(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE LEGACY OF BENJAMIN’S MESSIANISM
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The wisdom of Sancho Panza’s “great and profitable entertainment”
may indeed have the power to undo the oppression of the law, but the
place of this reversal is neither a spot, nor a threshold or a gap as Agamben
would have it. Instead, this place, in Benjamin, rather uncannily
resembles the space of literature, its fullness and worldliness, its power
to save the past and its commitment to the concrete particulars of the
ordinary world.
Habermas, who otherwise calls for a strict distinction between literature
and philosophy, introduces into his essay “Bewußtmachende oder
rettende Kritik,” quoted at the beginning of this essay, a brief literary
intermezzo when he draws what he calls a “surrealistic scene” in which he
imagines “Scholem, Adorno and Brecht gathered together for a peaceful
symposium around a table, under which Breton and Aragon are squatting,
while Wyneken stands at the door.” 34 In spite of all the reservations
that can be voiced against Agamben’s reading of Benjamin — his
utterly un-Benjaminian rehabilitation of myth at the expense of history,
his Heideggerian emphasis on ethos over ethics, his Paulinian messianism
devoid of political revolution, and above all his depletion of Benjamin’s
concrete wordliness — the Italian philosopher would undoubtedly be a
major participant at this table if a similar scene were to be imagined today.
Habermas’s image of a table around which Benjamin’s legacy is reclaimed
for the present evokes one of Arendt’s most famous political metaphors:
In The Human Condition she imagines a table “located between those
who sit around it.” 35 The “in-between” created by Arendt’s table, would,
however, be very different from Agamben’s. In Arendt’s scene, this table,
surrounded by those who share a common concern for what both separates
and relates them, is not an empty spot but the world itself.
Notes
1
Jürgen Habermas, “Bewußtmachende oder rettende Kritik: Die Aktualität Walter
Benjamins,” in Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins: Aus Anlaß des 80. Geburtstags
von Walter Benjamin, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1972), 173–223; “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity
of Walter Benjamin,” New German Critique 17 (Spring, 1979): 30–59.
2
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” Cardozo
Law Review 11.919 (1992): 1045.
3
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 1999), 171. Further references to this work are cited in the text
using the abbreviation P and the page number.
4
Scholem writes: “Thus in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived
in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably
accomplished” (emphasis by Scholem). Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea
in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 35.