Messianism without Delay: On the “Post-religious”

Political Theology of Walter Benjamin

Giacomo Marramao

1. The interpretive key to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses On the Philosophy of History” which
I intend to bring to light, can be deliberately and provocatively expressed in the title: “Mes-
sianism without Delay.” This is literally a para-doxical title which seemingly contrasts with
commonsense or current opinion with regard to those characteristics traditionally attributed
to the “messianic.” How is it possible, in a literal sense, to have a messianism without “hori-
zon of delay?” And does not the lack of a ‘wait’ constitute sufficient reason for dissolving
the very tension implied in the concept of a “messiah” itself? It is my firm conviction that
one finds hidden here the secret cipher of a text – at once translucent and enigmatic – which
can only be thoroughly grasped by reconstructing the multi-polar constellations of its con-
ceptual and symbolic referents. That is, one cannot interpret its radical political-theological
core simply as a “secularized” version of messianism (as occurs in the philosophies of
history criticized by Karl Löwith1 ): Benjamin’s brand of messianism is in equal measure
post-secular and post-religious. In short, the paradox of Benjamin’s message of redemption
lies in its position on the other side of the ambiguous Janus profile of western Futurism. It
is symbolized, on the one hand, by the promise of salvation in monotheistic religions and,
on the other, by the modern philosophy of history’s faith in progress. Hence, I will try to
illustrate how the singular figure of a “messianism without delay” is tied to the proposal of
a “concept of history” not after the end of history, but rather, after the end of the faith in
history.
2. I will begin with a passage from the last letter from Benjamin to Adorno: a precious
and intense document from a dialogue that became – despite well-known disagreements –
increasingly close (the more intimate “mein lieber Teddie” instead of the formal “Lieber
Herr Wiesengrund” with which their correspondence began on July 2, 1928 is telling in this
regard). In this letter dated August 2, 1940 – sent (an irony of fate) from Lourdes – Benjamin
seems to apply the political-theological constellation of the “Grenzfall” at the extreme hour
of his own existence, the extremus necessitatis casus: “Total uncertainty about what the
next day, the next hour will bring has ruled my existence for many weeks.”2 We have here,
together, an absolute temporal contraction and a diametrical overturning of the messianic
wait into a “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand): in the Ernstfall time carries a bi-polar
structure in which the extremes of Fear (Angst) and of Hope (Hoffnung) are hazardously
related. This is a motif that appears throughout the radical thought of the twentieth century
and which is echoed in Hölderlin’s knotty adage: “Where danger is there is salvation also.”
On the other hand, a recurring theme within the field of Benjaminian criticism argues
that Benjamin developed his idea of messianism from reading the Romantics (in particular
from Christenheit oder Europa by Novalis). This thesis is not completely correct and, on
this point, Hermann Cohen provides an invaluable reference for reconstructing the sources
and Urszenen (the symbolically prototypical scenes) of Benjamin’s intellectual formation.
Cohen’s notion that history, properly defined, is a creation of the prophetic is of particular
interest. Benjamin certainly draws from Novalis the idea of a ‘plural’ messiah (“with a million

Constellations Volume 15, No 3, 2008.


C The Author. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford

OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

398 Constellations Volume 15, Number 3, 2008

eyes”) but at the same time he recognizes a tension between the neo-Kantian Unendliche
Aufgabe and the Romantic idea of an infinite qualitative process. He halts in front of this
tension and in a certain sense takes a step back, moving backwards in the direction of
Leibniz’s monad and thereby raising the question of unification and immanent unity. Above
all, he poses the question of an Origin that is constantly unfulfilled and unrealizable (unerfüllt
and unerfüllbar). This question paves the way for a perspective that can relate, in a manner
that is as secret as it is resolute, the Benjaminian concept of history with cabbalistic tradition
(especially with the cabbala of Yitzchak Luria, principle exponent in the sixteenth century
of the Safed Cabbalistic school in Galilee). After all, it is not difficult to retrace in the
enigmatic phrasing of thesis IX – “make whole what has been smashed” (das Zerschlagene
zusammenfügen)3 – a messianic echo from Lurian doctrine of “breaking vases.” A doctrine
hinging on the concept of the Zimzûm (the idea of creation as an effect of the original
withdrawal of God to leave space for the cosmos), of the shevirath ha-kelı̂m (the breaking
of vases) which is at the origins of evil, and of the tiqqûn understood as the necessary and
consequent restoration of broken unity. And yet . . .
And yet the Benjaminian messiah and the cabbala intersect at a specific point: the ful-
fillment of creation is the task of human action. Thus, if we read Benjamin’s theses against
Heidegger’s last appeal we are struck by a paradoxical inversion: while for Heidegger “only
a God can save us,” for Benjamin only man can save God. A paradox which is intimately
Jewish and which sheds light on the meaning that the category of redemption comes to
assume within the constellation of ‘postponements’ outlined in the numerous drafts of that
radical and extreme text: Über den Begriff der Geschichte.
Another theme, which incidentally appears in re-reading some current commentaries of
Benjamin, consists of the remembrance/reawakening nexus, a nexus some have seen as
evidence of neo-Platonic traces in Benjamin. Despite my own doubts as to the value of this
hypothesis as an interpretive key, I find it nonetheless useful and productive: it allows us to
think of Benjamin not just from a theological perspective but also in the strictest sense from
a philosophical one (this seems to me important in light of the old and new prejudices of
academic philosophy with regard to Benjamin’s work).
3. We must therefore return to the thesis to re-focus the argument. The first aspect of our
re-reading speaks to theme. Here what is decisive is the programmatic character of the title.
Benjamin, as I have already noted, speaks of the concept (Begriff ) of history: that is, a
history that, while reduced to a concept, remains as a central (and still problematic) referent
of discourse. We are not speaking, therefore, of theses on the end of history but rather of
theses on history as they are thought and expressed in the “end-time.” I will argue that the
messianic, instead of capping the “end of time,” coincides with humanity’s return to its simply
historical role. That is, it coincides with the representation (Darstellung) of a humanity that
is finally liberated from the naturalized history of Progress (Fortschritt) and Domination
(Herrschaft). Our hermeneutic task consists in escaping the pitfall of misunderstanding
produced by tendentious and prejudicial critiques, including the polemical remarks of Adorno
himself who, in his Negative Dialectics, seems to chide Benjamin (whom he recognizes as
having taught him the necessity of crossing the “iron desert of abstraction” (Eisenwüste
der Abstraktion) to arrive rigorously at concrete philosophizing) on his inability to explode
the philosophical devices of Begriffslogik (the logic of the concept). In truth, Benjamin’s
insistence on the concept must be viewed in direct relation to the decline of a messianic
motif in the “mode of exposition” (Darstellungsweise) of Marxist dialectics. For this reason,
the theses should not be read as an omni-comprehensive key – as a sort of philosphico-


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Messianism without Delay: Giacomo Marramao 399

historical summa – but as an incandescent laboratory of experimental concepts and thoughts.

They are marked by a clear syncretism, in which the boundaries between what are extremely
diverse symbolic registers (those of messianism, eschatology, and the apocalypse, represented
by the figure of the Antichrist) disappear. It is through this “syncope” of heterogeneous
elements that the theses continue to exercise an extraordinary power of suggestion: they
give form to a withheld pathos. Up until the very end, Benjamin tried to polish the text,
carefully distilling the words, choosing with singular exactness the nouns and adjectives,
directing his argument towards a precise conclusion: to perform a symbolic conversion (and
not a generically metaphorical or analogical one) between the twin axes of messianism and
historical materialism. But – this is the crucial point – the figure of the conversion is provided
by a specific criterion that has been transformed from the area of political theology. Without
the political theology of the Ausnahmezustand - and here an obligatory reference is due to the
work of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben – the possibility of reciprocal convergence
and conversion between these two axes would remain a moot point.
At this point we cannot but advance serious doubts on Jacob Taubes’s reading of Ben-
jamin’s political theology. In particular, I am referring to his thesis of a Gnostic Benjamin,
a modern Marcionite (moderner Marcionit), founded on Benjamin’s anti-immanentism and
presented as the criterion of the real and true inversion of the Spinoza-Nietzschean line.4
This thesis, it seems to me, is both controversial and problematic. Taubes focuses on a
decisive issue: Benjamin read Nietzsche with extreme interest, while his most acute and
bitter hostilities were directed at Heidegger (a fact that is difficult to evade or overlook).
Taubes certainly provides an illuminating contribution by proposing a tripartite comparison
of Benjamin, Schmitt, and Karl Barth (recently revisited by Agamben and Badiou), which
he situates against the backdrop of Paul’s messianism. Taubes, however, misses the mark
in considering the themes discussed in Benjamin’s work as incompatible with the theme of
secularization. This critique is rightly underscored by Michele Ranchetti in his introduction
to the Italian edition of Abendländische Eschatologie: in any case, the question of secular-
ization makes little sense from Taubes’ viewpoint since he assumes that secularization, as
a purely historiographical question, is incapable of capturing the persistence of the sacred
and its reappearance in the modern era.5 I contend, on the other hand, that for Benjamin
secularization is tied to the theme of the persistence of the sacred (and not to its dissolution),
but in a specifically polemical sense. The theme of secularization is present in the theses in
a similar manner as in Karl Barth, but it sensibly diverges from that of Taubes. For Barth
as for the next “theological dialectics,” the condition for reopening the historical process to
redemption lies precisely in the fact that world becomes “exclusively world.” Only when
the world becomes only world – only when that which can become mundane becomes com-
pletely verwelticht – only then will the prospect of true redemption reappear. Benjamin’s
problem, from this point of view, would be that of the ‘false idols’ that appear within the
general frame of secularization, but certainly not the process of secularization as such. This
is the fundamental point, in a certain sense touched upon by Taubes, but without drawing
out its more radical conclusions.
4. The decisive theme that emerges at this point is that of nihilism as a method of worldwide
policy. In Benjamin this theme is constituted in diametrical opposition not only to the
apologetics of Progress but the rhetoric of “future generations” as well. This is an absolutely
explosive position with respect to the ethical revival that seemingly characterizes – on both
sides of the Atlantic – current academic debates in philosophy. It is precisely in the name of
the rights of future generations that the “pyramids of sacrifice” were created in the course of


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
400 Constellations Volume 15, Number 3, 2008

Western history. It is in the name of the rights of an ill-defined Future that we have sacrificed
present lives to fabricate paradise on Earth. One thinks of the epitaph-like sentence that
concludes thesis XII: the “Hatred” and “spirit of sacrifice” of the oppressed classes “are
nourished by the image (Bild) of enslaved ancestors, rather than by the ideal (Ideal) of
liberated grandchildren.”6 The strength of the symbol – the Bild, as contrasted with the
Ideal – is therefore rooted in the past, not in the future of the philosophy of history. I am not
maintaining that what is at stake here is sic et simpliciter the problem of political messianism,
nor is it the relationship between the messianic and the political in the conventional sense
of these terms. Rather, at stake is the theme of the Messiah: what the Bild of the Messiah
could represent in an epoch that is at once post-religious and post-secular. A preliminary
note from which to begin, so as to avoid misunderstanding the text, is that (unlike in Taubes’s
eschatology) here the Messiah can appear at any moment. It is on this point that it is
difficult to deny the congruence between Benjamin’s perspective and the Hebrew tradition.
The Mashı̂ah present in the rabbinical tradition can appear at any moment; his way is not
prepared by any plenitudo temporum, any eschatological “fullness of time,” or an apocalyptic
“end of time.” The Hebrew Messiah is a human figure, very human – “created by men.”
Even if the Messiah, as event, is already fixed in the original act of creation, his coming
occurs in a human way: “created by men.” Isaiah 60:22 reads: “it will happen in its own
time.” In the same verse, however, we also find, as an apparent contrast, the affirmation: “In
its time I will speed it up.” But how is it possible to speed up an event that is predetermined
ab originibus? The key point, on closer inspection, is that only action can fulfill the Origin:
thus the delectably Jewish paradox by which the fulfillment of the Origin is always finalized
after and never before. In playing with this interwoven paradox – an originary moment in
the hands of messianic action and an image of the future in which each and every instant is
opportune (and which can be “sped up”) – Benjamin gambles that this acceleration should be
properly considered historical and not meta-historical. Not in the sense, therefore, of history
as addition, but rather history as a constellation open to Erlösung (a category imported from
the lexicon of Franz Rosenzweig that is implicitly distinct – symbolically and semantically
– from the notion of Rettung).
The Messiah can come any day. Every generation deposits within itself its own particular
terminus: its own peculiar kairos, hidden but ready to be revealed at any instant – we just don’t
know when. A number of scholars within the Hebrew tradition, such as Sadya Gahòn and
others, have tried to compute the date for the Kètz, the expiration of the Messiah. I believe,
on the other hand, that Maimonides was right when, in Principles of Faith, he affirmed: “I
believe with complete faith in the coming of the messiah. Even if he may be late, I await him
every day – any day until he will arrive.” The word “any” is very important. This is precisely
the Hebrew orientation that we find in Benjamin. We only have to establish: in what form?
In what conceptual configuration? In what interweaving of the theoretical and practical?
5. The explanatory key is provided by the thesis numbered XVIII7 in the important typeset-
version of Über den Begriff der Geschichte which has been rediscovered by Giorgio Agam-
ben. This is a crucial thesis whose trajectory outlines a decline in messianism exactly in the
direction we have already stressed. “In the idea of classless society,” Benjamin affirms in
the opening of the thesis, “Marx secularized the end of messianic time.” And right after-
wards he adds: “And that was a good thing.” The degeneration occurs later, at the moment
when the ideological vision of the workers’ social democratic movement effects a kind of
sublimation of Vorstellung into Ideal: “It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this
idea to an ‘ideal’ that the trouble began.”8 The scale tips in the direction of a ‘deactivation’


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Messianism without Delay: Giacomo Marramao 401

of the messianic-political charge with the neo-Kantian doctrine of the “infinite task” (which
became Schulphilosophie, the “scholarship” of the Social Democratic Party, Benjamin spec-
ifies, with intellectuals and directors like Robert Schmidt, August Stadler, Paul Natorp, and
Karl Vorländer). Once the end of a society without classes was defined as an asymptotic
movement oriented towards an ideal scheme, “the empty and homogeneous time was trans-
formed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the
revolutionary situation with greater or lesser equanimity.”9 The passive character of the wait
is not therefore a prerogative of the messianic, but rather of a transcendental and undiffer-
entiated concept of historical time incapable of seizing the at once singular and “vertebrate”
constellation of the present. Continuing on in the same thesis we find the theme of the
“moment” (Augenblick). It has by now been clarified, thanks to the scholarly exegesis of the
last few years, that the category of Augenblick carries, within the theses, a function distinct
from that of Jetztzeit (of the “now” or the “now-time”). Why, then, in this crucial passage of
the theses, does he speak about Augenblick and not Jetztzeit: about a moment and not about
the time of the now? In my opinion, there can be but one plausible reply: only if we act to
speed up the coming can revolutionary action be properly defined as messianic. However,
and here lies the decisive element, every point, every monad of historical time is susceptible
and, if adequately rooted in the concept, can be transformed into the messianic time of the
end (Messianische Endzeit). But let’s go directly to the text:

In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance-
provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely
new resolution of a completely new problem [Aufgabe]. For the revolutionary thinker, the
peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the
political situation. But it is equally grounded, for this thinker, in the right of entry which
the historical moment enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up
to that point has been closed and locked. The entrance into this chamber coincides in a
strict sense with political action, and it is by the means of such entry that political action,
however destructive, reveals itself as messianic.10

6. Reinterpreted in light of this crucial passage of the theses, Benjamin’s messianism gains
a new and more intense sense. More precisely, it is placed at the intersection between
the moment (Augenblick) and the past (Vergangenheit), outside of the “future-oriented”
symbolism of waiting. Every instant carries within it the enérgeia, the power (potenza) or
virtuality of the messianic: on the condition that it be conceptualized – begriffen, literally:
caught, ensnared – in its singular, unrepeatable specificity. It is only when political action
can be recognized as messianic action that Jetztzeit is converted into Augenblick. But there
is more to it. The constellations of the “now-time” are converted into the “moment” not by
virtue of a utopian tension in the direction of the future, but because of the fact that the
memory (Erinnerung) of the past of the oppressed – as indicated in thesis VI – “flashes up
at a moment of peril” (“im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitz”).11 It is in the image of the
past therefore and not in some “projection” of the future that one finds the key to reciprocal
conversion of messianism and historical materialism: “Historical Materialism wishes to
retain that image of the past [Bild der Vergangenheit] which unexpectedly appears to man
singled out by history at a moment of danger.” It is in that unpredictable and unexpected
“flash” that revolutionary action comes to the fore, and it is precisely in that moment that we
find ourselves in the time properly called messianic.12 Yet if the messianic is not in the proper
sense the time of waiting, it is also not mere Jetztzeit. The monadic density of Nunc, of the
present, of the now, is the subject of the “interpreter,” of the historian capable of seizing the


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
402 Constellations Volume 15, Number 3, 2008

constellation determined by the present in its Darstellung. Messianic time is rather a time of
action, because only through acting do we become revolutionary subjects, subjects capable
of effecting a conversion from the “political” into the “messianic.”
7. At this point, however, things become even more complicated, and it is necessary to reorient
the matter. Redemption, which we are able to reactivate through action, is (as we have seen)
tied to the flash of the image of the past. And, once again, the bifocal correlation of the
twin axes messianism/historical materialism produces, in thesis XIV, a secret symmetry of
opposites: at one pole we find the “tiger’s leap into the past” (Tigersprung ins Vergangene)
represented by fashion (on this subject we know how Benjamin related modernity and
fashion through his reading of Georg Simmel); on the other side we find the dialectic leap
(dialektischer Sprung). One must here observe how between these two “leaps” there is at
the same time an analogy and a contrast, a sort of conflicting affinity. Fashion’s leap into
the past, with its “flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago,”
certainly captures the dimension of the Jetztzeit, extracting it from the historicist continuum
of “homogeneous and empty time”; and in a sense the French Revolution, in the same person
of Robespierre, “evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes the continuum of history.” Yet
this leap occurs, inevitably, in a space already predisposed and prefigured by power, “in an
area where the ruling class gives the commands.” On the other hand, in spite of any structural
analogy, this is radically different from the way in which the continuum of Progress explodes
as a result of the dialectical jump in the Marxian concept of revolution. The categorical
referent of this leap is no longer the now-time but precisely the Now, an Augenblick that
thesis XV – in confirmation of what has been argued – intimately fuses with the dimension
of action: “The awareness that they are about go make the continuum of history explode is
characteristic of the evolutionary class at the moment of their action.”13
At this crossroads one finds Benjamin’s original re-elaboration of the theme of the “state
of exception” (Ausnahmezustand), understood – with and against Carl Schmitt – as a theft
of the homogenous, empty time which culminated in a continuum of self-referential domi-
nation and produced, as a very modern phenomenon, the horror of fascism. Despite all the
“mythologies of legitimation” of Romantic derivation, the essence of fascism does not reside
in a nostalgic recourse to the past, but is inscribed in the technocratic power (potenza) that
one attributes to the modern concept of progressive history. From this point of view, for
Benjamin progress feeds fascism exactly as it feeds the worker’s movement, which in that
continuum has passively slackened its pace: “Nothing has corrupted,” one reads in thesis
XI, “the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It
regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was
moving.”14
8. But how does one escape this impasse, this entropic derivative of the historical process?
One escapes, for Benjamin, not only by exploding this continuum through the steep point of
convergence between historical materialism and messianism, but also by detaching oneself
from the anthropocentric roots common to all traditional forms of messianism and the
ideological variants (whether progressivist or revolutionary) that have “secularized” it. From
this point of view, the allusion to Blanqui’s L’ Éternité par les Astres is decisive. What
precisely is the strategic importance of this work for Benjamin? Blanqui provides not only
the idea of a “secularized abyss” with his image of the cosmos (as we find written in the
material on Passagenwerk); he actually illustrates how the messianic idea – coinciding with
the syncope, the acceleration of time – is one and the same with the knowledge that the
entire history of homo sapiens is but a fragment, an infinitesimal segment when viewed


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Messianism without Delay: Giacomo Marramao 403

against the whole of cosmic time. The apocalyptic shortening of time is flipped in this way
from indicator of centrality and absoluteness into a figure of the finitude and brevity of
human history. The theme of accelerating time appears, as is well known, in Luther’s Table
Talk inside a suggestive representation of the immanence of the apocalypse as a vertiginous
shortening of time, whereby centuries become years, months become weeks, weeks turn into
days, days into hours, hours into minutes, and minutes become seconds: Dann die Welt eilet
davon, quia per hoc decennium vere novum saeculum fuit.15 Benjamin’s symbolic inversion
consists in making this unheard syncopation of time the figure of absolute contingency
in human history. Benjamin introduces, therefore, an anti-anthropocentric tendency in all
traditional visions of history (be they progressive or revolutionary): none of which is capable
of thinking through the “strangeness” and “disorientation” that surrounds, and relativizes,
the events of History and Civilization.
9. This theme brings us, moving towards a conclusion, to a further motif: taking this cosmic
‘‘disorientation” as a starting point, how does one identify the space or opening produced by
the convergence of messianism and historical materialism? We know that such an opening is
very narrow, what Benjamin calls a “strait gate” (kleine Pforte) through which the Messiah
might enter. The strait gate represents the precariousness of a dangerously minimal margin.
The Messiah does not arrive as the grand representation of Roman Catholicism, as Schmitt
thought, but appears in a moment of danger, when a small opening seems to reveal itself: the
entryway for the messianic is also the entrance point of contingency, of transience. The
entrance point is a contingency that is “kairological” and that coincides with a sort of
interlude between being and nothingness, “fullness” and “emptiness,” desperation and hope.
Thus Benjamin draws from Auguste Blanqui the ideas of contingency and of nature as
an eschatological category. He makes them intersect at the point where the dangerously
minimal character of the margin and the opening to redemption are caught in a precarious
equilibrium. One finds in this precarious equilibrium the theoretical traces of Marx. But
this Marx is not the “halved” Marx of tradition, nor the “scientist” Marx of explanation
(seeking to describe the laws of movement of capital); it is not even the “prophet” Marx
of historico-dialectical narrative (mytho-poetically intent on inspiring the energies of the
revolutionary subject). Rather, it is the Marx of Darstellung, capable of fusing, in an explosive
synthesis, the “spectroscopic” analysis of a world dominated by commodity fetishism with the
latent messianic tension in every authentically revolutionary action. In this way, the Marxist
representation is transformed in the Benjaminian laboratory into the essential chemical
reagent necessary for a synthesis of science and redemption. And it is in virtue of this
fusion that the phantasmagoric analysis of commodities (re-read by Benjamin in almost
surrealist terms) is permeated with a pathos that originates in the “experience” (Erfahrung)
of the oppressed, of the defeated – or, to use a suggestive expression by Primo Levi, the
“submerged” of history. Once invested with an appeal to the past, the historical-materialist
Darstellung is capable of restoring the constellation of a present open to messianic action
(diametrically opposed to the apologetic Vorstellung of a present sealed by the mythology
and jurisprudence of the victor).
10. Here blossoms the truly conclusive aspect of Benjamin’s political messianism: it corre-
sponds to the past’s appeal rather than an injunction of the future. A radical and symbolic
inversion of the notion of the ‘messianic wait’ departs from this, making the present genera-
tion – every present generation – the recipients or “object” of the wait and the “subject” of
redemption. In short: we are the ones the dead are “waiting for.” The extraordinary emphasis
of thesis II can have no other meaning: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
404 Constellations Volume 15, Number 3, 2008

is referred to redemption. There exists a secret agreement between past generations and the
present one . . . Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak
messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.”16 It is we, then, we who live in
the present, who are invested by past generations with the responsibility, not to safeguard a
utopian hope or wait, but to engage in messianic action. Once transcribed as “the flash in a
moment of danger” of a past that has not been redressed for the oppressed, for the victims
and those without name, the Benjaminian idea of redemption merges with the feeling that
“even the dead will not be safe from the enemy” if that enemy continues to win.17
The return, in the heart of the text, to the cabbalistic theme of redemption as an unsatu-
rated formula, as with the Jewish paradox for which only we can save God, occurs therefore
from the dissolution of a concept of history oriented towards a linear “homogenous and
empty time.” And still, something of the linearity remains: precisely in the feeling of an
irreversibility declined, à la Baudelaire, in hyper-modern key: from the moment we find our-
selves irreversibly thrust onto an “Einbahnstrasse,” a one-way street, it is not the beginning
but the end that is at stake for the Angel of History. To paraphrase Kafka (another key author
for comprehending Benjamin’s latent sense of messianism-without-delay): faced with the
messianic appeal of a past of which we – we who live in the constellation of the Jetztzeit –
are the sole destination and heirs, what matters is not the road but the end, the terminal-point.
That which we call the road is nothing but our own hesitation.
(Translated by Luca Follis)

NOTES

1. For a “genealogical” reconstruction of the philosophical and political-theological questions implied

by “Säkularisierungstheorem,” please see my: Potere e secolarizzazione (1983), new extended edition,
(Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005); German edition, with updated bibliography Macht und Säkularisierung.
Die Kategorie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1989); Cielo e terra. Genealogia della
secolarizzazione, (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1994); German edition revised and extended, Die Säkularisierung
der westlichen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996).
2. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel. 1928–1940, ed., Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp,1994), 442.
3. Cfr. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, GS, I-2, 697.
4. Cfr. Jacob Taubes, Walter Benjamin – ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems Benjamin-Interpretation
religionsgeschichtlich überprüft, in Antike und Moderne. Zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen,” ed. Norbert Bolz
und Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 138–147.
5. Cfr. Michele Ranchetti “Preface” to Jacob Taubes, Escatologia occidentale ed., Elettra Stimilli
(Milano: Garzanti, 1997), 7–15.
6. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 700.
7. Cfr. Benjamin, Sul concetto di storia eds., Gianfranco Bonola and Michele Ranchetti (Torino:
Einaudi, 1997), 52–55. In this edition the thesis in question has been inserted under the number XVIIa “so
as not to disturb the established numbering of GS, which has already been adopted by scholars”[see the
editors’s note, 19]).
8. Ibid., 52 [Das Unheil setzt damit ein, daß die Sozialdemokratie diese Vorstellung zum ‘Ideal’
erhob].
9. Ibid., 54 [so verwandelte sich die leere und homogene Zeit sozusagen in ein Vorzimmer, in dem
man mit mehr oder weniger Gelassenheit auf den Eintritt der revolutionären Situation warten konnte].
10. Ibid., [In Wirklichkeit gibt es nicht einen Augenblick, der seine revolutionäre Chance nicht mit
sich führt – sie will nur als eine spezifische begriffen sein, nämlich als Chance einer ganz neuen Lösung
vorgeschrieben von einer ganz neuen Aufgabe. Dem revolutionären Denker bestätigt sich die eigentümliche
revolutionäre Chance aus einer gegebenen politischen Situation heraus. Aber sie bestätigt sich ihm nicht
minder durch die Schlüsselgewalt eines Augenblicks über ein ganz bestimmtes, bis dahin verschlossenes
Gemach der Vergangenheit. Der Eintritt in dieses Gemach fällt mit der politischen Aktion strikt zusammen;
und er ist es, durch den sie sich, wie vernichtend immer, als eine messianische zu erkennen gibt].


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Messianism without Delay: Giacomo Marramao 405

11. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 695.

12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 701 [Das Bewußtsein, das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen, ist den revolutionären
Klassen im Augenblick ihrer Aktion eigentümlich].
14. Ibid., 698.
15. Martin Luther, Tischreden, in Werkausgabe, II, 2756 b. See Giacomo Marramao, Macht und
Säkularisierung, cit., 92 ff.
16. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, 693–694.
17. Ibid., 695.

Giacomo Marramao is professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Political Philosophy at

the University of Rome, member of the Collège International de Philosophie of Paris and
professor honoris causa at the University of Bucharest. He is co-editor of Iride, a review
of public philosophy, and director of the International Basso Foundation. He is the author
of numerous works, including Macht und Säkularisierung (1989), Minima temporalia. Zeit,
Raum, Erfahrung (1992), Die Säkularisierung der westlichen Welt (1996), Kairós: Towards
an Ontology of Due Time (2006), and Westward Passage. Philosophy and Globalization
(forthcoming).


C 2008 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.