doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.

12061

Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Experience

Kyong-Min Son

“In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance.”1

Walter Benjamin’s effort to conceptualize politics is often considered a failure. Even

sympathetic readers are perplexed by, and then quickly become critical of, his seeming
oscillation between subject and object, continuity and discontinuity, and political theory
and theology.2 More popular portrayals, too, rarely depict Benjamin as a political fig-
ure. The apolitical image of Benjamin is advanced, for example, in Susan Sontag’s in-
fluential account. Benjamin’s major projects, Sontag declares, “cannot be fully understood
unless one grasps how much they rely on a theory of melancholy.”3 Unfortunately, this
widespread emphasis on Benjamin’s political ambiguity tends to invite selective use of his
theological and literary tropes while discouraging sustained efforts to understand his overall
project.
This paper attempts to challenge this tendency by demonstrating how Benjamin’s writings,
despite their diversity, are clustered around a central motive that is most distinctively, if
unconventionally, political. Of course, I do not suggest that Benjamin has a systematic
conception of politics; to do so would amount to imposing a seamless yet false narrative
on what is resourcefully incoherent. However, it is still possible to discern a consistent
orientation in the numerous traces he has left behind, often without full articulation. My aim
is to give some shape to this orientation and to show how a unique vision of politics emerges
from it.
If Arendt was right to say that what fascinated Benjamin was always a phenomenon,4 it
seems fitting to begin my discussion by understanding the phenomenon that had captured his
attention: the Paris arcades. Benjamin had been working consistently on the Arcades Project
(Passagenwerk) since the late 1920s, and “there is little Benjamin wrote after 1927 that did not
relate directly to (and even “steal” from) the Arcades Project.”5 But why did the 19th century
Paris arcades matter so much to him? What phenomenon did it represent for him? As I will
elaborate, Benjamin viewed the arcades as the exemplary time-place where the new modes
of life generated by the technology of mass (re)production were writ large. He offers one of
the keenest insights into the political implications of this transformation, or more precisely,
the formation of modernity. Like many of his contemporaries, Benjamin saw in modernity
various pathologies of capitalist society and commodified culture. But his diagnosis goes
further. In the later phase of his career, he introduces a temporal dimension to his analysis,
suggesting that the danger of modernity lies not simply in its exploitative and vulgarizing
effects manifested in the present, but in its power to transform the mode of experience by
constructing a mythic continuity between past, present, and future–the “phantasmagoria of
history” as he calls it. Based on his nuanced understanding of modernity, Benjamin identifies
and experiments with various ways of counteracting the phantasmagoria of history. In doing
so, he does not completely turn away from modernity as some of his critics suggest, but finds
those emancipatory counter-measures within modernity itself. In other words, persistent
attempts to rescue modernity from within – and not sentimental reminiscences – guide
Benjamin’s eclectic oeuvre.

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In elaborating these ideas, my discussion is centered on Benjamin’s conception of

“experience.” Although experience is probably one of the most elusive concepts in West-
ern philosophy,6 for Benjamin, experience does not simply mean a passive reception and
comprehension of the world as an already existing entity. Instead, what people perceive
through their senses and register by way of their imagination and memory is the world.
But experience is neither completely random nor purely subjective—it is conditioned by a
socially shaped mode of experience, the objectivity of which overlaps with, but is distinct
from, that of economic conditions. Thus understood, Benjamin’s conceptualization of expe-
rience specifies and complicates a Marxist theory of politics: we (re)make the world through
collective practice, but the possibility and the destination of that endeavor does not reside
in the realm of economic production alone. If the political struggle to “change the world” is
often incomplete without attending to the economic structure, the origins and trajectory of
that political struggle are incomprehensible without inquiring into the mode of experience.
By highlighting the mode of experience as the arena that regulates life with its own logics,
Benjamin thus offers a genuine contribution to political theory. Challenging conventional
binaries between sense and imagination, culture and nature, past and future, reality and
dreams, he shows how these distinctions permeate, disrupt, and transform one another in the
process of shaping the mode of experience.7
What follows is divided into three parts. First, I examine Benjamin’s analysis of the fateful
mode of experience, drawing on his engagement with the Paris arcades. Comparing the two
exposés he wrote for the Arcades Project, I analyze the phantasmagoria of history as the
central concept of his diagnosis of modernity. Second, I reinterpret Benjamin’s historical
materialism as an antidote to the fateful mode of experience. It is well known that Benjamin
takes the ruins and traces from the past as the focal point of his theoretical inquiry, but his
view is often dismissed as romantic, nostalgic, or undialectical. Challenging these criticisms,
I show that Benjamin’s historical materialism is a political strategy to enact a revolutionary
mode of experience. Last, I examine Benjamin’s conception of revolution as the moment of
truth, animated by the revolutionary mode of experience. Rejecting both determinism and
voluntarism, he emphasizes how revolution relies on collective endeavors, rather than on a
revelation or a predetermined goal set by the vanguards.

The Phantasmagoria of History, or the Fate of Modernity

In one of his early notes, Benjamin posits the central theoretical motivation of the Arcades
Project as a reversal of the conventional Marxist view. “[What matters] is not the economic
origins of culture . . . but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other
words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon, out of
which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and accordingly, in the nineteenth
century).”8 This is a provocative yet elusive statement and, in order to clarify its meaning
and implications, we need to situate it in Benjamin’s broader project.
Benjamin saw the Paris arcades as a manifestation of capitalist society in its most advanced
form. The two exposés he wrote for the Arcades Project, as well as its first Konvolut,
open with a memorable depiction of the arcades.9 “These arcades, a recent invention of
industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole block
of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides
of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the
passage is a city, a world in miniature.”10 Whereas the structural setting of the arcades reflects
the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution, the dazzling objects that attract


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the passers-by (flâneurs)–gaslight, show windows, mirrors, street-cafés, or panoramas–are

the emblems of bourgeoning commercialism. The Paris arcades, indeed, are the “temples
of commodity capital.”11 But the arcades do not just display commodities and provide
instrumental incentives for shopping; it is where the distinction between dreams and reality
collapses, and disenchanted people of the Enlightenment are brought back to the world of
myths and dreams.12 Echoing Marx and Lukács, Benjamin writes, “The arcade . . . is wholly
adapted to arousing desires . . . the commodity proliferates along the margins and enters
into fantastic combinations, like the tissue in tumors. The flâneur . . . is no buyer. He is
merchandise.”13
Benjamin’s account of the arcades is one of the most sophisticated elaborations of the
mythic nature of capitalist society. And this aspect of Benjamin’s thought has already been
acknowledged and appreciated.14 Still, it is not entirely clear what Benjamin intends to
achieve by “reversing” the Marxist view. Why is it important to look at the “expression of
the economy in its culture” rather than the “economic origins of culture?”
This question brings us to the issue at the center of Benjamin’s thinking: the fate of
experience under conditions of modernity. We find a more focused discussion of experience
in his later works. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1940),” for example, Benjamin argues
that modern society is characterized most distinctively by a “change in the structure of . . .
experience.”15 We moderns, he claims, are witnessing a broad shift from the history-bound,
collective, continuous mode of experience (Erfahrung) to a more spontaneous, isolated,
immediate one (Erlebnis). New technologies mechanize and fracture people’s ways of life,
as, for example, the telephone did when it replaced an entire set of activities required to initiate
communication with the simple act of lifting the receiver. And as anonymous members of
the crowd populating big cities—the prevalent mode of existence in modern society—people
are constantly exposed to a “series of shocks and collisions” produced by automobiles,
advertisements, and other pedestrians. (Suggestively, Benjamin links this “shock experience
[Chockerlebnis]” to the worker’s experience at his machine.)16
This, of course, is the theme already developed in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in
the Age of its Technical Reproduction [hereafter, the Artwork essay].”17 In this essay, he
discusses how the condition of technological reproducibility has shattered the totality of life
into fragmented images that individuals must reassemble themselves.18 Many of Benjamin’s
contemporaries who witnessed this process issued dire warnings about the degeneration of
culture and the loss of authenticity, and Benjamin too was cognizant of this danger. He argues
how the “here and now” or the “aura”–the basis of authenticity–has declined due to the rise
of technological reproducibility, and how it could result in distraction (Ablenkung) as the
dominant mode of social behavior.19
Benjamin is distinguished from others, however, in that he also saw an emancipatory
potential within this transformation.20 After all, what we call authenticity has been lit-
tle more than the exclusive privileges of the few at the expense of the many. (Consider
all the coerced labor behind the authenticity of the pyramids.) And the “totality of life”
often served to justify social oppression and suppress resistance. (The slaves might have
endured the toils of building the pyramids because that was what their fathers and grand-
fathers had been doing.) It is, then, not entirely lamentable that more people now get to
interpret the world on their own terms, maximizing their capacity for “imagination’s play
[Spiel-Raum].”21 If the totality of life is but a master image that has served to legitimize
traditional power relations, the “decay of the aura” de-authorizes it and thereby opens up
the possibility for a new politics that allows people to contest and renegotiate their ways of
life.22


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Benjamin knows, though, that the debunking of the fake totality would not lead auto-
matically to emancipatory politics. Quite the contrary, political conformism, the numbing
and enervating mood of boredom, and distraction seem to prevail in the modern world.23
What is the problem? Though Benjamin does not discuss this matter explicitly, it is possi-
ble to infer his view from various notes. For example, consider the following observation:
“The intentional correlate of “immediate experience” [Erlebnis] has not always remained
the same. In the nineteenth century, it was “adventure.” In our day, it appears as “fate,”
Schicksal. In fate is concealed the concept of the “total experience” [Erfahrung] that is fatal
from the outset.”24 The idea that experience works with correlates adds crucial nuance to
Benjamin’s diagnosis of modernity. The trouble is not simply that Erlebnis has become the
dominant mode of experience in the modern world, but that it carries fate as its correlate,
or put it differently, assumes a fateful mode. Fate induces an uncritical and unconditional
devotion to the existing order. And when it works as the organizing principle of the masses’
isolated experience it anticipates something much more devastating than ennui: war.25 With
the benefit of hindsight, we know that Benjamin was prescient about the danger inherent in
the combination of Erlebnis and fate.
Benjamin’s insight shifts the focus of the “crisis of experience” debate from the prede-
termined nature of experience exemplified by neo-Kantian Erfahrung or vitalist Erlebnis to
a socially shaped and thus politically challengeable mode of experience. But there remain
more historical questions. Why did fate, the correlate of Erfahrung, not go away with the
rise of Erlebnis? How was it reattached to Erlebnis, subjecting its emancipatory potential
to fascist manipulation and channeling its critical energy into total destruction? The name
Benjamin gives to the force behind this perverse course of change is the “phantasmagoria of
history.” “Phantasmagoria” would become his central diagnostic notion in the later phase of
his thinking.26 For example, in the 1939 exposé for the Arcades Project, Benjamin defines
modernity as “[t]he world dominated by its phantasmagorias,” which is completed with “one
last, cosmic phantasmagoria which implicitly comprehends the severest critique of all the
others . . . the phantasmagoria of history itself.”27 In traditional society, the fateful mode
of experience is sustained by the sense of natural continuity produced and reinforced by
the repeated performance of rituals. In a time when experience is emancipated from rituals,
it is the phantasmagoria of history that performs the same function. If Erlebnis opens up
the possibility of discovering the truly new, the phantasmagoria of history suppresses this
potential by putting the new into an endless cycle of “always the same (das Immergleich).”28
Under the working of the phantasmagoria of history, Benjamin writes, “the sense for the
sameness in the world . . . has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts same-
ness even from what is unique.”29 The typical outcome of the fateful mode of experience–
unqualified submission to the existing order–thus reappears, not because the social hierarchy
is rendered natural but because mythic temporality makes everything new mundane and
dull.30
It now becomes clearer why Benjamin emphasizes the “expression of the economy in
its culture” as the theoretical focus of the Arcades Project. By exploring the realm that
has been dismissed as the residue of the economy, he provides a powerful account of why
capitalism was experienced by many as something natural and unchallengeable, namely, as
fate. The 1939 exposé for the Arcades Project ends with a story of Blanqui, once a legendary
revolutionary but now dying in prison in despair. What had finally defeated him were not the
social institutions that he had helped topple, but the sense that “one cannot demand anything
more” in “the present eternalized.”31 This, of course, is exactly what the phantasmagoria of


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history engenders. Hence the great irony: “[T]he terrible indictment [Blanqui] pronounces
against society takes the form of an unqualified submission to its results.”32 Does this mean
that the emancipatory potential of modernity has been crushed entirely by the phantasmagoria
of history? Are we moderns left utterly hopeless? What can be done? Benjamin’s politics
begins with these questions.

Toward a Revolutionary Mode of Experience: Benjamin’s Historical Materialism

Benjamin rarely discusses his conception of politics in explicit terms, but he comes closest
in the following passage:
“[Here are] two articles of my “politics”: the idea of revolution as an innervation of the
technical organs of the collective (analogy with the child who learns to grasp by trying to
get hold of the moon), and the idea of “cracking open of natural teleology.”33

To unpack this dense formulation, we need to revisit Benjamin’s historical method. Once we
recognize the fateful mode of experience as Benjamin’s chief concern, it is possible to see
his historical method as a political training intended to resist the phantasmagoria of history
and to enable revolutionary political action.
Let us begin with his second article of politics. It is well known that Benjamin develops
his unique view of “historical materialism” as a critical response to nineteenth century
historicism, which constructs a seamless chain of events leading from the past to the present.
Representing historical events as verifiable facts, historicism perceives the present as a stage
of continuously progressing universal history. In other words, it looks to the past to find a
fixed reference point that absolutely affirms the present as its continuation: time becomes
a neutral medium that mechanically transmits the past to the present. Benjamin rejects this
notion of time as “empty, homogeneous,” suggesting that time is a site of the construction
of history.34 As the subject of construction, history is concerned with the actualization
(“redemption”) of past possibilities of happiness in the present. But it also means history is
always vulnerable to the victors of the present who reconstruct events reinforcing their vision
of happiness as the past and relegate others, complicating and challenging their narrative to
oblivion. Based on this recognition, Benjamin approaches the past as a resource to reveal
discontinuities between and within the times, questioning and disrupting what is given to us
as the present. “Historical materialism must renounce the epic element in history. It blasts the
epoch out of the reified “continuity of history” . . . [and] explodes the homogeneity of the
epoch.”35 Now so-called “facts” become “something that just now first happened to us, first
struck us” and the task of historian is to establish and utilize them as the “flash of awakened
consciousness.”36 In other words, Benjamin’s historical method denies the familiarity of
the present. It does so, on the one hand, to reveal the extent to which the present falls far
short of, or even contradicts, what we could achieve with modern technology and, on the
other hand, to de-naturalize “reality” as a manmade construct and thus a course of history
we chose to live. By retrieving the traces of the past not to preserve but to interrogate
the present, Benjamin’s historical materialism generates a consciousness that can initiate
a new course of history. Hence for him “remembering and awaking are most intimately
related.”37
Perhaps not surprisingly, his proposal that the “cracks” ought to be the center of historical
inquiry has caused a great deal of debates and controversies, many of which took place around
the theoretical label Benjamin puts on those cracks–the “dialectical image.” Benjamin’s most


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sustained account of the dialectical image can be found in the 1935 exposé for the Arcades
Project:
“Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still
ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which
the new is permeated with the old. These images are wish images; in them the collective
seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the
inadequacies in the social organization of production . . . In the dream in which each epoch
entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history
(Urgeschichte)—that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experience of such a
society—as stored in the unconscious of the collective—engender, through interpenetration
with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from
enduring edifices to passing fashions.”38
Benjamin identifies the “ambiguity” produced by the intersection of the old and the new as
the site where the “dialectical image” or the “law of dialectics at a standstill” appears. And
perhaps more provocatively, he argues that “such an image is afforded by the commodity per
se: as fetish.”39
Even Benjamin’s most sympathetic readers grew quickly impatient with this formulation.
When Benjamin asked for his opinion on this idea, Adorno rejected it as a gesture to evade
a critical analysis of capitalism by reducing it to a matter of psychology. For Adorno, the
fetish character of commodity cannot be taken to mean a given state of consciousness, but
is “dialectical” in the sense that it “produces consciousness.”40 By depicting the commodity
merely as a dream, Adorno charged, Benjamin ended up diverting our attention from “true
objectivity [of economic conditions]” that produces “alienated subjectivity” as its correlate.
From Adorno’s point of view, the task of theory is “to polarize and dissolve this ‘conscious-
ness’ dialectically between society and singularities, and not to galvanize it as an imagistic
correlate of the commodity character.”41 Adorno’s criticism verged on a complete dismissal
of Benjamin’s theoretical perspective as a whole. “It seems to me that your uncritical ac-
ceptance of the first appearance of technology is connected with your over-valuation of the
archaic as such.”42
There is something almost oddly simple about Adorno’s reading of the dialectical image.
For one thing, Benjamin never argues that the dialectical image can be equated with the
commodity as Adorno suggests. What he actually says is the dialectical image is “afforded
by” the commodity, indicating that the fetish character is not something to be uncritically
accepted but actively scrutinized and utilized. It is significant that Benjamin designates the
commodity as a site of dialectics, namely, as a site in which opposing forces take effect
simultaneously. The commodity invokes the collective’s utopian longings, exposing at the
same time capitalist exploitation. Benjamin believes that this internal incoherence of the
commodity can reveal the gap between expected happiness and experienced unhappiness,
thereby soliciting political energy for radical political practice.
However, as it should be clear from Benjamin’s unique conception of historical time
examined above, all this remains a possibility that could be actualized or vanquished. As he
explicitly states, wish images bring to light only the “ambiguity” peculiar to capitalist social
relations—a political opportunity to mobilize people’s enduring hopes for a better future.
Remember the major political problem Benjamin sees in modernity is that revolutionary
opportunities opened up by technological development are co-opted by the phantasmagoria
of history and subsumed under the fateful mode of experience. One may conclude, then, that
Benjamin attempts to end the uninterrupted cycle of reproduction that mystifies capitalism
as fate, by “cracking open” the proselytizer of that mysticism—the commodity. Seen in this


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light, Adorno’s mistake becomes evident: he fails to see the possibility that the dialectical
image is not a description of the current state of collective consciousness, but a prescription
for the overcoming of its co-opted state.43
Now, Benjamin’s second article of politics is supplemented by the first one – revolution as
the “innervation of the technical organs of the collective” – which can be viewed to elaborate
the political dimensions of his historical materialism. For him historical materialism is not
simply a conceptual tool for historians’ intellectual endeavor; it is the driving force of
revolution. Here I interpret Benjamin’s articles of politics as a specific kind of political
training. In the next section, I discuss how Benjamin’s conception of political action might
manifest itself in relation to revolution.
Let us begin by looking at the two protagonists of the Paris arcades: the collector and
the flâneur. These are the figures symptomatic of modernity that constitute its interior and
exterior. On the one hand, the flâneur is someone who takes the arcades as a “dwelling place”
and finds an “unfailing remedy” for boredom in intoxication with the commodities as well
as the crowd.44 The complete identification with the rules of commodity society and the
abandonment of imagination in favor of the uncritical reception of immediate stimuli are
his distinguishing traits. On the other hand, the collector–“true resident of the interior”–is
isolated from the masses, and leads a bourgeois, fetishistic, and antiquarian life by turning his
living room into a “box in the theater of the world.”45 What is interesting about the collector,
however, is that while he fetishizes objects, he refuses to acquiesce to capitalism’s demands
of homogenization. The collector, Benjamin writes, “makes his concern the transfiguration
of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character
by taking possession of them.”46 Here “taking possession” refers not to legal ownership, but
to the fact that he has developed special attachment “not only to his object but also to its
entire past,” all the details of which ultimately form a “whole magic encyclopedia, a world
order, whose outline is the fate of his object.”47 By rescuing the newness of each object that
would otherwise be thrown into the endless cycle of reproduction and forgotten as “always
the same,” the collector dismantles the fateful mode of experience. That is, he performs what
Benjamin would have called “imagination’s play” par excellence.
Despite the stark contrast in their characters, the difference between the collector and
the flâneur is not readily determined by their material conditions. Rather, it stems from
their dispositions.48 Benjamin describes the flâneur, for example, as the “virtuoso of th[e]
empathy” that identifies himself with the commodity and its exchange value. Empathy,
of course, does not refer to a state of consciousness, but rather to a sensibility or a dis-
position embodied by a subject. As Benjamin vividly puts it, the flâneur “takes the con-
cept of marketability itself for a stroll.”49 In contrast, the collector owns the “hatred of
the abstract configuration of human life in epochs”—the sensibility Benjamin terms the
“pathos of nearness.”50 The pathos of nearness, then, seems to constitute the core of
the affective relationship the collector develops with his objects to endure the labor re-
quired to perform imagination’s play and rescue the newness from the phantasmagoria
of history. Put somewhat starkly, if imagination’s play constitutes a what-to-do dimen-
sion of Benjamin’s historical materialism, the pathos of nearness constitutes its how-to-do
dimension.51
It is curious that Benjamin chooses the term “pathos” to portray the nature of this crucial
sensibility. To understand his intention more precisely, it is crucial to note that Benjamin
pays significant attention to the affective aspect of historicism. Historicism is responsible,
he writes, for “[t]he false aliveness of the past-made-present, the elimination of every echo
of a ‘lament’ from history” that “marks history’s final subjection to the modern concept


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of science.”52 Lamentation is critical not just because it produces energy for imagination’s
play (empathy too produces some energy), but it does so in a way that reveals the violence
and injustice hidden in the objects under scrutiny.53 While empathy engenders conformism
by promoting uncritical identification with the commodity, lamentation makes palpable the
critical distance or gap within the object, thereby replacing “an uncritical hypostatization”
with a “critical interrogation.”54 In other words, lamentation is a disposition that could at
once dismantle the fateful mode of experience and keep the unleashed energy from being
manipulated by fascism.
Thus viewed, Benjamin’s historical method should not be dismissed as signaling nostalgia
as some of his readers have suggested.55 While the famous “angel of history” has his sad
face “turned toward the past,” he neither wants to return to the past nor looks at it with a
melancholy gaze. Instead, he “would like to stay [in the present],” trying to “awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”56 One might say that the angel is like one of
Benjamin’s collectors who have keen eyes and a lamenting spirit. But suggestively, the angel
is described here as a tragic figure. His effort proves too weak in the face of the “storm of
progress.” Is it because the angel, like the collector, is alone? Does the fact that the collector’s
imaginative activities take place only within his abode announce the ultimate victory of the
phantasmagoria of history? Is it possible to transform the collector’s perilously privatized
practice into a politically viable form?

Beyond Messianic Time: Revolution and Truthful Moments

When Benjamin was discussing the idea of revolution as the “innervation of the technical
organs of the collective,” he added a note for himself: “analogy with the child who learns
to grasp by trying to get hold of the moon.” A later fragment clarifies: “Just as a child who
has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so every
revolution sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach.”57
Revolution, then, is a twofold process for Benjamin. The “currently utopian goals” (the
moon) appear idealistic from the present point of view, but are useful and necessary for
“learning to grasp,” that is, practicing necessary skills and setting the stage for attaining
more realistic revolutionary goals (a ball).
This formulation leads us to believe that Benjamin has at least some vision of the instances
when collectors’ imaginative yet solitary activities materialize as a collective endeavor.
In fact, he seems to anticipate this collectivization to a certain extent when he considers
the intersubjective impulse contained in “imagination’s play” as the critical element for
the production of the “aura,” which is supposed to have become obsolete in the modern
world. 58 Benjamin never developed his ideas about the intersubjective dimension of imagi-
nation’s play, so here I must rely on a symptomatic rather than strictly hermeneutical reading.
The point of departure is what he enigmatically terms “now-time [Jetztzeit]” or “now of a
particular recognizability.” It is possible to see now-time as the moment when collectors’
individual activities take effect as a collective endeavor, partly because of the term Benjamin
uses to describe its nature: “truth.” As he puts it, “truth is charged to the bursting point”
in now-time, and “[t]his point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio,
which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.”59 We can
begin to unpack this obscure statement by addressing the issue that must have been bothering
the mind of a perceptive reader since we began to discuss the collector: Even if a collector
rescues the truly new from the homogenizing force of the phantasmagoria of history by
discovering and rearranging all the little details of the object, how can we ascertain that her


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findings are not arbitrary? If a person has a passion for “a misprinted streetcar ticket that had
been in circulation for only a few hours,”60 how can we know that her discovery provides us
with a truly new way to imagine a better society?
I think the problem of arbitrariness cannot be completely solved as long as the findings
of a collector remain within the four walls of her room.61 It can be dealt with only when
collectors bring out their findings in public and subject them to the judgment of people
who live with an unexplained sense of uneasiness, repressed dreams, and unrealized utopian
longings, all of which call for articulation. This, of course, is a political process. Benjamin’s
term “force field” seems to capture this process. “[E]very dialectically presented historical
circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between
its fore-history and after-history is played-out. It becomes such a field insofar as the present
instant interpenetrates it.”62 In a force field, what a collector discovers no longer enjoys
its secluded and unlimited freedom, but is put to the public test as the dialectical image.
Now its “truth” is decided not by the producer’s or collector’s subjective intention (hence
the death of intentio), but by the political tension it creates between the utopian visions and
their suppressed state. The dialectical image, in Benjamin’s words, is to be found “where the
tension between dialectical opposites is greatest.”63 In this sense, truth is not a “contingent
function of knowing,” but bound to “a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and
the known alike.”64 The actualization of this “nucleus of time” amounts to nothing less than
the opening up of a new course of history.
In “On the Concept of History,” 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. Then we will clearly see that it
is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the
struggle against fascism.”65 In light of this passage, truthful moments in which the history of
the oppressed materializes in the form of truth may be seen as a “real state of emergency” that
challenges the state of emergency proclaimed by the Third Reich (“the state of emergency in
which we live”). Benjamin’s “real” state of emergency is hardly peaceful; it entails a violent,
“barbaric” struggle, if only to match the barbarism of fascism. In “Experience and Poverty”
written shortly after his flight from Germany, Benjamin openly entertains the possibility
of “a new, positive concept of barbarism.”66 Of course, he has already developed elaborate
and political insights into violence in his early essay, “Critique of Violence (1921).” In it
Benjamin discusses a fundamental interdependence between violence and law. As he puts
it, “violence . . . is either lawmaking or law-preserving . . . [Violence] is implicated in
the problematic nature of law itself.”67 Against the violence that reinforces law and state
power, Benjamin envisions a “different kind of violence” (variably called “divine,” “pure,”
or “revolutionary”)68 that at once reveals the violence-ridden nature of existing laws and
enacts a possibility of transcending the system of law.69 On this violence, Benjamin states,
“a new historical epoch is founded.”70 The above passage from “On the Concept of History”
suggests that Benjamin continues to hold on to the idea of the state of emergency and
revolutionary violence in his late work, perhaps with a clearer idea of legitimizing conditions
for revolutionary violence.
Some critics take Benjamin’s notion of now-time as an example that reveals the inher-
ent tension between his view of history and political action. Peter Osborne argues that
Benjamin’s politics is constructed “at a point of tension between an avant-garde, action- and
future- oriented impulse . . . and an angelic, backward-looking, memorializing cognitivism
of redemptive remembrance” and, as a result, “the temporality of now-time and the tem-
porality of praxis are incommensurable.”71 Habermas makes a similar point when he faults


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Benjamin’s redemptive critique for projecting a leap into the future on the basis of a leap
into the past.72 This line of criticism, however, seems to be a slightly different version of
Adorno’s misguided reading of the dialectical image, insofar as it presumes what is to be
politically realized is something already determined. Failing to realize Benjamin’s distinc-
tively political understanding of truth, this view effectively reduces truth to the matter of
knowing, against which he pronounces a “resolute refusal.”73 Benjamin’s “truth” comes into
being as people, as collectors or audiences, create and respond to the dialectical tension
that exceeds the confines of existing reality. This overcoming of the status quo might occur
periodically, but it does not happen by accident. The ground for radical political action is
prepared by Benjamin’s historical materialism that “trains” perceptive collectors as well as
an attentive audience. And, in turn, moments of truth leave their traces in all configurations
of life, thereby inviting future “collections.”74 Far from incommensurable, in Benjamin’s
thought history and political action are indispensable to each other in generating social
change. The social change he considered most important was a proletarian revolution, but
unlike self-appointed “vanguards” of his time, he refused to instrumentalize revolutionary
action. He believes the attempt to transform the economic system must go hand in hand with
the effort to establish a revolutionary mode of experience in which political training and
action work together in a truly dialectical fashion. If such a state can be achieved, “there is
not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance.”
Seen in this light, another group of critics are equally mistaken to suggest that messianic
motifs in Benjamin’s “now-time” demonstrate the failure of his political thinking. Unable to
resolve the contradictions of his theory, they charge, Benjamin turns to God as a last resort
and in effect depoliticizes his theory. For instance, Gershom Scholem influentially claims
Benjamin’s angel of history is a “melancho[lic] figure” that implies the “leap leading out of
the historical continuum into the “time of now”,” and has about it “something of that leap
into transcendence . . . which is . . . implied in their materialistic formulations as their secret
core.”75 Rolf Tiedemann goes even further and argues that Benjamin abandons the realm of
history and politics in favor of eschatological mysticism. Interpreting Benjamin’s later note
(“The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death”) as the sign
of his despair in the face of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Tiedemann asserts that Benjamin might
have concluded that “the onset of revolution could no longer be awaited with the patience
of Marx; rather, it had to be envisaged as the eschatological end of history.”76 According to
Tiedemann, Benjamin’s “leap into the past” is “in reality a leap out of history and the entry
into the messianic kingdom.”77
It is true that numerous messianic motifs appear in Benjamin’s account of politics. But
he consistently and resolutely refuses to see religion as a superior alternative to history and
politics. Insofar as my claims about Benjamin’s political concerns hold validity, there is a
strong case to be made against interpreting his religious tropes literally as God’s absolute
commands that override the human pursuit of a better collective life. Instead, those motifs
are to be seen as a metaphor that elucidates the nature and demarcates the boundaries of
history and politics. Consider the following passage:

“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 established as a goal. From the
standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]. Therefore, the secular order
cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only
a religious meaning.”78


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Here it is clear that for Benjamin the messianic has a meaning only insofar as it opposes the
realm of human endeavor. As he writes, the Kingdom of God begins where history ends. So
when Benjamin argues that historical materialism should “enlist the services of theology,”79
theology might not produce absolute injunctions but serve as a reminder of our fundamental
incompleteness. If only the Messiah completes all history and is distinguished from humanity
by that capacity, as a metaphor it implies that human beings bound to history and politics
cannot create a utopia once and for all. More concretely, Benjamin’s theology might have
been intended as a critique of the Social Democratic Party’s historical materialism that held
dogmatic and hubristic faith in the inexorable coming of a classless society. In resisting such
instrumentalization of politics, Benjamin nevertheless does not turn away from political
praxis. We do not simply recognize the Messiah; we resemble him. As Benjamin states,
humanity retains a “weak messianic power.”80 We can, and should, retrieve forgotten pieces
of past longings and realize them in truthful moments, reaching for a classless society. But
since we are not the Messiah, these “messianic” tasks can be accomplished not by a fully
mapped-out program, but only by a long and arduous process through which we become
collectors and collective.

Conclusion
Benjamin might have chosen the Paris arcades as the central subject of his inquiry because
there the dangerous potential of capitalism had not yet found an extreme form and coexisted
with its promises. As he wrote in the 1935 exposé, the inventions and discoveries of the
new era are “on the point of entering the market as commodities. But they linger on the
threshold.”81 We drifted far away from that point, and it is becoming harder to trust the
promise of modernity. Recently, the unsettling effect of unbridled capitalism is deeply felt.
Benjamin’s insights bring the gravity of the situation into sharp relief: He reminds us that
a social system that continues to inflict suffering on people while simultaneously depriving
them of the means to confront and reinvent their form of life leaves them in an extremely
vulnerable state. And more often than not, this vulnerable state is exploited not to serve but
to destroy humanity, as indicated by the Second World War Benjamin foresaw and yet could
not survive. Similar indications are not in short supply today.
Although this account may sound overly pessimistic, it should not deter us from envi-
sioning a better course of history. It should, instead, provoke a more vigorous reflection on
the current state and future directions of social criticism. Here again, Benjamin’s insights
this essay has sought to reconstruct might prove to be essential. If Lisa Duggan is right to
observe that “[t]he Achilles’ heel in progressive-left politics since the 1980s, especially, has
been a general blindness to the connections and interrelations of the economic, political,
and cultural,”82 Benjamin can be seen to provide a unique vision of politics that attends to,
interrogates, and ultimately reconfigures those connections and interrelations. He picks up
the realm of experience dismissed as trivial and messy by many dogmatic Marxists of his day,
and establishes it as the arena for political struggle. At the same time, Benjamin insists on
the mutual imbrication of individual experience and structural conditions, warning against a
celebration of individual experience for its own sake, however singular or subversive it may
be. This is a vision assuring us that, despite accumulating signs of crisis, politics still can
be a realm of possibilities. Resignation without hope, Blanqui’s last state of mind, does not
have to be ours.


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NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association. For their helpful comments, I am grateful to Susan Buck-Morss, Paul Apostolidis,
James Martel, Uri Jacob Matatyaou, and Constellations’ anonymous reviewers.
1. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History” (1940),” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 402. A number of Benjamin’s important writings have been recently
compiled in four edited volumes of Selected Writings. Hereafter they are cited as SW followed by the
volume number.
2. As the editor of Benjamin’s collected works, Adorno was instrumental in disseminating this line of
criticism. Theodor W. Adorno, “Letters to Benjamin,” in Theodor W. Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics,
ed. Fredric Jameson (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 110–133. Despite their otherwise different inter-
pretations of Benjamin, a number of influential commentators agree that Benjamin’s attempt to conceptualize
politics is inadequate, if not an outright failure. Jürgen Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising
or Rescuing Critique,” New German Critique 17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue (Spring, 1979): 91–128;
Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk (1982),” trans. Gary Smith
and Andrè Lefevre, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 929–945; idem., “Historical Materialism or Political
Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History” (1983–1984),” in Benjamin:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 175–209;
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1971), 60–82; Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994). See also various essays in Walter
Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994). In what follows, I will engage with these criticisms in more detail.
3. Ibid.
4. Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 12.
5. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 207.
6. For a useful discussion of the various ways in which the concept of “experience” has been theorized
in the history of Western philosophy, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European
Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
7. I think the “mode of experience” can clarify missing elements of a few previous attempts to artic-
ulate Benjamin’s politics. For example, Esther Leslie highlights the double meaning of the term “Technik”
(technology and technique) in an attempt to flesh out Benjamin’s non-deterministic Marxism. In doing so,
however, Leslie tends to situate Benjamin too comfortably within the Marxist tradition, effectively under-
stating his contributions. Margaret Cohen carefully examines the influences of Surrealism on Benjamin’s
thought. But Cohen, in contrast to Leslie, detaches Benjamin too much from Marxist politics, leaving him
vulnerable to the charge of anarchistic enthusiasm. My discussion draws on Susan Buck-Morss’s interpre-
tation that reads Benjamin’s historical method as materialist pedagogy intended to bring about a proletarian
revolution. Still, Buck-Morss tends to link Benjamin’s pedagogy a little too directly and too immediately
to revolution, focusing on its “explosive” power. The concept of the mode of experience helps bring out the
complexity and subtlety of the connection between Benjamin’s historical method and revolutionary political
action. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Margaret
Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995); Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing.
8. The Arcades Project, N1a, 6. As is well-known, the Arcades Project is not a finished work but
a massive collection of fragmentary quotations and commentaries. However, they are organized quite
methodically by key words (Konvoluts) and the numbering system. In this essay, I refer to the number of
Konvoluts when I cite from the Arcades Project. For periodization of Konvoluts, see Buck-Morss, Dialectics
of Seeing, 50–52.
9. Benjamin wrote two exposès for the Arcades Project, entitled “Paris, [the] Capital of Nineteenth
Century”: one in 1935, and the other in 1939 (Benjamin dropped the definite article “the” in the 1939 version
in response to Adorno’s suggestion). These two documents are quite similar in outlook, but have subtle yet
significant differences. They are included in the English edition of The Arcades Project (3–13 and 14–26,
respectively), and cited here as the “1935 exposè” and the “1939 exposè.”
10. 1935 exposè, 3; 1939 exposè, 15; and The Arcades Project, A1, 1.
11. The Arcades Project, A2, 2.


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12. “Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe,
and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces.” Ibid., K1a, 8.
13. Ibid., A3a, 7. Benjamin’s exposure to Marxism was mediated by Lukács’s influential discussion
of commodity fetishism in History and Class Consciousness (1923). Benjamin read this book when he was
in Capri, and immediately recognized its significance for his own project. See Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin:
An Intellectual Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1991), 74–76. In his letter to Scholem on June
13, 1924, Benjamin said that “[Lukács’s is] a very important book, especially important to me.” Walter
Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 244.
14. For a discussion that finds the germ of Benjamin’s insight into the “re-enchantment of the world”
in his early engagement with Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” thesis, see Howard Caygill, “Non-Messianic
Theology in Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 215–226.
15. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1940),” in SW 4, 314.
16. Ibid., 328–329.
17. Benjamin wrote at least three different versions of this essay. The first version was composed in
Paris in 1935 and revised and expanded into the second version in 1936. The second version represents the
form in which Benjamin originally wished to see the work published. But, partly responding to Adorno’s
criticism, he revised it quite significantly and completed the third version in 1939. There are subtle yet
significant differences between the second and the third versions of this essay, which are included in SW
3, 101–133 and SW 4, 251–283, respectively. Hereafter they are cited as the “Artwork Essay II” and the
“Artwork Essay III.”
18. My extension of the artwork essay to the realm of experience in general seems to be in line
with Benjamin’s own intention. “The process [that is analyzed in the Artwork essay] is symptomatic; its
significance extends far beyond the realm of art.” Artwork Essay II, 104; Artwork Essay III, 254.
19. One can find an early formulation of this concern in Benjamin’s 1933 essay, “Experience and
Poverty,” in SW 2, 731–736.
20. Benjamin’s ambivalent view of this change is well expressed in the following statement: “If one
considers the dangerous tensions which technology and its consequences have engendered in the masses at
large—tendencies which at critical stages take on a psychotic character – one also has to recognize that this
same technologization has created the possibility of psychic immunization against such mass psychoses.”
Artwork Essay II, 118.
21. Ibid., 127fn22. Benjamin’s positive assessment of the emancipatory potential contained in moder-
nity is conspicuous in the 1935 version of the Artwork Essay, but significantly weakened in the 1939 version.
A similar shift in tone is also observed in the differences between the 1935 and 1939 exposés for The Arcades
Project. As I will elaborate, this change cannot be taken to mean that Benjamin abandoned his initial view.
22. Benjamin puts this point as follows. “[F]or the first time in world history, technological repro-
ducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual . . . [A]s soon as the criterion
of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized.
Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.” Artwork Essay II, 106;
Artwork Essay III, 256–257, emphasis eliminated.
23. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anesthetics,” October 62 (Autumn, 1992): 3–41; Andrew
Benjamin, “Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity,” in Walter Benjamin and History, 156–170.
24. The Arcades Project, m1a, 5.
25. According to Benjamin, the mentality of fate is this: “I am born German; it is for this I die.” Ibid.
26. Benjamin’s exposure to Blanqui’s writings seemed to play a particularly significant role for
the development of this insight. In the later notes of Konvolut D (D5, 7ff), Benjamin made extensive
citations from Blanqui’s book, L’Eternité par les astres [Eternity via the Stars]. In the new introduction and
conclusion for the 1939 exposè, Benjamin formulates the idea of the phantasmagoria of history drawing
specifically on Blanqui.
27. 1939 exposè, 26, 25.
28. Benjamin expresses this point in a characteristically ambivalent passage: “This degradation, to
which things are subject because they can be taxed as commodities, is counterbalanced . . . by the inestimable
value of novelty . . . Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. [But] It is [also]
the source of that illusion of which fashion is the tireless purveyor.” 1939 exposè, 22.
29. Artwork Essay II, 105; Artwork Essay III, 255–256.
30. “Everything new [humanity] could hope for turns out to be a reality that has always been present;
and this newest will be as little capable of furnishing it with a liberating solution as a new fashion is capable
of rejuvenating society.” 1935 exposè, 15.
31. 1939 exposè, 26.


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32. Ibid., 25.

33. The Arcades Project, W7, 4.
34. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History (1940),” in SW 4, 395. Benjamin developed his novel
conception of historical time through a critical engagement with Heidegger’s works. For a careful treatment
of this issue, see Howard Caygill, “Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition,” in Walter
Benjamin’s Philosophy, 1–31. See also Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,”
in Walter Benjamin and History, 38–68.
35. The Arcades Project, N9a, 6.
36. Ibid., K1, 2.
37. Ibid., K1, 3.
38. 1935 exposé, 4, emphasis added.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Theodor W. Adorno, “Letter to Benjamin (1935),” in Aesthetics and Politics, 111.
41. Ibid., 113.
42. Ibid., 116.
43. My intention is not to decide whose position is theoretically superior. Rather, I intend to show
why Benjamin’s approach must be recognized as a legitimate theoretical viewpoint. Max Pensky nicely
formulates Adorno’s and Benjamin’s approaches as the difference between theory and method. “Theory, for
Benjamin, in general always requires the stability of a (theorizing) subject and the imposition of subjective
intention on the structure of historical time; the invariable effect of even the best-intentioned theory is a
certain pacification of history and hence the loss of the capacity for recognizing sites where past and present
lose their familiar contours. Hence theory for Benjamin must be replaced by method.” Max Pensky, “Method
and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David
S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 181.
44. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire (1938),” in SW 4, 19.
45. 1935 exposé, 9; 1939 exposé, 19.
46. Ibid.
47. The Arcades Project, H2, 7; H2a, 1, emphasis in original.
48. In this respect, Benjamin cannot be seen to use these stereotypes as factual and unchangeable
categories. Consider the following passage where Benjamin portrays a wonderful moment when the flâneur
becomes a collector of some kind. “[The flâneur’s] eyes open, his ear ready, searching for something entirely
different from what the crowd gathers to see. A word dropped by chance will reveal to him one of those
character traits that cannot be invented and that must be drawn directly from life; those physiognomies so
naively attentive will furnish the painter with the expression he was dreaming of; a noise, insignificant to
every other ear, will strike that of the musician and give him the cue for a harmonic combination; even for
the thinker, the philosopher lost in his reverie, this external agitation is profitable: it stirs up his ideas as the
storm stirs the waves of the sea. . . . Most men of genius were great flâneurs—but industrious, productive
flâneurs.” Ibid., M20a, 1.
49. Ibid., M17a, 2.
50. Ibid., I( 2; H2, 3.
51. Seen in this light, empathy and the pathos of nearness might constitute the negative and the
positive poles of the answer to the following question: “Now, it would be important to know: What is the
dialectical antithesis of boredom?” Ibid., D2, 7.
52. Benjamin, “Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History,” 401.
53. The spirit of lamentation is beautifully recorded in the following passage: “Whoever has emerged
victorious participates . . . in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying
prostrate . . . the spoils are carried in the procession [and] called “cultural treasures” . . . [I]n every case
these treasures have a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not
only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of others who lived
in the same period. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391–392.
54. The Arcades Project, N13, 1.
55. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 60–82.
56. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392, emphasis in original.
57. Walter Benjamin, “A Different Utopian Will (1935–1936),” in SW 3, 135.
58. “Inherent in the gaze [into the camera] . . . is the expectation that it will be returned by that on
which it is bestowed. When this expectation is met . . . there is an experience of the aura in all its fullness
. . . To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.”
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 338.
59. The Arcades Project, N3, 1.
60. Ibid., H2a, 2.


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61. In this respect, I disagree with Osborne’s claim that “The charge of arbitrariness in the choice
of [the dialectical] images is rebutted by their specific, philosophically constructed, historical content.”
Peter Osborne, “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Time,” in Walter
Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, 85, emphasis in original. I doubt that Benjamin would
endorse this interpretation, which borders on esotericism and elitism. In my view, what is crucial to his
concept of imagination is not philosophical expertise, but attentiveness to the object. Consider, for example,
Benjamin’s discussion of collecting books. “The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or
expert knowledge alone. Not even both factors together suffice for the establishment of a real library, which
is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself.” Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My
Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, 63.
62. The Arcades Project, N7a, 1.
63. Ibid., N10a, 3.
64. Ibid., N3, 2.
65. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392.
66. Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 732.
67. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz
(New York: Schocken, 1978), 289.
68. Giorgio Agamben suggests that Carl Schmitt conceived his theory of sovereignty in Political
Theology (1922) as a response to Benjamin’s account of divine violence in “Critique of Violence.” Schmitt,
of course, arrives at a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of Benjamin. Appropriating Benjamin’s
insight that law relies on extra-legal violence, Schmitt integrates violence into a sovereign with authority to
decide on the state of exception that puts the law in crisis. Like Benjamin’s revolutionary violence, Schmitt’s
sovereign violence suspends the law, but only to neutralize attempts to radically challenge state power.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 52–64. See also Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl
Schmitt,” Diacritics 22(3/4) (1992): 5–18; Horst Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via
Thomas Hobbes,” trans. Melissa Thorson Hause and Jackson Bond, Critical Inquiry 25(2) (1999): 247–66.
69. Benjamin illustrates his distinction between law-making/-preserving violence and revolutionary
violence by juxtaposing it with Georges Sorel’s distinction between the “political general strike” and the
“proletarian general strike.” “The political general strike demonstrates how the state will lose none of its
strength, how power is transferred from the privileged to the privileged, how the mass of producers will
change their masters . . . [In contrast] the proletarian general strike sets itself the sole task of destroying state
power . . . While the first form of interruption of work is violent since it causes only an external modification
of labor conditions, the second, as a pure means, is nonviolent.” Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 291.
70. Ibid., 300.
71. Osborne, “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats,” 87, 90.
72. Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” 50, 54.
73. The Arcades Project, N3, 2.
74. Benjamin discusses the “refined and spiritual things” present in the class struggle. They are not
present, he writes, “as a vision of spoils that fall to the victor. They are alive in this struggle as confidence,
courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude . . . [and] constantly call into question every victory, past and present,
of the rulers . . . The historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390.
75. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” in Gershom Scholem, Jews and Judaism
in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 234–235.
76. Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” 944.
77. Ibid.
78. Walter Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment (1919 or 1938),” in SW 3, 305. The dating of
this fragment is debated. While Gershom Scholem insisted that this piece reflects Benjamin’s ideas from
the early 1920s, Adorno recalled that Benjamin had read the text to him, describing it as the “newest of the
new,” in late 1937 or early 1938. Both claims have plausibility, but either way, I think Benjamin’s theological
language becomes more and more metaphorical in the later phase of his thinking.
79. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389.
80. Ibid., 390, emphasis in original.
81. 1935 exposé, 13.
82. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), xvi.
Kyong-Min Son is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at
the University of Delaware. He is currently working on a book manuscript that traces the
development of democratic thought in the Cold War era.

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