(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE LEGACY OF BENJAMIN’S MESSIANISM
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and instead situates Benjamin in the vicinity of Franz Kafka as a poetic
thinker (WB, 205).
Similar discrepancies exist between Arendt’s and Agamben’s comments
about Benjamin’s reflections on collecting. The figure of the collector,
Arendt writes,
could assume such eminently modern features in Benjamin because
history itself — that is, the break in tradition which took place at the
beginning of this century — had already relieved him of this task of
destruction and he only needed to bend down, as it were, to select
his precious fragments from the pile of debris. (WB, 200)
Arendt compares the recovery and preservation of these treasures to
that of pearls und corals. This hardly sounds like a revolutionary vocabulary,
even if these historical fragments are the treasures of revolutions und
the moments of freedom. While it is doubtful whether Arendt’s emphasis
on preservation and appreciation does justice to the destructive aspect
of Benjamin’s attitude, such a doubt also holds true for Agamben’s contrary
reading, which, though undoubtedly closer to Benjamin, addresses
exclusively the destructive impulse of his understanding of tradition and
focuses primarily on the moment of disruption itself. Significant in this
connection is Agamben’s comment on Benjamin’s imperative “to shake
off the treasures that are piled up on humanity’s back . . . so as to get its
hands on them” (P, 138–59, 153). Here, Agamben comments, “tradition
does not aim to perpetuate and repeat the past but to lead to its decline”
(P, 153). However, even in Benjamin’s image of breaking fragments out
of the continuum of the past, something still remains literally “at hand.”
Agamben does grant Benjamin’s relation to the past an aspect of “taking
possession” of what has been, yet, for him, what is to be cherished of the
past is precisely “what has never happened” and therefore remains a potential
that is yet to be fulfilled and can only be completed in a religiously
and politically redeemed world. The messianic realm revealed here could
not be more alien to Arendt.
Arendt’s and Agamben’s treatment of Benjamin’s approach to the
past illustrates the discrepancies between their processes of thinking.
Antitheses that Arendt leaves in juxtaposition or in succession consistently
reverse into one another in Agamben: The view that the new can
appear only in the destruction of the old, indeed, that it occurs out of this
destruction, contrasts with Arendt’s ideas of a new beginning. Hence in
the final chapter of On Revolution she emphasizes that “the end of the
old is not necessarily the beginning of the new” and that “freedom is not
the automatic result of liberation, no more than the new beginning is the
automatic consequence of the end.” 14 It can only be achieved with the
constitution of a new political order. For Arendt, the interval between
the “no longer” and the “not yet,” which she calls the “hiatus” between