Frederic Jameson in LRBin 1995: ‘Like Kafka, Benjamin had to decide early in his life whether he was to be a Jewish writer or a German writer. The reviews show the choices he made, and in the spaces between the lines of this correspondence we can read his attempts to ward off Scholem’s over-enthusiastic embraces, even though the final decision not to emigrate to Palestine (…) seems to have been as much as anything else the result of laziness (in learning Hebrew), incompetence (in sorting out his divorce) and sheer lack of ideological commitment.’

And: ‘We must not take it here that Benjamin repudiates Bloch’s Utopian doctrine of hope and the future, which he himself shared in far more complex and internally conflictual ways.’

The Messiah may be another catastrophe.

Hope? No catastrophe, no life. Give us another catastrophe.

There is Trump as a Benjaminian messiah. Sort of.

(a sf 2191)