LÖWY-Michael-Revolution-Against-Progress-Walter-Benjamins-Romantic-Anarchism

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Walter Benjamins style of thinking is unique and resists classification, but it

can be better understood and explained if related to the cultural atmosphereofMittel-Europa at the beginning of the century, and to certain religious-political undercurrents among German-speaking Jewish intellectuals of this

period. Neo-romanticism, as a moral and social critique of progress and ofmodern Zivilisationin the name of a nostalgic loyalty to the traditionalKulturbecame the dominant trend among the German intelligentsia fromthe end of the nineteenth century to the rise of fascism. It was mainly a

reaction to the very forceful, brutal and rapid process of industrialization of

the country during this time, which threatened to dissolve all ancient valuesand beliefs and replace them with the cold and rational calculations of

commodity production. Several German-speaking Jewish writers and philos-

ophers were attracted by this Weltanschauung and developed (in a relationshipof elective affinity) a Romantic version of Jewish Messianism and a Romantic

version of revolutionary (libertarian) Utopia. One of the central elements in

Michael Lwy

Revolution Against Progress: WalterBenjamins Romantic Anarchism

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this affinity was the restorative-utopian character of both spiritualconfigurations, which can be found in the works of several well-knownfigures of the Central European Jewish intelligentsia: Martin Buber,Gershom Scholem, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukcs, andso on.1

Walter Benjamin is related to this pattern not only by his personal links

with most of the members of this complex network, but also becausehe concentrates in his life and thought all the contradictions, tensions andoppositions which divided this neo-Romantic JewishGerman culture:between Jewish theology and Marxist materialism, assimilation andZionism, communism and anarchism, conservative Romanticism andnihilist revolution, mystical Messianism and profane utopia.

The intimate association of Messianic and anarchist-utopian themes(against a background of neo-Romantic criticism of progress) is oneof the central features of Benjamins political philosophy. If we examineone of his first works, the speech On Student Life (1914), we canalready find the seeds of his whole social-religious Weltanschauung.Against the formless idea of progress he celebrates the critical powerof utopian images, such as those of the French Revolution and of theMessianic Kingdom; the real issues for society are not those of tech-nology and science, but the metaphysical problems raised by Plato,Spinoza, the Romantics and Nietzsche, under whose inspiration thestudent community should become the harbinger of a permanentspiritual revolution. The anarchist dimension is already suggested by

the statement that truly free art and knowledge are alien to the state,frequently hostile to the state. But it is also present in a more explicitway, in the reference to the Tolstoyan spirit of serving the poor,whose most authentic expressions were the ideas of the most profoundAnarchists and the Christian monastic communities.2 Utopia, Anarch-ism, Revolution and Messianism are alchemically combined and linkedto a neo-Romantic cultural criticism of progress and merely technical-scientific knowledge; the past (the monastic communities) and the future(the Anarchist utopia) are directly associated in a characteristicallyRomantic-revolutionary short-cut. This document contains in nuce many

of Benjamins future preoccupations and one can rigorously show itssimilarity with his last writings. It suggests certain themes and motivesthat will recur during his life work, sometimes openly, sometimes as ahidden undercurrent. We can see a basic continuity in his spiritualtrajectory from 1914 to 1940which does not mean that there were nochanges or transmutations: after 1924 Marxism becomes an increasinglyessential ingredient of his world-view. Communism and historical materi-alism did not replace his former spiritualist and libertarian convictions,but amalgamated with them, forming a distinctive pattern of thought.

For Benjaminas for many young Jewish intellectuals at the beginningof the centuryRomanticism was the starting point, the decisive cul-tural climate, the basic source of values and feelings. It is important to

1 We have developed these ideas in the essay Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central

Europe,New German Critique 20, Spring/Summer 1980.2 W. Benjamin, Das Leben der Studenten, Illuminationen, Frankfurt 1980, pp. 9, 13, 14, 16.

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insist on this, because criticism has (in general) not given sufficientattention to his neo-Romantic background and its relevance for his ownsocial, religious and philosophical-historical viewswhich represent ofcourse an original perspective, irreducible to classical Romantic ideas.

In one of his first publications (under the pseudonym J. Ardor), theshort notice Romantik (1913), Benjamin criticizes the false Romanti-

cism taught in school and calls for the birth of a new Romanticism,stressing that the Romantic willto beauty, the Romantic willto truth,the Romantic willto action are insuperable (unberwindlich) acquisitionsof modern culture.3 In a little-noticed but highly significant essay in theform of a dialogue, also from 1913 (Dialog ber die Religiositt derGegenwart) he writes that we all still live very deeply immersed inthe discoveries of Romanticism and that we have to thank Romanticismfor the most powerful insights on the nocturnal side of the natural.Sharply criticizing the reduction of men to working machines and thedebasement of all work to the technical, he insists, in opposition to theillusions of progress and evolution, on the need for a new religion(whose prophets would be Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Strindbergi.e.cultural critics of modern civilization) and for a new, sincere (ehrlichen)socialism, very different from the conventional one.4

Enlightenment Blindness

Benjamins first important literary essay (191415) was devoted to therevolutionary-Romantic Hlderlin, and after 1916 he became fascinated

by Friedrich Schlegels youthful writings, which were to be the primamateria of his doctoral thesis. In a letter to Scholem in June 1917, hepraised the infinite deepness and beauty of the Frhromantik (Friedrichand August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck and Schleiermacher werementioned); he was particularly attracted by its ways of uniting religionand history and he significantly concluded that Romanticism is the lastmovement that has once again saved tradition for us.5 At the beginningof1918, in the essay Uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie,he sharply criticized the blindness not only of the Enlightenment butof the new times (Neuzeit) in general, precisely in relation to two

dimensions of culture that are so essential to Romanticism: religion andhistory. His neo-Romantic scorn for the Aufklrungwent so far that hesingled it out as one of the lowest-situated world-views, and as acultural era whose experience was flat and shallow.6 In 1919 Benjaminpresented his thesis Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschenRomantik and it was under the inspiration of this Romantic methodof literary criticism that he wrote his well-known essay on GoethesElective Affinitiescelebrated by one of the main figures of neo-Romanti-cism, the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as absolutely incomparable.The correspondence during the twenties gives evidence of his persistentinterest in Romanticism: he was deeply stimulated by Johann Wilhelm

3 W. Benjamin, Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften (GS) 11, 1, Frankfurt 1977, p. 46.4 W. Benjamin, GS 11, 1, pp. 22, 24, 25, 26, 34. In another characteristic passage he condemns thereduction of social activity to an affair ofZivilisation, like the electric light (p. 19).5 W. Benjamin, Briefe, Frankfurt 1966, vol. 1, p. 138.6 W. Benjamin, GS II, 1, pp. 158159.

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Ritters distinctively Romantic esotericism, by Tiecks novel Eckbertthe Blond, by the medieval fairy tales, and by Grimms collections ofGerman Sagen.7 He was even sensitive to conservative neo-Romanticcultural critics of capitalism: the mystic and esoteric German poet StefanGeorg, the Catholic royalist French novelist Leon Bloy (has ever abitterer criticism, or rather satire, been written against the bour-geoisie?), the Bachofen conservative commentator Ludwig Klages

(without doubt a great philosophical work) and evenhorribile dictuAction Franaise, to which he subscribed in 1924!8 In 1930 he gave alecture on E.T.A. Hoffmann and Oscar Panizza, who represented forhim the beginning and the end of the Romantic spiritual movement inGermany in the last century, and whose religious-metaphysical dualismbetween Life and Automaton he considered as a kind of theology. Hesaw Hoffmann, with his fantastic story-telling, as the follower of an oldtradition going back to the Greek and Oriental epic, and he consideredthat authentic story-telling (Erzhlen) has always a conservative charac-ter, in the best meaning of the word, and we cannot think of any oneof the great story-tellers separated from the oldest spiritual heritage ofhumanity. He also celebrated Hoffmanns belief in effective connexionswith the most ancient times (Urzeit); as we shall see, this reference toa primeval, archaic or ancestral era would become central in his laterwritings, in contradistinction to the usual Romantic nostalgia for theMiddle Ages.9

It is true that in the thirties, with his growing appropriation of historicalmaterialism, the references to Romanticism tend to become infrequent;

yet some basic elements of the Romantic world-view are chemicallysublimated in his religious and philosophico-political ideas. One of thelast discussions of Romanticism in his writings is a review in 1939 ofAlbert Beguin,Le romantisme et les rves. Benjamin argues that the authorwas unable to understand Romanticism as a reaction to social andindustrial development, and he concludes with this illuminating insight:The Romantic appeal to dream life was an emergency signal; it pointedless towards the way home of the soul to its Motherland, than to theobstacles that already had barred this way.10

Romantic Messianism

The link between Romanticism and Messianism is documented not onlyby Benjamins interest in the kabbalist-philosophical writings of theGerman Romantic Franz Joseph Molitor,11, but above all in his doctoralthesis, where he insists that the true essence of the Frhromantik mustbe sought in Romantic Messianism. He discovers the Messianic dimen-sion of Romanticism, especially in the writings of Schlegel and Novalis,and quotes among others this astonishing statement by the young

Friedrich Schlegel: The revolutionary desire to achieve the kingdomof God is the beginning of modern history. Anything which is not

7 W. Benjamin, Briefe, 1, pp. 381, 383, 342, 394, etc.8 W. Benjamin, Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 349, 358, vol. 2, p. 515.9 W. Benjamin, GS II, 2, pp. 642, 64445, 647.10 W. Benjamin, GS III, p. 560.11 W. Benjamin, Briefe, 1,p. 134136.

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related to the Kingdom of God is for it just marginal.12 This themeseems incidental to the main aesthetic subject of the work, but it wasessential to his own preoccupations: in a letter to Ernst Schoen, in April1919, he explains that he cannot deal with the centre of Romanticism,Messianism, because such questions, though highly relevant, wouldprevent the thesis from keeping to a conventionally scientific form(which he distinguishes from the authentic one).13

Noting in his diary in 1916 a conversation with his friend, GershomScholem writes: The spirit of Benjamin turns . . . around the phenom-ena of myth, which he approaches from various angles. From history,where he starts from Romanticism, from poetry, where he starts fromHlderlin, from religion, where he starts from Judaism.14 Benjaminsmind is at this moment a peculiar cultural crucible, in which Hlderlin(or Schlegel) and the Bible, Romantic poetry and Messianic theology,history and religion are distilled to produce a new and unexpectedsubstance.

Benjamins libertarian Utopia is also grounded in a neo-Romanticstructure of feeling. There is a very illuminating passage in a letter of1918 to Gershom Scholem where this connection is explicitly stated.After proclaiming that Romanticism is one of the most powerfulmovements of the present times, Benjamin argues that through thereception of social elements the ideal side of Romantic catholicism(as opposed to its association with political power) developed intoAnarchism (Leonhard Frank, Ludwig Rubiner).15 As we have seen,

the Catholic-Romantic restorative dimension is intimately linked, inBenjamins speech on students (1914), to its libertarian aspect: monasticcommunities and anarchist groups are presented as the two mostsignificant models of social action.

In a more general way, Benjamins social views are influenced bylibertarian, anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist thinkers most akin to Roman-tic anti-capitalism and its restitutionist aspirations: Georges Sorel,Gustav Landauer. But his thinking is far from political in the usualsense of the term. Paradoxically he seems to have been attracted neither

by the Russian October nor by the German Revolution of191819: indiscussions with Scholem at this time, he was more reticent towardsthe new Soviet power than his friend, who saw it as a kind ofdictatorship of the poor. The sympathies of both went rather to theSR heirs of the Russian nihilistswhom they considered to be closerthan the Bolsheviks to anarchist ideas.16 Scholem described as theocraticanarchism the conception which was common to both in 1919

12 F. Schlegel,Seine Prosaischen Jugendschriften, Vienna 1966, quoted by Benjamin in Der Begriff derKunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, inaugural dissertation, Berlin 1920, p. 2. Benjamin mentions also

the book by Ch. Pingaud Grundlinien der sthetischen Doktrin Friedrich Schlegels(Stuttgart 1914, p. 52),according to which the aspiration to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, here and now, is the

foundation of F. Schlegels new religion.13 W. Benjamin, Briefe, 1, p. 208.14 G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt 1976, p. 45.15 W. Benjamin, Briefe, 1, p. 181.16 G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, pp. 100, 204, and memorandum of conversation with G. Scholem,December 1979.

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the term theocratic having a purely religious rather than politicalsignificance.17 According to Werner Kraft, who knew him well at thattime, Benjamins anarchism had a certain symbolic quality: it wasneither left nor right but somewhere else.18 In the twenties Benjaminhimself used the term nihilism with evident pleasure to designatehis own political, or rather anti-political, ideas.19 Scholem certainlycontributed to the development of such convictions, by providing him

with libertarian literature such as the writings of Landauer,20 but the1914 speech on students indicates that the tendency already existedbefore they met.

The key to Benjamins peculiar form of anarchism lies in its relationshipto Jewish Messianisma relationship that can best be analysed as oneofelective affinity. Growing out of the same neo-Romantic roots, the twocultural outlooks have in common a utopian-restitutionist structure, arevolutionary-catastrophist perspective on history, and a libertarianimage of the edenic future.

One of the first occasions on which Benjamin fully expressed hislibertarian-revolutionary views was the essay on violence (Zur Kritikder Gewalt, 1921), directly inspired by Sorels Reflections on Violence.Speaking with harsh contempt of state institutions such as the police(the most degenerate possible form of violence) or parliament (miser-able representation), he endorses the devastating anti-parliamentariancritique of the anarcho-syndicalists and the Bolsheviks (a highly reveal-ing association), as well as the Sorelian idea of the proletarian general

strike as an action whose one and only task is to destroy the violenceof the state. This conception, which he explicitly describes asanarchist,seems to him profound, moral and authentically revolutionary, evenif it should lead to catastrophic consequences. Howeverand hereBenjamin parts company with Sorel and moves into the quite differentsphere of theological Messianismpure and immediate revolutionaryviolence is a manifestation of divine violence, the only one capable ofbreaking the circle of the mythical forms of law . . . and therefore theviolence of the state and of establishing a new historical age; the onlyone which is law-destroying and radically counterposed both to the

mythical law-founding violence and to the reactionary law-conservingviolence.21 Thesui generis dialectical bond between anarchism and Mes-sianism which constitutes the crux of this truly demonic essay (inGoethes sense of the word) reappears in a particularly intense form inthat piece of hermetic quicksilver The Theologico-Political Fragment, writ-ten more or less at the same time and significantly influenced, in ourview, by a reading of Franz Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlsung.22 Althoughwe cannot here attempt the kind of sentence-by-sentence, word-by-

17 G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 108 and memorandum of conversation with G. Scholem, December

1979.18 Memorandum of conversation with Werner Kraft, January 1980.19 See, for example, W. Benjamin, Briefe, 1, p. 335, and G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 155.20 G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, pp. 19, 22.21 W. Benjamin, GS II, 1, pp. 190, 191, 194, 202.22 Scholem explains in a letter in 1970 to Maurice de Gandillac, the French translator of Benjamins

writings, that Adorno was wrong to believe this text was written in 1937: These pages were composed

in 192021, and are linked to Zur Kritik der Gewalt; they do not contain any relation to Marxist

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word exegesis that this text deserves, a brief outline will give some ideaof its content. It starts by drawing a radical distinction between thesphere of historical becoming and the sphere of the Messiah: nothinghistorical can relate by itself and from itself to the Messianic. Butimmediately afterwards Benjamin tries to bridge this abyss through asubtle mediation, a strange passage from earth to heaven: the profaneorder of the profane may advance the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.

The profane is indeed not a category of this Kingdom, but a category,the most adequate one, for the easiest approach to it.23 The similaritybut not identity with Rosenzweigs thesisacts of liberation whichare not in themselves the Kingdom of God but constitute a precon-dition for its comingseems undeniable. Concluding the fragment,Benjamin calls for a spiritual and worldly restitutio in integrum and assignsthis task to a peculiar form of worldly politics whose method must becalled nihilism (the termanarchism perhaps being judged too profane).

Scheerbarts Utopia

In 1917, thanks to his friendship with Scholem, Benjamin discoveredthe work of Paul Scheerbart, who had died in poverty and obscurity in1915. A bizarre and fantastic utopian, a kind of latter-day offspring ofCyrano de Bergerac and Swift, Scheerbart is generally considered tohave been a neo-Romantic author, and in an autobiographical note hehimself wrote: Artistically, my main roots must be found in theRomantic age. Although he never published anything directly political,he was a friend of the anarchist poet Erich Mhsamhimself linked to

the utopian Neue Gemeinschaft movement of which Gustav Landauerwas a memberand showed affinities with anarchism in his hostility toimperialism, nationalism, militarism and the institution of the state. Inhis astral utopia Lesabendio (1913) he describes an asteroid Pallaswhose inhabitants have created a society without any laws, politicalstructures, administration, state or private property, linked by mutualaid and voluntary common activity. The main theme of the novel is theconstruction of a gigantic tower to reach a mysterious celestial body.The architectural technique seems to play an important role for theauthor, but in the final analysis it is an instrument in the service of a

cosmotheism, a religious-astral aspiration. The supreme purpose issubordination to a Greater One, and a leading character refers to thetower as what one designates in other stars as religion. In 191819Benjamin wrote a first brief notice onLesabendio, in which he presentedits leitmotiv as the spiritual overcoming of technology and the spiritualtestimony of a Greater One, identified as the accomplishment ofUtopia. However, the specifically political dimension of Scheerbartsnovel was not discussed, although it must have figured prominently ina further review, The True Politician, that Benjamin wrote in 1919and lost soon afterwards. In a letter to Scholem from November of thatyear, he explains that his second essay was designed to show that Pallas

conceptions. They are situated in the sphere of a metaphysical anarchism, corresponding to the authors

ideas before 1924. (In Walter Benjamin, Mythe et Violence, Paris 1970, p. 149, footnote by thetranslator.) In our opinion it would be more accurate to situate them in 192122, because they most

probably postdate the publication of Rosenzweigs book.23 W. Benjamin, One-Way Street, NLB, London 1979, p. 155.

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was the best of all worlds. At any event, Benjamins intense interestin Scheerbartto whom he would frequently refer in his writings ofthe thirtiesis evidence enough of a spiritual kinship with his neo-Romantic, religious and libertarian style of thought.24

After Benjamins simultaneous discovery in 1924 of Marxism (throughLukcss History and Class Consciousness) and Bolshevism (thanks to Asja

Lacis), communism and later historical materialism became central inhis political thought. Aware of the tensions between what he calledthe foundations of my nihilism and Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, asrepresented by Lukcs in 1923, he was nevertheless powerfully attractedby the political praxis of communism as an obligatory attitude(verbindliche Haltung).25 Two years later, he wrote to Scholem that hewas considering joining the Communist Party, but he insisted that thisdid not mean he would abjure his former anarchism. (By the way, thisletter is the first place where he explicitly refers to his own convictionsasanarchistrather than just nihilist.) For him, anarchist methods are

useless and the Communist goals nonsense and non-existent; how-ever, this does not reduce the value of Communist action because it isthe corrective for its own goals and because significantpoliticalaims donot exist.26 Anarchist goals, it would seem, are significant because theyare not politicalaims, yet the best method to achieve them is providedby Communist action. According to Richard Wolin, the meaning ofthis sybilline formulation is that for Benjamin the only ultimatelyvaluable goals are still Messianic.27 That is a quite perceptive interpret-ation, but precisely because Benjamin sees anarchist goals and Messianic

aims as kindred if not identical: in the same letter to Scholem he speaksof an identity between religious and political observance which showsitself only in the paradoxical conversion (Umschlagen) of the one intothe other (in any direction whatsoever). This Umschlagen is perhapsone of the keys to Benjamins complex and subtle social-religiousWeltanschauung, from thePolitical-Theological Fragmentto the Theses on the

Philosophy of History.

Surrealism

The attempt to combine or articulate communism and anarchism is theleitmotiv of Benjamins well-known essay on Surrealism (1929). Referringto himself (the German observer) as being in the most exposedposition between anarchist fronde and revolutionary discipline, hecelebrates surrealism as the most outstanding heir to the libertariantradition: since Bakunin, no radical concept of freedom has existed inEurope. The surrealists do have one. They are also heirs to those othergreat anarchists who worked during the years from 1865 to 1875,without knowing each other, in the preparation of their time-bombs:Dostoevsky, Rimbaud and Lautramont, whose engines exploded

24 See W. Benjamin GS II, 2 pp. 61819 and the notes of the editors in GS II, 3 p. 14231425; alsoBriefe 1, p. 233. Some of Scheerbarts novels (including Lesabendio) have been republished in thevolume: P. Scheerbart,Dichterische Hauptwerke, Stuttgart 1962. On Scheerbarts worldview see HubertBr,Natur und Gesellschaft bei Scheerbart, Genese und Implikationen eine kultur Utopie, Heidelberg 1977.25 Letter to Scholem from September 1924, Briefe 1, p. 355.26 Letter of May 1926, Briefe 1, p. 426.27 R. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption, Cambridge 1982, p. 177.

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exactly at the same time 40 years later, in the upsurge of Surrealism.Benjamin praises Bretons revolutionary nihilism and draws attentionto the passage inNadja where the Surrealist poet hails the Parisian daysof riot in solidarity with the anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti.

It is true that Benjamin is concerned about the danger of insistingexclusively on the anarchist component of revolution, at the expenseof its methodical and disciplined preparation (i.e. Communism). How-ever, he believes that in relation to the cardinal questions of thetime, Surrealism and Communism are very close; in opposition to themindless, dilettant optimism of social democracy, they have the sameview of the destiny of European humanity: pessimism all along theline. And if the Communist Manifesto requires reality to transcend itself(through a revolutionary discharge), the surrealists are the only onesto have understood its present commands.28

From 1929 on, the references to anarchism seem to fade away in hiswritings, as well as those referring to the Messianic era, but one candiscover their hermetic presence, as a kind of subterranean fire activelyshaping developments on the surface. For instance, it is likely that hissympathy for Communism during the years 19291935 was not unrelatedto the distinctly apocalyptic orientation of the Comintern during thistime: the so-called Third Period, with its doctrine of the final crisis ofcapitalism and the imminence of world revolution. In his letter toScholem of April 1931, he refers to the Bolshevik revolution inGermany as a probable event in the near future! In his answer, Scholemsees a danger in Benjamins intense yearning for community, even if itis the apocalyptic one of revolution; Benjamin replies in July 1931 thatit is very unlikely that we will have to wait longer than next autumnfor the beginning of the civil war.29 His 1930 article on theories offascism contains a famous last paragraph (which Adorno wanted toeliminate from a new edition in the 1960s) calling for the Marxist trickof transforming world war into civil war in Germany.30 Benjaminspeculiaranarcho-Bolshevism also included a certain mistrust towards theSoviet Union which increased after 1935see, for instance, his notes

on the conversations with Brecht in 1938, where the USSR is describedas a workers monarchy, comparable to certain grotesque sports ofnature dredged up from the depths of the sea in the form of hornedfish or other monsters.31 After the German-Soviet Pact in 1939 hedefinitively broke with Stalinism, and in the Theses on the Philosophy ofHistory he described the Stalinist leaders as politicians in whom theopponents of fascism had placed their hopes but who confirm their

28 W. Benjamin, Surrealism, in One-Way Street, pp. 22539. Benjamin carefully distinguishes surrealismfrom Romanticism, and criticizes some dangerous Romantic prejudices. However, there is, in our

view, an unmistakable similarity between neo-Romanticism and his own socio-cultural pessimism.29 W. Benjamin, Briefe, 2, pp. 530, 533, 536.30 W. Benjamin, Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,Die Gesellschaft, 1936, vol. 2, p. 41. Benjaminwas very keen on this idea, which had already been censured in one of his former publications. In a

1929 article on a militarist theatrical play he wrote that the only answer to war consisted in armed

insurrection (bewaffneter Aufstand).Dic Literarische Weltpublished the article on May 1929withoutthis passage. (See W. Benjamin, GS IV, 1 p. 463 and IV, 2 p. 1031.)31 W. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, Verso, London 1983, p. 121.

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defeat by betraying their own cause.32 At the same time, his writingsfrom the late thirties evinced a radical contempt for social democracy,and he remained consistent with his old anti-parliamentarism in express-ing scepticism about the Popular Front in France. In a letter to FritzLieb in July 1937, he complained that the left press in France sticks tothe fetish of the left majority, and is not disturbed by the fact thatthis majority has a policy which, if operated by the right, would provoke

riots.33

But there is more direct evidence for the persistence of Benjaminsesoteric anarchist faith during the thirties: in February 1935duringthe period when he seemed nearest to the orthodox Communist doc-trinehe wrote in a letter to Alfred Cohn that on reading Drieu LaRochelles novelLe Dserteur, I discovered with astonishment the exactpresentation of my own political attitude (Haltung).34 An examinationof this novel, published in 1934, can therefore give us a precious clue

to his hidden political philosophy. Its hero (or anti-hero) is a Frenchdeserter from the First World War exiled in Latin America, a cosmopoli-tan internationalist and anti-militarist for whom nationalism is the vilestaspect of the modern spirit. The traveller who is arguing with him(and who probably represents Drieu himself) calls him in turn anold reactionary, a wandering Jew, an anarchist and an inoffensiveutopian. The Deserter answers: I dont want your European state ofwar, your general mobilization, your military socialization. You maycall this by any name you like: anarchist, if you wish. But I know wellthat I have nothing to do with theories whose books I never read. But

there is a kind of spontaneous libertarian spirit in his anti-political andanti-state philosophy: Politics is the foulest of all games that this planetoffers. All that belongs to the State is the vile task of lackeys.35 If thisliterary figure is, in Benjamins words, the exact presentation of his ownpolitical position, there is no doubt that this was much nearer toanarchism than his published works from 1935 would suggest.

There is a sad and moving passage in Drieus piece which one cannotread without immediately thinking of Port-Bou, 1940. The Deserter

says: In 1914 I was one of the rare ones, but there will be thousandslike me in the next war. There will be thousands of men who willdefend themselves against the earthquake, by running awayor whowill choose, between two deaths, the one of the executed protesterrather than the one of the resigned subject, bombed or gassed.36

No explicit reference to anarchism can be found in the various essaysand notes on Baudelaire written by Benjamin in 193839; but RolfTiedemann has very perceptively grasped that these writings can beread as a palimpsest: under the explicit Marxism the old nihilismbecomes visible, whose road threatens to lead to the abstraction of

32 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, New York 1968, p. 260.33 W. Benjamin, Briefe 2, p. 732.34 W. Benjamin, Briefe 2, p. 648.35 Drieu la Rochelle,Le Dserteur, Paris 1960, pp. 220, 222, 224, 226.36 Ibid., p. 223.

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anarchist practice.37 The term palimpsest is perhaps not accurateenough: the relation between the two messages is not a mechanical oneof superimposition, but rather an alchemical one of alloying previouslydistilled elements.

The same applies to the Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940):

according to Tiedemann, Benjamins representation of political praxiswas rather the enthusiastic one of anarchism than the sober one ofMarxism.38 Such a formulation is debatable, not only because Marxismitself is open to an enthusiastic reading, but also because the libertarianand the Marxist utopias are not as contradictory as tradition would haveit. Habermas too refers to the presence of an anarchistic conception of

Jetztzeiten in the Thesesalthough in another passage of his essay hewrongly argues that from 1930 on, under the influence of Brecht,Benjamin dissociated himself from his earlier anarchist inclinations.39

If anarchist ideas are only implicit in the Theses of1940, there is a moredirect reference to them in one of the preparatory notes: Force of hatein Marx. Pugnacity of the working class. To interweave revolutionarydestruction with the idea of Redemption (Nechaev. The Devils). Inanother note he insists on the need to release the destructive energiesof historical materialism.40

The Power of Destruction

Analysing the regulative ideas governing Benjamins thought, Scholemshows that an apocalyptic element of destructiveness is preserved inthe metamorphosis undergone in his writing by the messianic idea,which continues to play a patent part in his thought. The noble andpositive power of destruction . . . now becomes an aspect of redemption. . . The secularization of Jewish apocalyptic doctrine is plain for all tosee.41 Scholem relates this idea mainly to the essay Der destruktiveCharakterand to the literary essays of the thirties, but the preparatorynotes to the Theses on the Philosophy of History are the most arrestingexpression of such a Messianic/revolutionary concept of destruction,

interweaving class struggle and redemption, Marx and Nechaev, histori-cal materialism and Dostoevsky (considered by Benjamin in 1929 as oneof the great anarchists of the nineteenth century).

Destructiveness is not the only convergence between Messianism andlibertarian-communist revolution in Benjamins late writings. The elec-tive affinity between them is grounded in their common restitutionist/utopian structure: the redeemed future as restitutio in integrum, re-

37 R. Tiedemann, Nachwort, in W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Frankfurt 1980, p. 207.38 R. Tiedemann, Historischer Materialismus oder politischer Messianismus? in P. Bulthaup,

Materialen zu Benjamins Thesen Uber den Begriff der Geschichte, Frankfurt 1975, p. 109.39J. Habermas, Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive CriticismThe Contemporaneity of Walter

Benjamin,New German Critique 17, Spring 1979, pp. 51, 55.40 W. Benjamin, GS I, 3 pp. 124041.41 G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 1964, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, New York 1976, pp. 19495.

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establishment of a lost paradise, Tikkun of the world.42 The nostalgiafor the lost edenic harmony, which is so decisive in Benjamins earlytheological writingsfor instance, the essay on language (1916) wherethe expulsion from Paradise is linked to the loss of the blessed adamitespirit of language and the subsequent decay into the linguistic chaosof the Tower of Babel43emerges again in the Theses. The expulsion isnow represented by the dialectical image of a storm blowing from

Paradise which irresistibly propels the angel of history into thefuture. The new figure of the Tower of Babel reaching to the heavensis the pile of debris growing skyward produced by the storma stormwhich is nothing other than what we call progress.44 The criticism ofprogressdefined in the Theses as one single catastrophe which keepspiling wreckage upon wreckageis one of the main combustibles withwhich Benjamin fuels his fire. Of neo-Romantic origin, it receives inhis work a peculiarly revolutionary and subversive quality. (Soon afterhis Theses were written, technical progress was to be instrumental in

adding the two most catastrophic wreckages ever to the pile: Auschwitzand Hiroshima.) It runs throughout his writings, from the speech onthe life of students to the endwith the exception of a short periodbetween 1933 and 1935 when, under the influence of Brecht, he exper-iments with the idea of technological progress as an instrument toforward revolutionary politics.

We find this basic and essential mistrust of progress in the dialecticalimage of One Way Street (1928), which presents the anti-bourgeoisrevolution as the act of cutting the burning fuse before it reaches thedynamite at a certain almost calculable point in economic and technicaldevelopment, i.e. before the explosion that would put an end to twothousand years of human culture.45 It is present in the Storytelleressay(1936), where Leskov is hailed (through a quotation from Tolstoy) asone of the first men who pointed out the inadequacy of economicprogress, and as the prototype of the storyteller who keeps faith withthe lost golden age of harmony between man and nature.46 It is acrucial argument in the Fuchs essay (1937), where Benjamin shows thatpositivismincluding positivist social-democracywas only able tosee the progress of natural science in the development of technology,

but failed to recognize the concomitant retrogression of society. Heopposes to this social-democratic (Darwinist) evolutionism and itsshallow optimistic illusionswhich ignore the dangers of technology(particularly in relation to war)the vision of emerging barbarismwhich Engels perceived in The Condition of the Working Class in England,

42 In Franz Joseph Molitors book on the Jewish Tradition and Kabbalaprobably one of the main

sources of Benjamins religious thoughtthe redemptive mission of the Messiah is described as the

re-establishment of the former state before Adams fall. See F. J. Molitor,Philosophie der Geschichteoder ber die Tradition, Mnster 1839, part 3, p. 598.43 W. Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 121. On the edenic Ursprache there is also an interesting chapter

in F. J. Molitor, op cit. pp. 32940.44 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, New York 1968, pp. 25960.45 One-Way Street, p. 80. The problem of technological progress is also critically discussed in the finalsection (Towards the Planetarium) which is, in the words of the publishers note, perhaps the first

and certainly the finestbecause most temperate and rationalexpression of that rejection of the notion

of the mastery of nature by technology that was afterwards to become a hallmark of Frankfurt

Marxism. Op. cit., p. 36.46 W. Benjamin, The Storyteller, Illuminations, pp. 92, 97.

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and Marx glimpsed in his prognosis of capitalist development.47 It isalso one of the main reasons why Benjamin felt so attracted to Baude-laire. Among his notes on the French poet, there is a remark thatprobably dates from 1938: This devaluation of the human environmentby the commodity economy had a deep impact on his historical experi-ence . . . Nothing is more contemptible than to bring into play the ideaof progress against this experience . . . History has since then shown

how right he was, not to rely for this reason on technical progress.48

In a remarkable essay Irving Wohlfarth argues that Benjamin variouslyconceived revolution as accelerating the dialectic of historical progressand as pulling its emergency cord.49 This is a most lucid formulation,but in our view it is necessary to specify that the first variant was abrief intellectual experiment during the mid-thirties, while the criticismof progress was an essential component of most of his oeuvre.

How can we explain Benjamins short-lived experiment in progress-

ism? The usual argument is Brechts influence; but influence ingeneral, far from explaining anything, has itself to be explained. Wewould suggest the following hypothesis: the articles written in 193335, in which one can find a highly positive assessment of technologicalprogress, are also characterized by a rather uncritical stand towards theSoviet Unionwhose ideology, at the time of the Second Five-YearPlan, was more than ever a blindly industrialist and productivist brandof Marxism. Until 1933 Benjamin, though sympathetic to the USSR,was open to critical viewsas one can gather from his reading with

breathless enthusiasm Trotskys My Life and History of the RussianRevolution in 193132.50 The beginning of the progressist parenthesisin Benjamins work coincided with the advent of Hitler in Germany,which made the USSR appear, in the eyes of many leftist intellectuals,as the last bulwark against fascism. The end of it seems to coincide withthe first Moscow trials, which filled Benjamin with perplexity and mayhave stimulated him to take a greater distance from the USSR and itsdoctrine. Among the recently discovered papers of Benjaminnowdeposited at the Bibliothque Nationale in Paristhere is a short,undated note on Brecht, containing a sharp indictment of the GPU.51

After 1936 Benjamin did not, however, simply dismiss science andtechnology, nor deny that there had been advances in mans ability andknowledge (as he explicitly stated in the Theses). What he passionately

47 W. Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian, in One-Way Street, p. 370.48 W. Benjamin, GS I, 3, p. 115152.49 I. Wohlfarth, On the Messianic Structure of Benjamins Last Reflections, Glyph 3, Baltimore 1978,p. 168.50 W. Benjamin, Briefe, 2, p. 50. On the various references to Trotsky in Benjamins correspondence,see the publishers note in One Way Street, p. 36, note 13. Already in his Moscow JournalBenjamin

criticizes the Soviet leadership for trying to stop the dynamics of the revolutionary process in the lifeof the stateexactly the kind of criticism being levelled at the time by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.

(Moscow Journal, 30 December 1926.)51 These are self-critical notes, probably from 1939, on his Commentary on Brechts Poems. FondsWalter Benjamin, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris. In 1937 Benjamin met Pierre Missac, then close toTrotskyist ideas, and one of the things they discussed was Missacs sympathetic review ofThe RevolutionBetrayedin the journal Cahiers du Sud, No. 196, August 1937. (Personal communication from PierreMissac.)

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and obstinately rejected was the mortally dangerous myth that techno-logical development in itself would improve the human social andmoral condition, and that socialists had only to follow the irresistiblemovement of material progress in order to establish an emancipatedsociety. He was keenly aware that without a revolutionary interruptionof technological progress as it existed under capitalism, the future ofmankind itself would be threatened. Moreover, he was increasingly

convinced that capitalist industrial progress had produced considerablesocial regression and made of human life exactly the contrary of thelost paradise: namely, hell itself. In Zentralpark (1938), Benjamin arguedthat the concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of catastrophe.That things go like that is the catastrophe . . . Strindbergs thought:hell is not anything imminentit is this life here.52 The Second WorldWar was soon to provide a very concrete figure of this profane hell,produced with the help of the most advanced conquests of technology.

The Interruption of History

Against the social-democratic and vulgar-Marxist myth of progressas an automatic, irresistible and boundless improvement, Benjaminconceived revolution as a redemptive interruption of the continuum ofhistory, a reaching for the emergency brake in the train of history.53

Blanqui, the legendary revolutionary fighter whose name was therallying sound that reverberated through the preceding century, hadnothing but scorn for the belief in progress: the basic presuppositionof his activity was not this illusory belief but the decision to put an endto present injustice. This decision, at the last moment to pull humanityout of the impending catastrophe which threatens it, is precisely forBlanqui, more than for any other revolutionary politician of his time,the essential criterion.54

Instead of progress, revolution is a tigers leap in the past,55 searchingfor the lost paradise, the archaic golden age of edenic harmony betweenhuman beings, as well as between humanity and nature. One findshere again the restitutio in integrum suggested by the Theological-PoliticalFragment(192122). Utopia and restitution, future and past are alchemi-

cally married and opposed to the present hell. In a key paragraph ofParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1836) Benjamin refers to thedreams of the future as always being married (vermhlt) to elementsof pre-historic ages (Urgeschichte), i.e. of classless society; for him, theexperiences from this archaic past stored in the collective memoryproduce, by interpenetration with the new, Utopia.56 As is well known,in his letter to Benjamin of August 1935, Theodor Adorno sharplycriticized this formulation, and the whole essay, as being marred by anoverestimation of the archaic, reminiscent of Klages mythical thought.

52 W. Benjamin, Zentralpark, Charles Baudelaire, p. 179. The term regression does not appear inBenjamin, but was coined by the anarchist geographer Elise Rclus. The contradiction between

progress in the control over nature and retrogression in social life is the main theme of Thesis XI on

the Philosophy of History (Illuminationen pp. 25657).53 W. Benjamin, GS I, 3, p. 1232.54 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 262, and Zentralpark, C. Baudelaire, p. 183.55 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 263.56 W. Benjamin, In Charles Baudelaire, Verso, London 1983, p. 159.

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He refused the association of the archaic past with a golden age aswell as the identification of the present mercantile era with hell.57

What exactly did this pre-historic, archaic, classless society mean forBenjamin? The main reference here is not Klages, but the great classicwhich Klages later interpreted in his own reactionary way: Johann

Jakob Bachofen. Benjamins French review of Bachofen (1935) is one

of the most seminal, yet still largely neglected, keys to the understandingof his whole philosophy of history. Bachofens work, writes Benjamin,is inspired by Romantic sources and has attracted the interest of bothMarxist and anarchist thinkers because of his evocation of a communistsociety at the dawn of history. The anarchist Elise Rclus found inBachofens books the ancient sources of his libertarian ideal andEngels as well as Lafargue were interested in his studies of matriarchalcommunities, where there existed a very high degree of democracy andcivil equality, as well as forms of primitive communism which subvertedthe concept of authority.58 This reviewtogether with the contempor-aneous mention of Drieus anarchist deserterpoints to the continuityof Benjamins libertarian sympathies. Moreover, it suggests that theprimitive communist, anti-authoritarian and egalitarian communitiesdescribed by Bachofen are exactly the pre-historical, classless societiesdefined inParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Century as the source of Utopia.

Impressed by Adornos severe criticism, Benjamin played down thearchaic tendency in his next Baudelaire essays; yet it is still present, ina subdued form, in the article On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), where

one can discover, by careful scrutiny, a new version of the oppositionbetween present hell and lost paradise. The central trait of the modernhell is here the degradation of experience that manifests itself inthe standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses, or in theinhospitable, blinding [experience] of the age of large-scale industrial-ismin particular the life of the unskilled workers whose labour hasbeen sealed off from experience, degraded, standardized, regimentedand reduced to an automaton by modern machinery.59

True experience survives mainly as memory of a collective past, present

in rituals with their ceremonies, their festivals; it is at the heart ofBaudelaires concept of correspondances, which relates to a form ofexperience possible only within the realm of the ritual. And herereappears the figure of the edenic age: The correspondances are the dataof remembrancenot historical data, but the data of pre-history. Whatmakes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier

57 T. Adorno, in Bloch et al.,Aesthetics and Politics, Verso 1980, pp. 113, 116.58 W. Benjamin, GS II, 1, pp. 220, 226, 23031. Following Bachofen, Benjamin refers to gynocraticcommunities; but there is an obvious contradiction between gynocracy (or matriarchy) on one side,

egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism on the other. Modern anthropology questions the existenceof such gynocratic societies. Could it not be that matriarchy or gynocracy is but the mythical

expression of patriachal mens fear and anxiety towards past communities where equality existed

among the sexes? Matriarchy would in this case simply designate the absence of patriarchal authority.59 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 15859, 178, corrected according to the German original in C.Baudelaire, pp. 105, 12829. Benjamin quotes Marx in this context, but one could recall also his essayon E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1930 in which he stressed the religious opposition between Life and Automaton

in the stories of the Romantic writer.

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life . . . The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondances.60

As Tiedemann perceptively comments, the idea of the correspondencesis the Utopia through which a lost paradise appears projected in thefuture. It is a Utopia of reconciliation between man and natureassuggested by Baudelaires poem itself.61

One name is for Benjamin the emblem of this reconciliation: Fourier.

In the Jochmann essay (1937) he is mentioned as a dialectician whodiscovered that all partial improvements in the social constitution ofhumanity during civilization are necessarily followed by a deterio-ration of its general status, and inParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,he is compared to Benjamins favourite Paul Scheerbart as a paradigmaticcombination of ancient and new in a Utopia which gives new life tothe primeval symbols of desire. In an unpublished note from the

Passagenwerk (quoted by Tiedemann), Fouriers travail passionnis referredto as the authentic form of a harmonious relation to nature.62 Finally,in ber den Begriff der Geschichte, Fouriers ideas are contrasted to thebourgeois, social-democratic and vulgar-Marxist conception of work asexploitation of nature, and his most fantastic dreams are celebrated asillustrations for a kind of labour that aims at liberating the creativityof nature.63

By situating his golden age in the pre-historic past, Benjamin dis-tinguishes himself from the mainstream of German Romanticism, whosenostalgic Heimatwas the Middle Ages. In this he is perhaps closer thanhe realized to Marx and Engels themselves: in a letter to his friend on

25 March 1868, Marx wrote that the first reaction against the ideologyof Enlightenment had a medieval, Romantic perspective but that thesecond reaction, which belonged to the socialist orientation, consistedin plunging beyond the Middle Ages to the primitive epoch (Urzeit) ofeach people. In such primeval communities one may discover in theoldest the newest and in particular Egalitarians to a degree that wouldthrill Proudhon.64 It is highly unlikely that Benjamin knew of thisletter, but one cannot but note the striking similarity with his ownreference to an egalitarian and libertarian Urzeit, where the oldest andthe newest are married.

Ursprung ist das Ziel(origin is the goal): Karl Kraus epigram serves asmotto for Benjamins 14th Thesis on the philosophy of history, whichdefines revolution as a tigers leap into the past. There is an undeniableaffinity between this restitutionist-utopian theory of proletarian revol-ution and Jewish Messianism: in the Messianic idea, writes GershomScholem, even the restorative force has a utopian factor, and in

60 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 161, 184.61 R. Tiedmann, Nachwort, pp. 2056. See also R. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption,

p. 236: The correspondences recapture a relation to nature whose lost traces are being extirpated bytechnical mastery of the environment . . . they hark back to a ur-historical state of reconciliation with

nature.62 W. Benjamin, GS II, 2 p. 583, and R. Tiedmann, Nachwort, p. 205.63 See W. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 26162. Benjamin does not consider Fourier and Marx ascontradictory. InParis, Capital of the XIXth Century (p. 160) he quotes Marxs favourable opinion ofFouriers gargantuan concept of man.64 Marx, Engels,Ausgewhlte Briefe, Berlin 1953, p. 233.

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utopianism restorative factors are at work . . . The completely neworder has elements of the completely old, but even this old order doesnot consist of the actual past; rather it is a past transformed andtransfigured in a dream brightened by the rays of utopianism.65

The elective affinity is not here mere analogy, but active interpenetrationand combination of both elements. There exists an intimate link, a

correspondance in the Baudelairian sense, between each term of the profanerevolutionary utopia and of the sacred Messianic sphere, between thehistory of redemption and the history of class struggle: to the LostParadise corresponds the pre-historic classless communist society, egali-tarian and non-authoritarian, living in edenic harmony with nature; tothe expulsion from the Garden of Eden, or to the Tempest blowingmen away from Paradise, towards Hell, correspond progress, industrialcivilization, capitalist-commodity society, the modern catastrophe andits pile of wreckage; to the Coming of the Messiah, the proletarian-

revolutionary interruption of history; and to the Messianic Age, the re-establishment of Paradise with its edenic adamite language, correspondsthe new libertarian-communist classless society and its universal langu-age.66 Ursprung ist das Ziel and restitutio in integrum are the spiritualquintessence of this peculiar theology of revolution.

Many commentators conceive the relation between Messianism andrevolution in Benjamins work as one of secularization, while others(Gerhard Kaiser) speak of a theologization of Marxism.67 During theheated Benjaminstreit of the sixties in Germany, some insisted on his

religious metaphysics, others on his Communist materialism. Benjaminhimself referred to his thought as Janus-faced, but it seems that hiscommentators and partisans choose to look at only one of the faces,ignoring or neglecting the other. In order to supersede this kind ofpolemic, it might be useful to recall that the Roman god had indeedtwo faces but only one head: Benjamins faces are manifestations of oneand the same thought, which hadsimultaneously a Messianic and a secularexpression.

As a matter of fact, Benjamin had already explained in the 1926 letterto Scholem that he was interested in a form ofidentity between religionand politics which showed itself only in the paradoxical Umschlagofthe one into the other: the Theses on the Philosophy of History are exactlysuch a paradoxical conversion of Jewish religion into Marxist classstruggle, and of revolutionary Utopia into apocalyptic Messianism.

65 G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judiasm, New York 1971, p. 4.66 Among the preparatory notes for the Theses there is a passage associating the Messianic era withthe advent of a universal language, able to replace the confusion of the Tower of Babel, a language

that everybody will understand as children on Sunday understand the language of birds. The relation

of this idea to his theological reflections of1914 on the Fall as loss of a primeval, paradisiac languageis undeniable. (See on this Irving Wohlfarths above-mentioned essay on the Messianic structure of

Benjamins last reflections.) See also Susan Buck-Morss, Walter BenjaminRevolutionary Writer,

New Left Review128, JulyAugust 1981, p. 57: Universal language has existed only in Paradise beforethe Fall. Universal history requires the restoration of Paradise in the form of a revolutionary

transformation of society.67 G. Kaiser, Walter Benjamins Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen , in P. Bulthup,Materialien zuBenjamins Thesen . . . , p. 74.

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The first kind ofUmschlagfrom Messianism into politicscannot begrasped strictly as secularization, for the religious dimension does notdisappear. What can be said, however, is that this dimension hassecularimplications and consequences. In the preparatory notes for the Theses,Benjamin wrote: Marx secularized the representation of the Messianicage in the representation of classless society. And rightly so. But, incontradiction to the claims of social-democratic philosophy, classless

society is not the final aim of progress in history; it is its frequentlyunsuccessful but finally accomplished interruption. Therefore, onemust restore to the concept of classless society its true Messianic face,in the interest of the revolutionary politics of the proletariat itself.68

Criticizing these notes, Tiedemann argues against Benjamin: Thereforethe revolutionary policy of the proletariat should not be implementedin the interest of establishing classless society but, the other way round,the latter is only an occasion to bring into play revolutionary politics,in order to make a revolution for the sake of revolution . . . Goal andmeansclassless society and revolutionare confused.69 But the aimand the means are not confusedthey are dialectically and inseparablyunited in Benjamins thought; there can be no classless society withouta revolutionary interruption of the historical continuum (progress),and no revolutionary action of the proletariat if the aim (classlesssociety) is not understood in all its Messianic explosiveness, as a breaking

point. Benjamins aim is not revolution for the sake of revolution, butfor him without revolution there can be no redemption, and without aMessianic-redemptive view of history, no really radical revolutionary

praxis.

The profane consequence of Messianism in his last writings is to increasetheir explosive charge; it helps to give them that unique subversivequality which makes the Theses on the Philosophy of History one of themost radical, path-breaking and seminal documents of revolutionarythought since Marxs Theses on Feuerbach. If we apply to Benjamins ownwork the distinction he established between the chemist-commentatorand the alchemist-critic, then we should look beyond the wood andthe ashes of his writings and focus on the burning spiritual flame ofhis oeuvre: the revolutionary redemption of humanity.

68 W. Benjamin, GS I, 3 p. 123132.69 R. Tiedemann, Historischer Materialismus oder politischer Messianismus, in F. Bulthaup, op. cit.p. 109.

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