Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption - Monoskop

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particular, the one over the many, the hypostatized general concept over the individual in the fullness of its concrete
positivity; and it is as a result of this awareness that he insists on the necessity of allowing the idea to emerge in a
purely immanent fashioni.e., from a concrete constellation of philosophically reconstituted material elements. On the
other hand, he nevertheless situates his theory of knowledge squarely within the legacy of Western metaphysics,
drawing especially from the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis and the Leibnizian theory of monadology.
His theoretical reliance on the metaphysical tradition becomes especially apparent in his employment of the
categories of "origin" and "monad" to illustrate the being of ideas. Through the concept of origin, Benjamin attempts
both to ensure the actuality of ideas in empirical reality and to account for their relation to history. Origin, Benjamin
claims, is a historical category, yet it has nothing to do with the idea of genesis, i.e., with the idea of the emergence
of a given phenomenon at a determinate moment in time. Instead origin refers to a history of a different type: not
empirical history, in which the inessential being of the phenomenon persists in its mere facticity, unredeemed, but a
type of essential history, in which the phenomenon stands revealed as it will one day in the light of Messianic
fulfillment. The "origins" of this concept for Benjamin are twofold. It derives, firstly, from Kabbalistic lore,
according to which origin inherently contains a teleological dimension. It represents an original condition of
harmony and perfection (paradise), which is subsequently squandered (the fall), yet ultimately recaptured (with the
advent of the Messianic era), though not in the static sense of a simple return, but in a return which simultaneously
unleashes and actualizes a superior potential latent in origin to begin with. In this sense origin constitutes a return
which is simultaneously a qualitative leap beyond the original condition of perfection, its realization on a higher
plane. Thus, Benjamin remarks at one point, "On the one hand [origin] needs to be recognized as a process of
restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and
incomplete.'' 47 Secondly, it derives from Goethe's discussion of the "Urphänomen" in the Farbenlehre, a notion
Benjamin claims to have transferred from the pagan domain of nature
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