This article discusses Walter Benjamin’s messianic thought. Far from being a theological concept proper or a secularized motif of Judeo-Christian religion, the messianic is a complex figure of thought addressing a dimension of profane life that is neither culture nor nature but a ‘weak power’ within history allowing for a messianic standstill of the self-totalizing and self-eternalizing progress of capitalist ‘real-history’. If the messianic is not about religion or political theology but concerns the profane order of the profane, how are we to conceive of it in a non-reductionist way? The underlying question of this article hence is: if the messianic is the theological name for something within the realm of the profane that is neither addressed by political philosophy nor life and social sciences, what is its relevance for a materialist understanding of history, historical time, and revolutionary politics?

Uwe Steiner’s Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought is a comprehensive and compelling account of Walter Benjamin’s life and work, which will satisfy both newcomers to Benjamin and those with an existing interest. In this review, I argue that Steiner’s account goes beyond similar encounters with Benjamin in two main ways: first, by focusing specifically on Benjamin’s personal and intellectual relationship with ‘modernity’ and, second, by presenting Benjamin’s enduring appeal as a result of the creative interpretation of his work according to changing times and tastes. Yet Steiner’s historicising account of Benjamin also somewhat neutralises his critical potential as a historical-materialist thinker. Drawing on the work of Benjamin’s erstwhile friend and contemporary Ernst Bloch, as well as on Peter Osborne’s concept of modernity as a specific consciousness of time, I argue that the act of interpretation itself requires a weakly teleological concept of history, such...

In this article, artistic re-enactments will serve as a backdrop for a re-evaluation of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history in light of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of trauma. This article will set out to show how remediation plays a similar role in establishing historic truth for both Benjamin and Freud, but it will also point to some fundamental differences. Indeed, artistic re-enactments, and their Freudian underpinnings, seem to reverse the mechanism at work in Benjamin, for whom it is the trauma of the present that is redeemed by the fragments of the past, rather than vice versa. If Freudian trauma re-enacts the past in order to free the present of its influence, it was Benjamin’s present that was traumatic under National Socialism, and he turned to the past in order to leave open the possibility for a different future. How can the artistic re-enactments of the 21st century help us to understand how history and trauma are experienced in our own times?

How can one think of History in a time in which Europe happened to be haunted by the specter of catastrophe, in our modern times? How can one escape the perils of Progress? This urgency determined the thought of Walter Benjamin since his youth, and decisively marked his conception of history itself, but also of his vision of language and of translation, of his own critique of art and reception. Starting from the concept of dialectic image as a new paradigm of comprehension of history, Benjamin tries to substitute an idea of a narrative of progress for discontinued and figurative idea of history, that regains in the present the possibility of reactivate the past and that values a qualitative dimension of temporality, instead of a quantitative temporality that homogenized and disfigured his reading of history. Benjamin takes, essentially from the idea of Messianism, as a secularized category of Jewish tradition, to “build” what he designated as the dissident and revolutionary gesture of the historian of “brushing history against the grain”, focusing on himself that potentiality of rescuing the “messianic parcel” that become our fate and that brings in itself the echoes of voices that come to us. This is also the most important dimension of Benjamin’s thought, eminently political and ethical, configuring a radical gesture that reclaims justice for the ones that the history of Progress forgot: the overpassed and the victims of history.

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

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

History has always been shown to empathize with these victors in history, or the rulers or political elites who have derived their power from the oppression of the lower classes or proletariat. As Benjamin puts it, this empathy with the victors in history is also an occasion of horror because the spoils of victory owe themselves to the anonymous toil of contemporaries as much as their great minds and talents who have created them. Thus Benjamin holds that there is no document of civilization which is not free from barbarism, it is the violence of class oppression which has allowed the victors in history to maintain their power and advantage. The task of the historical materialist is thus to brush history up against the grain and also depict the losers in history who will be eventually redeemed by the coming of the Messiah who will bring justice for them and give them a voice. Keywords: Benjamin; History; Messianic Time; Class struggle; Redemption