagoria and
lays bare its own eradication. The modern advocates an absolute faith
in progress, but the continued changes eradicate the individual from
the past, extinguishing any notion of centrality, alienating the individ-
ual from nature and throwing them into a world of goods, in which all
relationships are reified. The experience of the modern is an experience of
subtraction of the past. The places of the past no longer exist, even physi-
cally. The Paris of the Second Empire is, in this sense, a place of privi-
leged observation. The psycho-anthropological structures, linked to the
preceding period, are swept away by modernization and the individual is
left alone, isolated in their sole value as labour power, as a producer and as
a possible purchaser of goods. The liberation promised by the modern is
only an illusion, because progress bases itself on its own inherent destruc-
tive character. It is the eternal recurrence of always the same, in the form
of continuous change in the catastrophe. Those few intellectuals who
understood the nihilistic character of the modern are even more isolated
and uprooted from their own century, since they do not participate in
the euphoria of progress and they are aware of the fact that their protests
can only end in failure. Benjamin views Poe, Baudelaire, Blanqui and
Nietzsche in this particular light, as heroic figures, but also as tragic fig-
ures. These authors are able to make the catastrophe of the modern pro-
ductive, inasmuch as they are able to overturn progress’s inherent nihilism
in a conscious and emblematic process of self-annihilation—from which
stems the suicidal nature of modern art. Baudelaire writes: ‘The time is
not far when it will be understood that any literature that refuses to walk
fraternally between science and philosophy is a homicide and suicide lit-
erature.’80 Failure—by eccentric and paradoxical pathways—is the only
way to make clear the destructive nature of the modern. The memory’s
past to ‘save’ is only the awareness of continuous change in action, carried
out through the production of allegories.
Baudelaire translated Poe, whose work he directly compared with his
own, largely to improve his English for the sole purpose of being able to
translate some more of Poe’s works. The identification between Poe and
Baudelaire (at least in regard to epochal criticism) must also be seen in
the American author’s diffusion in French culture. Like Baudelaire, Poe
reached this state of higher consciousness via artificial means; even his
drunkenness was to explain the aesthetic pleasure of the marvellous, and
it was, in short, a method of work. Baudelaire writes in his first essay on
Théophile Gautier: ‘There is in the word, the verb something sacred which
forbids us to make it a game of chance.’81 This sentence, made famous by
the French Symbolists, must have struck Benjamin for the stress put on
the strength of the language. The inexpressibility of language is its meta-
physical aspect. Baudelaire, therefore, is an anticipator of Symbolist and
Surrealist trends, but precisely in the sense that Benjamin uses to criticize
Aragon. The ‘governance’ of the poetic language is the guarantee that
defends him from the gambling of automatic writings. Here re-emerges,
although veiled, Benjamin’s polemic against the Surrealists, who admire
the phantasmagoria of the modern, without even attempting to investi-
gate its origins.
According to Baudelaire, the poet has an ‘intelligence par excel-
lence’, thus wishing to underline the programmatic and artificial char-
acter of poetic production, without abandoning himself to sentimental
spontaneity; which is not to say that poetry should not concern itself
with passion. This freeing of oneself from sentimental poetry assumed
7 Baudelaire 211
a cathartic meaning in Baudelaire. The language in this process was a

‘sorcellerie évocatoire’.82 Benjamin recaptures the ‘evocative sorcery’ of this
way of writing; therefore his book on Paris, at the centre of which is
the figure of Baudelaire, is so difficult to decipher. Poe also argues that
to be a critic of poetry one must either be a poet oneself, or one must
have poetic sentiment. Baudelaire goes one step further, by claiming that
the poet is the highest rank of literary critic.83 Poe was convinced that
the poet was able to express anything through language and that there
did not exist an inexpressible thought or feeling. Both Baudelaire and
Benjamin have in some way accepted Poe’s faith in the expressive capac-
ity of poetic language as a barrier against the ecstatic mysticisms of the
poet-prophet. Baudelaire’s predilection for representation pervades the
structure of his poetry as well, it is invested in his polemic against the
Romantic identification between art and life, and urges him to conceive
of art as a device. Paradoxically, it could be argued that Baudelaire consid-
ers poetry to be an artificial paradise. He rejects the Romantic abandon-
ment towards the irrational and has a blind trust in the expressive ability
of language. ‘L’inexprimable n’existe pas’ (‘the inexpressible does not exist’)
he writes, referring to a conversation with Gautier.84 In this statement,
Benjamin has clearly found an elective affinity with his refusal to allow
himself to be overwhelmed by the inexplicable images of the Surrealists.
Both seek to ask themselves what the meanings are behind these images:
Baudelaire, because of his taste for representation, and Benjamin, because
of his quest to reconstruct the ‘prehistory of the modern’. In a letter to
his mother on 25 December 1857, Baudelaire writes: ‘I wanted to put
[in this book] some of my anger and my melancholy’;85 in another letter
on 9 July the same year, he defines the Flowers of Evil as being a ‘cold and
sinister beauty’.86 The modern poet is therefore a ‘cold’ poet who plans
his linguistic process.
Perhaps the young Benjamin held a different opinion regarding the
untranslatability of language in respect to ‘magic language’, but it seems
difficult, in his work on Baudelaire and Paris, to connect his observations
on ‘appearance’ and expressibility to the theory of the ineffable.87 Here,
it seems instead that Benjamin, as he writes in his letters to Horkheimer,
inscribes his work on Baudelaire within the theory of art in the era of
its mechanical reproducibility. Furthermore, he simply seeks to use Poe’s
statements in contrast to the Surrealist theory of the inexplicabilité of the

modern. The language of which he speaks is a poetic language. The con-
ditions needed to produce art in the modern era, with all the euphoria
and shock that are now inherent in it, are on the one hand completely
explainable (and this, ultimately, is the goal of The Arcades Project), yet
on the other hand are inexpressible in both a theoretical and a poetic
sense. At the beginning of One-Way Street, Benjamin writes: ‘True literary
activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework—this is,
rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary effective-
ness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and
writing; […]. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the
moment.’88 The need to incorporate the extra-literary in the text (through
montage and citations), and, on the other hand, the need to change soci-
ety through the text, are the Marxist and materialist ways of expressing
the need to make modernity the focal point of literary analysis (or of
the poetic text). In the structure of his work on Paris, which resulted
from a brief analysis of his Baudelaire essays (a sort of miniature model
that was the product of various exposés), his discourse on the modern era
started from a series of socioeconomic analyses in which he drew from
the writings of Marx and Engels. Benjamin defined this preliminary stage
as his ‘materialistic base’. He then went on to include a series of observa-
tions on the phenomena and forms of the modern, which had nothing
to do with Marxism or materialism. In this phase, Benjamin uses all the
observations drawn from psychoanalysis, as well as the beliefs drawn from
the literature of Baudelaire, Proust and so on. His line of reasoning, from
a methodological point of view, is rather eccentric. His friends did not
succeed in following the intricate path that made up his analysis, because
the writings that they did manage to read were almost always fragmen-
tary, leading to their being rejected based on the dyscrasia between the
‘base materialism’ and the rest of his analysis, as Adorno indeed does in
his long letter of 1938 and as Scholem does in all his correspondence with
Benjamin. The discourse on language and the inexpressibility of certain
words, which refers to a metaphysical discourse, is not drawn on in regard
to the issue of appearance and the poetic expressibility of concepts.89
Benjamin combines appearance and the poetic expressibility of concepts
with the historical-social motifs that caused the changed relationship
7 Baudelaire 213
between author and audience. Instead, he connects the theory of lan-

guage to the more complex metaphysical category of the relationship
with logos. He conceives of the capacity to produce a criticism of the
illusions of modernity (illusions that also affected the Marxists and the
materialists) as an Umweg. The only way to represent the failure of hope
in progress that the modern brings with it is the production of allegories.
Another great literary model for Baudelaire—perhaps at the same
level as Poe in criticizing contemporary literature—is Balzac. There is
no doubt that Benjamin’s observations on Balzac, as well as the citations
that are to be found in The Arcades Project, find their inspiration, their
spark, in Baudelaire’s articles. Benjamin finds in Balzac an entire series
of themes that Baudelaire draws on in his own work and that the same
Berlin critic wanted to organize into the central chapters of his book.
Baudelaire’s (and Poe’s) works should be read using memory as the key.
One of the claims that the French poet makes, one of his forms of resis-
tance against the modern, is that of remembering the ‘anterior reality’,
as if searching for the traces of those correspondances between the urban
landscape and the already lost nature. In the poem as well, significantly
entitled ‘Spleen’, Baudelaire reiterates the concept of this anterior experi-
ence: ‘I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years!’90 Here,
the archetypal figure overlaps with that of the collector (of experiences
and memories) and recombines with the figure that Benjamin outlines in
his essay on Fuchs. ‘I have the art of calling forth the happy times’91 is the
recurring verse of ‘Le balcon’. Benjamin wanted to read Baudelaire using
memory as a key, giving it a more expansive meaning than the memory
of the past, until it became the memory of the Erfahrung (experience).
And also the refrain of ‘The Clock’, defined as ‘sinister, impassive god’,
is ‘Remember!’,92 almost to strengthen this unbreakable bond between
time and memory. In ‘Le portait’, Baudelaire defines time as a ‘black
murderer of Life and Art’,93 to underline the encroachment of death and
how passions have been reduced to mere ash: ‘Disease and Death make
only dust and ash’.94 However, he contrasts this path towards nothing-
ness with memory: ‘You’ll never kill her in my memory’.95 Benjamin uses
this intuition for a messianic hope, in a metaphysical sense, to contrast
time. Baudelaire, within Benjamin’s discourse, could be considered as a
moment in the transition from historical time to messianic time.
5 ‘Click’ and Shock
According to Benjamin, the modern is characterized by the introduction
of sudden gestures that cause an action, in place of the complex processes
that were once necessary: for example, lighting a fire was an elaborate pro-
cedure, replaced at the dawn of the modern era by the sudden gesture of
lighting a match. With the advent of technology, the immediacy, the snap
that separates one action from another, was in some way accentuated:
the telephone, for example, has moved on in just a few years from the
swirling movement of the crank to the clicking of the receiver. Benjamin
understood this aspect of modern technology really well, so much so
that one could add more current examples to his schemata: the click of
the television’s on/off button, the changing of channels, the countless
buttons on the video recorder or any computer operating system. So the
experience of the modern is characterized by a sharp transition from one
action to another, marked by a click that Benjamin relates to the continu-
ing shock of the experience itself. Shock, in a Freudian sense, is a spike in
internal energy, but also shock in a more general sense, if related to the
experience of the crowd or the urban experience. Benjamin pays particu-
lar attention to the click of the camera shutter, because it produces an
image and because it goes on to become a part of the memory:
With regard to countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and

the like, the ‘snapping’ by the photographer has had the greatest conse-
quences. Henceforth a touch of the finger sufficed to fix an event for an
unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous
shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones,
such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic
of a big city. Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series
of shocks and collisions.96
This means, in essence, that the experience of the modern, which is rep-
resented by the urban experience, takes place through a series of opti-
cal shocks, of traumatic bursts of images in each individual’s psyche,
which becomes a ‘kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness’, according
to Baudelaire’s definition.97 Benjamin considers film to be the art form
7 Baudelaire 215
best suited to this type of experience. Indeed, film is nothing other than
a rapid succession of individual frames, of fixed images in their instanta-
neousness. It is modern art par excellence, produced by the latest tech-
nology, capable of expressing, better than anything else, modernity’s
condition of continuous shock.
The role of the ‘miniature model’ that his essay on Baudelaire plays
in The Arcades Project can easily be pinpointed in the fact that Benjamin
exhibits the whole range of planned motifs in his preparatory materi-
als, and uses them in a logical progression that somehow anticipates
his book on Paris. If the essay on Baudelaire is read carefully, with great
attention paid to its detail, one can discern the dense network of cita-
tions present in the Convolutes. Behind the frequent quotes from Marx
it is not difficult to perceive the ‘Konvolut N’: Theory of Knowledge,
Theory of Progress’ or the ‘Konvolut X’, dedicated to the German phi-
losopher himself. Here, Marx is used as a ‘base support’, as a sociological
and socioeconomic analysis of a series of behaviours that have influenced
the Bilder of modernity, the modern imagination, in the double sense
that the images are a shock and that they are received within the ‘kalei-
doscope endowed with conscience’.98 For example, Benjamin relates
the uniformity of crowd behaviour, noted by Poe, with the mechanical
movements of workers on the assembly line, highlighted by Marx. The
automatism of gestures in the workplace also produces a uniformity of
behaviour in social situations. The behaviour of pedestrians noticed by
Poe is of the automatic type, it is a reaction to the shock. Baudelaire
was not interested in the automatism of the workplace, but had found
another field in which shock sets in motion a reflex mechanism caused
by the machine: gambling. The click of the labourer’s machine corre-
sponds with the coup of gambling. In this passage, Benjamin emphasizes
the similarities between human-operated machinery and gambling, on
which some rely for their tragic fortune. In the convolutes of The Arcades
Project, Benjamin analyses all aspects of the gambler’s psychology in rela-
tion to the experience as shock and to the acceleration of psychological
time. Yet here the game is seen only as an analogy with work on the
assembly line: to link destiny and fortune with the mechanical repeti-
tion of a gesture. Essentially, Baudelaire gives Benjamin the interpreta-
tive key to gambling when he indicates the foundations of the game
itself, in relation to both time and impatience. On these two coordi-

nates Benjamin builds a psychological explanation of the gambler as an
allegory of reaction to the shock of the modern. The gambler seeks to
intensify the duration of the experience of shock, in order to focus all of
his fortune on a number or on a card. Baudelaire, with his comments on
photography, is aware of the fact that technical reproduction does not
offer more space to the beautiful. The images of the mémoire involontaire
retain an aura that it is no longer possible to find in technical reproduc-
tions; that is, in photography. The figure of the gambler becomes part of
the typology of the ‘eccentric’ figures that escape from the capitalist dis-
positif guilt-debt. ‘Trying your luck’ in a coup of gambling only means
evading the logic of the market. Yet with the gambler, like the dandy,
emerges the ambiguity of these ‘precarious’ figures, more so than the
other typologies: the revolt and subversion of the gambler are doomed
to inevitable failure and material and psychological ruin, which often
culminates in suicide.
The urban experience is, in the first place, a visual experience: no won-
der that images are the experience of the modern’s focal point and that
Bilder are at the centre of cultural heritage and the ‘dream landscapes’ of
modernity.99 In a chapter of the Salon de 1846, entitled ‘De l’héroïsme
de la vie moderne’, Baudelaire writes that ancient life ‘represented’ a lot,
as it was in fact made up of representation and made especially for ‘the
pleasure of the eyes’; additionally he writes that this ‘daily paganism
served the arts wonderfully’.100 Baudelaire’s ‘pleasure of the eyes’ is trans-
posed by Benjamin as Schaulust and applied to the urban experience,
essentially the main feature and the existential motivation of the flâneur.
When Benjamin says that Baudelaire is a classical writer who is opposed
to his own era, he wants to emphasize that Baudelaire has recognized
from antiquity this taste for representation, this ‘plaisir des yeux’. Here it
should be briefly noted that Schaulust was the term used to describe the
pleasure of going to the cinema. Benjamin relates the visual experience of
the great metropolis to photography, both in regard to the automatism
of some images and their position in the memory. However, the curios-
ity about the new that continuously appears in the city and the pleasure
of immersing oneself in the crowd are directly related to the new art of
cinematography.
7 Baudelaire 217
In Baudelaire, the representation of the metropolis sometimes assumes

the form of ekphrasis, the description of a no-longer existing urban land-
scape that is evoked in the paintings and drawings of the ‘old Paris’.
Despite also starting from ‘the pleasure of seeing’ as a fundamental
moment in Baudelaire’s poetry, Benjamin instead links him to the figure
of the flâneur and the joy of looking around, seeing the phantasmagoria
of the images provided by a big city, images that are almost exclusively in
the form of goods, with all the flattery and the window dressing of the
réclame. So Benjamin manages to explain Baudelaire’s modernism per-
fectly: he anticipates the following epoch because he is aware of a series of
processes that have radically changed society and, as a result, have perme-
ated the same preconditions of poetic writing. These radical changes of
the modern era were understood by Baudelaire with a clarity that is much
greater than that of his contemporaries. In the following era, his ‘extrava-
gant’ positions could be shared readily, since they were, in a way, diffused.
Benjamin’s conception of the modern implies a certain interpretation
of Nietzsche. Modernity invokes a vitalistic reaction that also manifests
itself in a self-destructive force.101 In fact, Benjamin’s intention to empha-
size this nihilistic character of the modern is very explicit:
Show with maximum force how the idea of eternal recurrence emerged at
about the same time in the worlds of Baudelaire, Blanqui, and Nietzsche.
In Baudelaire, the accent is on the new, which is wrested with heroic effort
from the ‘ever-selfsame’; in Nietzsche, it is on the ‘ever-selfsame’ which the
human being faces with heroic composure. Blanqui is far closer to Nietzsche
than to Baudelaire; but in his work, resignation predominates. In Nietzsche,
this experience is projected onto a cosmological plane, in his thesis that
nothing new will occur.102
Benjamin adopts Baudelaire’s nihilistic elements in order to relate him to

Nietzsche. Baudelaire writes:
The world will end. New examples and new victims of inexorable moral
laws, we will perish by what we believed to live by. The mechanics will have
so Americanized us, progress will have so atrophied us in all our spiritual
parts, that nothing, including the sanguinary, sacrilegious or anti-natural
utopian dreams, can be compared to its positive results.103
This catastrophic vision of technology and progress coincides remarkably

with Benjamin’s conception. It should also be noted that this catastrophic
vision is, albeit to a lesser extent, mirrored in Aragon’s Paysan de Paris in
visionary terms. In the preface to the Fleurs du Mal, Gide focuses on the
‘centrifuge et désagrégante’104 force that Baudelaire had recognized in his
psyche. Destructive character is an essential component of any analysis of
the modern age. The destructiveness of the modern can only be combated
with nihilism. In Baudelaire there is a component, both destructive and
self-destructive, that borrows, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the
modern. Baudelaire combats the depreciation of objects caused by the
acceleration of production—the inherent need in capitalism to release
new goods onto the market continuously, the changing of fashions—by
depreciating his image (his appearance) as a poet, acquiring in this way a
better exchange value.
In stressing the substantial and ‘hidden’ affinity between Baudelaire,
Nietzsche and Blanqui, which includes the concept of ‘eternal recur-
rence’, it is as if Benjamin wanted to retrieve happiness, albeit as a para-
doxical key, by welding together, in what is perhaps a fictitious or parodic
manner, the principle of ‘eternity’ and ‘yet again’.105 Happiness is in an
antinomic relationship with the kingdom of the profane and eternal
recurrence is the projection of a desire, a wish, a parody of the advent
of happiness. It is neither progress as historical fact nor the technologi-
cal discoveries provided by it that Benjamin refutes, it is the faith, the
euphoria in progress that he opposes; this myth of progress pushes him
to theorize on the necessary future happiness.
Instead of seeing the revolution in the Marxist sense, as the ultimate
result of progress, Benjamin sees it in a messianic sense, like a messianic
interruption of the historical continuum. To understand the transition
from the utopian to the messianic in Benjamin, it is necessary to read a
text of his that is not well known: his writing on Bachofen. According
to Benjamin, the interest that Marxist and anarchist thinkers have in
Bachofen explains the evocation of a communist society at the begin-
ning of history; that is, certain matriarchal communities characterized
by a highly democratic and egalitarian order.106 Benjamin does not con-
sider it a matter of restoring the matriarchal system, but of recovering
the memory of these egalitarian societies and using it in the current fight
7 Baudelaire 219
against authoritarianism. As already mentioned, the exposé of 1935 was

criticized by Adorno (in the letter of August 1935) for Benjamin’s reuse
of archaism, comparing him to Klages and Jung. Benjamin interprets
Baudelaire’s verses as an observation of the decadence of the modern and
of the mythical regret for an archetypal situation, which in Baudelaire
he identifies with Greek myth and in Benjamin’s own work takes on the
appearance of the prehistoric matriarchal era. The fifth poem of Spleen
et Idéal, ‘I Love the Souvenirs of Ancient, Naked Days’,107 contains both
the remembrance of the archetypal experience of the past and the disap-
pointment felt towards the present. However, the poem in which this
archetypal-Oedipal element is more evident than anywhere else is ‘A
Former Life’: ‘I once lived under vast and columned vaults […] So there
I lived, in a voluptuous calm’.108 Here the poet interprets this ‘former
life’ obviously in a mystical and archetypal sense, but (given Baudelaire’s
biography) it can also be read in a Freudian sense. The ‘previous life’ is
the reservoir of images from which the poet draws in order to counteract
the modern and produce his own allegories. Benjamin interprets it in an
epochal sense (the reservoir of images of the modern is its ‘prehistory’)
and in an oneiric sense (the images that populate the dreams of the indi-
vidual are taken from the previous collective experience, Proust’s mémoire
involontaire). Baudelaire’s ‘correspondences’ are reminiscent of experience
as Erfahrung, of the collective experience linked to the previous life, which
are the archetypical situations mentioned by Bachofen. In the exposé of
1935, Bachofen was labelled one of the sources of utopian Socialism. The
idea of correspondences allows the ‘lost paradise’ to be projected into
the future.109 In his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin picked up on some of
Roger Caillois’s considerations regarding the feast as reminiscent of and a
commemoration of the archetypal past. As already mentioned, Benjamin
attended Caillois’s conference at the Collège de sociologie in May 1939, as
demonstrated by a letter to Gretel Adorno of February 1940. The feast is
a commemoration of a previous time, of the Urzeit.110
In Benjamin’s later writings, this concern to reconcile man with nature
is a common theme. He speaks often of Fourier and of his wanting to
transform the game into a non-alienating model of work, citing Bachofen.
Both in The Arcades Project and the Theses on the Philosophy of History,
Benjamin polemicizes against vulgar Marxism and contrasts it with the
fantastic imaginings of Fourier. He projects all these archetypes about a

previous, right society into a future, post-capitalist dimension. This shift-
ing of the golden age into a future dimension would seem to recall the
messianic waiting of Marxism or even seem to anticipate the technologi-
cal utopia of Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilisation, but Benjamin dis-
tinguishes it and himself radically from any other utopia, by emphasizing
the fact that he does not trust progress. His conception of the modern and
his hopes for the future go in the opposite direction to that of Marcuse
and Marx, due to the fact that Benjamin sees the negative character of
technology and the destructive nature of the modern. Future liberation
cannot come from the ‘further development’ of science and technology
that continues in the same direction as that taken in the modern age;
redemption can only be achieved through a ‘jump’, a ‘radical break’ that
disturbs the continuity of this development. In this sense, Benjamin’s uto-
pia can be defined as a utopia that interrupts the course of history, a uto-
pia of radical fracture, a utopia of the decisive turning point: it assumes
all of the messianic values to which he wanted to take back ‘historical
materialism’. Faced with the modern, with all its features (mechanization,
isolation of the masses, fashion, commercialization and the experience of
continuous shock), Benjamin discovers the work of Baudelaire as a form
of resistance against progress, through the production of allegories.
In this way, the allegory is internalized within the constellation of
memory as well: ‘The key figure of the early allegory is the corpse. The
key figure of the later allegory is the ‘souvenir’ [Andenken]. The ‘souvenir’
is the schema of the commodity’s transformation into an object for the
collector.’111 It is the same situation with the modern, which incites the
poet to produce the allegory as an extreme defence, as an attempt to
project the memory of the ‘has-been’ onto a metahistorical dimension:
‘The figure of the “modern” and that of the “allegory” are to be referred
to one other.’112 This process is directly connected to the conception of
expressive means.
The political hero of modern times, according to Baudelaire, is not
Napoleon III, but the conspirator: Blanqui. Baudelaire takes leave of a
world ‘where the action is not the sister of the dream’. Benjamin argues
that Blanqui’s action was the ‘sister of the dream’ of which Baudelaire
spoke. In a letter to Horkheimer on 16 April 1938, Benjamin,
7 Baudelaire 221
illustrating his project, writes: ‘The third part deals with the histori-
cal configuration, where Flowers of Evil joins Blanqui’s L’eternité par les
astres and Nietzsche’s Will to Power [Der Wille zur Macht] (the eternal
recurrence) by virtue of the idée fixe of the new and the immutable.’113
On his path, Benjamin seeks out intellectuals who are confronted with
the great transformations of the modern and who have addressed its
destructive nature, offering a certain resistance to the widespread faith
in progress. Baudelaire, as we have seen, is the main example of the
discourse on Paris (and his planned Arcades Project). However, next to
Baudelaire Benjamin discovers the figure of Blanqui, who serves as a
model to highlight the heroic aspect that is a paradoxical necessity in a
modern intellectual: ‘In Blanqui’s cosmology, everything hinges on the
stars, which Baudelaire banishes from his world.’114 This affirmation goes
a little beyond its external meaning, which can be traced back to the fact
that Blanqui assigns much significance to the analysis of the stars, while
Baudelaire, in a protest against Romanticism, banishes the stars from his
poetry. Benjamin, as usual, transcribes his notes in phrases ‘for effect’,
in order to be able then to allude synthetically to more complex phe-
nomena. Blanqui, in his cosmology, makes use of the quality of patience
in order to emphasize the return of the immutable as a liberation and
to find the escape route from his personal and epochal situation in the
eternity of the stars. Conversely, Baudelaire sees no way of escape: his is
indeed a ‘heroic’ resistance to progress, from which both metaphysical
and materialistic hopes of redemption are excluded. Based on this, the
stars become an allegory of the hope of salvation that Baudelaire did not
possess.115
Notes
1. AP, 346 [J 66 a, 4].
2. ‘The description of confusion is not the same as a confused descrip-
tion’ Walter Benjamin, Central Park [13], in SW 4, 169.
3. Benjamin cites the opinion of Paul Verlaine on Baudelaire (AP, 288
[J 33a, 3]) and he also mentions the opinion of Apollinaire: ‘that
Baudelaire, while inaugurating the modern spirit, played little part

in its development’ (AP, 265 [J 20a, 2]).
4. AP, 318 [J 50, 2].
5. ‘But he had about him something of the mime who apes the “poet”
before an audience and a society which no longer need a real poet,
and which grant him only the latitude of mimicry’ (SW 4, 166).
6. AP, 329 [J 55 a, 3].
7. See Walter Benjamin, The Paris in the Second Empire by Baudelaire,
in SW 4, 52.
8. AP, 245 [J 10, 6].
9. See Heinz Wisman (ed.), Walter Benjamin et Paris, Paris 1986; Willi
Bolle, Physiognomik der modernen Metropole: Geschichtsdarstellung
bei Walter Benjamin, Böhlau, Köln-Weimar-Wien 1994; Heinz
Brüggemann, Architektur des Augenblicks, Offizin, Hannover 2002;
Philippe Simay (ed.), Capitales de la modernité. Walter Benjamin et
la ville, éditions de l’éclat, Paris-Tel Aviv 2005; Willi Bolle, Paris on
the Amazon? Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European
Modernism, in Rolf J. Goebel (ed.), A Companion to the Works of
Walter Benjamin, Cadmen House, Rochester- New York 2009,
p. 216–245. Ralph Buchenhorst Miguel Vedda (ed.), Urbane
Beobachtungen. Walter Benjamin und die neuen Städte, Transcript,
Bielefeld 2010; Anca M. Pusca (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the aes-
thetic of change, Palgrave MacMillan, New York 2010; Gevork
Hartoonian (ed.), Walter Benjamin and architecture, Routledge,
London [u.a.] 2010; Maria Filomena Molder, O Químico e o
Alquimista. Benjamin, leitor de Baudelaire, Antropos, Lisboa 2011.
10. See ‘alternative’, n. 56/57, October-December 1967; Klaus Garber,
Rezeption und Rettung, Tübingen 1987.
11. GS V, 1158 s.
12. C, 556. See also B, 750. This concept is reiterated in a letter to
Pollok, written on 28 August 1938. See GS I.3, 1086.
13. See Bernd Witte, Benjamin’s Baudelaire. Rekonstruktion und Kritik
eines Torsos, in ‘Text und Kritik’, n.31/32 (1979), pp. 81–90; Michel
Espagne – Michael Werner, Les manuscrits parisiens de Walter Benjamin
et le Passagen-Werk, in Walter Benjamin et Paris, pp. 849–882.
14. See C, 556. B, 751.
7 Baudelaire 223
15. AP, 321 [J 51a, 5]. This thought image is reiterated in a letter to
Horkheimer of 14 April 1938: see also C, 557, B, 752.
16. Bertolt Brecht, Journale 1, in GBFA, 22, 315 Own translation.
17. SW 4, 342.
18. SW 4, 343.
19. ‘Every living thing needs to be surrounded by an atmosphere, a
mysterious circle of mist: if one robs it of this veil, if one condemns
a religion, an art, a genius to orbit as a star without an atmosphere:
then one should not wonder about its rapidly becoming withered,
hard and barren’ (ADHL, 40).
20. Benjamin reiterates this view clearly: ‘The concept of progress must
be grounded in the idea of catastrophe’ (Walter Benjamin, Central
Park [35], in SW 4, 184).
21. ‘Baudelaire’s destructive impulse is nowhere concerned with the
abolition of what falls to it. This is reflected in his allegory and is the
condition of its regressive tendency. On the other hand, allegory
has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illu-
sion that proceeds from all “given order”, whether of art or of life:
the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures
that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive
tendency of allegory’ (AP, 331 [J 57, 3]).
22. AP, 329 [J 56, 4].
23. SW 4, 169.
24. ‘On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenprole-
tariat of Paris had been organised into secret sections, each section
led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of
the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsis-
tence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous off-
shoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers,
discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks,
lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps],
brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife
grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disinte-
grated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la
bohème […]’ (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
Progress Publishers, Moscow 1937, p. 38; MEW, 8, 160 s.).
25. MEW, 7, 273. Own translation.

26. Engels writes from Paris in correspondence of December 1849: ‘It
is clear that the tax in question belongs essentially to the monarchi-
cal traditions of France. Repealed as soon as the mass of the people
got the upper hand, it was restored as soon as either the aristocracy
or the Bourgeoisie, represented by a Louis XVIII or a Louis Philippe,
held the reins of government. […] The tax in itself weighs very
unequally upon the different classes of the nation. It is a grievous
burden upon the poor, while upon the rich the pressure is exceed-
ingly light. There are about twelve millions of wine-producers in
France; these pay nothing upon their consumption of wine, it being
of their own growing; there are, further, eighteen millions of people
inhabiting villages and towns under 4,000 inhabitants, and paying
a tax from 66 centimes to 1 fr. 32 centimes per 100 litres of wine;
and there are, finally, some five millions inhabiting towns of more
than 4,000 inhabitants, and paying upon their wine the droit
d'octroi, levied at the gate of the town. […] The tax, further, falls
quite as heavy upon the most inferior as upon the higher-priced
wines; the hectolitre which sells at 2, 3, 4 francs, and the one sold
at 12 to 1,500 fr., both pay the same tax; and thus, while the rich
consumer of choice champagne, claret, and Burgundy, pays almost
nothing, the working man pays to the government upon his infe-
rior wine a tax of 50, 100, and, in some cases, 500 or 1,000 per cent
upon the original value’ (Friedrich Engels, Letters from France I, in
‘The Democratic Review’, January 1850, now in MECW, 10, 18.
See also Works of Friedrich Engels 1849 http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1849/12/20.htm).
Marx, often cited by Benjamin in his Arcade Project, also writes
in his essay on The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850: ‘The
“nephew of his uncle” was not the first of his family whom the wine
tax defeated, this tax which, in Montalembert’s phrase, heralds the
revolutionary storm. The real, the great Napoleon declared on St.
Helena that the reintroduction of the wine tax had contributed
more to his downfall than all else, since it had alienated from him
the peasants of Southern France. As far back as under Louis XIV the
favourite object of the hatred of the people (see the writings of
7 Baudelaire 225
Boisguillebert and Vauban), abolished by the first revolution, it was

reintroduced by Napoleon in a modified form in 1808. When the
Restoration entered France, there trotted before it not only the
Cossacks, but also the promises to abolish the wine tax. The gentil-
hommerie [gentry] naturally did not need to keep its word to the
gens taillables à merci et miséricorde [people taxed pitilessly]. The
year 1830 promised the abolition of the wine tax. It was not its way
to do what it said or say what it did. The year 1848 promised the
abolition of the wine tax, just as it promised everything. Finally, the
Constituent Assembly, which promised nothing, made, as already
mentioned, a testamentary provision whereby the wine tax was to
disappear on January 1, 1850. And just ten days before January 1,
1850, the Legislative Assembly introduced it once more, so that the
French people perpetually pursued it, and when they had thrown it
out the door saw it come in again through the window. […] The
popular hatred of the wine tax is explained by the fact that it unites
in itself all the odiousness of the French system of taxation. The
mode of its collection is odious, the mode of its distribution
aristocratic, for the rates of taxation are the same for the commonest
as for the costliest wines; it increases, therefore, in geometrical pro-
gression as the wealth of the consumers decreases, an inverted pro-
gressive tax. It accordingly directly provokes the poisoning of the
laboring classes by putting a premium on adulterated and imitation
wines. It lessens consumption, since it sets up octrois [toll houses]
before the gates of all towns of over four thousand inhabitants’ (Karl
Marx, The Class Struggles in France,1848 to 1850, ‘Neue Rheinische
Zeitung’, Oct. 1850, in Karl Marx Selected Works, Volume 1,
Progress Publishers, Moscow 1969, p. 79; MEW, 7, 81 s.).
27. FE, 217 (modified translation).
28. See Heinrich Heine, Französische Zustände, in Sämtliche Schriften, hg.
von Klaus Briegleb, Frankfurt a.M.-Berlin-Wien 1981, vol. 5, p. 170 s.
29. Adorno, in his long letter of 10 November 1938, writes: ‘Rather, I
see the moments in which the text lags behind its own a priori as
being closely related to its connection to dialectical materialism—
and right here I speak not only for myself but also for Max, with
whom I discussed this question in the greatest detail. Let me express
myself here in as simple and Hegelian manner as possible. If I am

not mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation. The primary
tendency is always to relate the pragmatic content of Baudelaire’s
work directly to proximate characteristics of the social history of his
time, and preferably economic characteristics when possible. I have
in mind, for example, the passage about the wine tax, certain com-
ments about the barricades, or the section I already mentioned
about the arcades. The latter seems particularly problematic to me
because this is precisely where the transition from a fundamental
theoretical consideration of physiologies to the “concrete” represen-
tation of the flaneur is particularly flawed. […] I have a sense of such
artificiality every time you put things metaphorically rather than
categorically. […] There is an extremely close relationship between
the appeal to concrete modes of behaviour, like that of the flâneur or
the later passage about the relationship between hearing and seeing
in the city, which, not entirely as a matter of coincidence, enlists a
quotation from Simmel, and the kind of materialistic excursuses in
which one never completely sheds the anxiety anybody would feel
for a swimmer who dives into cold water when covered with the
most terrible goose bumps. All of this makes me quite uneasy. […]
This basis, however, is nothing other than that I consider it method-
ologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics
from the realm of the superstructure a “materialistic” twist by relat-
ing them to corresponding characteristics of the substructure in an
unmediated and even causal manner. The materialistic determina-
tion of cultural characteristics is possible only when mediated by the
total process’ (C, 581—B, 784 s.). See also Jean Michel Palmier, T. W.
Adorno et Walter Benjamin, Paris 2003.
30. C, 581.
31. ‘It therefore seems to me that you misjudge the circumstances if
you find a “direct inference from the tax on wine to l'âme du vin in
the text”. […] If you think back to my other works, you will find
that the critique of the philologist’s stance is an old concern for
me—and most profoundly identical with my critique of myth.
Each time, the critique provokes the philological work itself. To use
the language of my essay on Elective Affinities, it pushes for a display
7 Baudelaire 227
of material content in which truth-content is historically revealed. I

understand that this side of the issue was of secondary importance
to you. Consequently, however, some important interpretations
were secondary as well’ (C, 588 s.)—B, 794 s.
32. C, 586. B, 792.
33. C, 589. B, 796.
34. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and
the Arcade Project, MIT Press, Cambridge-London 1991.
35. ‘If the arcade is the classical form of the interieur, which is how the
flâneur sees the street, the department store is the form of the
interieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout of the flâneur. If in
the beginning the street had become an interieur for him, now this
interieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth
of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the
city’ (Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles
Baudelaire, ed. by Michael Jennings, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge-London 2006, p. 54).
36. See SW 4, 170, 173, 178.
37. See WS 4, 188 s.
38. See AP, 316 [J 48a, 2].
39. C, 557.
40. See Bernd Witte (Ed.), Topographie der Erinnerung, Königshausen
& Neumann, Würzburg 2008.
41. See Nicols Pethes, Mnemographie. Poetiken der Erinnerung und
Destruktion nach Walter Benjamin, Niemeyer, Tübingen 1999.
42. See AP, 332 [J 57a,3].
43. AP, 346 [J 66a, 1].
44. Charles Méryon (1821–1868) was a French artist who worked
almost entirely in etching, as he suffered from colour-blindness. His
most famous work is a series of views of Paris.
45. FE, 175 (modified translation). ‘Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une
ville/Change plus vite, hélas ! que le coeur d’un mortel)’ (OC, I, 85).
46. FE, 175. OC, I, 86.
47. FE, 181. ‘Ces monstres disloqués furent jadis femmes’ ( OC, I, 89).
48. FE, 175 (modified translation). ‘Frémissant au fracas roulant des
omnibus’, OC, I, 86.
49. Own translation; ‘à travers le chaos des vivantes cités’ OC, I, 91.
50. FE, 153. OC, I, 76.
51. SW 4, 185 s.
52. See GS I.2, 687.
53. See Georges Friedmann, La crise du progrès, Paris 1936—one of
Benjamin’s sources regarding the history of ideas.
54. See Michael Löwy, Walter Benjamin critique du progrès: à la recher-
che de l'expérience perdue, in Heinz Wisman (ed.), Walter Benjamin
et Paris, Paris 1986, p. 630.
55. See OC, II, 38.
56. AP, 298 [J 38a, 7]. See also [J 38a, 8].
57. See Walter Benjamin, Central Park, in SW 4, 50 [35].
58. See AP, 119 [D 10a, 4].
59. See AP, 106 [D 2 a, 4].
60. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, in The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire,
ed. by Michael Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge-
London 2006, p. 36. ‘“The arcades, a rather recent invention of
industrial luxury,” so says an illustrated guide to Paris of 1852, “are
glass-covered, marble-panelled passageways through entire com-
plexes of houses whose proprietors have combined for such specula-
tions. Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from
above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade
is a city, even a world, in miniature”’ (ibid., p. 36 s.).
61. See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)-London 1995.
62. See Alain Montandon, Des rayons et des ombres de l’éclairage au gaz,
in ‘Links. Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft’,
7 (2007), pp. 37–47.
63. On this topic there is a letter by Baudelaire to his mother, from 26
December 1853. See Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. by Claude
Pichois, Flammarion, Paris 1973, vol. I, p. 243.
64. See AP, 239 [J 6 a, 4].
65. AP, 240 [J 7, 4].
66. See AP, 245 [J 66, 1].
7 Baudelaire 229
67. See Ferruccio Masini, Brecht e Benjamin, De Donato, Bari 1978;

Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Links hätte noch alles zu enträtseln,
Frankfurt a. M. 1978; Christa Greffrath, Metaphorischer
Materialismus, Munich 1981; Chryssoula Kambas, Walter Benjamin
im Exil, Tübingen 1983; Ansgar Hillach, ‘Interrompre le cours du
monde… le désir le plus profond chez Baudelaire’. Le poète e l'anarchiste
selon Benjamin, in Walter Benjamin et Paris, pp. 611–628; Gudrun
Klatt, Rettende Kritik. Walter Benjamins Baudelaire Studien
(1938/39), in Von Umgang mit der Moderne, Berlin 1984; Andrew
Benjamin, Tradition and experience: Walter Benjamin's some motivs
in Baudelaire, in The problems of modernity, ed. by Andrew Benjamin,
London-New York 1989.
68. See Jean Lacoste, L’aura et la rupture, Paris 2003.
69. See Remy De Gourmont, Promenades litéraires, Paris 1906, p. 86;
E. Thebault, Baudelaire disciple de St. Thomas d'Aquin, in ‘Mercure
de France’, 15.7.1929; Giovanni Macchia, Baudelaire critico,
Milano 1986, p. 60, note 24.
70. See SW 4, 10; GS 1.2, 526.
71. SW 4, 314.
72. ‘The totality is tradition. Its past does not exist as a series of discrete
events in themselves. Rather it endures as ritual. While Benjamin
does not argue it as such, there is a distinction between the past
proper to history and the past proper to ritual. It will be in relation
to ritual that a conception of experience that involves allegory will
emerge. Events are particularised and cannot be repeated. The con-
tinuity of ritual is the repetition of the storyteller’ (Andrew
Benjamin, Tradition and experience, in The problems of modernity,
ed. by Andrew Benjamin, London-New York 1989, p. 127).
73. ‘Where there is experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the
word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the mem-
ory [Gedächtnis] with material from the collective past. Rituals,
with their ceremonies and their festivals (probably nowhere recalled
in Proust’s work), kept producing the amalgamation of these two
elements of memory over and over again. They triggered recollec-
tion at certain times and remained available to memory throughout
people’s lives. In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection

cease to be mutually exclusive’ (SW 4, 316).
74. SW 4, 317. GS 1.2, 613.
75. See SW 4, 318.
76. See SW 4, 320.
77. See SW 4, 321 s.
78. SW 4, 327.
79. Ibid.
80. Own translation. ‘Le temps n’est pas loin où l’on comprendra que toute
littérature qui se refuse à marcher fraternellement entre la science et la
philosophie est une littérature homicide et suicide’ (OC, II, 49).
81. Own translation. ‘Il y a dans le mot, dans le verbe quelque chose de
sacré qui nous défend d’en faire un jeu de hasard’ (OC, II, 117).
82. OC, II, 118. This term is used once more in the Journaux intimes.
OC, I, 658.
83. See Giovanni Macchia, Baudelaire critico, p. 224.
84. OC, II, 118.
85. Own translation. ‘J’ai voulu mettre [dans ce livre] quelques-unes de
mes colères et de mes mélancolies’ (Charles Budelaire, Correspondances,
vol. I, p. 436).
86. Own translation. ‘une beauté sinistre et froide’ (ibid., p. 410 s.).
87. See Hartmut Engelhardt, L'interprétation de l'apparence chez
Benjamin et Baudelaire, in Benjamin et Paris, pp. 145–152.
88. SW 1, 444.
89. For more on the theory behind Benjamin’s language, see Winfried
Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1980; Marleen Stoessel, Aura. Das ver-
gessene Menschliche, Munich-Vienna 1983.
90. ‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans’ FE, 147 (modified
translation).
91. FE, 75.
92. FE, 161 and 163.
93. FE, 81.
94. FE, 79.
95. FE, 81.
96. SW 4, 328.
7 Baudelaire 231
97. Ibid.
98. SW 4, 328.
99. See Jennings, Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin’s Theory of literary
Criticism, Ithaca-New York 1987; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics
of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press,
Cambridge (Mass.)-London 1989;
100. Own translation. OC, II, 493.
101. See GS 1.2, p. 578; Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, in The Writer of Modern Life.
Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. by Michael Jennings, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge-London 2006.
102. SW 4, 175.
103. OC, I, 665. Own translation.
104. See AP, 258 [J 17, 1] .
105. ‘Eternal recurrence is an attempt to combine the two antinomic
principles of happiness: that of eternity and that of the “yet
again”.—The idea of eternal recurrence conjures the speculative
idea (or phantasmagoria) of happiness from the misery of the times.
Nietzsche’s heroism has its counterpoint in the heroism of
Baudelaire, who conjures the phantasmagoria of modernity from
the misery of philistinism’ (SW 4, 184).
106. See SW 3, 11–24. In a letter to Fritz Lieb of July 1937, Benjamin
writes: ‘I had intended to write a critique of Jungian psychology,
whose Fascist armature I had promised myself to expose’ (C, 542).
107. FE, 19 (modified translation). ‘J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues’
(OC, I, 11).
108. FE, 31.
109. See Michael Löwy, Walter Benjamin critique du progrès, p. 637.
110. See Roger Caillois, La fête, in Le collège de sociologie, edited by Denis
Hollier, Gallimard, Paris 1979, pp. 475–521.
111. SW 4, 190.
112. AP, 239 [J 6 a, 2]
113. C, 557.
114. AP, 331 [J 56 a, 11].
115. See Wolfgang Bock, Walter Benjamin—Die Rettung der Nacht.
Sterne, Melancholie und Messianismus, Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2000.
8
The Order of the Profane
1 The Hyphen of Conjunction

The insurmountable contrast between ‘historical’ and ‘theological’, in all
its forms (ephemeral/eternal, profane/divine etc.), emerges in every reli-
gious thought. Between the order of the profane and the order of the
divine fits very often the motif of ‘necessity’, the restriction of the nec-
essary, the inevitable. Benjamin insists, more in the Theological-Political
Fragment than in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, on a clear sepa-
ration between historical time and messianic time, reconstructing the
order of the political with materialistic principles that have nothing of
the theological, but the weak messianic hope. In the Theological-Political
Fragment he writes:
Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense that he alone
redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic. For this reason
nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything
messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical
dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not
the goal, but the terminus [Ende].1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7_8
Literary criticism has often written (and frequently in a lampooning way)

on the hyphen that unites—and divides—‘Theological’ and ‘Political’ in
Benjamin’s Fragment. However, the core of the question is completely
expressed by that hyphen, by the relationship that arises between the
theological and the political.2
‘The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness’,
writes Benjamin.3 In the religious conception, happiness can be repre-
sented only in a form that is metaphysical, apocatastatic and absolute.
Earthly happiness is linked to the ephemeral and thus is only momen-
tary. Not by chance had Benjamin made the concept of happiness the
discriminating point, perhaps the famous hyphen, between theology and
politics. If the order of the political is trying to organize the happiness
of the individual here on Earth, this organization can be compared with
a metaphysical and absolute happiness, which does nothing other than
stress the ephemeral nature of earthly happiness. From a subjective point
of view, the connection/division between the profane and the theological
works well, regarding the awareness of the diversity of the two Edenic
perspectives, but from a social, collective or political point of view, the
issue is more complex. The foundation of a community is based on the
identification of common elements: there is a need for a centripetal force
that acts as a binding, a subjectively and objectively recognized motiva-
tion to legitimize a political organization that tries to achieve (insofar as
is possible) happiness on Earth.
In the Jewish-Christian tradition, the order of the profane is born
of the loss of a privileged place, a ‘garden’ as a meta-historical location,
situated ‘close’ to God. History begins with the expulsion from para-
dise. So this de-location—the loss of the meta-historical place—and the
beginning of temporality coincide with this ‘expulsion’, with the ‘fall’,
with the ‘exile’ in historicity. That also implies the promise of ‘recom-
position’, in an eschatological and apocalyptic vision, which will have
a strong significance for the order of the profane's constitution.4 The
historical dimension, which poses the problem of the social organiza-
tion of the community, also poses the problem of the foundation of the
community and its relationship with the divine. The differentiation of
space, the ‘place’ of existence—the here and the hereafter—determines
the contrast between the finite and the infinite, but it also raises—from a
metaphysical perspective—the ‘historical’ problem of what to do ‘in the

meantime’ and especially, if there is a relationship of direct dependency
between the earthly and the divine, between profane and theological.
Every political philosophy involves a conception of history. If one pre-
sumes to organize the profane ‘in the name of God’, then it enters into
the dead end of theocratic conception, in which the main problem con-
sists of defining who exactly is the interpreter of desire or the divine plan.5
If the assumption is that there is a direct relationship (and even a direct
communication) between the divine and the profane, then the question
arises as to whether humankind is or is not capable of influencing the
divine plan, whether we are able to convince God to change his will.
Obviously, we cannot oppose the will of God: anyone who has opposed
divine will has been annihilated in history—think of the Pharaoh of
Egypt—burning in the eternal fire of damnation in the metaphysical and
meta-historical dimension (this is true of all three monotheistic religions).
However, can one persuade God to change his plan? Prayer and ‘offer-
ings’—which are recorded in both Old and New Testaments—attempt
to ‘convince’ God, to ask for his ‘mercy’, to implore him to intervene
in terms of rescue or compassion in the historical dimension. Although
these direct interventions are rare and theologically problematic, it is
theoretically possible to ‘persuade’ God; there are numerous examples in
the Bible. What remains problematic is the motivation: why should God
intervene directly in the profane, in the finite, in the ephemeral, if the
essential dimension is that of the metaphysical, the eschatological? Divine
intervention in history is linked to the manifestation of God’s power, the
revelation, and then the apocalypse; or again, in an exquisitely theocratic
dimension, in the defence of a ‘chosen’ people or a prophet. Divine inter-
vention in history poses a series of collateral problems on predestination,
human liberty, divine justice and so on, which are interwoven in such a
manner as to make it difficult to disentangle oneself from them—from
here arise radical solutions and the birth of fundamentalism.
On the question of whether one can persuade God to change his
mind, Taubes, in The Political Theology of Paul, addresses the problem of
expiation.6 When Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, quotes the Talmud,
writing ‘For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for
my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, the children of Israel’
(Romans 9:3), he means ‘to atone and convert myself ’, but in this state-
ment his identification with the Jews also plays an important role: Paul
turns to the Hebrews as a Jew who had converted to Christianity. Taubes
connects this Pauline passage to Exodus 32:32 and to the comments from
the Talmud (Berakhot), in which Moses prays to God to expiate the sins
of the Jewish people. Paul was actually in a similar situation to that of
Moses in that he needed to establish a community; that is, he needed to
find the elements that would legitimize the theological (and theoreti-
cal) identity among the faithful. Paul presents himself as Jewish (‘for my
brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh’) who, having recognized
the messiah, wants to spread his word: ‘Is he the God of the Jews only?
Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: Seeing it is one
God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision
through faith.’7
God can then change his mind, and can be ‘convinced’ by prayers
and expiations. This establishes the problem of human freedom and
predestination. The maximum degree of freedom that humans can exer-
cise, therefore, is convincing God to be merciful. Because it involves the
intervention or non-intervention of God in history, historical time is not
empty and homogeneous, but can be ‘driven’. From a theological point
of view, God does not present just his wrathful side, but also his merciful
side. Paul insists on this aspect of the divine: that the Christian God is a
God who forgives.
Both Moses and Paul founded their respective communities on a reli-
gious homogeneity, on an identity of faith. Moses descended from Mount
Sinai with the commandments and he founded a community and then a
political organization governed by these same commandments—insofar
as he fought and defeated myth and idolatry.
Paul the Apostle acted in some ways similarly to Moses, but also in a
different way: the ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’ founded his community of
believers by declaring the fulfilment of the law (i.e. the consumption
of its function) in the new faith, and in the new community, therefore
improving its political value.8 Paul carried out a true revolution: he
appropriated the Talmudic tradition, inserting an element of necessity—
even a Messianic one—in order to justify his process, and demolished the
conception of the ‘chosen people’, ‘overcoming it’ with an ‘ecumenical’
vision, rejecting both the religious order of Judaism and the political
order of the Roman Empire. The most interesting aspect of this process
is the fact that Paul appropriated the political and theological force of the
two systems that he wanted to ‘consume’ and overcome, by indicating
Christ as the fulfilment of Mosaic law and by exploiting the structure of
the Roman Empire as a political model of the organization of the Church
(and as a vehicle for the propaganda of the faith). The fact that the deci-
sion to go to Rome and to combat the deification of the emperor meant
martyrdom, from a theoretical point of view, is only an irrelevant phe-
nomenon, even if it is consciously used as an ulterior ‘pastoral’ element,
which today we would define as being ‘promotional’.
Paul’s process is interesting because it exceeded all the cultural differ-
ences that existed in the Roman Empire, by founding an identity that was
able to cancel out any otherness. The Christians of the Pauline period,
while united by a feeling of common faith, differed in languages, behav-
iour and the cultural and religious traditions to which they belonged;
the problems experienced between the Christians who originated from
Judaism and those who came from paganism are evidence enough.
Paul inserted an ‘external’ element (not only faith, but also grace) into
two consolidated and widespread systems, with a coagulating function
that was able to use both theological and political discourse, and that
could be understood by differentiated and articulated masses, in order to
join them together in a new community. Yet the grace of God does not
only depend on human actions, but also on divine will: ‘So then, he has
mercy on whom he desires, and he hardens whom he desires.’9 Here Paul
very clearly distinguishes the human dimension from the divine. Ishmael
and Esau were firstborn, according to the nomos they would have had
a more predominant role to play, but it did not happen that way. Isaac
and Jacob were preferred to their elder brothers, because they were better
suited to the divine plan. Human logic does not coincide with the divine,
and the order of the profane cannot coincide with the order of the divine.
There is undoubtedly an apocalyptic element to Paul (Romans
13:11–14; Corinthians 7:29–32): ‘time is short’. Taubes identifies in this
apocalyptic root Paul’s choice not to operate in the world of politics: it
was not worth it, the apocalypse was near. Yet perhaps Paul’s temporal
dimension is different: the mutual love of the members of the community
of believers is Paul’s only political directive, the only indication of actual-

izing the historical dimension—and here he repeats the words of Christ
literally. However, it is not worth organizing the order of the profane,
because the secular dimension is in any case ephemeral and it is only
worth considering the theological aspects. Paul’s strong political indica-
tion is in his philosophical and theological asceticism—we do not need
many objects to be happy: ‘Let us walk properly, as in the day; not in
revelling and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and lustful acts, and
not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make
no provision for the flesh, for its lusts’ (Romans 13:13–14). Of course,
Paul is a radical, but his tendencies are very interesting; especially in the
era of the new poverty and the inundation of the consumer society. Paul’s
recalling of the spirit is an invitation not to seek happiness in things,
in commodities. So, in essence, it does not matter whether the apoca-
lypse is temporally (historically) close: in Paul there is a prevalence of the
theological-messianic dimension.
According to Assmann, the ‘Mosaic differentiation’ characterizes the
advent of monotheism: this significant newness consists in considering
all other religions as ‘false’ (while before in polytheism, all new religions
could co-exist with old ones).10 This tendency to ‘differentiation’ obvi-
ously exists in every religion: the radical novelty of monotheism consists
completely in considering other religions to be ‘false’. It is very difficult
to create a ‘dialogue’ with monotheistic religions, which is problematic
both from a theological and from a political point of view. In an absolute
sense, every monotheistic religion excludes any other type of faith, label-
ling it ‘false and deceitful’, so it is difficult for a monotheistic religion to
communicate with those whom it considers to be mistaken, aside from
attempting to ‘save’ and ‘convert’ the ‘false’ believers. The problem of
dialogue is ultimately political, not theological. The order of the pro-
fane resolves the issue of the political. It is necessary to get rid of the
binding relationship between theology and politics, to get rid of what is
allegedly theocratic, and then to reconnect the political to the profane.
For monotheistic religions, the name of God is untranslatable: any pos-
sible equivalence is rejected, because there is but one God. The dialogue
between representatives of monotheistic religions may occur only at the
political level.
2 The Order of the Profane

Benjamin writes in the Convolutes of The Arcades Project:
In the historical action which the proletariat brings against the bourgeois
class, Baudelaire is a witness; but Blanqui is an expert witness. […] If
Baudelaire is summoned before the tribunal of history, he will have to put
up with a great many interruptions; an interest that is in many respects
foreign to him, and in many respects incomprehensible to him, conditions
the line of questioning. Blanqui, on the other hand, has long since made
the question on which he speaks entirely his own; hence, he appears as an
expert where this question is tried. It is therefore not exactly in the same
capacity that Baudelaire and Blanqui are cited to appear before the tribunal
of history.11
In this passage, Benjamin seeks to specify the two different ways in which
he uses the figures of these two French intellectuals. If Blanqui is the
allegory of the melancholic and the utopian flight, he is also the more
genuine representative of the revolutionary will of the proletariat and its
frustrations and illusions; Baudelaire, on the other hand, while taking
part in the opposition to the modern, is free of illusions, he understood
more deeply the irreversibility of mechanisms and the impossibility of
changing ‘the course of the world’. However, the two characters in this
citation are still embedded in a conception of ‘historical materialism’, in
which the ‘tribunal of history’, in addition to looking a little too much
like the tribunals evoked by Marx and, in reality, organized by Stalin,
evokes a metaphor completely within the revolutionary and rebellious
language of utopian socialism. Blanqui manages to turn his existential
condition of prisoners without hope into a paradigmatic accusation
against the modern.12
Blanqui feels both chained to instantaneousness and repeating the same
gesture of writing up to the infinite. He himself speaks of the ‘melancholy
of the eternity of man by means of the stars’: this is the melancholy of
not being able to die, but even more so, the melancholy of not being able
to break this dilated instantaneity. His is a paradoxical situation, but it
is precisely this extreme situation that interested Benjamin: ‘In Blanqui’s
view of the world, petrified unrest becomes the status of the cosmos itself.
The course of the world appears, accordingly, as one great allegory.’13 The
position of Blanqui appears interesting to Benjamin for its projected fix-
ity in an eternal dimension, but it is precisely this ‘petrified unrest’ that
makes the figure of Blanqui unfeasible to use to overcome the modern.
Blanqui serves as an extreme example of critical heroism. The idea of rep-
etition, even if projected in cosmic terms, causes the illusion of newness
and progress, which would have characterized the modern, to fall.
The fact that in the Theses on the Concept of History (in the twelfth the-
sis, to be precise) the name of Blanqui is mentioned together with that
of Nietzsche14 means that Benjamin does not see history as the theatre
of action, but instead wants to ‘establish an energetic link with history’.15
Benjamin wants to overthrow historical perspective, not to think about the
‘enslaved ancestors’, but to project the ideal of liberty onto future genera-
tions. Then it can be seen in the Theses that this ideal, this liberating utopia,
is nothing other than the ‘weak messianic power’. In the last text that he
left us, the shadow of Blanqui appears, on close inspection. It is as if the
author, in the weaving of his theses, had provided an esoteric comment
on the manuscripts of Blanqui: ‘the tiger’s leap’ is recognized. As an expert
in montage, it is as if Benjamin is turning the weapons forged by Blanqui
against positivism itself, in order to take shots at ‘historicism’s bordello’.16
If Blanqui was a stimulus for Benjamin in the preparation of the Theses
on the Concept of History and if he was a conceptual ‘passage’ for writ-
ing The Arcades Project, this does not mean that Blanqui represents the
only interpretative key to the Theses. In order to understand Benjamin’s
process, one must refer to multiple heuristic systems. One alone is not
enough. Blanqui serves to retrieve a judgement on history, and in those
years one had a need for a political judgement of events.17 So Benjamin
picks up again this concept of the hero who manages to aid humanity on
its way, but who is the victim of his time, not only because his position is
not recognized as being correct, but also because he is persecuted for his
ideas. This is the destiny of Blanqui and, in part, the fate of Baudelaire. It
is the destiny that Benjamin chooses with The Arcades Project. Now it is
not possible to reduce the role that Benjamin means to assign to his work
on Paris to mere historical or ‘archaeological’ analysis. It does not consist
simply in an exhaustive analysis of the modern, but it had to employ
critical thought to focus its negative aspect.
In his Arcades Project, Benjamin implements a type of montage of con-

cepts found in the writings of key figures, used as allegories for the under-
standing of the modern era. Blanqui’s radical critique of the nineteenth
century interests Benjamin partly for its ‘subversive’ character, which was
underlined by a surprised Scholem, but much more because his critique
of progress is not only based on a historical analysis, but directly on a
cosmic analysis. The materialistic, not historical, root of Blanqui’s cri-
tique of progress is undoubtedly the most original element that Benjamin
finds in L’éternité par les astres. And so the theory of eternal recurrence
that he finds in Blanqui allows Benjamin to allude to the more estab-
lished theory of Nietzsche. Blanqui is also a conceptual ‘passage’ that can
lead towards Nietzsche. Benjamin does not want to establish the cyclicity
of events through our doubles or in the parallel stars of which Blanqui
speaks,18 but instead seeks to find the original experience that began the
cycle of eternal recurrence, by connecting Nietzsche with Bachofen. And
once again, the original and eternally lost experience is redefined and
Benjamin flips expectations by reintroducing the discourse of Blanqui on
resurrection after catastrophe.
The problem of impatience is vital to understanding Benjamin’s atti-
tude to modern society and history. And it is easier to understand him
if one considers the models that he used as a tradition of ‘rebellious’
thought. In Blanqui, patience is required to endure the pain and the
restrictions of imprisonment and is the premise of freedom of the spirit.
After his escape attempt failed, Blanqui uttered one of his most famous
mottos: ‘Allons! de la patience toujours! de la résignation, jamais!’ (Let’s go!
Patience always! Resignation never!). His patience is embodied in the
expectation of rebirth after death. Yet this is only the beginning of the
path of thought that Benjamin detects in Blanqui: he realizes that in fact
Blanqui, despite being a great example of messianic expectation com-
pletely manifest in a materialist and non-deterministic conception, ends
up crystallizing the situation in a cyclicity that blocks the possibility of
existence. Baudelaire, in this sense, seems to represent a step forward in
the awareness (and criticism) of the modern. In fact, the French poet is
resistant to progress and the modern, producing a book of poetry that lays
bare the disasters on which modernization is based; here patience trans-
mutes into the willingness to wear the masks of the outsider (bohemian,
cursed poet, ragman, flâneur etc.) in order to be able to express ‘heroic’

resistance. Kafka represents the last stage on Benjamin’s path, the figure
among those he examines with which he identifies the most. With regard
to Kafka, Benjamin speaks explicitly of ‘impatience’, considering it his
only serious fault that becomes the precondition of failure. Kafka, in fact,
is not satisfied with projecting messianic waiting into a meta-historical
future. He—just like Benjamin—believes that the revelation of God can
be found in his retreat from the world of history. This absence of God
is also his anger. So Kafka—impatient—wants to chase the revelation
in this absence of God, in this negativity, and he goes down the route
of kabbalic mysticism (like Benjamin). Negative theology is conceived
as a difficult, perhaps impossible, shortcut; it is the sign of impatience.
Benjamin in the Theses lost the patience typical of Blanqui, even if he
quotes him continuously; Benjamin in the Theses is close to Kafka of the
Penal Colony and the Next Village.19
In the same letter to Rychner, dated 7 March 1931, in which Benjamin
underlines his tendency to study and think in a theological sense (accord-
ing to the Talmud-related forty-nine levels of meaning), he writes: ‘Of
those, the one most familiar to me would be to see in me not a represen-
tative of dialectical materialism as a dogma, but a scholar to whom the
stance of materialism seems scientifically and humanely more productive
in everything that moves us than does that of the idealist.’20 The defini-
tion of his attitude to materialism and theology, contained in this letter,
seemed so important to the author that he sent a copy of it to Scholem.
This is the same author who states his approach to historical material-
ism in the letters to Scholem, written from Naples and Capri in 1924,
in which he says that he had met a ‘Bolshevik’ and read Lukács’ book
(History and Class Consciousness).21 From the outset, Benjamin relates his
interest in communism and materialism to his previous interest in nihil-
ism. The negative side of the dialectic and destructive nature are the pre-
dominant elements of Benjamin’s theoretical reception of materialism.
His conception of historical materialism implies a detachment from
a causal view of historical events, focusing the analysis on the question
of time, with the messianic-apocalyptic tones of the book of Daniel.22
In this anti-historicist vision—where a certain reading of Nietzsche has
played a crucial role—returns the constellation of the ring of Saturn,
in which there is no longer a place for the idea of progress. Benjamin

clearly writes it in the Theses: ‘A critique of the concept of such a pro-
gression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself.’23
He expresses this conception of history explicitly in his essay on Eduard
Fuchs (written between 1934 and 1937). The dialectical vision of history
can only be conquered by surrendering to historicism:
Historicism presents an eternal image of the past, whereas historical mate-

rialism presents a given experience with the past—an experience that is
unique. The replacement of the epic element by the constructive element
proves to be the condition of this experience. The immense forces bound
up in historicism’s ‘Once upon a time’ are liberated in this experience. To
put to work an experience with history—a history that is originary for
every present—is the task of historical materialism. The latter is directed
toward a consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of
history.24
The modern era is not to be seen as the ‘last era’; it should not be projected
to the absolute, but considered historically, in its entirety, as concluded
and surmountable. Historical materialism should also not be considered
as an eternal interpretative key that can unlock the entirety of humanity’s
history, both past and future, but instead should be contextualized.25
According to Benjamin, the sign under which the potential new uto-
pia or objective possibility will manifest itself is that of ‘ambiguity’; he
considers the situation to be ambiguous insofar as the utopian promise
remains unfulfilled, due to the thrust in the opposite direction that is
imposed by the retrograde character of the capitalist production system.
In this sense, Benjamin has purely and simply transported into his philo-
sophical discourse and adapted to his reasoning the ‘classical’ Marxist
dichotomy between forces of production (Produktionskraft) and relations
of production (Produktionsverhältnis). Therefore, he avoids the determin-
istic point of view of orthodox Marxism, recognizing the fact that the
forces of production will not necessarily explode the latecomer relations
of production.26 According to Benjamin, but also according to Lukács,
the main obstacle to liberation is the so-called reification. Yet, unlike
Lukács, Benjamin does not believe that reification is only a product of the
workplace, he sees reification diffused in the whole of society, in the form
of the fetishism of the commodity. Reification affects all human rela-

tionships in modern society, even the imagination and the dream space.
Humanity is faced with a fulfilling dream and at the same time faced with
a dream from which it has just woken up. From here stems ambiguity.
In order to understand Benjamin’s concept of history, it is necessary to
connect the two terms mentioned in the title of the essay on Fuchs, the
collector and the historian, with that of the ‘interpreter of dreams’ that
appears frequently in the Convolutes of his book on Paris. The historical
materialist collects objects from the past (including those belonging to
the dream space) like a collector.27 The historical materialist is, accord-
ing to Benjamin, the ragman, of which Marx speaks in the Eighteenth
Brumaire (also mentioned by Heine in Französische Zustände). The rag-
man must collect debris, objects that are apparently useless, from the pile
of rubble that is the past. This eccentric and esoteric activity is defined by
Benjamin, with much conviction, as being the only historical science pos-
sible, the only way that allows us to understand the present age. Then his
Arcades Project acquires a structural and epochal meaning, as an attempt
to collect from the phantasmagoria of the modern those pieces of debris
that have allegorical significance, for an ambitious project to criticize the
modern itself and to consider it historically as a transitory era. Benjamin’s
process is not confined to his own time, he wants to change the analysed
subject; indeed, he wants to destroy it in order to be able to go beyond it,
hinübergehen, as Nietzsche used to say. In the thought of Benjamin there
are no Hegelian traces of Versöhnung, there is no possibility of ‘synthesis’,
even in the Marxist sense, there is the certainty of catastrophe (which
can possibly be anticipated) in order for a weak hope of apocatastasis, a
rebuilding from the primordial condition.
Benjamin interprets Marx in the light of the writings of Karl Korsch.28
His reading of Marx is thus influenced by a not certainly Stalinist inter-
pretation. And this, at least from a theoretical point of view, is a factor that
he has in common with Brecht. It should be pointed out that between
1934 and 1938, although just for short periods, Brecht, Benjamin and
Korsch were all in Svendborg,29 and that in the dialogues between Brecht
and Benjamin, recorded in the autobiographical writings of the latter,
there are explicit criticisms of Stalinism. Benjamin’s reading of Marx was
of a particular type.30 The analysis of the modern era, carried out via the
city of Paris, implies an analysis of the production and transformation

of capitalism, which uses the Marxist texts extensively, but ultimately
the purpose of Benjamin’s work is to overcome historical materialism.
Benjamin transposes Marx in such a way as to highlight the Messianic
roots of his historical conception, in order to demolish the optimistic
determinism of his historicism and overturn it in a messianism that is
freed from the idea of progress. In fact he writes:
It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to

demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the
idea of progress. Just here, historical materialism has every reason to distin-
guish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept
is not progress but actualization.31
There are several ideas in Marx’s works that were also used by Benjamin,
beyond those listed in his Convolutes. Marx, for example, writes in The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘On the other hand, proletar-
ian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize
themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return
to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with
cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their
first attempts […].’32 Benjamin draws from Marx not only the economic
basis for the analysis of the class struggle in France between 1848 and
1851, but also the scepticism with which he treats these vain attempts,
destined from the very outset for inevitable failure.33 The definition of
the revolution, here expressed by Marx, is incredibly close to the meta-
physical conception of the concept of revolution on which Benjamin was
working at the end of the 1930s. The concept of revolution that inter-
rupts the course of the world at any point must have been for Benjamin
a profound ‘enlightenment’.
Benjamin’s interest in the social revolutions of the nineteenth cen-
tury, which are essentially of that ‘rebellious’ character, is due to the fact
that these revolutions or rebellions are interpreted as an (unsuccessful)
attempt to interrupt the course of history. Benjamin considers history
from the point of view of the defeated. He identifies a common trait in
all revolutions: namely, that utopian impulse to construct a rift, a break
in the course of events. And this interest, this ‘weak Messianic hope’ with
which he views the revolutions, is in essence the ‘secularization’ of his
Jewish messianism. Marx had transported the expectation of redemption
from a meta-historical event to a necessary outcome of history (prole-
tarian revolution, world revolution), so Benjamin sees in every revolu-
tion the attempt to realize hic et nunc this hope of redemption. That
these attempts are doomed to failure is evident, since the same Benjamin
ends up projecting the ‘redemption’ into a meta-historical dimension.
However, in his opinion they are equally important, because they repre-
sent the only real possibility—the only historical possibility—to express,
even if only in the form of ‘representation’, this expectation of the inter-
ruption of the continuum.
For Benjamin, Marxism is the only key that allows an understanding
of the great socioeconomic changes of the nineteenth century. Yet, once
the origins of the material forms of the modern are decrypted, Marxism
is no longer practicable as such, because it participates in the positivist
optimism and hope for happiness that are unfeasible in practice. As a
result, the historical materialist must treat Marx historically, tearing him
from his determinism and ‘quoting him’:
The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part,
will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink.
The history which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the cita-
tions occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a
manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs
to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object in each case is
torn from its context.34
Benjamin cites Marx precisely in a messianic sense. In Convolute X of The

Arcades Project, which is entirely dedicated to Marx, he writes:
A passage on the Revolution as a ‘Last Judgement’ opposed to the one

Bruno Bauer dreamt of—one that would usher in the victory of critical
consciousness: ‘The holy father of the church will be greatly surprised when
judgement day overtakes him […] a day when the reflections of burning
cities in the sky will mark the dawn; when together with the ‘celestial har-
monies’ the tunes of ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Carmagnole’ will echo in his ears
accompanied by the requisite roar of cannon, with the guillotine beating

time; when the infamous masses will shout, ‘ça ira, ça ira !’ and suspend
‘self-consciousness’ by the lamppost. [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 1., The German Ideology, International Publishers,
New York 1976, p. 53].35
This is one of many passages in which Marx uses a handful of biblical

vocabulary and an apocalyptic tone in order to describe the proletar-
ian revolution. However, it is interesting that Benjamin reads it in its
apocalyptic-messianic direction and that he quotes it in this section of
The Arcades Project as one of the available materials that can be used to
relocate the thought of Marx into this dimension.36
In the fourteenth thesis, which opens with a quote from Kraus, ‘Origin
is the goal’,37 Benjamin reiterates the concept of revolution as an inter-
ruption of history and uses the term Jetzt-Zeit, which was used for the
first time by Jean Paul. It is the result of the meeting, at the crossroads of
destructive character, of mystical and materialist thought, which always
remain separate and are not able to relate to one another: ‘It is the tiger’s
leap into the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where
the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of
history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.’38 Exactly
on the basis of this reading of Marx, Benjamin, in the seventh thesis,
deals with the history of culture as being a ‘heritage of the victors’, from
which historical materialists must detach themselves. Historicism leaves
no space for the defeated. Revolution, in a broad sense intended to inter-
rupt this historical chain, this cultural heritage of the victors, is viewed
as a liberation of the past, as a Rettung der Vengangenheit (salvation of the
past), which opens the way, albeit in the form of representation, for an
apocatastastic rebuilding: ‘The historical materialist therefore dissociates
himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards
it as his task to brush history against the grain.’39 And that is exactly
the programme that Benjamin proposes to implement with The Arcades
Project: ‘brushing it against the grain’ in the sense that he looks back on
the origins of the phenomenon, in the sense that he reveals the hidden
causes of it, but also in the sense that he overturns the origin in the pur-
pose, which becomes the end.
3 The ‘Weak’ Messianic Power

Bernd Witte relates Benjamin’s will to write an encyclopaedic work on
his era with the sensation of approaching death.40 The attitude of the
collector is the attitude of a person who feels that death is nearby. After
all, the constellation of Saturn refers to death. With the outbreak of the
Second World War, Benjamin’s book project was modified. His hopes of
overcoming the modern era were relocated into a meta-historical dimen-
sion. It has been observed that Benjamin’s experience of life (Erlebnis) is
linked to two suicides: that of his friend Heinle and his own in Portbou.
One could also say that his experience passes from one war to another.41
Benjamin identifies three key characteristics in the materialist conception
of history: the discontinuity of historical time; the destructive power of
the working class; and the tradition of the oppressed.42 In this note, the
true purpose of his process is evident: the time of patience is over, the
time of the break, of the conceptual ‘leap’, has arrived: historical material-
ism, emptied of both the concept of progress and the concept of histori-
cal continuity and necessity, reveals its messianic aspect.43 The historical
materialist, as Benjamin writes in the sixth thesis, must use history as it
appears in the moment of danger; and the danger at the time Benjamin
wrote the Theses was manifested in Nazism and the loss of hope in politi-
cal revolution personified by Stalin. Only the victors write history: it is
necessary to know how to write the history of the vanquished, of the
failures, of the ruins.
Then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present
one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation
that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a
power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled
cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this.44
Thus Benjamin concludes his second thesis on the concept of history.

The weak messianic power of each generation is the hope that the tem-
poral continuum will be broken, leading to salvation, to a redemption in
which Benjamin, at the time of writing the Theses, did not place much
hope. And yet his cultural process could easily be defined as an attempt
to combine his weak messianism, of Jewish origin, with the Marxist secu-
larization of the messianic waiting of historical materialism. Time and
again, Benjamin’s criticism repeated Scholem’s famous phrase, according
to which the thought of Benjamin is a materialistic theory of revelation,
whose object no longer appears in the theory itself.45 Scholem’s statement
explains the core of Benjamin’s thought, as well as the true meaning of
The Arcades Project. Yet the detachment, the pietas, with which Scholem
handles his friend Benjamin is perhaps also due to the fact that the expert
in Jewish mysticism had understood the ultimate purpose of Benjamin’s
process. When Benjamin, in many passages of his work on Paris as well
in his Theses, proclaims himself to be a ‘historical materialist’, he con-
fers a very particular meaning on this term. There is a paragraph in the
Convolutes in which this feature is defined in a programmatic manner:
This research—which deals fundamentally with the expressive character of

the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial architecture, the earli-
est machines, but also the earliest department stores, advertisements, and
so on—thus becomes important for Marxism in two ways. First, it will
demonstrate how the milieu in which Marx’s doctrine arose affected that
doctrine through its expressive character (which is to say, not only through
causal connections); but, second, it will also show in what respects Marxism,
too, shares the expressive character of the material products contemporary
with it.46
The aporetic use of Jewish mysticism and Marxism allows Benjamin to

criticize the roots of the forms of modernity and the faith in progress, and
to imagine the possibility of a radical critique of the modern as the only
possibility of Rettung (salvation) of the past. In short, Benjamin ‘recovers’
from historical materialism exactly the messianic (albeit ‘weak’) aspect
inherent in Marxist philosophy. This seeks to give future generations the
weak hope of redemption as a dowry. Benjamin’s utopia escapes the old
definitions of Marxism and can certainly not in any way be identified with
Communism. There are already sufficient documents to demonstrate that
Benjamin considers Communism ‘nothing but the lesser evil’ (as he wrote
in a letter to Scholem in May 1934),47 and as the most suitable way to
liberate the world from Nazism. However, both his Moscow Diaries and
the conversations he had with Brecht at Svendborg, when he was writ-

ing his essay on Kafka, demonstrate in abundance that neither Benjamin
nor Brecht believed at all in either Stalin or the alleged equality promised
by real, existing Communism. When, in his long correspondence with
Scholem, Benjamin defends his ‘historical materialist’ position, he always
distinguishes it from Communist political practices and does not con-
sider it in contrast to his Jewish roots (something by which his friend was
troubled). Reading Benjamin’s letters and comparing his statements on
historical materialism and Jewish mysticism, one cannot find ‘coherence’
according to the traditional canon; rather, one finds the assertion of want-
ing to maintain his radical, he would say ‘extreme’, position.
This aporia is only resolved by analysing the meaning that Benjamin
seeks to attribute to the terms ‘materialism’ and ‘theology’. His definitions
of these terms are explicitly stated in his writings. However, Scholem
understood the terms ‘historical materialism’ and ‘Communism’ solely
through their usual meanings, not the meaning that Benjamin attributed
to them. So here lies the root of the misunderstanding between the two
men. Scholem would only be able to interpret Benjamin in the way he
intended once he had access to the larger part of the corpus of Benjamin’s
work. The ‘historical materialism’ of which Benjamin speaks is the result
of his particular interpretation of Marx’s philosophy, from which he
extrapolated that ‘weak messianic power’ and the concept of historical
‘necessity’. An old thesis identifies the Jewish roots of Marx’s work in
the secularization of messianic waiting,48 transforming it into a faith in
progress and the improvement of conditions of the oppressed class as an
objective need of historical development. The faith in the need for revo-
lution as a ‘necessary’ event—on which Marx’s historical materialism is
based—finds its roots in Jewish messianism. Marx has not only ‘reversed’
the Hegelian dialectic, putting it back on its feet, but has also ‘reversed’
messianic expectation, secularizing it and establishing it as a necessity
that must be included within history. Benjamin takes historical mate-
rialism back to its roots, to its ‘origins’. He seeks to demonstrate in The
Arcades Project that modernity has not been able to respond with a social
order that fulfils the promises of redemption; namely, the promises that
the previous generation had projected onto the modern. And therefore he
investigates its origins, its ‘prehistory’, and that period in which the forms
of the modern manifested themselves in their Bildungskraft (forming

force) and projected their weak hope of emancipation onto the following
era, onto the era in which the modern should have been completely ful-
filled and humanity liberated from bondage, hard work, pain and so on.
Yet this weak hope not only proved to be vain, because the modern
era had a nihilistic character; it also proved to be misleading, because
the apparent product of ‘historical materialism’ had no liberating aspect
whatsoever. Brecht and Benjamin stated in their talks in Svendborg that
in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) there was a ‘dictator-
ship on the proletariat’. In the Theses on the Concept of History, the col-
lapse of any hope of historical redemption is expressed in radical terms,
given that the Theses were written while the author felt the shock of the
Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, which seemed to nullify even Benjamin’s
instrumental support for Stalin. Nevertheless, in many senses the hope of
historical redemption is absent from all of his work on Paris. Benjamin’s
‘historical materialism’ does not coincide with that of Marx. In him we
do not find the faith in the secularization of messianic hope. The weak
messianic power is destined to disappoint generation after generation,
up until the point in history when the messiah will come, and with that
there will indeed be no more history. Benjamin’s version of the weak
messianic power seeks to overthrow the messianism of Marx, to remove
it from history in order to project it into a meta-historical dimension.
On closer inspection, Marx’s ‘revolution’, which would correspond to the
advent of the messiah, developed on a global scale (and, given the histori-
cal necessity, it could not be otherwise), would lead to a society without
classes; it would have then expelled the dialectic from history, it would
have insulated history from the primary contradictions, and it would
have restored the meta-historical Edenic order (given that the history of
humanity, according to Marx, has always been a history of class struggle).
However, Benjamin, in part down to his political experience—in this
sense, his trip to Moscow was decisive—and in part due to his intel-
lectual experience (the influence of Scholem cannot be underestimated),
did not consider faith in the thaumaturgical and liberating character of
the revolution to be plausible. Nor did he believe in the bourgeois lib-
erating nature of technical progress. Then, he relocated the weak hope
of redemption to a meta-historical dimension. Yet he was not able (or
did not want) to connect this redemption entirely to the Jewish religion.
Here is perhaps the most uncanny aspect of Benjamin’s thought, which
Scholem once again identified with much insight when he wrote that
Walter Benjamin tried asymptotically to approach Judaism, without ever
actually reaching it.49
In the eighth thesis, Benjamin writes: ‘The tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception
but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with
this insight.’50 So the contingent political element, which is partly inher-
ent in the writing of the Theses, is projected into a meta-historical dimen-
sion; the necessity of brushing history against the grain is not dictated by
the tragic conditions of exile, but by the desire to save the past, to escape
from the logic of the victors. The identity crisis of the assimilated Jew finds
an eccentric way to overcome the dominant culture, that cultural heritage
based on the debris of history and crossed by the storm that blows down
from paradise, which we call progress. In the eighteenth thesis, Benjamin
defines the Jetzt-Zeit as a consequence of the revolutionary interruption
that was the core of his historical conception, and that should be translated
as ‘now-time’ in order to emphasize its instantaneous character, an indepen-
dent succession of moments that the author wanted to attribute to time:
Now-time, which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire his-

tory of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the
figure which the history of mankind describes in the universe.
A—Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among
various moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal signifi-
cance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously,
as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of
years. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell the
sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He grasps the constellation
into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one.
Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through
with splinters of messianic time.51
Historical time is turned into messianic time, with all the apocatastasis-
tic implications inherent in this expectation.52 In this sense, the follow-
ing affirmation of Benjamin can be understood: ‘An object of history
is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue.’53

Benjamin is apparently facing the past, but his research is directed towards
a messianic-revolutionary future.
4 The Tiger’s Leap

The concept of now-time serves to define the transition from past and to
future. The revolution will occur, according to Benjamin, when this pas-
sage is interrupted by a jump (‘the tiger’s leap’) that interrupts the conse-
quentiality of time. It is then when the messiah may come. This involves
abolishing the perception of the lifetime. Benjamin focuses his atten-
tion on the psychology of the gambler: there, he considers the illusion
of increasing the intensity of the moment through risk, even when faced
with a progressive reduction in lifespan. This is the parody of the ‘leap’:
just as in Baudelaire, the search for an artificial paradise can only end in
disaster. The continuity of time is that of technical progress. A messiah
cannot be produced by a world of ruins and ashes. For this reason, the
war had removed every last bit of Benjamin’s hope.
That element of instantaneousness, which Benjamin develops in the
concept of now-time, finds its source (albeit completely literary and
devoid of any messianism) in Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes
en prose.54 Here Baudelaire expresses his anguish for the dictatorship of the
time, which drags man down. Yet he also grasps the idea of instantaneous-
ness as a means to stop, albeit temporarily, the power of time. Benjamin
overturns Baudelaire’s melancholy in the now-time as a moment of lib-
eration from this slavery. Baudelaire’s instantaneousness is identified in
the sensual joy that expands the temporal space, just like the gambler.55
Benjamin instead does not bind this instantaneousness to a particular
experience, but considers it to be an existential condition of humankind.
The world of historical occurrence is clearly separated from the mes-
sianic. Man can neither desire nor seek redemption. He can only wait
for the coming of the messiah. The original sin was an act of pride of
the subject, a self-glorification. The original sin was therefore the fruit of
impatience. Irving Wohlfahrt notes that original sin entailed the despotic
self-affirmation of the subject. The desire to change the kingdom of God
would therefore itself be in need of redemption, insofar as that original

sin would be prolonged until the alleged redemption. When the subject
relates everything to himself, in this moment, he mimics God. In doing
so, he perpetuates the desire to resemble God—a desire that determines
original sin.56 It is this sin of pride of Kafka (and perhaps also of Benjamin)
that makes failure an immanent characteristic of his cultural process.
Materialism and theology are not complementary, but on two dimensions
that have no contact between them: the dichotomy between politics and
mysticism is resolved by Benjamin in a radical sense, precisely by working
from his conception of time. Redemption, the eternal, the absolute can-
not remain in contiguity, in temporal consequence with the ephemeral,
with the fleeting, with the perceptible world. The so-evoked ‘tiger’s leap’
that can save the past amounts to a radical break. In a letter to Scholem
of 29 May 1926, Benjamin writes: ‘If I were to join the Communist party
some day (something that, in turn, I am making dependent on one last
twist of fate), my stance would be to behave always radically and never
consistently when it came to the most important things.’57
This divergence between historical and messianic time is not just the
result of the ‘state of emergency’ of a thinker hunted by the Gestapo
and disappointed by the pact between Hitler’s Germany and the USSR
under Stalin, it is clearly expressed in the Theological-Political Fragment
that dates back to 1920/1921:
The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The
relation of this order to the messianic is one of the essential teachings of the
philosophy of history. It is the precondition of a mystical conception of
history, encompassing a problem that can be represented figuratively. If
one arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and
another marks the direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest
of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction. But
just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another
force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature as
secular—promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. 58
At this point one can understood what Benjamin wanted to allude to

when he spoke, in a letter to Gretel Adorno that accompanied the Theses,
of having regathered the concepts that had been hidden for decades: he
was alluding to the Saturnian allegory of the angel, of the Angelus Satanas
of the autobiographical work of 1933, but also to the Theological-Political
Fragment, in which one can feel the influence of Bloch (who, after all, is
mentioned explicitly in the fragment itself ).59
The contrast, thus conceived, between messianic and historical (and
especially the image of the two forces that pull in opposite directions)
is the key to understanding the linguistic and cultural level onto which
Benjamin moves his entire body of work. The ‘tiger’s leap’ can only occur
by operating radically in the profane world in order to promote—if only
for a moment—the messianic force. In the Fragment we find, expressed in
simple terms and with great effectiveness, the programme that Benjamin
had in mind and wanted to implement in his book on Paris: only by
operating ruthlessly and radically in his own way does the dynamis of
the profane get overturned immediately in its messianic opposite. He
remained ever faithful to this programme, which would later become
a method, an ‘attitude’ (Haltung), as he himself defined it in a letter to
Rychner. In the letter to Scholem of 29 May 1926, Benjamin emphasizes:
It is basically very difficult for me to have to give a hypothetical account of

myself, since my book on these matters (should it ever materialize) has not
yet matured. What there currently is of it increasingly seems to be giving
signs of attempting to leave the purely theoretical sphere. This will be
humanly possible in only two ways, in religious or political observance. I
do not concede that there is a difference between these two forms of obser-
vance in terms of their quintessential being.60
This conception returns, although via different terms, in his essay on

Surrealism (1929), when ‘profane enlightenment’ is treated as the over-
coming of religious enlightenment, in the sense of ‘creatively’ overturning
one force in another. Benjamin’s intention is not to care about theology
itself, in a messianic hope of salvation. Materialist radicalism and theo-
logical radicalism coincide. The common purpose is to unleash the pro-
fane from any theological interference. Then the profane enlightenment
can be considered as the creative overturning of the theological enlighten-
ment.61 According to Benjamin’s theology, understanding that ‘language
devoid of tension’, which is the logos, is not available to us. We can only
represent it.62 The relationship of the profane and the messianic will not
have been established by the image of two arrows, but represented as a
relationship of tension and thus achieved in an ‘embryonic and intense
form’.63 So Benjamin’s intention was to represent, in a messianic sense,
the overturning of the modern; therefore his work would be ‘no longer’
and ‘not yet’ messianic, seeking to indicate, through an elliptical or chi-
astic anticipation, that true language that can only be alluded to in an
esoteric manner.
The famous and often-cited sentence from The Arcades Project, con-
tained within the decisive chapter ‘Theory of Progress, Theory of
Knowledge’, which is full of citations from Marx and Engels, indicates
Benjamin’s attitude regarding theology: ‘My thinking is related to theol-
ogy as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to
go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.’64
This explicit statement, expressed in terms typical of Jewish mysticism, is
an acknowledgement and a programmatic declaration; at the same time
it plays an important role in Benjamin’s system of signs and his alle-
gories. Benjamin acknowledges the Jewish and theological origin of his
thought, an affirmation that Scholem would subsequently state repeat-
edly. Benjamin’s thought is saturated with theology and Jewish mysticism
(in particular Kabbalah), without which it would be rendered incom-
prehensible. The programmatic declaration consists of the desire to hide
these roots, to make them disappear, in order to speak another language,
a profane language, connected to the events of his time, a language that
is useful to all the verbal categories of historical materialism. That irrec-
oncilable dualism between Marxism and theology, to which Scholem and
Missac allude (albeit with differing emphases), often incites Benjamin to
adopt the technique of describing theology with materialist language and
vice versa. In this process, it is arguably quite easy to see the same process
that the Kabbalists implement: they, according to Scholem, wanted to
use the profane (i.e. mythical) language to reinforce their religious tradi-
tion; namely, to exalt the Lord. However, Benjamin is unique in stating
programmatically the theological substance of his thought in the midst of
a chapter regarding the theory of knowledge, which itself is located in a
book in which he sought to criticize the modern and its faith in progress.
Right at the moment at which Benjamin assumes the role of ‘historical
materialist’, he seeks to remind himself of the messianic and nihilistic

character of his materialist vision. Probably at some point during the
drafting of The Arcades Project—which coincided with the decision to
begin writing the book with the chapter on Baudelaire as its starting
point—Benjamin encountered conceptual difficulties in explaining his
ideas on messianic waiting without faith in the messiah himself, without
using allegorical terms; or, as Scholem states, difficulty in explaining the
idea of a revelation whose object no longer appears in the theory itself.
At this point, Kafka’s experience must have seemed to him to be decisive:
the only possible revelation is the one that is considered from its negative
side, and the only possible hope of messianic waiting lacks the coming
of a messiah.
However, to use Benjamin’s thought image, the blotting paper cannot
pretend that nothing of what has been written remains. Benjamin had
the courage—that ‘heroism’ that he saw in Baudelaire—consciously to
follow a path that was destined to lead him to fail to ‘burn’ that possibil-
ity and open ex negativo the way to a destructive representation of the
modern.65 Benjamin used all of the profane languages and concepts of
his era—mainly the ‘historical materialism’ that he considered to be the
dominant thought—in order to consume them in his apocalyptic pro-
cess. Yet, ultimately, the meaning of Benjamin’s process fits perfectly into
that attitude that is present in Jewish tradition, albeit only marginally.
His weak messianic power resides completely in the hope that from the
pile of debris that is made up of the ‘profane’ systems of his time, despite
the exhaustion of impassable roads, the course of history could be inter-
rupted with a tiger’s leap. The unshakeable force of patience, referred to in
the Saturnian allegory of the angel, is the force that pushed him to write
The Arcades Project, which incited him to keep a few sheets of manuscript
with him when he ventured onto the path through the Pyrenees; they
were ‘more precious than life’ to him.66 Regarding his weak messianic
power, the epoch that would follow Benjamin’s would have the right of
judgement—as he himself states in the second thesis—and our genera-
tion has extensively exercised this right, as all the studies on Benjamin in
recent decades have shown. However, beyond the analysis of the crisis
point of the modern that Benjamin carries out in his Arcades Project, it
is necessary to understand the perspective moment (what Missac calls
the ‘vanishing point’) of his thought. The bitter final destination of

Benjamin’s intellectual journey consists of a faithless period of waiting. In
projecting the messianic revolution into a meta-historical dimension (a
revolution that seemed to be eternally delayed), Benjamin, by absorbing
all of the concepts of Jewish mysticism and concealing them, reveals the
messianic roots of the dominant thought, of that ‘historical materialism’
that seeks to merge with the ‘secularization’ of a Jewish messianic waiting.
Benjamin was attracted by the mystical elements of the Kabbalah,
the semi-prohibited aspect of Jewish mysticism. These aspects of the
Kabbalah appear in his works in an oblique manner, but, in spite of
everything, are crucial to the understanding of his process. It is primarily
the kabbalistic conception of the quite absolute abyss that separates the
profane continuum of history from the messianic kingdom of redemp-
tion, a common factor in his works, especially in the Political-Theological
Fragment and the Theses.67 After all, the Theses remain conceptually linked
to the criticism that Benjamin wanted to develop in The Arcades Project
against the Western doctrine of historical progress, but their substance
remains intrinsically linked with the metaphysical period of his earlier
work.68 The real problem lies in determining whether Benjamin, in his
Theses, wanted to abandon the process of secularization, ‘entrusting’ it to
the Kabbalah in Scholem’s mystical-religious sense, or whether he instead
persevered with his ‘secularization’ by transforming the Jewish religion’s
messianism into the ‘vulgar’ materialism of Blanqui. It seems to me that
the revelation and the redemption of which Benjamin speaks in the Theses
are, admittedly, a reconciliation, a recomposition that connects the end to
the origin, but also that the whole process does not involve any messiah
figure. As Scholem notes, Benjamin’s revelation was in fact deprived of
its object. Saturn’s ring becomes a cast-iron balcony; the secularization
of messianism does nothing other than cast a melancholic look at the
past; the intention of the later Benjamin, of the ‘historical materialist’
Benjamin, to unite theory and practice clashes with the inability to act in
the face of that no way out that characterized the whole of modernity. So
the only possible course of action is the destruction of his eccentric path.
Saturn’s ring can only really be used during the act of its demolition.
In a note written in preparation for the seventeenth thesis, Benjamin
writes: ‘In the representation of society without classes, Marx has
secularised the Messianic time.’69 Benjamin attempted to connect his-

torical materialism to his meta-historical messianic waiting, without
reintegrating the presence of God into this process. He radically inter-
preted the hypothesis of the negative theology inherent in the Kabbalah:
to reach God through the other side of the nothingness of revelation.70
He expanded on this point to the extent that he causes this negativity to
accept the role of ‘temporary angel’: those angels, destined to last but a
moment, that God creates with the sole aim of having them pass before
his throne in order for them to exalt him. The allegory of the tempo-
rary angel—which counterbalances Klee’s angel of history—perfectly
expresses Benjamin’s position and destiny: with The Arcades Project he
wanted to analyse the pile of debris that makes up the origins of the
modern and conceptually express the weak hope, to leave as a dowry to
the following era, to radically overcome the modern, not towards this
‘fairer society’ called for by historical materialists, but towards the break,
the interruption of the historical continuum that is exactly the messianic
waiting of Jewish tradition. This is made abundantly clear in the last of
his Theses:
We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the
Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. This disenchanted
the future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for
enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future
became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gate-
way in time through which the Messiah might enter.71
In other words, Benjamin was perfectly aware that the expectation

of political liberation by Communism was destined to disappoint.
Additionally, he was also aware that at a theoretical level, historical mate-
rialism was nothing if not a profane exposure of a messianic expectation
that could not be disregarded in historical time and could only be ful-
filled in meta-historical time. The ambitious project that Benjamin wants
to achieve through The Arcades Project is to ‘bring to light’ the destructive
character of his epoch. However, the archaeological disclosure of these
roots also addresses the impracticability of expectations that the ‘new cen-
tury’ generated through technology and progress. Benjamin radicalizes
the destruction of the modern’s illusions to the point where he exercises

his nihilist thought, demolishing the final expectation of the liberation of
‘historical materialism’. Through Fourier and Blanqui, Communism and
Marxism are reconnected to their utopian roots. In the Theses, historical
materialism becomes the expectation of a messianic time, which no lon-
ger has anything historical. In a preparatory note on the Theses, Benjamin
writes: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But it is
perhaps something entirely different. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt
to activate the emergency brake, by those who are travelling on the con-
tinuum of universal history.’72
Here returns the conception, already expressed in the Convolutes in
a quotation from Marx, of the revolution as a break in historical conti-
nuity, as a ‘leap’ that stems from a historicist vision and evokes (or bet-
ter, mimics) the coming of the messiah. Benjamin wanted to leave the
defeat of the entire conceptual heritage of the modern era as a legacy to
the next generation: from faith in progress and technology to historical
materialism. Recent events might lead to his thought being attributed
with a prophetic character, which is in fact just a part of Jewish mys-
ticism. Currently, not one of the dominant ideas in the ‘prehistory of
the modern’ has withstood the storm of the angel of history, particularly
materialism and its terminology, of which Benjamin made ample use in
order to neutralize them from within the logic of a false promise. Yet the
idea of ‘prophetic value’ is far from Benjamin’s thought. Bear in mind
how radically he withheld this component from the thought of Kafka,
with which he indeed identifies. His rejection of the ‘prophetic vision’
also extends to the figure of Baudelaire, from where stems his aversion to
Romantic mysticism and the desire for lucid analysis and rational plan-
ning of the poetic and cultural process. As such, he broadens his refusal to
the Surrealist ‘visions’ that halt on the threshold of the ‘inexplicability’ of
certain ‘forms of the modern’. The new forms and expectations must be
explained through analysis of their origin, through the description of that
‘prehistory of the modern’ that is, in essence, his work on Paris.
In a letter to Scholem of 12 June 1938, Benjamin writes: ‘Kafka’s work
is an ellipse with foci that lie far apart and are determined on the one
hand by mystical experience (which is above all the experience of tradi-
tion) and on the other by the experience of the modern city dweller.’73
The theoretical inconsistency of historical materialism (and of political

Marxism and Marxism as a system) was demonstrated by Benjamin at the
moment at which he radicalized its prerequisites. Benjamin is not inter-
ested in reconciling Marxism and theology; instead, he seeks to radicalize
the fundamental concepts of one system, then the other, in order to verify
them in the origin of the modern era and to project them onto the ‘sub-
sequent era’. Historical materialism does not stand the test and merges in
the messianic waiting of apocalypse without salvation. Now we are faced
with a new age—one that we cannot define as post-modern, because even
this term has been ‘burned’ on the altar of cultural trends and is therefore
impractical because of all the inherent implications that would have no
place in an analysis on Benjamin74—an age that contains new promises
and new tragedies, the legacy of Benjamin’s thought and the unfinished
Arcades Project is a lucid analysis of the ‘prehistory of the modern’, con-
taining elements of cultural archaeology, the dismantling of a series of
new concepts and systems that promised improbable liberations, and
the paradigmatic example of an impassable route. Much more impor-
tant than the conclusions that can be drawn from Benjamin’s theoretical
journey are the methods with which he used the cultural heritage of his
time, in order completely to remove all systems and reduce them to the
often-mentioned pile of debris. Benjamin wanted, in a certain sense, to
imitate Baudelaire epistemologically: he saw in the French poet someone
who had perfectly understood the signals of the modern and who had
destroyed faith in progress with the masks of representation, with alle-
gory. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin had the ambition to express, in an
allegorical manner, a synthesis of his entire epoch through the perspective
of an overturning. He wanted to strengthen the force of the profane, in
order then to overcome it through the messianic, in a work that was the
allegorical representation of apocatastasis. Hence comes his ‘sin of pride’
(invoked by the satanic aspect of the Saturnian angel), as well as his ‘mim-
icking’ of redemption, from which stem the certainty of failure and the
negative character of his process. The force of Benjamin’s thought lies in
the extreme radicalism of his process. His epochal criticism offers every-
one a ‘cross-section’ of modernity, evoked by Kracauer in his analysis of
the metropolis. Benjamin’s work shows us the overcoming—indeed, the
‘leap’—of those gnoseological systems that the ‘new century’ interpreted
in a completely different way and that are proving equally inadequate.

Beyond the historical-cultural character of The Arcades Project, which is
a model example of how to understand his many threads of thought and
their relative failures, Benjamin leaves us the legacy of a vision of the
modern as a historically exhausted era. This epoch is deprived of its false
theoretical and political illusions, and that ‘weak messianic power’ that
we can only pass on (perhaps more in a secular way than in metaphysical
terms) to the next generation.
The ellipse between the two foci also passes through Nietzschean
nihilism and its overturning via the practice of the production of rep-
resentations. The ‘tiger’s leap’ is the production of images destined to
disappear into nothingness, and the alchemy of extremes consists of the
cultivation of a weak hope within the ‘starless sky’ of Marxist secular-
ization and Nietzsche’s vitalism, which materializes when noting the
absence of God, whose very being has withdrawn from the world of the
modern era.
Notes
1. SW 3, 305.
2. See Vittoria Borsò, Walter Benjamin—Theologe und Politiker. Eine
gefährliche Verbindung, in Bernd Witte – Mauro Ponzi (ed.), Theologie
und Politik. Walter Benjamin und ein Paradigma der Moderne,
Schmidt, Berlin 2005, pp. 58–69; Giacomo Marramao, Messianismus
ohne Erwartung. Zur ‘post-religiösen’ politischen Theologie Walter
Benjamins, ibid., pp. 241–253.
3. SW 3, 305. Modified translation.
4. See Gabriele Guerra, Judentum zwischen Anarchie und Theokratie,
Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2007.
5. See Moshe Zimmermann, Politisierte Theologie des Judentums, in Bernd
Witte – Mauro Ponzi (ed.), Theologie und Politik. Walter Benjamin
und ein Paradigma der Moderne, Schmidt, Berlin 2005, pp. 150–163.
6. See Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, ed. Aleida Assmann,
Jan Assmann, Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph
Schulte, trans. Dana Hollander, Stanford University Press, Stanford

2004.
7. Romans 3:29–30. This assertion is reiterated in Romans 10:12: ‘For
there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same
Lord over all is rich to all that call on him.’
8. ‘But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that
in which we were held; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and
not in oldness of the letter’ (Romans 7:6).
9. Romans 9:18. The concept is reiterated in 9:15, ‘For he said to
Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have
compassion on whom I have compassion.’
10. See Jan Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, Hanser, München-
Wien 2003, p. 12.
11. AP, 363 [J 76a, 1] and [J 76a, 2].
12. See Miguel Abensour, Walter Benjamin entre mélancolie et révolution.
Passages Blanqui, in Walter Benjamin et Paris, p. 243.
13. AP, 329 [J 55a, 4].
14. The quotation from Nietzsche is taken from On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of History for Life: ‘Certainly we need history. But our
need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the
garden of knowledge’ (ADHL, 7).
15. Miguel Abensour, Walter Benjamin entre mélancolie et revolution,
p. 238. Own translation.
16. SW 4, 396.
17. Blanqui writes in Libérateur in March 1834: ‘Alas! humanity is walk-
ing with a blindfold and does not remove it to glimpse the road
except at long intervals. Each step in the path of progress crushes the
guide who made him do. Always its heros began being its victims’
(Auguste Blanqui, Textes choisis, Paris 1955, p. 101. Own transla-
tion). It matters little whether Benjamin read Blanqui’s manuscript
at the Bibliothèque Nationale: the point of meeting with the French
thinker is more profound, regarding his polemic against historicism
and his conception of the eternal recurrence that Benjamin com-
bines with Nietzsche’s thoughts on the subject.
18. Blanqui imagines a series of parallel dimensions, of countless dou-
bles, with infinite, interchangeable destinies: ‘A land exists where
men are following the road despised by the other double. Its life
unfolds, a globe for each, and then branches off a second, a third
time, thousands of times. It also has some perfect doubles and count-
less variations of doubles’ (Auguste Blanqui, L'éternité par les astres,
Paris 1972, p. 155. Own translation).
19. See Bernd Witte, Feststellungen zu Walter Benjamin und Kafka, in
„Neue Rundschau’, 84 (1973); Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason,
New York 1984; Stéphane Mosès, Brecht und Benjamin als Kafka-
Interpreten, in Stéphane Mosès – Albrecht Schöne (Hg.), Juden in der
deutschen Literatur, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 1986; Beda
Allemann, Fragen an die judaistische Kafka-Deutung am Beispiel
Benjamins, in: Karl Erich Grözinger – Stéphane Mosès – Hans Dieter
Zimmermann (Hg.), Franz Kafka und das Judentum, Frankfurt am
Main 1987; Karl Erich Grözinger, Kafka und die Kabbala, Frankfurt
a. M., Eichborn, 1992; Bernd Müller, „Denn es ist noch nichts gesche-
hen’. Walter Benjamins Kafka-Deutung, Böhlau, Köln 1996. Bernd
Witte, Jüdische Tradition und literarische Moderne, Hanser, München
2007.
20. C, 372.
21. ‘Perhaps, or probably, I wrote to you that several references con-
verged: a reference to Lukács’ book joined one of a private nature.
While proceeding from political considerations, Lukács arrives at
principles that are, at least in part, epistemological and perhaps not
entirely as far-reaching as I first assumed. […] By the way, I want to
study Lukács’ book as soon as possible and I would be surprised if the
foundations of my nihilism were not to manifest themselves against
communism in an antagonist confrontation with the concepts and
assertions of Hegelian dialectics. But, since I have been here, this has
not prevented me from seeing the political practice of communism
(not as a theoretical problem but, first and foremost, as a binding
attitude) in a different light than ever before’ (C, 247 s.).
22. The Angelus Novus, which Benjamin outlines in his autobiographi-
cal fragment of 1933, recalls the passage in the Bible where Daniel
has visions of the angel in order to interpret the dreams of the
Pharaoh. See Daniel 2:27–28; 8:15–16; 9:21–22; 12:2–3.
23. SW 4, 395.
24. SW 3, 262. The condemnation of historicism returns, almost in the

same terms, in the sixteenth thesis, see SW 4, 396.
25. He writes indeed in his essay on Fuchs: ‘More important, however, is
another, complementary circumstance: because he was a pioneer,
Fuchs became a collector. Fuchs is the pioneer of a materialist con-
sideration of art. Yet what made this materialist a collector was his
more or less clear feeling for his perceived historical situation. It was
the situation of historical materialism itself ’ (SW 3, 261).
26. See Richard Wolin, Expérience et matérialisme dans le Passagen-Werk
de Benajmin, in Walter Benjamin et Paris, p. 678.
27. AP, 838 [F°, 6].
28. See Karl Korsch, Karl Marx, London 1938. The book was published
in English in London in 1938, but Korsch had worked on the
German version since 1934. Benjamin suggests that he read this
book between 1938 and 1939 (probably in manuscript form) in a list
of read books that he wrote in the National Library of Paris. See GS
VII, p. 475. Additionally, the edition of Das Kapital that Benjamin
mentions in the Convolutes of The Arcades Project is the one edited by
Korsch himself (Berlin 1932).
29. See Erdmund Wizisla, Benjamin und Brecht, Frankfurt a. M.,
Suhrkamp, 2004, p. 100 s.
30. See Michael Löwy, On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy,
from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Haymarket, Chicago 2013.
31. AP, 460 [N2, 2].
32. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 6.
33. ‘For the rest, every fair observer, even if he had not followed the
course of French developments step by step, must have had a presen-
timent of the imminence of an unheard-of disgrace for the revolu-
tion’ (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 7).
34. AP, 476 [N 11, 3].
35. AP, 652 [X 1, 5].
36. He writes in the Theses: ‘What characterizes revolutionary classes at
their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make
the continuum of history explode’ (SW 4, 395).
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. SW 4, 392.
40. See Bernd Witte, Paris-Berlin-Paris, in Walter Benjamin et Paris,
p. 61.
41. See Pierre Missac, Passage de Walter Benjamin, Paris 1987, p. 17.
42. GS I.3, p. 1235 s.
43. See Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a revolutionary criti-
cism, London 1981; Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An aesthetic of
redemption, New York 1982.
44. SW 4, 390.
45. See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt a. M. 1983, p. 31.
46. AP, 460 [N 1 a, 7].
47. C, 439.
48. See Daniel Weidner (Hg.), Profanes Leben. Walter Benjamins Dialektik
der Säkularisierung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. 2010.
49. See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel, Suhrkamp,
p. 34.
50. SW 4, 392.
51. SW 4, 396 s.
52. As Michael Löwy rightly notes: ‘The revolution is at the same time
utopia of the future and restitutio in integrum (in the words of The
Theological-Political Fragment), Tikkun, in the Kabbalistic sense of
restoring the broken cosmic harmony, and messianic redemption
(Erlösung)’ (Michael Löwy, Walter Benjamin critique du progrès: à la
recherche de l'expérience perdue, in Walter Benjamin et Paris, p. 639.
Own translation).
53. AP, 476 [N 11, 4]. The same statement is repeated in the following
pages: ‘The authentic concept of universal history is a Messianic con-
cept’ (AP, 485 [N 18, 3]).
54. Je vous assure que les secondes maintenant sont fortement et solen-
nellement accentués et chacune, en jaillissant de la pendule, dit: “Je
suis la Vie, l’insupportable, l’implacable Vie!” – Il n’y a qu’une
Seconde dans la vie humaine qui ait mission d’annoncer une bonne
nouvelle, la bonne nouvelle qui cause … chacun une inexplicable
peur. – Oui! le Tempe règne; il a repris sa brutale dictature. Et il me
pousse, comme si j’étais un bœuf, avec son double aiguillon”

(Baudelaire, Œuvre Complètes, vol. I, p. 282).
55. See OC, I, 287.
56. See Irving Wohlfahrt, ‘Immer radikal, niemals konsequent’. Zur
theologisch-politischen Standortbestimmung Walter Benjamins, in
Norbert Bolz – Richard Faber (Hg.), Antike und Moderne. Zu Walter
Benjamins ‘Passagen’, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1986,
pp. 116–137.
57. C, 300 (modified translation).
58. SW 3, 304 (modified translation).
59. See Bernhard Wunder, Konstruktion und Rezeption der Theologie
Walter Benjamins. These I und das ‘Theologisch-politische Fragment’,
60. C, 300.
61. See Irving Wohlfahrt, ‘Immer radikal, niemals konsequent’, p. 117.
62. See here Chap. 5.
63. See Irving Wohlfahrt, ‘Immer radikal, niemals konsequent’, p. 122.
64. AP, 471 [N 7a, 7].
65. See Stéphane Symons, Walter Benjamin. Presence of Mind, Failure to
Comprehend, Leiden-Boston 2013. On failure in Walter Benjamin’s
life and work, see Howard Heiland – Michael W. Jennings, Walter
Benjamin: A Critical Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
(Mass.)-London 2014, p. 93, 117, 153, 194, 205, 338, 246, 377,
540, 549, 603, 622. See also James McFarland, Constellation.
Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History,
Fordham University Press, New York 2013, p. 14, 107, 135.
66. See Lisa Fittko, Mein Weg über die Pyrenäen, Hanser, München-Wien
1985.
67. See Richard Wolin, Expérience et matérialisme, p. 670.
68. Ibid., p. 676. In my opinion, the problem is not relatable to the
terms in which Wolin describes it: it does not involve linking
Benjamin’s ‘testament’ with his younger years, but instead, it is a
matter of discovering the contents of the ‘impatience’ and changes or
enhancements to the secularization process of the messianism that
Benjamin wanted to add to The Arcades Project.
69. GS I.3, 1231. [Ms 1098v] Own translation.
70. As Benjamin writes to Scholem in a letter of 20 July 1934: ‘I endeav-

ored to show how Kafka sought—on the nether side of that ‘noth-
ingness’, in its inside lining, so to speak—to feel his way toward
redemption’ (C, 449).
71. SW 4, 397.
72. GS I.3, 1232. [Ms 1100]. Own translation.
73. C, 563.
74. See David Harvey, The condition of Postmodernity, New York 1989.
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DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7
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Index
A 179n13, 179n19, 179n22,

Abensour, Miguel, 263n12, 263n15 179n23, 210, 218
Adam, 4, 132, 134, 141, 142 Arend, Hannah, 15n1, 23, 48n6
Adorno, Gretel, 219, 254 Aristotle, 25, 76
Adorno, Theodor Wiesegrund, 44, Assmann, Jan, 145n12, 238, 262n6,
82, 113, 151, 175, 182n60, 263n10
183n61, 188, 193, 194, aura, 25, 174, 185–91, 194, 205,
200, 212, 219, 225n29 206, 216
Agamben, Giorgio, 56n109, 139, Azuelos, Daniel, 181n43
141, 147n36
Allemann, Beda, 264n19
Althusser, Louis, 112 B
Altschul, Frank, 122n23 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, xv, 24, 36,
Apollo, 94, 95 218, 219, 241
Aragon, Louis, xiii, xiv, 37, 40, Baecker, Dirk, 15n2
53n70, 151–61, 165, 168, bare life, x, xv, 10, 15, 21–9, 37, 46,
169, 171–3, 176, 177n1, 57, 72, 73, 82
178n6, 178n7, 178n10, Bataille, Georges, 59, 60, 86n6, 86n7
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ denote notes.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39267-7
282 Index
Baudelaire, Charles, xiii, xiv, 16n4, On some Motifs by Baudelaire,

31, 33, 41, 50n39, 94, 103, 192
110, 130, 136, 137, 143, The Task of the Translator, 130–5
185–231, 239–41, 253, Theological-Political Fragment, 1,
257, 260, 261 8, 30, 140, 233, 254, 255,
Flower of Evil, 137, 192, 211, 221 266n52
Bauer, Markus, 178n8, 246 Theses On Concept of History, 29,
Baumann, Valérie, 179n15, 180n31 30, 84, 102, 240, 251
Bäumler, Alfred, 63, 78, 81, 90n62 Work of Art in the Age of Its
Beiküfner, Uta, 178n8 Technological
Benjamin, Andrew, 229n67, 229n72 Reproducibility, 194
Benjamin, Walter World and Time, 13
Arcades Project, xiii, xiv, 40, 42, Benso, Silvia, 48n1
69, 72, 84, 103–5, 120n6, Bermann, Marshall, 17n18
122n23, 144, 151, 155, Bernouilli, Carl Albert, 78, 90n68
157, 159, 161, 162, 166, Bible, 125n53, 132, 133, 135, 235,
175, 177n1, 177n5, 178n8, 264n22
186–8, 191, 193, 194, 197, Bismarck, Otto von, 60
200–2, 204, 205, 212, Blanqui, Auguste, xiii, 26, 41, 105,
213, 215, 219, 221, 192, 195, 200, 210, 217,
231n99, 239–41, 244, 218, 220, 221, 239–42,
246, 247, 249, 250, 258, 260, 263n17, 263n18
256–9, 261, 262, 265n28, Blaupot ten Cate, Anna Maria,
267n68 54n89
Berlin Childhood, 154 Bock, Wolfgang, 231n115
Capitalism as Religion, 1–20 Böhme, Jacob, 137, 139–42,
Central Park, 190, 191, 196, 197, 147n37–40
223n20 Bolle, Willi, 180n42, 222n9
Critique of Violence, xv, 1, 8 Bolz, Norbert, 177n5, 267n56
On language in general and on the Borradori, Giovanna, 48n1
language of men, 130, 132 Borsò, Vittoria, 50n44, 262n2
Moscow Diaries, 249 Brecht, Bertolt, 99–101, 107, 114,
One-Way-Street, 49n23 116–19, 124n40, 124n42,
Paris, the capital of the nineteenth 189, 223n16, 244, 250,
century, 187 251, 264n19, 265n29
Planetarium, xii Brüggemann, Heinz, 50n33, 222n9
rapture, xii, 13, 30, 32, 39, 40, Buchenhorst, Ralph, 180n42, 222n9
43–8, 53n81, 71, 77, 109 Buci-Glucksman, Christine, 180n39
Index 283
Buck-Morss, Susan, 178n8, 227n34, E

231n99 Eagleton, Terry, 181n43, 266n43
Burckhardt, Jakob, 64, 65, 75, 76 Ebrecht, Katharina, 122n20
Eiland, Howard, 54n89, 55n92,
120n7, 149n58, 183n61,
C 267n65
Cacciari, Massimo, 83, 92n88, 97, Emmerich, Wolfgang, 106,
120n8 123n35
Caillois, Roger, 36, 219, 231n110 Engelhardt, Hartmut, 230n87
Canfora, Luciano, 51n46 Engels, Friedrich, 224n26, 247
capitalism, ix, 1–20, 43–5, 79, 83, Espagne, Michel, 222n13
101, 118, 195, 218, Esposito, Roberto, 15, 20n46
228n60, 231n101, 245
Cassandra, 114
Cervantes, Miguel de, 124n53 F
Chiesa, Lorenzo, 48n1 Faber. Richard, 267n56
Christ, 235, 237, 238 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 27,
Christianity, 7, 62, 66, 82, 236 119n1
Circe, 85 Fenves, Peter, 50n44, 51n48
Clark, T. J., 17n19 Fischer, Gerhard, 89n47, 90n60,
Cohen, Margaret, 117n3, 178n6 90n63, 149n49, 179n24,
Cohn, Jula, 54n89 183n63
Colli, Giorgio, 57–9, 81, 85, 87n17, Fittko, Lisa, 267n66
92n94 Förster. Bernhard, 78, 81, 86n6,
communism, 23, 165, 242, 249, 90n70
250, 259, 260, 264n21 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, xvin9,
Connors, Clare, 49n8 58–60, 63, 77–9, 81
Cratylus, 25, 71 Foucault, Michel, 8, 10–12, 18n30,
18n35, 46, 47, 56n108, 83,
88n39
D Fourier, Charles, 219, 220, 260
Damasio, Antonio, 28, 49n28 Frankfurt School, 167, 187, 194
Darwinism, 23, 27, 39, 62 Freud, Sigmund, x, xiii, 2, 23, 61,
De Gourmont, Remy, 229n69 67, 144, 152, 161, 163,
Demeter, 85 165, 171, 202, 207
Dietzel, Ulrich, 106 Friedmann, Georges, 228n53
Dionysus, 23, 56n104, 61 Frisby, David, 179n29
Drumbl, Johann, 145n5 Fritsch, Theodor, 62, 63, 90n70
284 Index
Fuchs, Eduard, 31, 213, 243, 244, Heidegger, Martin, 8, 45, 71,
265n25 82, 83
Funk, Gerhard, 183n63 Heine, Heinrich, 14, 19n41, 193,
Fürnkäs, Josef, 177n3, 178n6 208, 209, 225n28, 244
Heinle, Fritz, 248
Heraclitus, 24, 25, 27, 38, 71
G Hesse, Hermann, 64, 66, 67, 73–5,
Garber, Klaus, 53n70, 178n6, 222n9 83, 87n24, 88n32
Gast, Peter, 58 Hillach, Ansgar, 229n67
Gautier, Théophile, 137, 210, 211 Hitler, Adolf, 59, 60, 86n6, 100,
Gentili, Dario, 48n1 101, 116, 117, 254
George, Stefan, 200 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus,
Glück, Gustav, 40 208
Glucksmann, André, 49n9 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 136
Goebel, Rolf J., 180n42, 222n9 Hollingdale, L. J., 49n9
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 96, Horkheimer, Max, 31, 82, 122n23,
124n53, 164, 180n37 188, 197, 205, 211, 220,
Goldschmit, Marc, 53n79 223n15
Golomb, Jacob, xvin9, 18n24, 91n73 Horneffer, August, 59, 86n4
Gotscheff, Dimiter, 102, 127n70 Horneffer, Ernst, 86n4
Green, David E., 92n87, 92n90 Hörnigk, Frank, 119n3, 122n19,
Greffrath, Christa, 229n67 124n44, 126n65
Groys, Boris, 56n107, 56n110 Hugo, Victor, 202
Grözinger, Karl Erich, 264n19
Gründgens, Gustaf, 112
Guerra, Gabriele, 20n47, 262n4 I
image space (Bildraum), xiii,
39, 162
H Inauen, Yasmine, 125n55
Hamacher, Werner, 15n2
Hamann, Johann Georg, 131, 137
Hardt, Michael, 48n1 J
Hartoonian, Gevork, 222n9 Jacobson, Eric, 50n44
Harvey, David, 268n74 Jacobson, Evelin M., 123n30
Haussmann, Georges Eugène, 152, Jacobson, Manfred R., 123n30
187, 190, 198, 199 Jaspers, Karl, 64
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 42, Jennings, Michael W., 54n89,
62, 64, 69, 92n87, 92n90, 55n92, 120n7, 149n58,
92n92, 97 180n38, 183n61, 227n35,
Index 285
228n60, 231n99, 231n101, L

267n65 labyrinth, xv, 17n15, 24, 37, 105,
Jewish, xv, 14, 15, 38, 41, 60, 63, 154, 155, 168–72, 174,
141, 147n41, 155, 160, 177, 179n13, 201, 227n35
234, 236, 246, 249, 250, Lacis, Asja, 54n89
252, 256–60 Lacoste, Jean, 229n68
Joshua, 33, 186 Lebovic, Nitzan, 18n29
Judaism, 14, 33, 66, 141, 147n41, Ledoux, Joseph, 28, 49n28
237, 252 Leenhardt, Jacques, 158, 179n22
Julian the Chaldean, 142 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 126n69
Jung, Carl Gustav, 219 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 118
Lessing, Theodor, 76
liberalism, ix, 10–12, 14, 39, 43
K Lieb, Fritz, 231n106
Kabbalah, 5, 50n44, 139, 140, 142, Lindner, Burkhardt, xvin2, 15n2,
147n40, 148n43, 148n48, 153, 177n5, 229n67
155, 256, 258, 259 Löschner, Sascha, 121n12
Kafka, Franz, 117, 242, 250, 254, Löwith, Karl, 8, 22, 26, 27, 49n24,
257, 260, 264n19, 268n70 56n99, 64, 82–4, 92n87,
Kambas, Chryssoula, 181n43, 92n90, 92n92
229n67 Löwy, Michael, 15n2, 228n54,
Kant, Immanuel, 42, 97 231n109, 265n30, 266n52
Kaufmann, Walter, xvin9, 49n9, 78, Lukács, Georg, 43, 45, 55n97, 67,
90n70, 92n91 79–83, 91n74, 91n76,
Kautzer, Chad, 16n4 92n81, 92n83, 242, 243,
Kerényi, Károly, 169, 170, 182n51 264n21
Klages, Ludwig, 37, 72, 200, 219 Luxemburg, Rosa, 117
Klassische Moderne, 67, 72, 88n38,
89n45, 89n46
Klatt, Gudrun, 229n67 M
Klee, Paul, xiv, 102, 190, 259 Macbeth, 117, 118
Kleist, Heinrich von, 101, 117 Macchia, Giovanni, 229n69, 230n83
Klibansky, Raymond, 49n27, Mann, Thomas, 64, 67, 73–8, 80,
148n45 81, 87n23, 88n32, 89n47,
Knossos, 170 89n49, 90n51, 90n60,
Korsch, Karl, 244, 265n28 90n63, 91n75, 116
Kracauer, Siegfried, 88n40, 178n8, Marcuse, Herbert, 220
203, 228n61, 261 Marramao, Giacomo, 262n2
Kraus, Karl, 64, 65, 94, 247 Marsyas, 93–127
286 Index
Martel, James R., 50n44, 181n43 Molder, Maria Filomena, 222n9

Marxism, 47, 104, 165, 166, 194, Montandon, Alain, 228n62
212, 219, 220, 243, 246, Montinari, Mazzino, 56n99, 57–60,
249, 256, 260, 261 81, 86n1–3, 86n5, 87n17,
Marx, Karl 87n20, 87n22, 91n73
Capital, 4–7, 17n22, 83, 165 Morgan, S. J., 15, 48, 119, 177, 221,
The Class Struggles in France from 262
1848 to 1850, 191, 192 Morgenroth, Claas, 50n44
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Mosès, Stéphane, 14, 15, 20n49,
Bonaparte, 191, 192, 133, 139, 145n9, 145n10,
223n24, 245, 265n33 147n37, 236, 263n9,
Manifesto, x, 5, 23, 198 264n19
Masini, Ferruccio, 44–6, 49n13, Müller, Heiner, 27, 69, 93–127
56n100, 56n102, 229n67 Müller-Schöll, Nikolaus, 124n42
Mattenklott, Gert, 143, 149n49,
183n63
Mayer, Hans, 118 N
McFarland, James, xi, xvin5, 18n28, Napoleon III, 192, 220
54n82, 55n92, 56n101, Nazism, xii, 8, 43, 44, 63, 76,
89n44, 144, 149n57, 79–81, 90n70, 101, 248,
267n65 249
Medea, 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich
mémoire involontaire, 161, 207, 216, Beyond Good and Evil, 63
219 Beyond Man, xii, 61, 71, 83–5
Mendieta, Eduardo, 16n4 The Birth of Tragedy. 65, 70,
Menninghaus, Winfried, 19n39, 89n43
139, 146n27, 146n29, The Dawn, 60
146n33, 147n35, 230n89 Ecce Homo, 58
Méryon, Charles, 198, 199, 227n44 On the Future of our Educational
messiah, 31, 32, 97, 233, 236, 251, Institutions, 64–6, 88n32
253, 257–60 Genealogy of Morality, 2, 4
messianism, 9, 23, 34, 35, 50n44, Human, All Too Human, 28, 36,
179n17, 245, 246, 249–51, 50n29, 52n65, 53n66
253, 258, 262n2, 267n68 intoxication, xii
Mette, Hans Joachim, 59 rapture, xii, 32, 40, 43–8, 54n81,
Mieth, Corinna, 124n51 71, 77
Minotaur, 169, 170, 172, 179n13 Rausch, xii
Missac, Pierre, 256, 257, 266n41 superman, xii, 7, 8, 62
Index 287
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 60, 61, Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 27, 46, 93–6,
71, 85, 87n24 112–14, 119n1, 120n4
Übermensch, xi, 8, 36, 44, 67, 71, Pauen, Michael, 149n49, 183n63
83, 84, 90n70 Paul the Apostle, 236
untimely, 24, 32, 33, 67, 84, 199, Pawel, Ernst, 264n19
206 Pessoa, Fernando, 94
the Will to Power, xvin9, 46, Petersen, Leena A., 48n2
49n9, 58–60, 63, 84, 85, Pethes, Nicols, 227n41
92n91 Pfotenhauer, Helmuth, x, xvin2
nihilism, x, xiii, xv, xvin3, 8, 9, Philoctetes, 114
18n28, 22–7, 32, 35, 36, Plato, 25–7, 38, 70
38, 40, 42–4, 48n1, 48n4, Phaedrus, 27
65, 68–70, 72, 83, 84, Podach, Ernst Friedrich, 77–9, 81,
97, 99, 101, 106, 119n1, 90n61, 90n64
198, 210, 218, 242, 262, Poe, Edgar Allan, xiv, 191, 193, 203,
264n21 208, 210, 211, 213, 215
Novalis, 66, 77, 105, 131 politics, x, xiii, 8, 9, 14, 15, 22, 25,
now-time (Jetzt-Zeit), 26, 31, 252 30, 43, 48n1, 49n17,
Nuselovici, Alexis, 19n36, 180n42 50n44, 75, 94, 114, 171,
234, 237, 238, 254
Polsky, Stephanie, 179n18, 181n43
O Ponzi, Mauro, xvin3, xvin4, 18n26,
Obad, Vlado, 124n47 18n28, 19n36, 48n4,
Odysseus, 85, 169 53n70, 53n80, 56n98,
Oehler, M. Richard, 60 88n38, 89n45, 89n46,
Oesterle, Günter, 50n33 119n1, 126n65, 126n68,
Opitz, Michael, 120n5 145n4, 178n6, 180n42,
Orsucci, Andrea, 87n14 262n2, 262n5
Osborne, John, 121n11 Prawer, Siegbert Salomon, 17n18
Otto, Walter, 58, 59 profane, x, xiii, 8, 9, 15, 20n49, 21,
22, 40, 50n44, 97, 144,
156, 177n3, 178n6, 218,
P 233–68
Palmier, Jean Michel, 183n60, Proust, Marcel, xiii, 37, 160, 164,
226n29 171, 180n36, 207, 212,
Pandolfi, Alessia, 144 219, 229n73
Panofsky, Erwin, 49n27, 148n45 Pusca, Anca M., 222n9
Parombka, Stephan, 89n45 Pythagoras, 38
288 Index
R Simay, Philippe, 222n9

Rabinbach, Anson, 181n43 Simmel, Georg, 72, 88n40, 226n29
Raphael, 70, 166, 167 Smith, Adam, 10, 12, 14
Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer, xviin9, Socrates, 25
91n73 Solibakke, Karl, 18n28, 50n44,
Rehm, Ludger, 53n70, 178n6 56n98
religion, ix, 1–20, 37, 52n66, 77, 82, Spengler, Oswald, 69
134, 141, 147–8n41, Stadelmeier, Gerhard, 117, 127n72
147n40, 160, 223n19, 235, Stalin, 116–18, 239, 248, 250, 251,
238, 252, 258 254
Richter, Gerhard, 18n28, 145n3 Steiner, Uwe, 15n2, 16n4, 16n7,
Richter, Jean Paul, 247 181n43
Rockmore, Tom, 92n82 Stewart, Elizabeth, 180n40
Roos, Richard, 58, 59 Stimilli, Elettra, 6, 15n2, 17n21
Rühle, Günther, 99, 121n14 Stoekl, Allan, 86n6
Rychner, Max, 242, 255 Stoessel, Marleen, 230n89
surrealism, 30–2, 34, 40, 54n85, 94,
151, 152, 158, 159, 162,
S 166, 173, 177n3, 178n6,
Sauerland, Karol, 110, 124n50 255
Saxl, Fritz, 49n27, 148n45 Symons, Stéphane, 126n62, 267n65
Scherpe, Klaus R., 89n48
Schlechta, Karl, 59
Schlegel, Friedrich, 29, 131 T
Schödel, Helmut, 117, 127n73 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 18n34
Scholem, Gershom, 32, 33, 40, 41, Talmud, 133, 235, 236, 242
50n44, 54n88, 54n89, Taubes, Jacob, 235–7, 262n6
55n90, 55n94, 104, 141–3, Thälmann, Ernst, 117
147n40, 148n48, 155, 175, Thebault, E., 229n69
179n16, 188, 212, 241, theology, x, 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, 30,
242, 249–52, 254–8, 260, 32, 34, 35, 50n44,
266n45, 266n49, 268n70 141, 234, 235, 238,
Schöne, Albrecht, 264n19 242, 250, 254–6, 259,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 64–6, 71, 81 261, 262n6
Schroeder, Brian, 48n1 Theseus, 168, 170, 172
Schulz, Brood, 122n22 thought image (Denkbild), xvin7
Schweppenhäuser, Hermann, Torah, 41, 132, 133, 259
123n34, 142, 143, 145n6 Toscano, Alberto, 48n1
Shakespeare, William, 76, 100, 101, Trabitzsch, Michael, 179n17
108, 118 tsim-tsum, 9
Index 289
U Werner, Hendrik, 127n77

Ulbricht, Walter, 117 Werner, Michael, 222n13
Ursprache (original language), 131, Wetters, Kirk, 15n2
132, 135 Whittle, Karen, 85
Wisman, Heinz, 178n5, 179n22,
222n9, 228n54
V Wistrich, Robert, xvin9, 18n24,
Valéry, Paul, 207, 209 90–1n70, 91n73
Valk, Thorsten, 88n38 Witte, Bernd, xvin3, 14, 18n26,
Vedda, Miguel, 180n42, 222n9 18n28, 19n40, 19n43, 48n4,
Verlaine, Paul, 221n3 50n44, 53n80, 56n98,
Vietta, Silvio, 89n45 145n11, 178n5, 222n13,
Vighi, Fabio, 19n36, 119n1, 181n42 227n40, 248, 262n2, 262n5,
Virno, Paolo, 48n1 264n19, 266n40
von Becker, Peter, 101, 121n17, Wizisla, Erdmund, 265n29
122n18, 127n74 Wohlfarth, Irving, x, xvin3, 23, 40,
von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 131 48n4, 49n7, 49n9, 53n80,
Voßkühler, Friedrich, 182n49 56n98, 129, 145n2
Wolf, Christa, 114
Wolin, Richard, 183n60, 265n26,
W 266n43, 267n67
Wagner, Richard, 101 Woodward, Ashley, xvi–xviin9,
Warburg, Aby, 27 91n73
Weber, Carl Maria von, 125n53 Wunder, Bernhard, 267n59
Weber, Max, 1, 2, 15n2 Wuttke, Martin, 101, 117
Weidner, Daniel, 18n29, 50n44,
56n111, 266n48
Weigel, Helene, 117 Z
Weigel, Sigrid, xvin7, 18n29, 53n76, Zarathustra, xvin9, 60–2, 65, 71, 85,
56n106, 120n7, 125n55, 87n24, 88n32
143, 144, 149n52–4, 154, Zimmermann, Hans Dieter,
179n14, 180n34, 183n63 264n19
Weiss, Otto, 58 Zimmermann, Moshe, 262n5
Wekwerth, Manfred, 117 Žižek, Slavoj, 18n34, 42, 55n96, 97,
Welbers, Ulrich, 145n7 121n10
Welzel, Klaus, 121n15 Zweig, Stefan, 158, 179n21

Mauro Ponzi (Auth.) - Nietzsche's Nihilism in Walter Benjamin-Palgrave Macmillan (2017) PDF

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nietzsche’s nihilism

ISBN 978-3-319-39266-0 ISBN 978-3-319-39267-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958128

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © maurice joseph / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

3 Nietzsche: Editions and Interpretations of His Works 57

4 The Cry of Marsyas: History as a Place of Permanent

5 Hidden Refusal 129

6 The Dream Space 151

8 The Order of the Profane 233

ADHL Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of

KG Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by

Walter Benjamin’s analysis of modernity and modern society offers

perspective that would allow us to speak of an order of the profane ‘here

When Nietzsche brilliantly misuses the German language, he is taking

go beyond’. However, this duplicity and ambiguity of meaning become

In the usual English version Rausch is translated as ‘ecstatic trance’ and

and because it is not capable of resolving the ‘inexplicability’ of visible

Rome, February 2016

Woodward (ed.), Interpreting Nietzsche. Reception and Inﬂuence,

1 The Dispositif Guilt-Debt

© The Author(s) 2017 1

From the outset he draws attention to capitalism’s ‘extremist’ nature,

The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, to pursue our train of inquiry

We can see, then, that Nietzsche understands guilt as a debt, a guarantee

capitalism as religion. However, what is most important is Nietzsche’s

Yet the madness of capitalism is precisely this: setting in motion a

2 The Credo of Capital

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same

‘original sin’. Capitalism is therefore founded on a ‘guilt’, which is, in

The global domination of capitalism and colonialism is expressed here in

tural characteristics of capitalism, and he ﬁnds a correlation between the

Nietzsche’s philosophy is so connected to an apocalyptic dimension

theological-political device, but also because he projects in a metaphysi-

ﬁrst has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speak-

Nietzsche uses the term Umkehrung, which in Benjamin’s essay reappears

beyond the concrete practices of liberation of slaves, property restitu-

36. See Mauro Ponzi, Naples as Topography of Spaces In-between: Walter

46. See: Roberto Esposito, Due. La macchina della teologia politica e il

© The Author(s) 2017 21

a philosophical anthropology.2 Benjamin’s approach to the modern, no

analysable in the writings of their youth, since these formative structures

an immanent element of Nietzsche’s thought, which he describes as the

The theory of the emotional brain allows an approach that is a little

religious, aesthetic conceptions and sensations […].’30 All ‘strong’ states

2 The ‘Secret Agreement’

also be understood to mean something quite different: the historian turns

The difference between the Romantic conception and that of Benjamin

February 1940 to Horkheimer, in which Benjamin said he had written

This conception of history is repeated in another fragment too: ‘A con-

To interrupt the course of the world—that was Baudelaire’s deepest inten-

3 The Tribunal of History

its nature corporeally. In the total decay of corporeality, an experience that

‘The movement into the inscrutable groundlessness of total vitality’ closely

Benjamin gives us, indirectly, a further self-portrait in a short written

Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates

every phenomenon within a harmonious global edifice; on the contrary,

Nietzsche criticizes industrialization and the labour market because he

4 The Power of Rapture

Ferruccio Masini speaks of the ‘grim rationalistic and historical defeats’

Aufhebung, but is exalted in an ecstatic overturning in the extreme of the