3

The Violence of the Canon: A Contemporary Context for the Canonical Form

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the dynamic tensions here under scrutiny, if seen in the fullest spectrum of color, are those that point directly toward the core issues of religious identity amidst centuries of theological speculation. From their earliest usages in scriptural formations, the concepts of a canon and of a Messiah have continued to play an elucidating role in terms of how we continue to understand those given representations of a particular religious tradition in the western world. At the same time, however, such accounts have steered the debate into the terrain of a philosophical debate that has detached itself from the concrete, historical particulars of religious canons and those communities that adhere to their normative claims. Such a purely philosophical interest, though of supreme concern in terms of the conceptual clarifications that take place on that level, is yet limited in its ability to provide answers to the conceptual aporias that arise between such contrasting terms. As such, the irresolvable antinomies of thought continue to dominate the discussion in many ways.

The purpose of this second part of the study is, therefore, to attempt to bring a new perspective to light on how we might better comprehend the historical situatedness of the tensions between canonical forms and messianic forces, seeing their concrete developments alongside each other as well as their role within the historical languages they embody as they develop throughout time. My intention is to sketch a re-reading of these contrasting forces, in many ways similar to what has already been said, yet deviating from previous accounts in that this particular reading attempts to focus on the manner in which a hermeneutics could be said to develop in between these polarized tensions, one that we necessarily cannot ignore. I am, here, beginning a sketch of a radical theological hermeneutics that takes seriously the challenges to our traditional religious notions of transcendence, sovereign power, and canonical forms, while simultaneously developing a practical methodology for portraying the failures of representation as our only (and even perhaps best) means by which to ensure that our relationships with one another (as well as the divine) continue.

Accordingly, this chapter will delve further into a specific portrayal of canonical forces as bearers of cultural memory, before turning explicitly to the controversial figure who perhaps symbolically lies at the heart of this study—Walter Benjamin. That is, it is the contestations over his legacy that very much determine the course of where our answers will lie. It is also his initial formulation of the “weak messianic forces” of history that were forged in the midst of a personal and cultural crisis that in the end claimed his own life. It is by looking to such a struggle, both personal and theoretical—and certainly of great contextual interest—that we can begin to glimpse a possible solution to the apparently “irresolvable” tensions that come out of the first part of this work.

Specifically, I seek to highlight some of the essential dynamics of the canonical form and its messianic counterpart as described through the work of often unrelated authors. As such, I intend to develop the implications of the German Egyptologist and cultural theorist Jan Assmann’s thoughts in juxtaposition with Benjamin, and as regards the back-and-forth movement from canons to messianic forces. I aim to trace the evolution in Assmann’s contemporary work from those issues surrounding the processes of canonization to his more recent development of a form of “weak thought” in relation to religious violence, shortly before turning to Benjamin’s portrayal of a “weak messianic force” moving through history, which is only conceivable in close proximity to a scriptural legacy and a divine (or “pure”) violence, as he saw it. In doing so, I draw a line connecting the work of each to the other in order to solidify the structure and function of the monotheistic canon as being not only at the heart of western civilization, but also at the heart of all cultural transmissions today. That is, the formal elements at work in the canonical–messianic relationship as espoused by these prominent cultural commentators can be determined as applicable to identity formations made within most late modern subjectivities, whether political, cultural or religious—at least insofar as the western realm of representations appears to be governed by a canonical sense of normativity. A closer inspection of how these elements were brought together in their original religious context might therefore better enable us to discern the effects which canons have upon the construction of identities in a globalized world as well as to take our study further into the heart of contemporary philosophical and theological thought today.

By interpreting Benjamin’s at-times-fragmentary corpus as such, I am also aiming to somewhat problematize Agamben’s interpretation of Benjamin as a strictly antinomian thinker in the same mold as (his version of) Saint Paul. Reading Benjamin’s incomplete work as a result of his hyperbolic use of language—enacted as a response to the growing threats of a fascist regime bent on eradicating him (as a German Jew) from this world—I will develop a more hermeneutical perspective on Benjamin’s thought, composed from the suggestive fragments of his last great project. This focus on the use of an excessive, hyperbolic language as a particular tactical response to an extreme historical situation (i.e., Nazism) is what, in turn, will allow me to formulate the beginnings of a radical hermeneutics that steers itself not toward either side of the representational/presentational divide, but rather enters into the failures of representations themselves in order to find there a certain “presentation” of sorts. Such a reading, though jumping a bit ahead of myself here, is what I will then try to “radicalize”—as well as test—in the subsequent, and last chapter, focused on the work of Paul Ricoeur. It is through such a radicalization of hermeneutics, I contend, that we are able to glimpse a way out of the theoretical impasse we have been left with as we depart the debate waged by both Derrida and Agamben.

Jan Assmann on the historical emergence of the canon

Toward the end of Taubes that The Political Theology of Paul, we find him merely reading and glossing large sections of a particular Freudian work, one often dismissed as among the least plausible of Freud’s writings. The work appears in this context, however, as being yet so revolutionary to Taubes that he has little time to provide commentary: the radical insights of the text must be allowed to speak for themselves. So important are these ideas taken from Freud that the entire universalization of the Jewish message, now forever bound up with its Pauline furtherance, according to Taubes, can only now be re-thought and re-interpreted: “What is here developed as a conceptual network [begriffliches Netz] in the way of historical truth, of tradition and memory, of distortion [Verstellung]—against this, all the so-called exegeses that come from here are simply trivial.”¹

Despite Taubes’ enthusiasm, the initial consensus reaction to Sigmund Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism was that it was a speculative exposition of an almost absurd claim—that Moses was, in fact, an Egyptian and that it was a repressed version of Egyptian monotheism that he revived and propagated as what was to become the Judaic faith.² This initial reaction, however, subsided with time and gave way to a growing interest in his work by philosophers, critical theorists, and psychoanalytic schools of thought, which not only embraced his work on Moses, but saw it as a exemplary forerunner to the field of cultural studies.³ One of the most significant, and recent, contributions to this large body of work has come from the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, whose work on Freud, Moses, and any alleged Egyptian ties, has actually led him to (re)consider the role which the canonical form plays in formulating a cultural–religious worldview, that is, its role in terms of historical representation and repressed desire (its latency). This has led Assmann, for his part, to construct a more developed, more encompassing speculative system of his own, which expands beyond Freud’s project in order to depict the role of canons in introducing a particular cultural and ideological violence of division within cultures.

In Assmann’s redefining of the Freudian project, there is an obvious direct debt paid to Freud’s work on Moses, though there is also a substantial nuance taken toward it. According to Assmann, the revealing of the centrality of the canonical form has been a project of the “unthought” that need not arise from beneath the surface of the text, as Freud himself sought to indicate through his depiction of the “unconscious” of a text. This is the case for Assmann because texts dealing with historical representation, exemplified but not limited to the canonical form, actually reveal their truth on the surface. As he elaborates:

What Freud unearths [zutage fördert] and dramatizes as a revelation [Enthüllung] is not the historical truth, but merely some theoretical constructs that turn out to be superfluous. The truth can be found in the texts themselves. They speak of memory [Gedächtnis], remembrance [Erinnern], forgetting [Vergessen], and the repressed [Verdrängen], of trauma and guilt. In order to uncover this network [Semantik] of meanings we have no need to practice the hermeneutics of distrust; nor need we read these texts against the grain. We need only listen to them attentively [aufmerksam zuhören].⁴

He undertakes, in contrast to Freud, what he terms as a “mnemohistory,” a study of the past not as it historically happened but as it is remembered by the texts themselves. The task of such a study is to listen to the text in such a way as to unveil any ideological script that unfolds in the narrative, not to dig beneath it for one that must be presumed as repressed. This is actually a process, he states, which intends on getting behind the “mythical elements” embedded within traditions themselves. Any history passed through a tradition is already a myth, while still maintaining a sense of historicity, once it is “remembered, narrated, and used.”⁵ And, in return, this mythic discourse, once materialized as tradition, reproduces itself through its subjects.⁶ As we will later see, Assmann will read Freud in this manner in order to somewhat dislodge what he sees as the ideological script of monotheism presented in its canonical Judaic form—though in the end, he might not be able to do away with it altogether.

To begin, it is the book of Deuteronomy, Assmann contends, which contains theories of individual, collective, and cultural memory, and which confronts the Jewish people with the presence of a “counterfactual memory” (kontrapräsentischen Erinnerung) issued in the imperative toward them—to remember a “framework” (Rahmen) outside their present reality (e.g., recalling the nomadic life in the midst of the promised land or hunger in the midst of abundance, etc). This is a task given to the people of Israel to keep “present to the mind a yesterday that conflicts with every tomorrow.”⁷ The presence of “counterfactual” memory arises not only from the consolidation of 40 years of cultural memory as a mnemonic technique, but also as closely bound to a monotheistic conception of revelation since both manifest characteristics of an “extraterritorial nature.” Placing the divine giving of the Law in the wilderness becomes symbolic of a nomadic wandering, an “extraterritorial” mandate which situates the Law as separate from any locality: “This means that the laws that they are to remember and abide by are not the laws of the land [die Gesetze des Landes], but the extraterritorial laws [extraterritorialen Gesetze] from Mount Sinai.”⁸ This (re)defining of revelation and its relation to the canonical form is a movement intended to expand upon Freud’s project of perceiving writing as a nomadic exercise always displacing itself in order to reveal the “fuller” consequences of producing a written, sacred canon.⁹

In general, this reading of Freud allows Assmann to complete a (re)formulation of the definition of the canon, along with the desire for canonicity, as a “counter-religion” insofar as it bears what continuously becomes a displaced revelation.¹⁰ “Counter-religions,” according to Assmann, and as the name implies, seek to counter already existing religious trends by positing a “counterhistory” of their own, one always set in motion by, and thereby inherently connected to, an established canonical text. These “counterhistories” aim to distort the self-image, identity, and memory of their adversary, offering their own “‘official” version of these constituent features through the instantiation of the canonical form.¹¹ For Assmann, history in any form, including the canonical, becomes mythical, again, once it is “remembered, narrated, and used,” hence providing for itself its base ideological usage, though not actually serving to negate the historicity of its account.¹² Even an “imagined community” based upon a canonical foundation, to appropriate Benedict Anderson’s highly celebrated phrase, can accurately represent history though it functions politically in a polarized, and an even further polarizing ideological manner.¹³

Assmann, through recognizing the pivotal role that an Egyptian monotheism played in forming the Israelite religion, establishes a structural parallel between revelation, on the one hand, or that which is itself bound by the processes of the canonical (e.g., characterized by remembering, progression, and a monotheistic or ‘Mosaic distinction’ between true and false) and translation, on the other hand, or that which remained more ancient and bound to an oral culture (e.g., characterized by forgetting, regression, and a polytheistic worldview).¹⁴ As this tension outlines, he links revelation and canonization as fundamentally intertwined projects since religions based on a written revelation, and not simply the monotheistic ones, according to Assmann,

. . . are all founded on a corpus of canonical writings [ein Korpus kanonisierter Schriften] and thus on a highly authoritative codification of memory [eine hochverbindliche Kodifikation von Erinnerung]. To belong to such a religion calls for this codified memory [kodifizierten Gedächtnisses] to be accepted and taken to heart [Verinnerlichung und Beherzigung]. Evidently, the importance of the codification and canonization of memory is linked to the structure of the revelation [der Struktur der Offenbarung]. All revealed knowledge [offenbarte Wissen] is by definition knowledge of something outside the world [außerweltlich].¹⁵

Faith, in this manner, becomes equated with memory, and, thanks to Freud, an “inner spiritual guide” to be viewed as a progression over the antiquated desire for natural evidence once so heartily sought to justify religious belief. For Assmann, however, the decisive point remains the internal split in the subject brought about by monotheism’s claims to divide reality into true and false—a split which renders the human heart itself subject to the dual traumas of desiring to be at home in the world (its pagan element), but also being told to reject, and forget, the false idols of paganism (its monotheistic side).¹⁶ There is, here, a division of the world brought about by the canonical form itself. We are left, therefore, at the end of the discussion of Freud’s role within cultural analysis, with a de-centering of the trauma of monotheism, locating it not in the “Oedipal deep structure of the human psyche [Tiefenstruktur der menschlichen Seele], but in the Mosaic distinction [Mosaischen Unterscheidung] between true and false,” which the canonical introduces into culture and which could only be perpetually enacted because it becomes grounded as revelation.¹⁷ The binary divisions introduced by the “Mosaic distinction,” in Assmann’s view, begin to perform what will become a “monotheizing” tendency of the canonical. In doing so, the canonical work introduces a fundamental division into culture, one which in effect could be said to generate a system of cultural significations and, consequently, create the apparent “non-canonical” or marginalized elements upon its fringes.

Though all of this attests quite highly to the canonical form’s ability to generate cultural norms, it is by focusing on the “return of the repressed,” or a resurgence of the marginalized within (at times even seemingly against) canonically instituted divisions, that we first begin to discern the cultural role of canonicity on a whole new level. Quite generally, the canonical form, as it were, is often said to “forget” the heretical and/or apocryphal (messianic) text/s, only to face their reemergence later, often during periods of religious renewal, an acknowledgment which becomes perhaps Assmann’s strongest claim concerning polytheism’s relation to monotheism.¹⁸ Functioning as signifier for an entire cultural–symbolic system, the canonical form produces an atmosphere that, for Assmann, could be said to do violence (in a sense, yet to be fully determined) to the marginalized elements otherwise excluded from representation.

It is precisely this line of argumentation that has been at the heart of several criticisms concerning Assmann’s work as a whole, and which he addresses in his more recent works Of God and Gods and The Price of Monotheism.¹⁹ Noteworthy in this regard is the criticism offered by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) on Assmann’s alleged linkage between monotheism and violence, something which moved Ratzinger to remind those in the Catholic tradition of Christ’s proclamation of peace, as well as to point out how other, noncanonical religions have brought various violences into the world too.²⁰ Responding to critics, such as Smith and Ratzinger, who have seen his work as advocating a (sort of) return to polytheism through the erasure of the true/false dichotomy, Assmann nuances his position somewhat by referring here to the “latent monotheism within polytheism” as well as by offering a further distinction (beyond the simplified “Mosaic” one he offered earlier) between an intrasystemic violence (one yet translatable between cultures, and perhaps best exemplified by acts such as child sacrifice and its opposition) and extrasystemic violence (one that is nontranslatable, hence conversionary only, and with numerous historical violent examples easily at hand). Within this grid of violences, Assmann is able to critique monotheism’s basic contention that it is opposed to intrasystemic violence, while yet simultaneously giving rise to extrasystemic violence through its acts of (often forced) conversion or destruction.²¹ This reading, of course, still runs in stark contrast with Ratzinger’s attempt to diminish both the intra and extrasystemic violence said to stem from Christianity’s core.

By later giving nuance to his position in response to his critics, Assmann has actually, in part, come to defend a monotheistic worldview by illustrating its indebtedness to a particular conceptualization of justice. In essence, the contrast for Assmann becomes one between an implicit theology (the cosmogony of a polytheistic worldview) and an explicit theology (the created order of the monotheistic one).²² Monotheism, from this perspective, becomes the inventor of “religion” as a concept, as well as an embodied political practice, bringing a developed concept of justice from outside the traditional realm of (mythical–violent) religion and into its inner self-definition. In this fashion, the monotheistic worldview is not only able to stand up as a critic of existing political structures, but is also capable of narrating a history based upon a divine notion of justice.²³ In his view, Judaism was able to prevent itself from becoming indebted to a system of violence by refusing to universalize its historical claims, leaving them open to the processes of an eschatology never foreclosed within history, and thereby also maintaining justice as an always open horizon against which all (“righteous”) religious acts are formed.²⁴ By this route of recirculation around his most analyzed concepts, Assmann comes very close to espousing a similar claim made in the last century by Walter Benjamin concerning the relation of the messianic to a divine, and bloodless, violence (a connection which I will take up in the second half of this chapter). By such means, Assmann is also able to denounce any religion associated with manifest violent forms and to declare that the “power of religion rests on nonviolence.”²⁵

This “weak form of truth” espoused here is a non(or less)-violent appeal to be sure, one coupled with its basic position as being a counter-force to political power, something which can be found at the origins of all monotheistic, canonical claims, according to Assmann—though, as is true, the history of their reception has often proved anything but nonviolent. It is striking, however, that Assmann’s clarifications have themselves gravitated toward a reading of the non-violence at the center of the biblical canonical framework, something which now brings him into sharp relief against the backdrop of opinions already formed concerning his work.

A “weak notion of truth”

In general, scholars receiving these initial claims on the nature of canons formulated in Assmann’s work, both from a religious perspective and from without, have not found too much cause for criticism. It is rather when Assmann begins to draw conclusions on the relationship between these claims and violence (either as being inherent to it, which he at times seems to indicate, or that it is a perversion of the original intent, as he later tries to clarify) that he begins to run into firm critiques as such. In short, Assmann attempts to incorporate the “messianic” into his account of the canonical form as his work increasingly came under fire for its seemingly inherent linkage of monotheism and violence. Assmann’s introduction of the “Mosaic distinction,” as the polarized division of the world into two camps, the righteous and the wicked, the faithful and the idolaters, and hence as the defining characteristic of canonical thought, brought him before a torrent of both critical reception and harsh dismissal. His subsequent writings have sought to provide a clarification much needed in response to both his critics and allies alike, for his position had often been misread as advocating a return to some form of a primordial polytheistic worldview.²⁶ To counter this caricature, he carefully elaborates his position by stating that he is

. . . not suggesting that one return to “Egypt,” to the polytheistic system of mutual translatability and recognition, but rather that one step forward toward a religion that clings to the idea of the unity of God and commits itself to the moral commandments, while at the same time returning to a weak notion of truth in the sense expressed by Lessing and Mendelssohn: a truth that exists beyond the absolute knowledge of human beings, one that can only be aimed at but never possessed.²⁷

It is at this point, with reference to a “weak notion of truth,” one made often in relation to a nonsovereign theology, that Assmann comes extremely close to restating some of the central principles behind the work of Benjamin.²⁸ This is not a coincidence, I am here asserting, but rather an indicator of the continuum that can be established between the forces of the canonical and those of the messianic, as I have already outlined.

The omission of Benjamin’s name here, and of his claims on behalf of a “weak messianic power” that sought, in some sense at least, to overcome the violence of a universalized (“sovereign”) reading of history, is somewhat surprising, especially given the fact that only a few pages earlier Assmann had developed his views on religious violence solely in reference to Benjamin’s essay on the “Critique of Violence.”²⁹ It was in this context that Assmann had sought to expand upon Benjamin’s polarized scheme of divine versus mythical violence in order to propose five different types of violence, culminating in a thoroughly re-worked definition of “religious violence” given in relation to monotheism and its canon, specifically.³⁰ As one might expect, considering his work on the “Mosaic distinction,” Assmann inquires before answering: “What then is religious violence? By this term I mean a kind of violence that stems from the distinction between friend and foe in a religious sense. The religious meaning of this distinction rests on the distinction between true and false.” However, he is careful to nuance his position now in ways that he had previously failed to do, and thus, he states that there is yet an allegiance to religious truth that can yet be presented nonviolently. In this regard, Assmann admits at least this much:

It has by now become imperative to dissociate religion from violence. Violence belongs to the sphere of the political, and a religion that uses violence fails to fulfill its proper mission in this world and remains entangled in the sphere of the political. The power of religion rests on nonviolence. Only through a complete rejection of violence is monotheism able to fulfill its liberating mission of forming an alternative counterpower to the totalizing claims of the political.³¹

Assmann is intending to sever the theological from the political, to divide the “theo-political,” and in a sense to refute Schmitt’s assertion that theological and the political are inextricably intertwined. Yet, how distinct a religious violence that divides the world into a friend/enemy dichotomy could be from the realm of the political remains relatively unclear in his work, as he does little more than state that they are not identical.³² Thus, at the end of these essays, he concludes with a “weak” conception of truth offered as a message of nonviolence that echoes many themes running throughout Benjamin’s own work (perhaps best captured in his bid for a “bloodless” violence).³³ For Benjamin, indeed, this would be familiar terrain, especially as he concluded his oeuvre with his remarks “On the Concept of History” where a “weak messianic force” is said to work, and which I will take up in a moment.³⁴

In the context of Assmann’s conjectures, however, I am prone to ask: Can violence be so easily removed from the sphere of divine dealings with humanity? Or, conversely, can it be (even if ideally) eradicated from what constitutes political interaction? As we have already seen, canonical forms seem to bear at least a minimal violent gesture of cultural signification within their very existence.

Though the logic of his claims is often fuzzy and subject to alleged misreading and misunderstandings on these matters, the train of thought that led Assmann to move from the history and usage of the canonical form to the “weak forces” moving throughout history is, I would suggest, a parallel motion to what Benjamin would pursue throughout his lifetime (though in a different manner to be sure), beginning with a focus upon these same messianic forces and moving toward the canonical, sacred scriptures in some sense. As Brian Britt has pointed out, the sacred text was an implicit guiding thread throughout Benjamin’s entire career, despite his efforts at times to distance himself from its concrete traditions and religious practices.³⁵ What Benjamin evidences, moreover, and as I am here claiming, not only confirms Assmann’s basic intuitions (despite their possible shortcomings), but actually advances the fundamental connection between them much further, providing a clear “line of sight” between the canonical and the messianic that does not sever the political from the religious, a connection in sharp contrast to what Assmann is intending to present. I will, therefore, attempt to elucidate this disjuncture more fully through a closer look at Benjamin’s reading of this “theo-political” relationship of the canonical and the messianic.

Messianic forces within canonical representations in Walter Benjamin

An inadvertent consequence of forming a canon is that any given canonical representation will eventually come to be challenged as hegemonic, even if it is “sealed” (closed) as holy writ. For open (literary, political, social or cultural) canons, an alteration to the canonical code may indeed be an easier task to accomplish, hence the historical insignificance of its “messianic elements,” for once they have rendered justice, they are easily discarded in favor of new canonical formulations. For closed canons, however, change only comes through a re-reading (re-interpreting) of the material already present, illuminating once again the dynamic tensions which are to be found within any canonical formation, be it either open or closed. This is a fact that would serve to demonstrate why the messianic elements of a closed canon are, at times, thrust to the fore as well as how they endure historically: they must be constantly upon the horizon, or viewed as perceivable, if the closed canon is itself to be seen as worth continuing. As one biblical scholar has noted, “The canon, then, does not lend itself to a definitive solution of the problem of religious authority. The juxtaposition in it of law and prophecy suggests rather an unresolved tension, an unstable equilibrium.”³⁶ This “unresolved tension” is what ultimately opens canons up to their own internal, de-stablizing elements, ones that potentially challenge any hegemonic claims made on behalf of a given canonical formation.³⁷ The canonical form, by definition it would seem, is torn from within by its own messianic elements of disruption, those forces often labeled as “prophetic” that contest and challenge the ruling norms of a given canonical representation, albeit of historical, cultural, political, or religious identification. It might indeed be suggested that it was the (“weak”) force of the messianic which led in this direction, toward the historical (and I would simply qualify “historical” further with another descriptor, the “canonical”) image that so fascinated Walter Benjamin over the course of an all-too-short and trying career.

The inclusion of Benjamin on this point will also hopefully become illustrative of Assmann’s recent, close proximity to him, a closeness which the present study argues is not a coincidence, but rather a natural outcome of a conceptual interaction. In no uncertain terms, it unfolds as such: Assmann, in his early work on the canonical form, had neglected to account for this “messianic” aspect of a religious canon. Hence, as his later work will testify, he, on the one hand, starts from an analysis of the canonical form and slowly extends his study toward a logic of the messianic in order to clarify his claims, to clarify in fact what often appears as an aporia lodged at the heart of all historical (dialectical) representations—their violence and yet, their necessity. Benjamin, on the other hand, starts from the “weak force” of the messianic functioning in history only to later reach back toward canonical forms (though they are present in his earlier work on scripture and language as in his dialogue “The Rainbow,” as we will see shortly), though this was something in many ways he could only point toward, or indicate as the direction in which his work tended on the whole. It could perhaps also be said that it is no coincidence that Benjamin’s work was formed in the face of a dissolution of Jewish identity, formed, that is, at a time when the meaning given to history by a canonical form would acquire a great deal of significance and would encounter one of its greatest challenges as the threat of complete annihilation. It was the crisis of Jewish identity within the experience of the early twentieth century that would, in fact, drive Benjamin to consider a course of redemption in relation to history, and to reformulate some of the same insights which have driven Assmann’s work to date, as we will soon see.

From this angle, we might be able to perceive how a strand of messianism develops out of the cry for justice to be done to a people on the edge of being wiped clean from all cultural–canonical memory, a bid to instate themselves at the origins, or absent center, of history.³⁸ This is equally the direct route that Assmann will pursue when he states that “History, or God’s interaction with humanity (or with his chosen people), is based upon justice. The latter, in other words, appears to function as a generator of history.”³⁹ This is the history, I would only add, that was set in motion and given meaning by a specific canonical intervention. A rift is thereby opened between polytheism and its “usurper” monotheism, offering two distinct versions of history with two clearly incompatible visions of humanity’s relation to the divine. For Assmann, a transformation is effected wherein “Historia divina, the stories told about the gods that reveal their personalities and vicissitudes, is turned into historia sacra, the story of the one God and his chosen people.”⁴⁰ A “totally new conception of reality” was brought to life by the act of canonizing the sacred tradition of a people, and a “theologizing of history” was to begin which would reach “its apogee with Biblical . . . historiography.”⁴¹

This juxtaposition of two different versions of history, the Judaic and the polytheistic/pagan, would not be something far removed from Benjamin’s own conceptualization of history. Rather, he also came to see the distinction between a Judaic–biblical version of history and its pagan counterpart as the roots of his own formulations of a historical dialectical materialism. Indeed, as we will soon see, this tension provided the opening through which the messianic would enter into his deliberations on the dialectical image and the justice yet to be accorded the “losers” of history. It was, I would add, central to his own reformulation of historical representation on the whole. In this sense, and as I now intend to illustrate, Assmann’s work actually connects to Benjamin’s at this fundamental juncture, an overlap that will otherwise serve to bring about a profound interrelation of the canonical and the messianic that has yet to be fully realized in contemporary philosophical and theological discourses.

Benjamin and the sacred text

Though Benjamin’s views on the “weak messianic forces” moving through history have received numerous comments and applications, his views on scripture have remained far more muted.⁴² Any connection between the two, however, as I here intend to posit, has remained almost entirely without mention. By setting the stage as such, I will accordingly move through a close reading of some of Benjamin’s fundamental texts concerning the role which the canonical form might have played in his work, rather than present a more general overview of his writings, as was more easily done in the work of Assmann, for example. This will be the case as well because the presentation of Benjamin I wish to let unfold is a more original interpretation of his work that will also, hopefully, serve as a unification of some of his most fragmentary writings.

Regarding the messianic, and here functioning as a term utilized in order to get our bearings within his diverse corpus of writings, it has become almost commonplace to demonstrate how Benjamin’s use of the concept was not only something he had directly adapted from its Jewish heritage, but was also central to understanding the theological thematics of his work on the whole.⁴³ Despite the frequent use of the concept in his work,⁴⁴ it was not until near the very end of his life that the term acquired the connotations for which it has subsequently been known. In a difficult-to-date piece of writing appropriately labeled “Theological-Political Fragment,” Benjamin gave some initial flesh to his conceptualization of the term through his pronouncement that “Only the Messiah himself completes [vollendet] all history, in the sense that he alone redeems [erlöst], completes [vollendet], creates [schafft] its relation to the messianic.”⁴⁵ Conceived as a counter-force to the secular idea of happiness, Messiah charges all of history with the messianic impulses that run like an electric current throughout its length, giving it its consequent shape and understanding, and this despite its apparent externality to it.

Indeed, it was initially Benjamin’s break with a Marxist teleological reading of history that gave rise to, and fostered his insistence upon a “weak messianic force” working through history in order to redeem those who had seemingly been forgotten by history, a counter-dialectic that sought the origins and not some progressive, utopian end goal.⁴⁶ This was something no doubt on his mind as he raced, ultimately in vain, to escape some of the darkest forces known to history.⁴⁷ In response to the German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s delineating of a “political theology” which would unveil the figure of the (political) sovereign as theologically legitimated in some sense, Benjamin sought to demonstrate how the sovereign’s power to declare a “state of exception” to normal rule was in fact countered by the subtle, even “weak” messianic forces that moved against such an inherently violent (unjustifiable) reign.⁴⁸ In this manner, Benjamin sought to revolutionize historiographical methods (i.e., the feigned objectivity of historicism) in order to de-stabilize the exercise of sovereign power in the modern era, something which he is often credited for having paved the way toward.⁴⁹

No matter whether one reads this entrance of the messianic into the political realm as indebted to a strictly Jewish perspective (Scholem) or as opening to a Pauline–Christian one (Agamben), the religious roots of its general usage offer a suggestive reading of contemporary philosophy’s “return to religion” as perhaps truly being a “return to the messianic core of religious thought,” such as Taubes has already suggested.⁵⁰ Indeed, such a core seems to be at the heart of those who are currently engaged in such a renewal of religious thought, or even theology. Writers as diversely identified with deconstructionism (H. de Vries) and the emergence of “weak thought” (J. Caputo, G. Vattimo) or with Hegelian–Lacanian leanings (S. Žižek, E. Santner) have all claimed a certain messianic horizon to be the backdrop against which their thought forms.⁵¹ In some sense, each author, most typically in defiance of the totalizing rubrics of sovereign power, as with Benjamin before them, issues a call to remember what has been repressed by the “victors of history” in order to serve the promotion of justice within the messianic horizons of history.

The centrality of Benjamin’s “weak messianic force” to today’s thinkers seems primarily to stem from the juxtaposition of his views on formulating a potential for “pure” or “divine violence” taken in light of his conceptualizations of history and redemption. In contemplating movements beyond the violence of the state, Benjamin chose to highlight the role played by the victims of history, the marginalized elements within any given cultural, canonical memory. It was their ability to “strike” or suspend the governing norms, he would say in his “Critique of Violence,” that would give these masses a power over against the sovereign’s ability to declare his own exceptions.⁵² This was the closest Benjamin was to come in formulating what a truly “divine violence” might in fact be. In doing so, he staunchly opposed any totalizing presentation of history, offering up instead the “pure means” of history without any ideological ends, a breaking open of a mythical (cyclical) violence through a sense of responsibility to past generations of oppressed peoples. Thereby, a “messianic cessation” of historical representations ensues, providing an alternative history beyond the tragic–mythical orientations of society.⁵³

In this movement away from the tragic–mythic narratives that have dominated societies for centuries, Benjamin utilized the Hebraic notion of the messianic as a disruptive force that introduces difference itself into our canonical representations of history. Just as the messiah was envisioned to be the redemptive figure of political liberation for the Jewish people (as the one who would ultimately come to overthrow the “false” sovereign powers that oppressed them), Benjamin found a way to generate an alternative meaning to historical events through a “messianic cessation” of the way in which they were violently narrated for ideological ends. This manipulation which tries to pass itself off as objective fact was a reality with which he was no doubt more than familiar, and which most likely caused him to emphasize the messianic forces at the near complete expense of sovereign (canonical) norms. It was for this reason that Benjamin maintained a paradoxical relationship with scripture, at times seeming to rely heavily upon its cultural influence and relevance (i.e., the “messianic”), and at others, muting its influence almost entirely due to its sovereign claims (i.e., its “canonical” form).⁵⁴

Though I will not here rework the numerous readings which his notion of the messianic has received, I will briefly outline the manner in which it functions. In his series of theses “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin refers to a “secret agreement [eine geheime Verabredung] between past generations [Geschlechtern] and the present one,” an agreement wherein a “weak messianic power” [eine schwache messianische Kraft] holds a past claim on us, one that “cannot be settled [abzufertigen] cheaply.”⁵⁵ Essentially, history contains a limitless series of images, of those marginalized (or “dangerous”) memories (Erinnerung gefährlich) that hold the power to overthrow our present perceptions of the past, that is, our traditions as we have constituted them.⁵⁶ When these “dialectical images” are realized, the “objective” (canonical) version of historical events is overthrown, so to speak. This counter-force (as a “tradition of the oppressed”) indeed shatters the illusion of the homogenous time of history, positing instead a “messianic arrest of happening [einer messianischen Stillstellung des Geschehens],” what he otherwise calls “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed [unterdrückte].”⁵⁷ For the historian who can envision such a clash within historical normativity, there is only “a conception of the present as now-time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time [Splitter der messianischen eingesprengt sind].”⁵⁸ And if there was any doubt that Benjamin was, here, attempting to reformulate a predominantly Judaic term, he concludes his much celebrated theses with reference to the Jews who had first begun to see history “splintered” in just such a fashion, past, present, and even future—indeed, for the Jews, we are told, “. . . every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”⁵⁹

In this radical re-conceptualization lies a profound critique of any historicist “objective” approach to historical understanding, for there is no monolithic (“homogenous”) time to which one can make unobjectionable reference. As Benjamin was to formulate many times over in his Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk), the historicist project, as the viewpoint of the “victors” of history, was a bankrupt endeavor bound to be brought down (eventually and ultimately) by the “weak messianic forces” latent beneath any contemporary understanding of historical events. This reading of history would furthermore give rise to Benjamin’s critique of, and departure from, Marx, for any reading of history that would consistently side with the oppressed of history, and hence over and against the oppressed when they become those holding political power, is one that would bring all “dialectics to a standstill.”⁶⁰ It is also an interpretation of history that will find many deep resonances with its Jewish readers, something captured directly by the role of the Judaic scriptures in determining Jewish self-understanding. For this reason, it becomes imperative to link Benjamin’s comments on the messianic, as the disruptive force to any “objective” historical record, to their Judaic origins in scripture, something which Benjamin himself contemplated from time to time, and which seems never to have vanished altogether from his horizons.⁶¹

Though Benjamin did acknowledge what is perceived as the inherent violence (Gewalt) of transforming the “natural” individual into the “cultural” one,⁶² the direct mention of a canon in Benjamin’s work is a rare occurrence, and therefore, all the more to be taken seriously when it does appear, as in his early dialogue, “The Rainbow” (“Der Regenbogen”).⁶³ Though the mention of the canonical form there is hardly a fully developed concept, it is presented as that which proceeds “divinely” (göttlich hervorgeht) from the imagination (der Phantasie), but is itself caught up in the realm of form, and thus lacks the true beauty of something like the rainbow, which is presented to us without form, pure nature as it were.⁶⁴ He hints at a pure perception possibly taking place beyond all (canonical) forms, though a roughly contemporaneous fragment alludes toward the possibility of even perception itself being part of a canonical viewpoint, that is, perception as itself being formed within something like the structures of language. As he puts it:

The canon as form is to be defined conceptually [begrifflich]. But form is only one side of the canon; the other side is content, which is not to be grasped conceptually. The complete musical work is canon, in language and no longer audible; the topos of the canon is language. Completion of music ruptures [bricht] in the poetic, in the uncompleted.—The canon is in perception [Anschauung]⁶⁵

It is extremely intriguing, from the standpoint of this study, that the very next fragment among Benjamin’s corpus would begin with the contemplation of the “actual messianic moment [die Aktuell messianischen Momente]” within the artwork that is said to act in some sense as its content in the midst of form’s delayed appearance.⁶⁶ Conceiving of the messianic moment as such is to suggest that a pure content is presented (or present-able) in the time that remains between the form’s disintegration and its final appearance, when the thing itself (like the natural rainbow) can be glimpsed beyond its form. In the absence of form, the “actual messianic moment” appears as an instance of pure content, something which Benjamin tells us is completely “up to us,” perhaps because it is all and only us, and this is the case even though “form persists [Form verharrt]” in our world.

As we will see later on, this reading of Benjamin’s early work alongside his fragmentary notes from the same time period will demonstrate a profound resonance with later interpretations of his work, most notably in the writings of Agamben, for whom the “time that remains” becomes the messianic moment par excellence—the only moment wherein we might glimpse something of the “whatever being” beyond all forms and representations. Here, Benjamin merely hints at such a construction, and does not develop its implications any further, such as what he might have done in juxtaposing these thoughts alongside his comments on scripture. Despite this apparent absence, however, I will seek to illustrate how the logic of these early sketches on the relationship between the canonical form and the messianic moment do not drop out from his work altogether. They, in fact, reappear shortly before his untimely death, in another fragment that sought to unite the entire corpus of his work upon these same thematic grounds.

Fragmentary glimpses of the canonical form

For example, in a note written to himself on the back of a letter dated December 22, 1938, and as what was to be perhaps his last addition to the outline of his monumental Arcades Project (No. 25 in “Materials for the Exposé of 1935”), Benjamin sketched some notes concerning the “ephemeral nature” of the dialectical image, that revolutionary image of the oppressed which had been silenced from history. As a recurring central concept in his work, the dialectical image, or the always singular and yet entirely fluid result of bringing “dialectics to a standstill,” is here shown to be the object of history presented in contrast with the “fixity of the philological object.”⁶⁷ Certainly not a “timeless truth,” as a universal approach to history might prefer, the dialectical image was a process of awakening to what lies already singularly pronounced within history, not that which is caught up in a progression toward an historically immanent end or goal. As he had already outlined among the cards preserved of the project, the image, in its legibility, in the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) of its recognizability, is present in a singular sense at a particular time only; but this time, as with the relevant image it accompanies, changes for each epoch.⁶⁸ In this manner, it presents a unique portrait of what it means to do justice to history, from within history, and to seek the fulfillment of time as an infinite process that is ever-changing in each epoch, or for each age. Time, in essence, interrupts history and this becomes his vision of messianic time.⁶⁹

It is also here that the theological motifs which saturate his work surface again most directly in accordance with his use of the “messianic” as a “weak force” working from within to fulfill or redeem a history yet only presentable in a (renewed, or “more just”) canonical form. Indeed, the weak messianic force is portrayed as a movement to make history theological in some sense, over and beyond its secular form as the “Theological–Political Fragment” had hinted at, to posit history as an act of remembrance and as opposed to science:

What science has “determined” [festgestellt], remembrance [Eingedenken] can modify. Such mindfulness [Eingedenken] can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance [Eingedenken] we have an experience [Erfahrung] that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological [grundsätzlich atheologisch], little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts [theologischen Begriffen].⁷⁰

Theology, again, must be veiled, or hidden, as the dwarf inside the puppet (to borrow the image of the “magical” chess-playing automaton from Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history), yet its essential importance is not reduced in the least. Consequently, this is also why he is able to state that his thought is “saturated” with theology though his direct engagement with the discipline is often muted.⁷¹ This is, of course, how we are also led to read the relationship between the puppet and that dwarf inside it who controls it, that is, between historical materialism and its “master,” theology, in the first of his theses on the concept of history.⁷²

As Benjamin’s thought progresses toward the projected end of The Arcades Project, we find on the back of the same letter that the very next sentence reads, “Where the text is itself the absolute historical object [Gegenstand]—as in theology—it holds fast to the moment of extreme ephemerality [äußersten Flüchtigkeit] in the character of a ‘revelation’ [Offenbarung].”⁷³ This is revelation seen as, in some sense, defined by its precarious placement at the “moment of extreme ephemerality” or even “volatility” (Flüchtigkeit), and that presents itself only through the absolute historical object, here identified as the sacred text. In this sense, history itself could be said to spring from the sacred text as it were, or, as he succinctly renders it immediately afterward, “The idea of a history of humanity as idea of the sacred text. In fact, the history of humanity—as prophecy—has, at all times, been read out [herausgelesen] of the sacred text.”⁷⁴ Just as Assmann was wont to link revelation and the sacred canon to the rise of cultural identity and history, so too does Benjamin seem to signal something in this direction, though the intimations of this relationship are at this point vague and needing to be connected with the larger scope of his work on the whole.

Here, though in rough fragmentary form, he contemplates what the next successive move might look like, what questions it would need to address in the context of his Arcades Project. As he rather enigmatically pens it in direct sequence with the citations mentioned above: “The new and ever identical [Immergleiche] as the categories of historical semblance [historischen Scheins].—How stands the matter with regard to eternity [Ewigkeit]?” And again, the semblance of history, a universalized history which Benjamin opposed throughout his work to the messianic dialectical image, is brought into close relief against the backdrop of the sacred, or the eternal, and left there as if this juxtaposition alone were enough to properly guide our thoughts. What seems to be clear, at least to Benjamin, however, as he ends this fragmentary note, is that the “dissolution [Auflösung] of historical semblance must follow the same trajectory as the construction of the dialectical image [dialektischen Bildes].”⁷⁵ That is, the justice wrought from the focusing of the dialectical image, the fulfillment potentially brought to history through its realization (dissolution, or resolution) —which was for him a theological premise—must run counter to the universal history offered by a school of historicism itself too indebted to its hopes of becoming a science. Its reliance upon “historical semblance” (historischen Scheins), a realm of distorted, ideological (mis)readings of historical events, must be dissolved. It is this school of historicist thought, in fact, which misses the fundamental relationship of identity construction that takes place in the continuum spanned between the messianic and the canonical. In place of maintaining any tension between them, historicism would opt for a strict, and always becoming stricter, canonical (orthodox) reading of history, hence its attempt to fully utilize the canon’s inherently ideological nature. It is the sacred text, for Benjamin, from which history springs, what now, thanks to Assmann’s insight, we can say is the basic structure of the (monotheistic) canonical text in determining the meaning given to history.

We can trace this same line of thought elsewhere in Benjamin’s writings, especially in his work on language and translation where the biblical text becomes a model for a larger pattern of thought, one wherein the interlinear translation of the scriptures serves as an exemplary form.⁷⁶ As Benjamin succinctly renders it in his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” a title that alone bears witness to the split between the universal and particular with which history wrestles,

If in what follows the nature of language [das Wesen der Sprache] is considered on the basis of the first chapter of Genesis, the object is neither biblical interpretation nor subjection of the Bible to objective consideration as revealed truth [offenbarte Wahrheit], but the discovery of what emerges [sich ergibt] of itself from the biblical text with regard to the nature of language; and the Bible is only initially [zunächst] indispensible for this purpose, because the present argument broadly follows it in presupposing language as an ultimate reality [eine letzte Wirklichkeit], perceptible only in its manifestation [Entfaltung], inexplicable and mystical. The Bible, in regarding itself as a revelation, must necessarily evolve the fundamental linguistic facts [die sprachlichen Grundtatsachen].⁷⁷

The sacred text provides a unique insight, and point of departure, for viewing the “fundamental linguistic facts” of our existence, and Benjamin seems content to leave this at face value. Through this, we are led to believe that the sacred text says something profound concerning the “fundamental linguistic facts” of our existence, and is therefore “only initially indispensible” for discerning the structure of our linguistic existence.

Just as Assmann had pointed toward the significance of revelation within the act of canonization, Benjamin situates revelation in the linguistic being of humanity, something which the canonical form attempts to capture and propagate through history. This is the case because:

. . . the equation of mental and linguistic being is of great metaphysical moment [Tragweite] to linguistic theory because it leads to the concept that has again and again, as if of its own accord [der sich immer wieder wie von selbst], elevated itself to the center of linguistic philosophy and constituted its most intimate connection with the philosophy of religion. This is the concept of revelation [der Begriff der Offenbarung].⁷⁸

As Agamben, who is incidentally (and significantly) Benjamin’s Italian translator and editor, will later comment upon this fact, what is revealed, what appears as sacred, is the starting place of language itself, the very fact that language exists and which itself cannot be stated; this is the fact that religion aspires to present.⁷⁹ The canon, in some sense appears to be that form which most directly deals with the linguistic fact of our being, and which attempts to preserve that being in the face of a catastrophe that threatens to silence this precarious nature of existence. Hence, a tight overlap is presented between canons and the particular national or ethnic language in which they are communicated, a fact to which Jerome’s Latin, Luther’s German, or King James’ English all nicely attest.

From this vantage point, we are able to see how Benjamin was, in a sense, always already only working in the domain of history opened up by the processes of canonization, indeed articulating the forgotten byways of history in order to “blast” away at their continuity and to reassert the messianic force of justice. His was a project directly indebted to the Judaic tradition’s inscription of meaning within history (and language for that matter), a search for the origin of revelation that could not be conceived otherwise. It was also an effort to conceive of the dialectical image as the seeker after origins lost to history, lost within history, within the originary, canonical form and in great need of recovery if justice was, or is, ever to be performed. This is to speak of origins that can perhaps only be touched, if ever so slightly, through the messianic elements within a particular canonical formulation, and this is perhaps also to see the messianic as the elusive origin, as the instance of what was in the beginning that could not ever fully be named or actually realized. The affinity here between conceiving of the messianic elements as an elusive originary presence and the positing of the Christian messianic claims as those being a “Word” situated, but not created, in the beginning should certainly not be overlooked in this regard.⁸⁰

In many ways, this recovery was always one concerning origins. Indeed, Benjamin himself had only slowly begun to realize through the course of his work that the concept of “origin” he had been dealing with in his book on the Origins of German Tragic Drama was the same central motif hidden deep within his voluminous Arcades Project.⁸¹ What he discovered was that both senses of origin had a profound religious heritage, a trajectory that in effect mirrors Assmann’s contentions that Judaism’s most fundamental insights were originally (pagan) Egyptian. As Benjamin saw it, “Origin [Ursprung]—it is, in effect, the concept of Ur-phenomenon [Begriff des Urphänomens] extracted from the pagan context of nature [heidnischen Naturzusammenhange] and brought into the Jewish contexts [Zusammenhänge] of history. Now, in my work on the arcades [Passagenarbeit] I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin [Ursprungsergründung].”⁸² Perhaps reflecting in many ways the entrance of creation itself into history (as, I might suggest, Agamben’s “theology of creation” might enter into Derrida’s adherence to the realm of representations), the “Jewish contexts of history” were not to fall away once being initially utilized either; they were to form the basis, in a sense, though remaining only structural perhaps throughout his work, of representing humanity’s encounter with the always particular historical catastrophe, giving their interaction a religious twist beyond simply evoking the almost routine questions of theodicy. Catastrophe, in essence, was that which threatened to obscure or hide away forever the origins sought after.

As he was to express in his Arcades Project concerning the nature of the historical phenomena in need of saving from oblivion,

What are phenomena rescued [gerettet] from? Not only, and not in the main, from the discredit and neglect into which they have fallen, but from the catastrophe represented very often by a certain strain in their dissemination [Überlieferung], their “enshrinement as heritage” [Würdigung als Erbe].—They are saved through the exhibition of the fissure [Aufweisung des Sprungs] within them.—There is a tradition [Überlieferung] that is catastrophe.⁸³

Dealing with the essence of this “tradition that is catastrophe,” I would here assert, is the basis of the Judaic canon, center of the experience of Judaism and its “enshrinement as heritage.” It was a tradition formed (canonized) in the face of catastrophe, a tradition that responded to catastrophe with the introduction of the canon into our world. This would be, if Benjamin is here read correctly, as a second catastrophe equal to the first, the enshrinement of a heritage (as canon) that is itself catastrophic. Yet, it is also an enshrinement that would raise up its own internal messianic elements (the “fissure” or Sprung within) to disrupt its own “catastrophic” attempts at canonization. In no uncertain terms, this is why the messianic would seem to figure so prominently for Benjamin, and yet it also might serve to explain why the (Judaic) canon was always kept at a distance, though never that far removed from him either, even if it was seen by him to be a catastrophe of some sort because it sought to “objectify” history in a very concrete sense.

Despite Benjamin’s critique of the canonical form, I would suggest that so profound was this act of canonization in the midst of historical crisis that the idea of meaning in history itself could be said to be born from this act, something which Benjamin had not yet abolished entirely from his thought. Indeed, as I have already argued, it is something that cannot be banished from our understanding of history as such. As the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi has put it, “If Herodotus was the father of history, the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.”⁸⁴ And as Yerushalmi further makes clear, any attempt to counter the narrative strength of mythical recurrence runs straight through the terrain of, not to mention utilizes the tactics of signification indebted to, Judaism’s monotheistic canonical processes. As he so poignantly summarizes matters: after the canon was closed, the Jews stopped writing history.⁸⁵ And they stopped writing history because it now sprang solely from the canon itself, albeit entangled with centuries of subsequent canonical interpretations of canonical texts.

But, and here is where it becomes impossible for Benjamin to take up the messianic and yet entirely shed the canonical: there is yet another connection that Yerushalmi highlights and to which we must pay careful attention. By his count, destruction and redemption are now forever dialectically linked together in the figure of the Messiah who is indissociable from the (canonical) representations of history, and therefore, as the Talmud tells us, “On the day the Temple was destroyed the Messiah was born.”⁸⁶ In other words, the words central to this study: it was a catastrophe that forged the canon, and it was this same catastrophe that also formed the historically embedded conceptualization of a messianic figure. The two are inseparable because born of the same historical crises.

If Yerushalmi is correct in asserting that Judaism managed to unite cyclical time, the time of ritual and liturgy, with an historical time, and without yet slipping into the realm of myth,⁸⁷ then Benjamin’s project certainly would appear to us as an attempt to sever cyclical time from historical time, to engage a “pure” involvement of the messianic removed from the canonical, perhaps so strongly kept separate as a result of an intense grappling with the age in which he lived and worked, an age where particular ideological–canonical constructs were attempting to totalize (to make “completely objective” in relation to history) a virulent racist and antisemitic hatred. In other words, Benjamin’s efforts could be read as an attempt to save meaning within history (its “theological” element because external to historical events) while discarding the objective accuracy of history itself, something always bound to its potential misreading, bound in fact to always be catastrophic in some sense. This could ultimately be the reason why Benjamin could never fully develop a form of “nonviolence” (as Assmann will attempt to do), precisely because he realized the always ideological manner in which cultural–canonical representations, and even language itself, operate.

In his personal life, Benjamin faced the resurgence of another catastrophe so great as to nearly destroy the Jewish population of Europe, a crisis that indeed did bring immense devastation to the people of history and the book, and in which his life story could only appear as emblematic.⁸⁸ He was dealing with the shattering of tradition, caught simultaneously in the midst of the modern forces of reason and a fascism bent on destruction. In short, he was grappling with the upending of certain canonical forms of cultural memory and of history itself, upended by the forces of the messianic working from within and by external forces of destruction working from without . . . a time of crisis indeed. It would seem in some sense almost justifiable that Benjamin came to rely so heavily upon a one-sided reading of the relationship between the messianic and the canonical, for it was the former which provided so much hope in the face of destruction, in the face of those nationalist, ideological–canonical readings which sought to perform a most perverse violence upon certain “oppressed traditions” of history. His emphasis upon a hyperbolic language of messianic forces, at the exclusion of an equally merited emphasis on canonical, or scriptural forms, was in many ways an attempt to strike back with the only excessive response at his discretion: his words. In such a way, we can see how language itself, rather than manifest itself as a contagion of some sort in need of eradication, was actually an essential factor in providing Benjamin his sense of self in the face of an immanent death. There is little surprise, then, that he would reach his last destination in a terrible physical condition, having hiked far beyond his abilities, all the while tenaciously clutching a precious (though now lost) manuscript in his briefcase. These were his words, and therefore his life.

Reading his biographical context as a significant part of the overall argumentation he was making is not a measure I take lightly. On the contrary, it is by paying such notice to the nature of his language, its very moment of articulation, that we are able to recover not only the hyperbolic excess of his statements, but also the importance of historical context itself, the very real fragmentation and catastrophe that his era witnessed in a unique and compelling manner. Benjamin’s own life was not removed from his articulations, a point which many contemporary theorists have either tenaciously defended (i.e., feminist, postcolonial, liberation) or neglected altogether (and even the most rigorous ones, such as Agamben, may manage to fall somewhat into this category). Understanding the relevance which one’s historical context holds for the discernment of one’s position is ultimately something a radical hermeneutics must develop (and as I will try to gesture toward on occasion) as, once the traditional ontological supports for defining our varied natures are displaced, the very (historical, contextual) ground upon which we stand acquires a weight far beyond what we are typically accustomed to dealing with through scholarly measures.

Toward forming the canonical in Benjamin

So ultimately, what place does the catastrophic canonical form hold in Benjamin’s estimation? It would appear that the question to be put to Benjamin, based on what we have just seen, should rather be: Can the canonical form be so easily dismissed after proving so “initially indispensible” to him? I doubt that this is the case, even if Benjamin were to wish it so (or if his subsequent interpreters, perhaps even Agamben, would like it to be so). What we are witnessing is the appearance of the messianic as the logic of the canonical pushed to its edges, a project at the limits of cultural intelligibility. For as much as the messianic might appear to de-stabilize the norms of cultural and societal legibility, it is a force yet operative within the domain of representations, acting in response to these representations and from within representation’s own limitations.⁸⁹ It is ultimately representation itself that can be divided from within, thereby offering us a more legitimate method for reading canonical forms and traditions, as this hermeneutical project will claim.

It was those forces that we saw only hinted at toward the end of the last section, those bent on destroying tradition (ultimately what he was to label as reason and fascism), which were to coincide most profoundly in Benjamin’s essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”—a combination that serves to illustrate most insightfully (once again) the close proximity which Benjamin’s work on the messianic maintains with the contours of the canonical, though without being stated explicitly by him as such. From the outset, the essay itself “reproduces” the problematic of the relationship between the canonical and the messianic which the present era, he says, will grapple with under the banners of “tradition” and “authenticity.” The terms are synonymous enough (canonical/tradition, messianic/authenticity) to reveal the deep structures at work here. Indeed, the transformation from the one to the other runs straight through the Reformation and its attitudes toward the canonical sacred text, illustrating Benjamin’s point with a decisive rigor, as I intend to demonstrate in what follows.

The contrast between tradition and authenticity is actually central to comprehending the way in which, according to Stéphane Mosès, aesthetics plays the mediator between theology and politics in Benjamin’s work.⁹⁰ This mediation essentially raises the stakes concerning the role which art has played, and continues to play, in the modern world. As Benjamin lays it out before us,

It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction [Die Reproduktionstechnik] detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition [Bereich der Tradition]. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence [massenweises] for a unique existence [einmaligen Vorkommens]. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.⁹¹

Hence, we are confronted with the “power” which reproduction holds over the identity of the people, a power which could be said to be generated from the technology itself. Consequently, “These two processes lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past [gewaltigen Erschütterung des Tradierten]—a shattering of tradition [Erschütterung der Tradition] which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity [Erneuerung der Menschheit].”⁹² As this historical instance makes profoundly clearer, this “power” of cultural reproduction, which I will here assert is distilled into its “purest” technological form as a canon of sorts, is an external, selective, and technological memory device born of a particular culture and tradition, and yet capable of replicating those same formations over time.

It is to this principle of a canonical manifestation that Benjamin here turns his focus, and to which his thoughts return over and again, as I have already tried to demonstrate through his direct reference to the sacred textual form toward the end of his life. To perceive the canon as the bulwark of societal representations, as well as the “purest” form of cultural inscription and reproduction to have ever been invented, would not be a far stretch from his remarks here on the nature of technological forms. Just such a declaration could very likely have been posted (albeit indirectly implied) along with Luther’s theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, such was the tenacious allegiance to the canonical form (in this case, of scripture) pledged during the Reformation. Indeed, for its part, the Reformation was, if seen in this light, a mass movement almost entirely indebted to the technological advancement of print, something not conceivable for the earlier “vulgar” translations of the bible (e.g., John Wycliffe), and which was yet saturated entirely within an epoch given over to the “present crisis and renewal of humanity.” Indeed, though Benjamin himself does not indicate as much, the “Protestant” undertones present in his essay are often immediately discernable, as we shall see.

Grasping the social significance of advancing technologies is, in Benjamin’s eyes, inconceivable without also fathoming the accompanying destructive “liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage [die Liquidierung des Traditionswertes am Kulturerbe].”⁹³ In many ways, this is a struggle that only mirrors that between dialectics (taken as “progress”) and his messianic aim of bringing dialectics to a “standstill.” His project acquires a significant gravity in relation to the catastrophic (“destructive”) tradition that could be said to be the canonical precisely because it has been brought about by technological advancement. The radicality of this conjunctive trend is found within the realm of the aesthetic: art, especially in its “shock value” form, destroys tradition. This occurs as technology liberates art from its subservience to tradition, its foundation in ritual, from the fact that it was so thickly embedded in a tradition which granted it its use value. Now, we are told, instead of being founded in ritual, art is founded on politics.⁹⁴ And, as Mosès again makes clear, this transition from the aesthetic paradigm to the political is yet in conjunction with a third, that of the theological.⁹⁵ As an external provider of meaning to the aesthetic, the theological is consequently linked to (albeit indirectly, and as “hidden” within) the political. It is accordingly the aesthetic paradigm which comes to mediate, in Benjamin’s later work, between the theological and the political, opening Benjamin’s remarks on art in this context to an overt theo-political reading. In this sense, and as Benjamin would conclude, we are not ever really able to separate the theological from the aesthetic, or the aesthetic from the political.

Benjamin’s separation of tradition and technology, however, is produced at the expense of the interwoven relationship between them, something which can be evidenced by the manner in which certain technologies could be said to shape tradition itself. Hence, our ability to see the Reformation as bound up with the technological triumph of the printing press, a connection which indeed shattered and still shatters tradition, and leads to its tenacious allegiance to the canonical form alone (again in this case biblical–scriptural as sola scriptura). Though Benjamin is not dealing with the same scriptural–canonical form that the Protestant reformers were, he could almost point toward nothing less than the rise of something akin to “Protestant values” when he states that “Literary competence is no longer founded on specialized higher education [spezialisierten] but on polytechnic training [polytechnischen Ausbildung], and thus is common property [Gemeingut].”⁹⁶ And it is in this way that tradition is continually upended by the reforming hands of technology, even a technology that extends a (modified) tradition over time, even a technology that is “catastrophic” for tradition as it were. It is in this sense that the canonical form itself becomes the focal point of these reflections between Benjamin and the Reformation despite their apparent, and very real, distance from each other.

And this is where Assmann’s main contribution to our study should return to the forefront of our thoughts, as the presentation of the canon, and not just any “sacred text,” would be a fitting compliment to what Benjamin is perhaps trying to ascertain. It is precisely in terms of this sliding scale between being capable and being incapable of improvement, between being open and being closed, or between the canonical rule and its messianic de-stabilization, that tradition receives the form of a canonized representation, and thus seems in some sense to clarify the problematic descriptions with which Benjamin was here wrestling. It is a form which finds the biblical–canonical version to be only initially indispensible, but then quickly expands to include all forms of cultural–canonical representation (and hence, we can see why this stress upon the form over the content has led many down a path of “messianic thinking” beyond particular canonical traditions). This is even to provide another justification for why he saw the need to read the historical object of dialectical materialism as embodied through sacred scripture—a form clearly not entirely free from attempting its own universalized history or its own ideological readings of the victors and losers of history. In essence contradictory, he does seem to be discarding one myth for another, without his reasons for doing so being entirely clear.⁹⁷ Yet, there is a difference present in relation to history and to the potential for justice to be done, a difference which needs to be isolated and clarified through its relation to the canonical form. It is a difference discernable in terms of the canon’s relation to violence.

On this nexus between the canonical and violence, we find Assmann’s later determination to sever the bond between them as essential, for a canon which would espouse such a dialectical materialism, as Benjamin had defined the messianic project, would be one that was (self-) aware of its relationship to violence, though perhaps not completely “nonviolent” as Assmann might otherwise hope. It would be a canon which harbored its messianic elements on the surface of its text and which offered a redemptive hope for a “lesser-violence” through this very feature of its existence. It is, therefore, not surprising that Benjamin’s essay on art and technology points at its end toward violence on a grand scale, for “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate [gipfeln] in one point. That point is war [der Krieg].”⁹⁸ The triad of aesthetics–politics–theology must be kept functioning as separate, and yet within the same economy, not made to merge one into the other, even if one is occasionally “hidden” within the other.

The issue at stake here, and it is one which might help clarify the origin of the canonical form, is one of property relations (of land, of nationhood, of identity) and the technology (which is canonical in form) that is capable of preserving those ties between persons and their (right to a) dwelling throughout time. As his citation of F. T. Marinetti makes clear, the modern ethos of war is one that attempts to “immortalize” the human being, to push humanity beyond itself in dominion over itself.⁹⁹ This is the same impetus (though as an opposing force tending toward less violence) of what the Judaic canon was attempting to achieve. This would be to view the canonical form as a unique (historical) attempt to preserve the identity of a people pushed to the edges of extinction who yet wish to survive into the future. As Benjamin tries in fact to demonstrate, “Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology [Aufstand der Technik], which demands repayment in ‘human material’ [Menschenmaterial] for the natural material society has denied it,” a process which could be as true for canons as for the “false sacrality” of warfare and its myths.¹⁰⁰ If society has denied a “natural human material” from arising, something which may not actually exist as such, it is no surprise that Benjamin looked, or was beginning to look again at the end of his all-too-short career, to a canonical manifestation (the biblical–scriptures) in order to find an alternative route for overcoming the violence done through war, which itself is the most obvious example of how the “victors of history” dominate when the messianic elements within our cultural representations are almost completely effaced from memory.

Initial conclusions

As some commentators on Benjamin’s work have noted, and as Assmann’s uniting of Benjamin, the canon and violence illustrates, Benjamin’s remarks on divine violence are not to be read in isolation from his comments on scripture.¹⁰¹ In so many words, this is to say that we cannot separate Benjamin’s views on divine violence from the forces that work through the canons of history and their accompanying messianic elements. This link is what enables us to utilize Benjamin’s work in order to form an account of what I would here term a “just canon,” a canon that strives to become conscious of its relationship to violence, something the Judaic canon, with its focus on the victims and marginalized figures of history, can be said to accomplish in some fashion. Through this nexus of thoughts, we might subsequently be able to see how, in contrast to lawmaking which is always “powermaking,” “Justice [Gerechtigkeit] is the principle of all divine endmaking [göttlichen Zwecksetzung] . . .,” a reversal of the norms which have inspired political thought since its inception.¹⁰²

In short, the hypothesis that emerges from this chapter, as well as the entire thesis being presented here, develops as such: if there is a “messianic arrest of happening” which is also a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed,” it interrupts (or “blasts”) the continuity of the representation of history presented in canonical form, but only truly more or less in accord with the degree to which such a canonical representation unveils its own relationship to violence. The less the canonical element does it, the louder must this “weak messianic force” be sounded; the more the canonical element exposes its own proximity and propensity to violence in an effort to stem its tide, the quieter may the messianic forces grow.¹⁰³ Though Assmann might like to escape from an always violent “matrix” of cultural–canonical representations, Benjamin makes clear that this is neither desirable nor possible. Rather, if canonical–representational identities are to be justly formed in our globalized age, then a deeper understanding of these forces at work is necessary, for those inside religious structures as much as for those external to them. It is only therefore by dividing the canonical form from within through a discernment of corresponding violences that we might begin to perceive the differences between existing canons.

As Assmann and Benjamin both have pointed to in almost the entirety of their work, and by accounting for the convergences that are too uncanny to disregard, this would be to form an image of the canon that is able to preserve its nonviolent (or less violent) heritage by resisting the temptations to universalize history as fact, to allow the voices of the oppressed to be guaranteed and heard, and to engage in a dialectical materialist vision of history even as it proclaims a sense of something transcendent to it. For Benjamin, it was the sheer machinery of Nazi (ideological, canonical) representations that was so loud as to make it seem that only the “weak messianic forces” of history were the ones capable of speaking a just word to humanity. But, as Assmann’s progression from the canonical to the messianic has shown, and to avoid such catastrophic encounters in the future, a better understanding of the relationship between them must be sought, one which constantly seeks to enact “more just” historical representations, ones never fully siding with either the oppressed once they come to power (as certain forms of historical Marxist–Communism were wont to do) or with the dominant perspectives on society (as historicism had attempted to do), but with those who perpetually reveal the violences at work in our world, those who are perpetually aware of the oppressions at hand. In this manner, perhaps a hermeneutics of violence could be established between the canonical and the messianic elements of every historical representation in order to further the horizon of justice within which every identity is ultimately constructed.

At the least, it could be said in light of Agamben’s challenges to representation that finding a platform for re-envisioning and sustaining a coherent contemporary theological viewpoint on canonical forms is no easy task. We are, therefore, and in order to pursue this line of inquiry further, almost compelled to ask: where does Agamben’s attempt to locate an immanent theology beyond the contours of representational thinking ultimately place us? Does his gesture merely repeat so many Jewish messianic and antinomian responses to the sufferings of exclusion and exile? How are we to take seriously such antinomian responses from within a dialectical framework?

As I have already gestured, however, perhaps the scope of our inquiry can be deepened by repeating the Pauline gesture that Agamben finds so useful: the “division of division itself.” By thus making distinctions between canons which already serve to “divide” culture into various forms (Assmann’s Mosaic distinction), perhaps we are in a position to better discern the failures of representation and to thus point to a peculiar “presentation” beyond representation, though maybe not entirely the same thing as Agamben has in mind. Accordingly, and in order to make the first step toward developing a radical hermeneutics of use for theological methodologies, I would indicate that we make such a “division of division itself” within canonical forms, something accomplished through the division between those canons that condone and those that condemn certain acts of social and cultural violence. Though such a distinction may not appear to resolve the “violent” imposition of canonical forms upon us in the first place, I would suggest rather that, much as Paul had already suggested in his letters, the division of canonical forms according to their positions concerning violence is a movement that in a certain sense ‘de-activates’ the normative violence imposed by a given canonical form, perhaps even going so far as to provide a certain sense of liberation to its communal members through its ultimate recognition of the failures of representation. Establishing a criterion of violence with regard to (western) canonical forms thereby enables us to “think beyond” the binary divisions enacted between immanence/transcendence and presentation/representation in order to work toward, not only more just forms of cultural representation, but also a “presentation” of reality beyond the normativity typically associated with representational claims.

To further work through such conclusions, I intend in the final chapter to more fully detail the implications of such a hermeneutical position by applying such insights to the work of Paul Ricoeur. It is my hope that by doing so I am able, not only to confirm my basic hypothesis on the relationship of canonical forms to messianic forces, but also to give an answer to the (“antinomian”) desire to permanently transcend our given representations.