(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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as an interval, “which is altogether determined by things that are no
longer and by things that are not yet” and which, Arendt continues,
has repeatedly been shown to contain “the moment of truth” (BPF,
9). “The moment of truth” about Agamben’s relationship to Arendt’s
thinking can be read from his own remarks written at this time on the
passing on of a legacy in periods of a break in tradition. The legacy that
is at stake here is also Benjamin’s.
In the same year as Agamben’s letter to Arendt his essay “L’angelo
malinconico,” which also provides the conclusion to the book L’uomo
senza contenuto, and which was published in English in 1999 under the
title “The Melancholy Angel,” appeared in the periodical Nuovi argomenti.
10 This essay can be read as a dialogue with Arendt’s preface to
Between Past and Future and, above all, with her essay on Walter Benjamin.
11 The first pages of Agamben’s “The Melancholy Angel” provide an
insight into the dynamic of the small but decisive shifts Agamben makes
in the midst of virtually word-for-word appropriations of her text. The
opening quotation, the wording, and the order of the initial paragraphs
of Agamben’s piece repeat almost verbatim the beginning of the third
part of Arendt’s, in which she comments on Benjamin’s reflections about
the function of quotation and the meaning of collecting. Like Arendt,
Agamben introduces his essay with a reference to Benjamin’s theory of
quotation. According to Benjamin’s theory, quotation does not, as is usually
assumed, serve the reliving and passing on of what is past, but alienates
this past by tearing the quotation out of its original setting, thereby
breaking up the original context in which it occurs. Agamben quotes
Benjamin’s description of the power of quotations, which “arises not
from their ability to transmit the past and allow the reader to relive it, but,
on the contrary, from their capacity to ‘make a clean sweep, to expel from
the context, to destroy’” (MA, 104). 12 In her essay on Benjamin, Arendt
quotes these same words, adding the qualification that the “discoverers
and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely
different intention, the intention to preserve” (WB, 193). By contrast,
the Benjamin quote in Agamben’s essay is followed by considerations of
the “aggressive force” of quotations, and the explanation that Benjamin
had understood “that the authority invoked by the quotation is founded
precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain
text by a certain culture” (MA, 104). Whereas in the following pages
Arendt stresses Benjamin’s “duality of wanting to preserve and wanting to
destroy” (WB, 196; my emphasis), Agamben intensifies Benjamin’s dialectic
of a saving destruction. The divergence of their views becomes especially
obvious when Arendt acquits Benjamin of the “dialectical subtleties
of his Marxist friends” (WB, 200), which in another text she disparages
as a trick “where one thing always reverses into its other and produces it”
(“bei dem immer das Eine in das Andere umschlägt und es erzeugt”), 13