On the wreckage – Mark Lila in NYRB in 1995:

‘In the Sixties, however, the Adornos came under strong, generally unscrupulous, attack by members of the German New Left, who charged them with bowdlerizing Benjamin’s revolutionary Marxism. This political dispute was only intensified with the publication in 1966 of Benjamin’s selected correspondence, edited jointly by Adorno and the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem, one of Benjamin’s oldest friends.
These letters showed that although Benjamin professed to be a Marxist of sorts from the mid-Twenties on, from his first days to his last he was profoundly absorbed by theological questions. This aspect of his thought appears most clearly in his exchanges with Scholem, which make up the largest surviving portion of his correspondence. What began in Germany as a narrow squabble over Benjamin’s legacy soon became a significant controversy over the relation between political and theological ideas.
In spite of Benjamin’s lifelong preoccupation with theology and politics, English-speaking readers have largely concentrated on his literary criticism and ignored his philosophical writings, which have been central to his readers on the continent. The sorry state of English editions of his works has only perpetuated our provinciality in this regard.’

(…)

‘Walter Benjamin was born into a well-off family of Berlin Jews in 1892. His father had made a modest fortune as an auctioneer and art dealer, and later expanded it as an investor. Benjamin wrote two memoirs of his youth, “A Berlin Chronicle” and “Berlin Childhood,” bittersweet reflections on his privileged upbringing in the well-to-do western section of the city, filled with memories of promenades, cool relations with his parents, and absurd luxury. Because young Walter was somewhat sickly as a boy, his parents sent him away for two years to a provincial boarding school, one of whose directors, Gustav Wyneken, was a major force in the German Youth Movement. Benjamin soon began writing for one of the movement’s journals, Der Anfang, and remained allied with Wyneken and his Nietzschean pedagogical movement until the First World War.’

(…)

‘We learn here that young Walter, like many German Jews drawn to the early essays of Martin Buber, flirted with political Zionism in the summer of 1912. But in a letter to his friend Ludwig Strauss later that September, he wrote: “I see three Zionist forms of Jewishness: Palestine Zionism (a natural necessity); German Zionism in its halfness; and cultural Zionism, which sees Jewish values everywhere and works for them. Here I will stay, and I believe I must stay.” This would remain his position throughout his life.’

(…)

‘Scholem, too, had grown up in the bosom of the liberal Judaism of Berlin, but he was appalled by the cultural compromises it represented, with both Christmas trees and menorahs. When he received a picture of Theodor Herzl as a Christmas present one year, he was so disgusted that he began to learn Hebrew, mastering it quickly. By 1917 his family had turned him out of the house for becoming a Zionist, and he had decided to study the history of Kabbala.’

(…)

‘Statements like these are common-places in the history of philosophical Romanticism. The desire to reaffirm religious experience in the wake of Enlightenment secularism had long before been expressed in the works of Hamann, Jacobi, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. Typically, such writers turned toward a crypto-theological view of language as an alternative to Kant’s philosophy, and Benjamin followed their lead. In 1916 he wrote to Martin Buber: Every action that derives from the expansive tendency to string words together seems terrible to me….I can understand writing as such as poetic, prophetic, objective in terms of its effect, but in any case only as magical, that is as un-mediated.
To Hugo von Hofmannsthal he later remarked that “every truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in language.”’

(…)

‘Scholem shared Benjamin’s dissatisfaction with Kant and with the denatured “liberal” theology that grew up in his wake; Scholem, too, found the bourgeois pieties of Wilhelmine culture empty and stifling. But rather than turn to Romanticism, he began to study the mystical kabbalistic texts of medieval Judaism, from which he hoped to gain historical perspective on the spiritual dissatisfactions with “debased” experience, to learn how they arose in the history of religion, and to understand the reactions to them. This is the light in which he began to see Benjamin’s early writings—and it is a clarifying light.
Scholem’s research taught him that Judaism had always experienced a deep tension between the discipline of the law, which was a preparation for redemption, and a powerful messianic impulse, which regularly strained against such discipline and sought immediate, direct contact with the divine.’

(…)

‘ Hermann Cohen, the leading figure of the neo-Kantian philosophical school, was the most prominent proponent of reinterpreting Judaism as an ethical system, which he undertook in works such as The Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism(1929).
In his other writings Cohen asserted that Jews and Germans could exist harmoniously in a liberal society, which he considered Germany to be. Against this consensus an entire generation of young Jewish thinkers would rebel, some before World War I, others just after. Scholem and Benjamin belonged to this generation, as did Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, Ernst Bloch, and Leo Strauss. In their letters, Scholem and Benjamin seem very conscious of their affinities with these writers, and they discuss them frequently. Both were particularly taken with Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (1921), which they considered a significant critique of both Kantianism and liberal Judaism, and with the stories of Kafka, which offered, as Scholem later put it, “an intuitive affirmation of mystical themes which walk a fine line between religion and nihilism.”’

(…)

‘ In 1920 he published “The Critique of Violence,” a dense and not altogether successful essay on Georges Sorel’s Réflections sur la violence, which was becoming a key text for thinkers on the radical right and left. Benjamin criticizes Sorel, but he shares Sorel’s view that bourgeois life and parliamentary politics are based on an illegitimate official violence, and he proposes that a different kind of violence—a regenerative, “law-making” violence—can bring about a new social order. Less explicit about violence, but no less apocalyptic, is the short “Theologico-Political Fragment” written later that year. Here Benjamin writes that although “only the Messiah himself consummates all history,” history does not prepare for his arrival: the messianic moment comes unannounced, bringing history to an abrupt, perhaps violent stop. To strive for the passing away of the natural world is, Benjamin says here, “the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.” If Benjamin had never written another word about politics after these essays, we would probably understand him today as a proponent of that diffuse strain of vitalism in early twentieth-century Continental thought that drew many intellectuals to radical right-wing views and movements after World War I.’

(…)

‘Benjamin’s notion of criticism as alchemy, his conviction that politics is a matter of apocalyptic nihilism, and his fascination with right-wing vitalism all came together in his major work of the Twenties, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama).
Benjamin had moved to Frankfurt in 1923 to pursue the advanced degree that would have permitted him to teach in a university and to be recognized, as he later put it, as “the foremost critic of German literature.” It was a disastrous decision from nearly every standpoint. His professors were hostile to his planned dissertation on the long-neglected German “sorrow-plays” (Trauerspiele) of the seventeenth century, which they considered an idiosyncratic subject. Moreover, Benjamin seemed determined to flout every academic convention, writing in the most esoteric of styles and prefacing his book with a willfully obscure “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” that summarized his views on Plato, German idealism, Romanticism, beauty, works of art, language, and symbolism. The author himself described these indigestible pages to Scholem as a display of “unmitigated chutzpah” comprehensible only to students of Kabbala. Benjamin finally withdrew the dissertation when he was warned it would be rejected.’

(…)

‘By his own admission, Benjamin’s theological and political reflections in the Trauerspiel book were also inspired by the right-wing legal theorist (and later Nazi functionary) Carl Schmitt, whose Political Theology had just been published in 1922.
Two features of Schmitt’s work evidently attracted Benjamin. One was Schmitt’s assertion that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” The other was Schmitt’s characterization of all legal norms as resting, explicitly or implicitly, on a sovereign “decision,” which either applied rules generally to people’s actions or announced an “exception” to them. This doctrine, which came to be called decisionism, is summarized in Schmitt’s statement that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”’

(…)

‘Benjamin’s attraction to Marxism was widely shared at the time, but remains a puzzle. Although his early writings had defended the independence of a spiritual realm beyond “debased” modern experience, he now called himself a materialist; after criticizing historical progress in the name of a vague apocalyptic messianism, he now called himself a Marxist supporting Communist political action. How was this possible? Gershom Scholem thought he had the answer. As he would later write, in all messianic movements and thinkers there is a dangerous impulse to “press for the end,” to try to achieve here on earth what has been promised to us only in heaven. Religious history shows that “every attempt to realize [this impulse] tears open the abysses which lead each of its manifestations ad absurdam.”’

(…)

‘Several months after Benjamin’s suicide Hannah Arendt managed to escape from France to Spain. When she passed through Port Bou, she stopped to look for her friend’s grave but could find no trace of it. In her baggage, however, she carried a trace of the man. It was a short essay, a sort of intellectual last will and testament entitled “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which Benjamin had given her just before his attempted flight. His expressed wish was that the essay not be published, but when Adorno received the manuscript, he decided it was too important to remain in private hands. It was first printed by the Institute in a mimeographed memorial tribute to Benjamin in 1942, and has since become one of the most controversial of his writings.
The “Theses” reflect Benjamin’s apocalyptic vision of European politics in the late Thirties and his disappointment with communism’s betrayal in the Hitler-Stalin pact. He had remained stubbornly, irresponsibly silent about the Moscow show trials in the Thirties, and throughout the decade could not bring himself to criticize Stalin publicly, even after Asja Lacis had been condemned to the gulag. But Stalin’s pact with the devil finally shattered any illusions he may have had about communism’s redemptive mission. In the Twenties Benjamin had played with the ideas of divine violence, radical decisionism, and political nihilism; in the early Thirties he could still idealize the frenzy of what he called “the destructive character.” But now the real apocalypse approached, bringing with it satanic violence, not the Messiah.
At a deeper level, the “Theses” represent the last dramatic encounter between Benjamin’s theological metaphysics and his historical materialism. The essay opens with an image of the philosophy of history as a chess game, which a puppet called historical materialism can win only “if it enlists the services of theology, which today,” he says, “is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” And what can materialism learn from theology? Essentially that the idea of historical progress is an illusion, that history is nothing but a series of catastrophes piling wreckage upon wreckage, reaching up to the heavens.’

(…)

‘For genuine materialists, there can be no real tension between the sacred and profane, only between illusion and enlightenment. But for the theologically attuned this tension will continue to exist as long as we must find our way in a fallen world. They may cope with it by living within law and tradition, or they may try to abolish the tension altogether. Of these, some withdraw into an otherworldly mysticism or esotericism, some throw themselves fully into the world in hopes of redeeming it with a new law, a new gospel, or a new social order. Others, like Benjamin, flirt promiscuously with both possibilities, remaining a riddle to themselves and to all who encounter them.’

Read the article here.

Wreckage upon wreckage. If you know this, you flirt promiscuously with all possibilities.

And Benjamin’s materialism started with all too human love, as often is the case.

The state: a secularized theological concept.