GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART TWO
History

§ 9 Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption
I
"Walter Benjamin and His Angel" is the title of an essay published in 1972 in which Gershom Scholem proposes a remarkable reading of a brief and exemplary prose work by Benjamin, "Agesilaus Santander". In this important interpretation, Scholem argues that the apparent luminosity of the figure of the angel--which, as has often been noted, has particular significance in Benjamin's thought--hides the dark, demonic traits of "Angelus Satanas". This unexpected metamorphosis casts a melancholic light on the entire horizon of Benjamin's reflections on the philosophy of history, in which the angel plays its properly redemptive role.
In entitling my essay "Walter Benjamin and the Demonic", I intend to complete and, in a certain sense, also rectify the interpretation offered by the scholar of Jerusalem, seeking to leave Benjamin's text open to another possible reading. The aim of my essay, nevertheless, is not to revise Scholem's interpretation. Rather, it seeks to trace the fundamental (and for now provisional) lines of Benjamin's ethics. Here the word "ethics" is intended in the sense it had when it made its appearance in the Greek philosophical schools as a "doctrine of happiness." For the Greeks, the link between the demonic (daimonion) and happiness was evident in the very term with which they designated happiness, eudaimonia. In the text that is at issue here, moreover, Benjamin ties the figure of the angel precisely to an idea of happiness, which he states in the following terms: "He wants happiness: the conflict in which lies the ecstasy of the unique, new, as yet unlived with that bliss of the 'once more,' the having again, the lived." 1
It is this double figure of happiness, which Benjamin elsewhere characterizes through the opposition of the hymn and the elegy, 2 that I will seek to delineate. If we keep in mind that, in the Second Thesis of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History", happiness (Glück) and redemption (Erlöusung) are inseparable, we may argue that the presentation of Benjamin's theories of happiness can proceed only by means of a clarification of Benjamin's ideas on the philosophy of history, which have at their very center the concept of redemption.
II
The leading theme of the reading Scholem gives of Benjamin's text is the deciphering of the "secret name" Agesilaus Santander as an anagram for der Angelus Satanas. This ingenious hypothesis, formulated by a scholar with incomparable experience in the Cabalistic tradition, can be neither rejected nor confirmed in itself. Every hermeneutic conjecture of this kind has above all a divinatory character and, as such, cannot be verified in itself. As an eminent philologist once wrote, citing a phrase of Heidegger's, when one is confronted with a hermeneutic circle, what is important is not to leave it but to stay within it in the right way. What can, however, be verified in a hypothesis is whether its construction is necessary, that is, whether it economically explains the text without leaving unresolved the most problematic aspects and contradicting what we already know of the author's thought. Now, the anagrammatic decryption of the Satanic name behind the apparently anodyne name of Agesilaus Santander is so determining for the reading Scholem gives of the whole fragment that before he formulates the decryption in Part Four, Scholem has already projected its disquieting shadow on the image of the angel. On page 211 we thus read: "at that time," that is, in the period immediately following Benjamin's acquisition of Klee Angelus Novus, "Benjamin did not yet connect any Satanic-Luciferian thoughts with the picture." One page later, the foreshadowing is repeated in analogous terms: "The angel, not yet sunk in melancholy as he was later to be . . ." By page 213, the "Luciferian element" in Benjamin's meditations on Klee's painting is treated as a given. This element, indeed, indicates the picture's non-Jewish origin: "The Luciferian element, however, entered Benjamin's meditations on Klee's picture not directly from the Jewish tradition, but rather from the occupation with Baudelaire that fascinated him for so years. The Luciferian element of the beauty of the Satanic, stemming from this side of Benjamin's interests, comes out often enough in his writings and notes" (p. 213 ). Even if the adjective "Satanic" actually appears in the texts that Scholem cites at this point, nevertheless one should note that it is in no way tied to the figure of the angel. And as to the Baudelairean origin of the Luciferian elements in Benjamin's thought, we should not forget that in a letter to Theodor Adorno, Benjamin wrote, "I will let my Christian Baudelaire be taken into heaven by nothing but Jewish angels." 3 That this statement is to be taken literally is suggested by the fact that Benjamin immediately added that these angels let Baudelaire fall "shortly before his entrance into Glory," where "Glory" is the technical term Kabod, which designates the manifestation of divine presence in Jewish mysticism.
At the end of the passage that we have cited, Scholem has already fully anticipated his Luciferian reading of "Agesilaus Santander" without having demonstrated its validity with any precise textual reference: "The anthropomorphous nature of Klee's angel, now changing into the Luciferian, is no longer present when one (perhaps two) years later he [ Benjamin] wrote the piece concerning us here" (p. 214 ).
By the time Scholem announces his anagrammatic hypothesis in the following chapter, Benjamin's entire text has already been immersed in a demonic light, and a Luciferian element is present in its every detail. If Benjamin writes that the angel--it is worth remembering that in this text Benjamin always speaks only of an angel--"sent his feminine form after the masculine one reproduced in the picture by way of the longest, most fatal detour, even though both happened to be, without knowing it, most intimately adjacent to each other" (p. 207 ), this is interpreted in the sense that "the angel, in this a genuine Satanas, wanted to destroy Benjamin" (p. 221 ). Here Scholem takes no notice of the fact that this association of the feminine element with the Satanic element is in no way implied by Benjamin's text; indeed, his interpretation goes so far as to affirm that Benjamin discerned a Satanic element in the very two figures ( Jula Cohn and Asja Lacis, according to Scholem) that he most dearly loved.
III
Only at this point does Scholem briefly pause to consider the one trait in Benjamin's text that authorizes his interpretation of the Satanic sense of the figure of the angel. "The Satanic character of the angel," Scholem states, "is emphasized by the metaphor of his claws and knife-sharp wings, which could find support in the depiction of Klee's picture. No angel, but only Satan, possesses claws and talons, as is, for example, expressed in the widespread notion that on the Sabbath witches kiss the clawed hands of Satan" (pp. 222 -23).
Here we must first make an iconological correction. The statement that "no angel, but only Satan, possesses claws and talons" is not exact. There is no doubt that, according to a widespread iconographic tradition, Satan has claws (among other animal deformities). But the figuration of Satan that is at issue in such cases has lost every angelic connotation; it is simply the frightening, diabolical figure familiar to us through innumerable iconographic (above all, Christian) variations. The images to which Scholem refers present Satan in a purely diabolical role and often represent sabbat witches kissing his hands (or, more often, a different and shameful part of the body, as in the rite of osculum infame).
In the European iconographic tradition, there is only one figure that brings together purely angelic characteristics and the demonic trait of claws. This figure, however, is not Satan but Eros, Love. According to a descriptive model that we find for the first time in Plutarch (who attributes "fangs and claws" to Eros), but that is well documented in certain infrequent but exemplary iconographic appearances, Love is represented as a winged (and often feminine) angelic figure with claws. Love appears as such both in Giotto's allegory of chastity and in the fresco in the castle of Sabbionara (according to the model of what Erwin Panofsky supposed to be a "base and mythographic Cupid"), as well as in the two figures of angels with claws flanking the mysterious winged feminine figure in the Lovers as Idolators at the Louvre, attributed to the Maestro of San Martino. 4
Benjamin's figure of the angel with claws and wings can therefore lead us only into the domain of Eros, that is, not a demon in the JudeoChristian sense, but a daimאn in the Greek sense (in Plato, Eros appears as the demon par excellence). This is all the more probable if one considers the fact that Benjamin was aware of this specific iconographic type and, in particular, of Giotto's allegory. In his Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin speaks of the "representation of Cupid by Giotto, 'as a demon of wantonness with a bat's wings and claws.'" 5
A passage from Benjamin's notes to his essay on Karl Kraus proves be yond the shadow of a doubt that for Benjamin, the angel is in no sense to be considered a Satanic figure: "One must already have measured the poverty of Herr Keuner with Bertolt Brecht and glimpsed the clawed feet [Krallenfüße] of Klee's Angelus Novus--that angel-thief who would rather free humans by taking from them than make them happy by giving to them." 6 (In the definitive version of the essay, the detail of the clawed feet has been removed along with the reference to Brecht; one reads only that "One must have . . . seen Klee New Angel, who preferred to free men by taking from them, rather than make them happy by giving to them, to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.") 7 The claws of Angelus Novus (in Klee's painting, the angel's feet certainly bring to mind a bird of prey) do not, therefore, have a Satanic meaning; instead, they characterize the destructive--and simultaneously liberating--power of the angel.
We have now established a correspondence between the clawed angel of "Agesilaus Santander" and the liberating angel who, at the end of the essay on Kraus, celebrates his victory over the demon "at the point where origin and destruction meet." But what then disappears is precisely the support of the one textual element that seemed to suggest the secret Luciferian nature of the angel in "Agesilaus Santander." This does not mean that Scholem's interpretation is erroneous but, rather, that there is all the more reason to measure its validity only on the basis of its capacity to explain economically the most problematic aspects of Benjamin's text.
IV
Scholem's interpretation, however, is insufficient on just this matter. We have already cited the passage in which Benjamin speaks of a feminine figure of the angel in addition to the male figure of the painting. Scholem's interpretation offers no substantial clarification of these two figures of the angel (which, Benjamin says, were once united). It is certainly possible that on the biographical level, the "feminine figure" refers here to Jula Cohn (a possibility not precluded by one of Benjamin's letters, discovered since the composition of Scholem's essay, that shows he was referring to a woman whom he knew at Ibiza and who has not yet been identified). But the claim that the angel is linked to a Satanic element is unconvincing on the biographical level and, most importantly, in no way clarifies the double figure of the angel that is at issue on the tex tual level. In the Jewish tradition, moreover, the feminine figuration of the "other part" par excellence is Lilith, that is, a figure altogether distinct from Satan.
Nevertheless, the tradition of Jewish mysticism could have furnished material for extremely interesting comparisons precisely here. Those who have in some way studied Jewish mysticism--in particular those who have read the magnificent books that Scholem dedicated to its resurrection--are familiar with the representation of the Shechinah as the feminine moment of divinity and of divine presence in the world. In a passage of the Zohar that is particularly significant for us, the Shechinah is identified with the saving angel of Genesis 14:16 and characterized as both male and female. Let us read this passage, which I cite in the version offered by Scholem in his book On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead:
This is the angel who is sometimes male and sometimes female. For when he channels blessings to the world, he is male and is called male; just as the male bestows [fecundating] blessings upon the female, so does he bestow blessings upon the world. But when his relationship to the world is that of judgment [i.e., when he manifests himself in his restrictive power as judge], then he is called female. Just as female is pregnant with the embryo, so is he pregnant with judgment, and is then called female. 8
From this perspective, the feminine figure of the angel in "Agesilaus Santander" not only does not appear as a Satanic apparition but could even be seen as a figure of the Shechinah in its judging role, while the male figure would be the other, benevolent face of the same saving angel. 9 Insofar as the Shechinah designates the sphere of redemption, which in the Cabala is the proper dimension of happiness, the Cabalists call the Shechinah (in terms that recall the last lines of "Agesilaus Santander") "the eternal present," or the "return," since everything that had its beginning in it must ultimately return to it. 10
V
Scholem invokes another important Jewish parallel (which is in fact not only Jewish) when he notes the "conception of Jewish tradition of the personal angel of each human being who represents the latter's secret self and whose name nevertheless remains hidden from him" ( On Jews, p. 213) and when he writes further on, "in the phantasmagoria of his imagina tion, the picture of the Angelus Novus becomes for Benjamin a picture of his angel as the occult reality of his self" (p. 229 ). The last part of Scholem's study ties the figure of the angel in "Agesilaus Santander" to the angel of history in the Ninth Thesis of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History". "Here", Scholem writes, " Benjamin's personal angel, who stands between past and future and causes him to journey back 'whence I came,' has turned into the angel of history, in a new interpretation of Klee's picture" (p. 232 ). Yet the same melancholic light that the decipherment of the angel's Satanic name casts on Agesilaus Santander" now bathes the angel of history of the "Theses." This angel, according to Scholem, "is, then, basically a melancholy figure, wrecked by the immanence of history. . . . It is a matter of dispute whether one can speak here--as I am rather inclined to do--of a melancholy, indeed desperate, view of history" (pp. 234 -35). Benjamin would thus have wanted "to divide up the function of the Messiah as crystallized by the view of history of Judaism: into that of the angel who must fail in his task, and that of the Messiah who can accomplish it" (p. 235 ).
This interpretation is clearly at odds with Benjamin's own text, which ties the figure of the angel precisely to the idea of happiness. The angel, we read in the passage that we have already cited, "wants happiness: the conflict in which lies the ecstasy of the unique, new, as yet unlived with that bliss of the 'once more,' the having again, the lived" (p. 208 ). Moreover, if Benjamin's angel is "a melancholy figure, wrecked by the immanence of history," why is it said of him in "Agesilaus Santander" that on his return he "he takes a new human being along with him" (p. 208 )? It is even more significant that Scholem's interpretation contrasts with another text by Benjamin that is particularly important for the problem of interest to us here. We refer to the "Theologico-Political Fragment," which Scholem dates to around 1920-21 and which Adorno instead attributes to the last years of Benjamin's life. In this text, the messianic order is certainly distinguished from that of happiness, but it is the order of happiness--and not the messianic order--that has the function of a guiding idea for the profane--historical order. Precisely because the Messiah fulfills every historical event, Benjamin says, nothing historical can claim to refer to the messianic, since the reign of God is not goal but end. Hence the rejection of the political sense of theocracy; but hence too the statement that the profane order must be founded on the idea of happiness (this, Benjamin writes, is why the relation of the order of happiness to the messianic order is one of the essential theoretical problems of the philosophy of history). The profane-historical order of happiness is in no way opposed to the messianic order; instead, the one makes the occurrence of the other possible. "For in happiness," Benjamin writes,
all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in good fortune is its downfall destined to find it. . . . To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism. 11
If it is true that one must identify the angel who wants happiness in "Agesilaus Santander" with the angel of history in the Ninth Thesis, then this angel cannot be the melancholic and Luciferian figure of a shipwreck. Rather, he must be a bright figure who, in the strict solidarity of happiness and historical redemption, establishes the very relation of the profane order to the messianic that Benjamin identified as one of the essential problems of the philosophy of history.
VI
In order to find elements for a further clarification of Benjamin's text, we must now therefore turn with greater attention to the image of the personal angel briefly evoked by Scholem. Here we find ourselves before an extremely rich and yet coherent tradition, which is present not only in Judaism but also (as idios daimōn) in Neoplatonic mysticism, late-ancient hermeticism, gnosticism, and early Christianity, and which also has precise counterparts in Iranian and Muslim angelology. Scholem dedicated an exemplary essay to this tradition, which he entitled "Tselem: The Concept of the Astral Body"; 12 but decisive material is also furnished by the works of Henry Corbin, the great scholar of Iranian and Arabic mysticism (as well as the first French translator of Heidegger). Here we will seek to delineate in brief the essential physiognomic traits of this doctrine.
In the first place we find a fusion of the ancient pagan and Neoplatonic motif of the idios daimōn of every man with the Jewish motif of the ce lestial image, demuth or zelem, in whose image each man is created. The Cabalists interpret the passage of Genesis 1:27, according to which "God created man in his own zelem, in the zelem of God created he him" (which the Vulgate translates as creavit deus hominem ad imaginem suum: ad imaginem dei creavit illum), in the sense that the second zelem designates the originary angelic form (and, later, astral body) in the image of which each man is created. Thus we read in the Zohar:
When a man begins to consecrate himself before intercourse with his wife with a sacred intention, a holy spirit is aroused above him, composed of both male and female. And the Holy One, blessed be He, directs an emissary who is in charge of human embryos, and assigns to him this particular spirit, and indicates to him the place to which it should be entrusted. This is the meaning of "The night said, a man-child has been conceived" ( Job 3:3). "The night said" to this particular emissary, "a man-child has been conceived" by so-andso. And the Holy One, blessed be He, then gives this spirit all the commands that He wishes to give, and they have already explained this. Then the spirit descends together with the image [tselem], the one in whose likeness [diyokna] [the spirit] existed above. With this image [man] grows; with this image he moves through the world. This is meaning of "Surely man walks with an image" ( Ps. 39:7). While this image is with him, man survives in the world. . . . A man's days exist through the image, and are dependent on it. 13
The angel-zelem therefore constitutes a kind of alter ego, a celestial double and originary image in which each man existed in heaven and which also accompanies man on earth (this is also the case in the Neoplatonic doctrine of idios daimōn, which, in Iamblichus's words, "exists as a paradigm before the soul descends into generation"). From our point of view, what is important is the link between this theme, which concerns, so to speak, the prehistory and preexistence of man, and prophetic and redemptive motifs, which concern the destiny and salvation of man--or, in other words, his history and posthistory. According to a doctrine that can be found in both Cabalistic texts and hermetic writings, the vision of one's own angel coincides with prophetic ecstasy and supreme knowledge. In a Cabalistic anthology that dates from the end of the thirteenth century (Shushan Sodoth), prophecy appears as a sudden vision of one's own double: "The complete secret of prophecy . . . consists in the fact that the prophet suddenly sees the form of his self standing before him, and he forgets his own self and ignores it . . . and that form speaks with him and tells him the future." 14 In another Cabalistic text ( Isaac Cohen, c. 1270), prophetic experience is described as a metamorphosis of man into his own angel: "In the prophet and seer, all kinds of potencies become weakened and change from form to form, until he enwraps himself in the potency of the form that appears to him, and then his potency is changed into the form of an angel." 15
This vision of one's own angelic self concerns not only prophetic knowledge. According to a tradition found in Gnostic, Manichaean, Jewish, and Iranian texts, it constitutes the supreme soteriological and messianic experience. In the Arabic treatise Picatrix, which exerted considerable influence on Renaissance hermeticism, the angel appears as a form of an extraordinarily beautiful figure who, when questioned by the philosopher about its proper identity, answers: "I am your perfect nature." A Mandaean text describes the redemptive encounter with the angel in the following terms: "I go to meet my image, and my image comes to meet me; it embraces me and pulls me close when I leave prison." And in the "Song of the Pearl" in the Acts of Thomas, the prince who returns at the end to his Western homeland rediscovers his image as a bright garment: "the garment suddenly appeared before me as a mirror of myself. I saw it entirely in me, and I was entirely in it; for we were two, separated the one from the other, and yet we were one, similar in form." 16
In this regard it is also worth noting the Iranian theme of Daênâ. Daênâ is the angel who confronts every man after death in the form of a young woman appearing as both every man's archetypal image and the result of the actions he committed on earth. In the figure of Daênâ, origin and redemption as well as the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of salvation are thus joined in the idea of a new birth on the last day, a birth in which the generator and the generated are identified and produce each other. "The generation of Daênâ through and in the human soul as the soul's action," Corbin writes,
is at the same time the generation of the soul in and through the angel Daênâ. . . . There remains the idea of an eschatological sacred marriage accomplished in novissimo die, the mystery of a new birth in which a being is generated in the image of a celestial double. . . . These themes are to be found every time the fracture of a primordial celestial-terrestrial couple states the mystery of the origin. The restoration of its bi-unity, its duality, is then suggested as the rule for an interior ethics confirmed precisely by the encounter and eschatological recognition of man and his angel. 17
In this horizon it is possible to understand how the zelem-angel is also charged with a messianic meaning in Jewish mysticism, where it appears as the astral body assumed by the soul at the moment of death, in its return to Paradise. In the figure of the angel, the origin truly appears as constructed by its history; prophetic experience and messianic experience are identified. It is evident that such a figure could have exerted great force on a thinker such as Benjamin, who appropriated Kraus's motto, "origin is the goal."
It is in this complex background that we must situate both the epiphany of the angel described in "Agesilaus Santander" and the angelic figure of the Ninth Thesis. In this context, the encounter with the angel appears not as a Satanic illusion or melancholic allegory of a shipwreck but, on the contrary, as the cipher by which Benjamin registered what was for him humankind's most difficult historical task and most perfect experience of happiness. At this point we can abandon the figure of the angel and turn to the true goal of this chapter, the presentation of Benjamin's concepts of happiness and the philosophy of history. For according to an intention that deeply characterizes Benjamin's thought, only where the esoteric and the everyday, the mystical and the profane, theological categories and materialistic categories are wholly identified can knowledge truly be adequate to its tasks.
VII
Before I begin this presentation, however, I must briefly pause to consider a text in which it is truly possible to say that Benjamin drew from the history not of angelology but of demonology. I refer to the essay on Karl Kraus, one of whose sections bears the title "Demon." The demonic figure at issue here is a point of convergence for a number of motifs-from the Socratic daimonion to its resurrection in Goethe and to Ludwig Bachofen's idea of a pre-ethical state of humanity--that had already appeared many times in Benjamin's work.
In an early text (from 1916), the demonic light that would shine on Karl Kraus in the 1931essay instead illuminates the face of Socrates. Benjamin speaks of the "demonic indistinction" of sexual concepts and spiritual concepts that characterizes Socratic discourse. In the 1919 essay "Fate and Character," Benjamin speaks of the "demonic stage of human existence when legal statutes determined not only men's relationships but also their relation to the gods" and of "demonic fate," which is overcome in tragedy, where "the head of genius lifted itself for the first time from the mist of guilt." 18 In the 1921 essay "Critique of Violence," the dominant trait of the demonic sphere is ambiguity, and this ambiguity is also the mark of law. In Benjamin's great study Of 1921-22 on Elective Affinities, Goethe's particular concept of the "demonic" (that is, an "inconceivable" and "frightening reality" that is neither divine nor human, neither angelic nor diabolic) appears as the mark of mythic humanity and its anguish in the face of death; and this concept is submitted to a critique that finds in it the cipher of Goethe's ethical insufficiency.
In all these texts, the concept of the demonic refers to a prehistorical state of human community dominated by law and guilt, along with a state that is both prereligious and pre-ethical. Here Benjamin probably took as his point of departure Konrad Theodor Preuss's idea of preanimism as the prereligious phase of humanity. He most likely also drew on Bachofen's theories of the chthonic-neutonic moment and the ethereal promiscuity symbolized by the swamp (a symbol that returns several times in Benjamin's work, noticeably in the essay on Kafka).
All these motifs are clearly present in the essay on Kraus, published ten years later. The dark background in which Kraus's image appears is neither the contemporary world nor the ethical world but rather, we read, the "pre-historic world or the world of the demon." Furthermore, "nothing is understood about this man until it has been perceived that, of necessity and without exception, everything . . . falls within the sphere of justice." 19 Yet precisely at this point Benjamin introduces a peculiar trait that (while not among those listed by Scholem as Jewish elements in his friend's thought) can only originate in Jewish demonology. The solidarity of spirit and sex is defined on the one hand as the spirit's maxim and on the other as onanism: "spirit and sex move in this sphere with a solidarity whose law is ambiguity." 20 A little later Benjamin says that the demon comes into the world "as a hybrid of spirit and sex." In his preparatory notes, this trait of onanism is explicitly affirmed, and in a sketch Benjamin opposes it to Platonic love insofar as it is the identity of body and language, pleasure and the spirit's maxim. 21
What is the origin of the demon's attribute of onanism, and in what sense can Benjamin say that the demon comes into the world as a hybrid of spirit and sex? These questions can be answered by Jewish demonology. According to the talmudic tradition, demons are pure spirits who, having been created by God on Friday evening at dusk, could no longer receive bodies, for the Sabbath had already begun. From then onwards, demons have insistently attempted to procure themselves bodies and therefore seek out men, trying to induce them to perform sexual acts without a female partner, so as to make a body with unused human semen.
Here the demon is truly a hybrid of pure spirit and pure sex, and it is clear why he can be associated with onanism. Developing these ideas, later Cabalists wrote that when a man dies, all the children he illegitimately fathered with demons in the course of his life appear and participate in a funereal lament:
For all those spirits that have built their bodies from a drop of his seed regard him as their father. And so, especially on the day of his burial, he must suffer punishment; for while he is being carried to the grave, they swarm around him like bees, crying: "You are our father," and they complain and lament behind his bier, because they have lost their home and are now being tormented along with the other demons which hover [bodiless] in the air. 22
The figure of the demon in Benjamin's essay on Kraus thus originates in this dark demonic phantasmagoria as well as in the realm of prehistoric humanity. Yet in a striking movement, these spectral traits now become positive. Here the swarm of unborn spirits who, according to Jewish demonology, raise their cries of lamentation and accusation before the coffin of the dead, is transformed into Kraus's implacable "demonic" figure, who confronts humanity with the cry of "the eternally renewed, the uninterrupted lament." 23
In the face of the lies of the false, dominant humanism, the demon is the cipher of a guilty humanity that denounces its own guilt to the point of accusing the very legal order to which it belongs. It does so not in the name of redeemed humanity and liberated nature but in the name, Benjamin says, "of an archaic nature without history, in its pristine, primeval state.""His idea of freedom," he writes, "is not removed from the realm of guilt that he has traversed from pole to pole: from spirit to sexuality." 24
This is the reason--the only reason--why the demon must be overcome in the end. The one who carries him to his grave is not a new man but an inhuman being--a new angel. "Neither purity nor sacrifice," Benjamin states, "mastered the demon; but where origin and destruction come together, his rule is over." 25 In his preparatory notes, Benjamin clarifies this concept in the following manner: "Transfiguration, as the state of the creature in the origin, and destruction, as the power of justice, now master the demon." 26 The new angel, who makes his appearance at the point at which origin and destruction meet, is therefore a destructive figure whom the claws of "Agesilaus Santander" suit well. Yet he is not a demonic figure but rather "the messenger of a more real humanism." 27
We are now at last in a position to examine the categories of the philosophy of history that we wished to investigate.
VIII
Benjamin describes the link between happiness and redemption in the Second Thesis of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. 28
In this passage, the concept of happiness is inextricably linked to the concept of redemption, which has the past as its object. There can be no happiness that has not reckoned with this task, which the thesis presents as a "secret agreement" between the past generations and our own. In these statements, which situate the central problem of happiness in relation to the past, there is a profound and decisive intuition that we also find both in the angel's gaze, which is directed toward the past, and in Benjamin's reflections on historical consciousness. But what does Benjamin mean here by redemption, Erlösung? What does it mean to redeem the past?
An answer can be found in the next thesis, in which we read, "only a redeemed humanity receives the fullness of its past." This means, Benjamin adds, that "only for a redeemed humanity has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour--and that day is judgment Day." 29
When it is truly redeemed and truly saved, humanity is therefore in possession of its past. But for humanity to be in possession of it, Benjamin says, is for it to be able to cite it. How are we to understand "citation" here?
The elements for an answer can be found in the brief theory of citation that Benjamin presents in the last part of his Kraus essay. Here citation appears as an eminently destructive procedure whose task is "not to shelter, but to purify, to rip out of context, to destroy." Its destructive force, however, is that of justice; to the very degree to which citation tears speech from its context, destroying it, it also returns it to its origin. This is why Benjamin writes that in citation, origin and destruction merge and (in the passage cited above) that what masters the demon are "transfiguration, as the state of the creature in the origin" and "destruction, as the power of justice."
If we apply this theory of citation to the possibility of citing the past in each of its moments, a possibility that constitutes the defining characteristic of redeemed humanity, then historical redemption appears as inseparable from the capacity to tear the past from its context, destroying it, in order to return it, transfigured, to its origin. Here we have an image of redemption that is certainly not consolatory; indeed, in this light it is comprehensible that Benjamin, in a note to the "Theses," speaks of a "liberation of the destructive forces that are contained in the thought of redemption." 30
The return to the origin that is at issue here thus in no way signifies the reconstruction of something as it once was, the reintegration of something into an origin understood as a real and eternal figure of its truth. Such a task is precisely that of the historical consciousness Benjamin attributes to historicism, which is the principle target of the "Theses." "Historicism," he writes, "gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past." 31 Benjamin's criticism of historicism and its representation of continuous and homogenous time (which Benjamin opposes to a messianic interruption of becoming) has been analyzed and repeated countless times, to the point of becoming a commonplace. Yet interpreters have not dared to draw the extreme consequences implied by the unique experience of the past that is at issue here. Only occasionally have they posed the simple question, "What happens to the redeemed past?" The temptation to bend Benjamin's categories in the direction of a historiographical practice was great, and Benjamin's thought has all too often been assimilated to the domi nant doctrine that conceives of the task of history writing as the recuperation of alternative heredities that must then be consigned to cultural tradition. The idea that is presupposed in this practice is that the tradition of the oppressed classes is, in its goals and in its structures, altogether analogous to the tradition of the ruling classes (whose heir it would be); the oppressed class, according to this theory, would differ from the ruling classes only with respect to its content.
According to Benjamin, by contrast--and the radicality of his thought lies here--to redeem the past is not to restore its true dignity, to transmit it anew as an inheritance for future generations. He argues against this idea so clearly as to leave no doubts: "In authentic history writing," we read, "the destructive impulse is just as strong as the saving impulse. From what can something be redeemed? Not so much from the disrepute or discredit in which it is held as from a determined mode of its transmission. The way in which it is valued as 'heritage' is more insidious than its disappearance could ever be." 32 For Benjamin, what is at issue is an interruption of tradition in which the past is fulfilled and thereby brought to its end once and for all. For humanity as for the individual human, to redeem the past is to put an end to it, to cast upon it a gaze that fulfills it. "Redemption," we read in a note to the essay on Kafka, "is not a compensation for existence, but rather its only way out." 33 In the essay on Eduard Fuchs we find the following lines: "[The history of culture] may well increase the burden of the treasures that are piled up on humanity's back. But it does not give humankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them." 34
Benjamin therefore has in mind a relation to the past that would both shake off the past and bring it into the hands of humanity, which amounts to a very unusual way of conceiving of the problem of tradition. Here tradition does not aim to perpetuate and repeat the past but to lead it to its decline in a context in which past and present, content of transmission and act of transmission, what is unique and what is repeatable are wholly identified. In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin once formulated this problem with reference to Kafka in the paradoxical terms of "tradition failing ill"; 35 Kafka, he wrote, renounced the truth to be transmitted for the sake of not renouncing its transmissibility. Here the two Jewish categories of Halakhah (which designates the law in itself, truth insofar as it is separated from all narration) and Aggadah (that is, truth in its transmissibility) are played off against each other such that each abolishes the other (in the letter cited above, Benjamin says that Kafka's stories do not simply lie at the feet of doctrine as Aggadah lies beneath Halakhah, but rather "unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it"). 36 And at the end of his essay on Kafka, Benjamin expresses this particular relationship with the past and the idea of culture that follows from it in the figure of "students without writing": Bucephalus the horse, who has survived his mythical rider, and Sancho Panza, who has succeeded in distracting his knight and forcing him to walk in front of him. "Whether it is a man or a horse," Benjamin concludes, "is no longer so important, if only the burden is removed from the back." 37
Those who see the angel of history in Benjamin's Ninth Thesis as a melancholic figure would therefore most likely be horrified to witness what would happen if the angel, instead of being driven forward by the winds of progress, paused to accomplish his work. Here Benjamin's intention is not very different from the one Marx expressed in a phrase that exerted a profound influence on Benjamin. In the introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, considering the fact that in the course of history every event tends to be represented as a comedy, Marx asks: "Why does history take this course?" Marx answers: "So that humanity may happily separate itself from its past."
From this perspective, Benjamin's theory of happiness once again shows its coherence with his philosophy of history. In the "Theologico-Political Fragment," the idea of happiness appears precisely as what allows the historical order to reach its own fulfillment. The worldly restitutio in integrum, which is properly historical redemption and which is determined as the task of world politics, "corresponds to a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of messianic nature, is happiness." 38
IX
If these reflections leave no doubt as to the radicality and destructive forces implicit in Benjamin's idea of redemption, this is nevertheless not to say that we are confronted here by a pure and simple liquidation of the past. (The two metaphors of the origin show their difference here, "redemption" being a final, absolving payment and "liquidation" being a transformation into available funds.)
Today we are confronted by two forms of historical consciousness. On the one hand, there is the form of consciousness that understands all human work (and the past) as an origin destined to an infinite process of transmission that preserves its intangible and mythic singularity. And on the other hand, there is the form of consciousness that, as the inverted specular image of the first form of consciousness, irresponsibly liquidates and flattens out the singularity of the origin by forever multiplying copies and simulacra. These two attitudes are only apparently opposed; in reality, they are merely the two faces of a cultural tradition in which the content of transmission and transmission itself are so irreparably fractured that it can only ever repeat the origin infinitely or annul it in simulacra. In each case, the origin itself can be neither fulfilled nor mastered. The idea of origin contains both singularity and reproducibility, and as long as one of the two remains in force, every intention to overcome both is doomed to fail.
In Louis Auguste Blanqui's and Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return, Benjamin (perhaps unjustly) sees precisely the cipher of this "bewitched image of history," in which humanity tries to hold together "the two antinomical principles of happiness--that is, that of eternity and of the onemore-time." 39 According to Benjamin, humanity thereby succeeds only in inflicting upon itself die Strafe des Nachsitzens, that is, the punishment given to schoolchildren that consists in having to copy out the same text countless times. But it is worth emphasizing that Benjamin discerns the revolutionary value that is implicit in the image of the eternal return insofar as it exasperates mythic repetition to the point of finally bringing it to a halt. "The thought of the eternal return," he writes, "breaks the ring of the eternal return in the very moment in which it confirms it." 40 "It represents unconditional submission," Benjamin states, "but at the same time the most terrible accusation against a society that has reflected this image of the cosmos as a projection of itself onto the heavens." 41
At this point the dialectic of the singular and the repeatable to which Benjamin entrusts his philosophy of history and his ethics must necessarily reckon with the categories of origin, Idea, and phenomenon that he develops in the "Epistemological-Critical Preface" to The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. The redemption of the past, moreover, must be compared to the Platonic salvation of phenomena that is at issue in that text. The more one analyzes Benjamin's thought, the more it appears-contrary to a common impression--to be animated by a rigorously sys tematic intention (as Benjamin once wrote of another philosopher usually thought to be fragmentary, Friedrich Schlegel).
Here Benjamin conceives of origin not as a logical category but as a historical one:
Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it 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. There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fully, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development. The principles of philosophical contemplation are recorded in the dialectic which is inherent in origin. This dialectic shows singularity and repetition to be conditioned by one another in all essentials. The category of the origin is not, as Cohen holds, a purely logical one, but a historical one. 42
Let us pause to consider the idea of origin that Benjamin presents in this passage, which is far closer to Goethe's concept of Urphänomen than to the idea of origin to which we are accustomed. It cannot be apprehended as an event established on the level of facts, but at the same time it does not appear as a mythic archetype. Instead, Benjamin says that it acts as a vortex in the stream of becoming and that it manifests itself only through a double structure of restoration and incompleteness. In the origin, in other words, there is a dialectic that reveals every "original phenomenon" to be a reciprocal conditioning of Einmaligkeit, "onceness," we might say, and repetition. What is at play in every original phenomenon, Benjamin says, is the "figure in which an Idea confronts [auseinandersetzt] the historical world, until it is completed in the totality of its history." Here the theory of the origin shows its ties to the theory of Ideas presented in Benjamin's preface.
What is essential for this theory is the intention by which the exposition of the Ideas and the salvation of the phenomena are simultaneous and merge in a single gesture. An Auseinandersetzung, a reciprocal posi tion of the Idea and the historical totality of phenomena, is accomplished in this gesture. "In the science of philosophy," Benjamin writes, "the concept of Being" at issue in the Idea "is not satisfied by the phenomenon until it has consumed all its history." 43 In this consummation, the phenomenon does not remain what it was (that is, a singularity); rather, it "becomes what it was not--totality." 44 Here we find the same interpenetrating of "transfiguration, as the creature's form in the origin" and "destruction, as the power of justice" that we already discerned as one of the characteristics of historical redemption. To save phenomena in the Idea (to expose the Idea in phenomena) is to show them in their historical consummation, as a fulfilled totality. To show this in the work of art is the task of criticism. In historical knowledge it is the task of prophecy. This is why Benjamin writes, "criticism and prophecy must be the two categories that meet in the salvation of the past." 45 And just as in the artwork, in which the exposition of the Idea that saves the work corresponds to the "mortification" by which the "multiplicity of the work is extinguished," so, in the redemption of the past, transfiguration in the origin coincides with the power of destructive justice, which consumes the historical totality of phenomena.
X
If we now return to the image of the angel with which this chapter began, we can find in it more than casual analogies with the ideas of origin and redemption that we have just delineated.
We have seen that the angel is the originary image in the likeness of which man is created and, at the same time, the consummation of the historical totality of existence that is accomplished on the last day, such that in its figure origin and end coincide. Likewise, the reduction to the origin that takes place in redemption is also the consummation of historical totality. The fact that Benjamin often writes that this redemption takes place in a "dialectical image" does not distance us from angelology but, on the contrary, leads us to its very center. In its essence, the dialectical image "flashes." It is the "involuntary memory of redeemed humanity." 46 " The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is no longer seen again," we read in the Fifth Thesis. 47 This is why the redemption that it accomplishes can be grasped "always only as losing itself in the unrcdecmable." 48
Does this mean that redemption fails and that nothing is truly saved?
Not exactly. What cannot be saved is what was, the past as such. But what is saved is what never was, something new. This is the sense of the "transfiguration" that takes place in the origin. In the "Epistemological-Critical Preface," Benjamin states this explicitly: the phenomenon that is saved in the Idea "becomes what it was not-totality." In a note that bears the title "The Dialectical Image" ("Das dialektische Bild"), the method of historical knowledge is stated in this phrase: "to read what was never written." 49 just as, in the end, the angel that comes to meet man is not an original image but the image that we ourselves have formed by our own actions, so in historical redemption what happens in the end is what never took place. This is what is saved.
It is now possible to comprehend why the angel in "Agesilaus Santander" has no hope "on the way of the return home": what he brings with him is "a new man."
Benjamin expresses this profound angelogical meaning of the dialectical image in a passage that bears the title "From a Short Speech on Proust Given on My Fortieth Birthday." Concerning involuntary memory, he writes:
Its images do not come unsummoned; rather, it is a matter of images that we have never seen before remembering. This is clearest in the case of images in which we see ourselves as we do in dreams. We stand before ourselves just as we once stood in an originary past [Urvergangenheit] that we never saw. And precisely the most important images--those developed in the darkroom of the lived moment--are what we see. One could say that our deepest moments, like some cigarette packs, are given to us together with a little image, a little photo of ourselves. And the "whole life" that is said to pass before the eyes of the person who is dying or whose life is threatened is composed of precisely these little images. They present a rapid succession, like those precursors of cinematography, the little booklets in which, as children, we could admire a boxer, a swimmer, or a tennis player in action. 50
In the paradoxical figure of this memory, which remembers what was never seen, the redemption of the past is accomplished.
There is also a similar image for happiness. For a dialectic and a polarity also inhere in happiness. It can assume "the figure of the hymn or of the elegy." In the first case, the height of beatitude is the unsatisfied, the new; in the second, it is the eternal repetition of the origin. But this dialectic is also fulfilled in a new birth, whose luminous figure Benjamin sketched in a prose work probably composed in the same period in which he wrote "Agesilaus Santander." The text bears the title "After the Achievement" ("Nach der Vollendung"):
The origin of the great work has often been considered through the image of birth. This is a dialectical image; it embraces the process from two sides. The first has to do with creative conception and concerns the feminine element in genius. The feminine is exhausted in creation. It gives life to the work and then dies away. What dies in the master alongside the achieved creation is that part of him in which the creation was conceived. But this achievement of the work--and this leads to the other side of the process--is nothing dead. It cannot be reached from the outside; refinements and improvements do not force it. It is achieved on the inside of the work itself. And here, too, one can speak of a birth. In its achievement, creation gives birth anew to the creator. Not in its feminine element, in which it was conceived, but in its masculine element. Animated, the creator overtakes nature: he owes this existence, which the creator first conceived from the dark depth of the maternal womb, to a brighter realm. The creator's homeland is not where he was born; rather, he comes into the world where his homeland is. He is the first-born mate of the work that he once conceived. 51
At this point, in which generator and generated, memory and hope, elegy and hymn, onceness and repetition exchange parts, happiness is achieved. What happens here--new angel or new man--is what never happened. But this--what has never happened--is the historical and wholly actual homeland of humanity.

Notes:
30.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 490; original in Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 589.

§9 Benjamin and the Demonic
1.
Walter Benjamin, "Agesilaus Santander," in Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser ( New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 208. Benjamin text appears in English in Scholem chapter "Walter Benjamin and His Angel." All page citations in the body of my chapter refer to this edition of Benjamin's and Scholem's works.

2.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 313.

3.
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson ( Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 612; the original is in Walter Benjamin , Briefe, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W Adorno ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 2: 825.

4.
I considered the prehistory of this iconographical type in Giorgio Agamben , Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale ( Turin: Einaudi, 1977), pp. 142-44; translated as Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald Martinez ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 119-21.

5.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne ( London: Verso, 1977), p. 226; the original is in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 399.

6.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 1112.

7.
Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott ( New York: Schocken, 1978), pp. 272-73; the original is in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 367.

8.
Moses of Leon, Zohar, quoted in Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. Joachim Neugroschel ( New York: Schocken, 1991), p. 186.

9.
From this perspective, it is possible to discern the full meaning of the fact that Benjamin had a "secret name," Benedix Schönflies, as Werner Fuld notes in his Walter Benjamin zwischen den Stühlen: Eine Biographie ( Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979). The two parts of the secret name would correspond precisely to the two faces and to the two names of the saving Shechinah angel. I do not know if it has been noted that the name Schönflies (which was Benjamin's mother's last name) is evoked by Benjamin as a name of one of the oceanids, Calliroe, in a passage of his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities concerning Ottilie's beauty. See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 183.

10.
Cf. Gershom Scholem, "Shekhina: The Feminine Element in Divinity," in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, pp. 140-96.

11.
Benjamin, Reflections, pp. 312-13; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 204.

12.
Zohar, quoted in Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, pp. 251-73.

13.
Ibid., p. 263.

14.
Shushan Sodoth, quoted in Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, p. 253.

15.
Isaac Cohen, quoted ibid., p. 259.

16.
Texts quoted in Henri Corbin, En Islam iranien ( Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 2: 294-322.

17.
Ibid., p. 322.

18.
Benjamin, Reflections, p. 307; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 174.

19.
Ibid., English p. 254 ; original p. 349.


20.
Ibid., English p. 255 ; original p. 350.


21.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 1100.

22.
Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New York: Schocken, 1996), p. 155.

23.
Benjamin, Reflections, p. 250; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 345.

24.
Ibid., English p. 259 ; original p. 354.


25.
Ibid., English p. 273 ; original p. 367.


26.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 1107.

27.
Benjamin, Reflections, p. 272; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 pt. 1, p. 366.

28.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn ( New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 253-54; the original is in Benjamin, G esammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 693-94.

29.
Ibid., English p. 254 ; original p. 694.


30.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, 3, p. 1246.

31.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 262; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 702.

32.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1242.

33.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 1230.

34.
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter ( London: Verso, 1979), p. 361; the original is in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 478.

35.
Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, p. 565; original in Benjamin , Briefe, 2: 763.

36.
Ibid., English and original.

37.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 140; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 438.

38.
Benjamin, Reflections, pp. 312-13; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 204.

39.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schroen, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1153.

40.
Ibid., p. 1152.

41.
Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, p. 549; original in Benjamin , Briefe, 2: 742

42.
Benjamin, Origin, p. 45; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 226.

43.
Ibid., English p. 47 ; original p. 228.


44.
Ibid., English p. 46 ; original p. 227.


45.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1245.

46. Ibid., p. 1233.


47.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 255; original in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 682.

48.
Ibid., original p. 682.

49.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1238.

50.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 1064.

51.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 438.