The publication of an extensive edition of the writings of Walter Benjamin1 is intended to do justice to their objective importance. The aim here is neither merely to assemble the life-work of a philosopher or a scholar, nor to see justice done to someone who died a victim of National Socialist persecution and whose name was suppressed from public consciousness in Germany after 1933. The notion of a life-work as the nineteenth century knew it does not fit Benjamin; indeed, it is doubtful whether anyone today is granted a life-work, which requires a life brought to fruition on its own terms, without discontinuity. But it is certain that the historical catastrophes of Benjamin’s time denied his work a finished unity and condemned his whole philosophy, and not only the great project of his later years, on which he staked everything, to be fragmentary. For precisely this reason an attempt to protect Benjamin from the oblivion that threatens him would be legitimate enough: the stature of texts like those on Goethe’s Elective Affinities or on the origin of German Trauerspiel, long known to a small circle, is adequate reason to make work that has been lost for decades accessible again. But there would be a moment of impotence in such an attempt at spiritual reparation, a moment no one would have acknowledged with more self-abnegation than Benjamin, who had bravely renounced the childish belief in the historical immutability and permanence of intellectual works. Rather, what motivates the decision to publish an oeuvre which its author might have preferred hidden in “marble vaults,” from which it would be dug up some better day in the future, is a promise that emanated from Benjamin the writer and the person, a promise it has become all the more urgent to remember now that the superior power of empirical reality seems to be conspiring to prevent the emergence of anything like it; a fascination of a unique kind. This fascination does not derive solely from spirit, abundance, originality, and depth. Benjamin’s ideas glow with a color that rarely occurs within the spectrum of concepts, a color of an order to which consciousness usually blinds itself in order not to become weary of the familiar world and its ends. What Benjamin said and wrote sounded as if it came from the depths of mystery. It received its power, however, from its quality of self-evidence. It was free of the affectation of secret doctrine and access through initiation. Benjamin never practiced “privileged thought.”2 Certainly one could easily have envisioned him as a magician in a tall pointed hat, and on occasion he did indeed present his friends with ideas as though they were fragile and valuable magical objects, but even the strangest and most whimsical of them were always tacitly accompanied by something like a reminder that alert consciousness could attain that very knowledge if it were only alert enough. His statements appealed not to revelation but to a type of experience that was distinguished from ordinary experience in failing to respect the restrictions and prohibitions to which a ready-made consciousness normally submits. Never in what he said did Benjamin acknowledge the limit that all nineteenth-century thought took for granted, the Kantian prohibition against wandering off into “intelligible worlds,” or as Hegel, bristling, said, to “houses of ill repute.” No more than the sensuous happiness tabooed by the traditional work ethic did Benjamin’s thought deny itself the spiritual counter-pole to that happiness, reference to the absolute. For metaphysics—that which is beyond nature—is inseparable from the fulfillment of the natural. Hence Benjamin does not derive the relationship to the absolute from concepts but instead seeks it in bodily contact with the materials. Benjamin’s impulse would grant experience everything the norms of experience usually harden themselves against if it will only insist on its own concretion instead of dissolving concreteness, its immortal part, by subordinating it to the schema of the abstract universal. Benjamin thereby set himself in sharp opposition to the whole of modern philosophy, with perhaps the sole exception of Hegel, who knew that to establish a limit always also meant to overstep it, and he made it easy for those who dispute the rigor of his ideas to reject them as nothing more than bright ideas, merely subjective, merely aesthetic, or a mere metaphysical Weltanschauung. His relationship to such criteria was so oblique that it did not even occur to him to defend himself against their claim to validity as Bergson did; he also refused to claim any special intuitive source of knowledge. His fascination lay in the fact that all the familiar objections to the obvious truth of his experience, which certainly could not always be traced back through all its steps but which was often striking, took on a foolish, fumbling quality, an apologetic quality, the tone of “yes but.” They sounded like mere efforts on the part of conventional consciousness to assert itself against something irrefutable, against a source of light that was stronger than the protective covering of a rationality in league with the status quo. Anything but irrational, Benjamin’s philosophy convicted that rationality of its own stupidity through its mere existence, without polemics. It was not from lack of knowledge or from undisciplined fantasy that he ignored the philosophical tradition and the accepted rules of scientific logic but because he suspected it of being sterile, futile, and washed out, and because the force of unspoiled, unprocessed reality in him was too strong for him to let himself be intimidated by the raised index finger of intellectual control.
Benjamin’s philosophy provokes the misunderstanding of consuming and defusing it as a series of unconnected aperçus responding to the contingencies of occasion. It is not only the tense wit of his insights, which is completely contrary to any mollusk-like reactiveness, even with regard to the most mundane objects, that must be invoked in opposition to that misunderstanding. Beyond that, each insight has its place within an extraordinary unity of philosophical consciousness. But the essence of this unity consists in its moving outward, in finding itself by losing itself in multiplicity. The measure of the experience that supports every sentence Benjamin wrote is its power to move the center out to the periphery, instead of developing the periphery out of the center as the practice of philosophers and of traditional theory requires. If Benjamin’s thought does not respect the boundary between the conditioned and the unconditioned, nor conversely does it lay claim to a closed totality, a claim that is always heard when thought marks out its own sphere, the domain of subjectivity, in order to reign sovereign within it. Paradoxically, Benjamin’s speculative method converges with the empirical method. In his preface to his book on German tragic drama, Benjamin undertook a metaphysical rescue of nominalism: he does not draw conclusions from above to below, so to speak, but rather, in an eccentric fashion, “inductively.” For him, philosophical fantasy is the capacity for “interpolation in the smallest,” and for him one cell of reality contemplated out-weighs—this too is his own formulation—the rest of the whole world. The hubris of system is as foreign to Benjamin as resignation within the finite; in fact, they seem inherently identical to him. Systems sketch out a mere semblance of the truth native to theology, a truth whose faithful and radical translation into the secular is what Benjamin is after. To the strength of his self-renunciation there corresponds, below the surface, a warren of interconnected passageways. Benjamin deeply mistrusted superficial classificatory organization: he was afraid that it would lead, as in the fairy-tale warning, to “forgetting the best.” His dissertation was devoted to a central theoretical aspect of early German Romanticism, and in one respect he remained indebted to Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis throughout his life—in his conception of the fragment as a philosophical form which, precisely by being fragmented and incomplete, retains something of the force of the universal, a force that evaporates in any comprehensive scheme. The fact that Benjamin’s work remained fragmentary is therefore not to be ascribed solely to a hostile fate; rather, it was built into the structure of his thought, into his fundamental ideas, from the start. Even the most extensive book of his that we have, the Origin of German Tragic Drama, is so constructed that despite the extremely painstaking architecture of the whole each of the tightly woven and internally unbroken sections catches its breath and begins anew instead of leading into the next one as required by the schema of a continuous train of thought. This literary principle of composition claims nothing less than to express Benjamin’s conception of truth itself. No more than for Hegel is this for him the mere adequacy of thought to its object—no part of Benjamin ever obeys this principle—rather, it is a constellation of ideas that, as he may have envisioned it, together form the divine Name, and in each case these ideas crystallize in details, which are their force field.
Benjamin belongs to the philosophical generation that tried in every way to break out of idealism and system, and there are ample connections between him and the older representatives of such efforts. He is linked with phenomenology, especially in his youth, by the method of defining essences through the analysis of objective meaning, a linguistically oriented method, as opposed to the arbitrary definition of terms. His “Critique of Violence” exemplifies this method. Benjamin had always had an old-fashioned power of stringent definition, from the definition of fate as the “Schuldzusammenhang des Lebendigen”3 [literally, the guilt-context of the living] to his late definition of the “aura.”4 Reminiscent of the George School, to which he owes more than one can see on the surface of his work, is a spellbinding philosophical gesture that stops its animated subject matter in its tracks, the monumentality of the momentary that constitutes one of the defining tensions in the form of his thought. He is akin to the antisystematic Simmel in attempting to lead philosophy out of the “icy desert of abstraction” and put ideas into concrete historical images. Among those of his own generation, he and Franz Rosenzweig are related in the tendency to turn speculation into theological doctrine; he and the Ernst Bloch of the Spirit of Utopia share the conception of “theoretical messianism,” a lack of concern for the boundaries Kant set for philosophy, and the intention of interpreting mundane experience as a figure of transcendental experience. But it was precisely from the philosophical ideas with which he seemed most in agreement, since they were the intellectual currents of his time, that Benjamin distanced himself most emphatically. He preferred to incorporate elements from a thought that was alien and threatening to him, like a vaccine, rather than to entrust himself to something similar to him, in which he unerringly noted a complicity with the official status quo, even where people acted as though the new day had dawned and everything were to begin anew. Benjamin used to say that he did not understand Husserl, whose speculative audacity was strangely coupled with residues of a well-trained neokantianism and virtually scholastic distinctions. For Scheler he and Scholem had the contempt of the Jewish-theological tradition for a resurrection of metaphysics in the marketplace. But what distinguished him from everything somewhat similar in his own era was the specific weight of the concrete in his philosophy. He never denigrated the concrete to an example of the concept, not even to a Blochian “symbolic intention,” a messianic trace within the fallen natural world, but rather took the concept of concretion, which in the meantime had degenerated into ideology and obscurantism, so literally that it became simply unsuitable for all the manipulations that are performed with it today in the name of “mission” and “encounter,” of “concern,” “authenticity,” and “genuineness.” He was extremely sensitive to the temptation to smuggle in illegitimate concepts under the protection of concrete statements by tacitly presenting the concrete as a mere example of a preset concept, giving the concept the semblance of being substantial and true to experience. Insofar as thought is ever able to, he always chose as his object the nodal points of the concrete, the points where it has coalesced to become genuinely indissoluble. For all its gentle surrender to its object, his philosophy indefatigably breaks its teeth on the core. To this extent it is implicitly linked to Hegel, to the permanent exertions of the concept, without any confidence in the automatic mechanisms of a categorizing that merely covers up its objects. In an extreme contrast to contemporary phenomenology, Benjamin—when he is not dealing explicitly with intentions like the allegorical, as in his book on the Baroque Trauerspiel—does not want to trace intentions in thought but rather to crack them open and push out into the intentionless, if not even, in a kind of Sisyphean labor, to decipher the intentionless itself. The greater the demands Benjamin makes of the speculative concept, the more unreservedly, one might almost say blindly, does this thought succumb to its material. He once said, not out of coquettishness but with absolute seriousness, that he needed a proper dose of stupidity to be able to think a decent thought.
The material to which Benjamin devoted himself, however, was historical and literary. While he was still quit young, in the early 1920s, he formulated the maxim of never thinking off the top of his head, or, as he called it, “amateurishly,” but rather thinking always and exclusively in relation to existing texts. Benjamin understood that idealist metaphysics was deceptive in equating what exists with meaning. At the same time, any unmediated statement about meaning, about transcendence, is historically forbidden. This is what gives his philosophy its allegorical quality. It aims at the absolute, but in a discontinuous, mediated fashion. The whole of creation becomes for Benjamin a text which must be deciphered but whose code is unknown. He immerses himself in reality as in a palimpsest. Interpretation, translation, criticism—these are the schemata of this thought. The wall of words he explores by tapping provides his homeless thought with authority and protection; occasionally he spoke of his method as a parody of the philological method. Here too one should not miss the theological model, the tradition of Jewish and especially mythical Bible interpretation. Not the least of the operations designed to secularize theology in order to rescue it is that of regarding profane texts as though they were sacred ones. Herein lay Benjamin’s elective affinity with Karl Kraus. But the ascetic restriction of his philosophy to objects already formed by spirit, to “culture”—even where he played the concept of barbarism off provocatively against the concept of culture—this restriction to what spirit has produced, this renunciation of philosophical concern with immediacy of existence and so-called primordiality in any form, also indicates that it is precisely the world of the humanly produced and the socially mediated, the world that occupies his philosophical horizon, that has inserted itself in front of “nature.” Hence in Benjamin the historical itself looks as though it were nature. There were good reasons why the concept of “natural history” stands at the center of his interpretation of the baroque. Here as in many other places Benjamin distills his own essence out of alien material. For him what is historically concrete becomes “image”—the archetypal image of nature as of what is beyond nature—and conversely nature becomes the figure of something historical. “The incomparable speech of the death’s head: complete lack of expression—it combines the blackness of the eye cavities with the wildest expression—the sneering rows of teeth,” he writes in One Way Street.5 The unique imagistic character of Benjamin’s thought—this mythicizing tendency, if you like—derives precisely from the fact that under the gaze of his melancholy the historical becomes nature by virtue of its own fragility, and everything natural becomes part of the history of creation. Benjamin circles tirelessly around this relationship; it is as if he wanted to plumb the riddle that ships’ cabins and gypsy wagons offer to childlike amazement, and as with Baudelaire everything turns to allegory before his eyes. This kind of immersion could find its limits only in the intentionless; only there would the concept, pacified, be extinguished, and for this reason Benjamin elevates the Denkbild, the thought-image, to the ideal. But just as he did not envision an irrationalist philosophy, because only elements defined by thought could assemble to form such images, so in actuality Benjamin’s images are far from mythical images as Jungian psychology, for instance, describes them. They do not represent invariant archetypes to be extracted from history; rather, it is precisely through the force of history that they crystallize. Benjamin’s micrological gaze, the unmistakable color of his kind of concretion, represents an orientation to the historical in a sense opposed to philosophia perennis. His philosophical interest is not directed to the ahistorical at all, but rather to what is temporally determined and irreversible. Hence the title One Way Street. Benjamin’s images are not linked with nature as moments of a self-identical ontology but rather in the name of death, of transience as the supreme category of natural existence, the category toward which Benjamin’s thought advances. What is eternal in them is only the transient. He was right to call the images of his philosophy dialectical: similarly, the plan of his book on the Paris Arcades envisaged a panorama of dialectical images as well as their theory. The concept of dialectical image was intended objectively, not psychologically: the representation of the modern as the new, the past, and the eternally invariant in one would have become both the central philosophical theme and the central dialectical image.
The uncommon difficulties Benjamin poses for the reader are not primarily difficulties of presentation, although at least in the early texts presentation too makes demands of the reader through its doctrinal tone, a language that claims authority in and of itself, by virtue of naming, and for the most part—in this not at all unlike phenomenology—refuses to provide justification and argumentation. Still greater are the demands that derive from the philosophical substance. The latter requires that expectations with which a person trained in philosophy customarily embarks on texts be set aside. Benjamin’s antisystematic impulse determines his method in a far more radical way than is usually the case even with antisystematic thinkers. His confidence in experience, in a particular sense that is difficult to define in general terms and can be acquired only through familiarity with Benjamin’s thought, forbids stating so-called fundamental ideas and then deriving everything else from them. It is hard to tell how much the very notion of a fundamental idea is radically denied by Benjamin and how much his work is guided by his tendency to keep silent about these fundamental ideas in order to allow them to work all the more powerfully from their hidden position so that their light, which would blind anyone who looked at it directly, falls on the phenomena. In any case, in his youth Benjamin showed his cards—to use his expression—more often than he did later. He himself always thought especially highly of the short piece “Fate and Character,” regarding it as a kind of theoretical model of what he envisioned. Anyone who wants to approach him will do well to begin with an intensive study of that work. He will see in it both Benjamin’s deep and slightly antiquarian connection with Kant, especially with Kant’s rigorous distinction between nature and the supernatural, as well as the involuntary reconstruction and alienation such concepts undergo under Benjamin’s saturnine gaze. For it is precisely character, which Benjamin separates from the order of the moral as emphatically as he does the concept of fate, that, as “intelligible character,” something Kant defines as autonomous, is the determining ground of moral freedom; and of course the Benjaminian motif that in character the human being—that which is beyond nature—escapes the mythically amorphous is reminiscent of this in turn. Since, long after this relatively early work was written, there have been efforts to develop an ontological interpretation of Kant, it may be appropriate to point out now that under Benjamin’s medusa-like gaze, a gaze that turned its object to stone, Kant’s thoroughly functional thought, which aimed at “Tätigkeiten” [activities], froze to a kind of ontology from the start. In Benjamin, the concepts of the phenomenal and the noumenal, which in Kant are reciprocally determining even in their opposition and are linked through the unity of reason, become spheres in a theocratic order. This, however, was the spirit in which he restructured every element of culture that he encountered, as if the form of his intellectual organization and the melancholy with which his nature conceived the idea of something beyond nature, of reconciliation, necessarily endowed everything he took up with a deathly shimmer. Even the concept of the dialectic, to which he inclined in his later materialist phase, shares these characteristics. There are good reasons why his is a dialectic of images rather than a dialectic of progress and continuity, a “dialectics at a standstill”—a name, incidentally, he found without knowing that Kierkegaard’s melancholy had long since conjured it up. He escaped the antithesis of the eternal and the historical through his micrological method, through his concentration on the very smallest, in which the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in an image. One understands Benjamin correctly only if one senses behind each of his sentences the conversion of extreme animation into something static, in fact the static conception of movement itself; this also gives his language its specific character. In the theses “On the Concept of History,” a crucial text that belongs to the complex of the late work on the Paris Arcades, Benjamin finally spoke candidly about his philosophical idea and thereby transcended dynamic concepts like those of progress by virtue of his incomparable experience, which is similar perhaps only to the photographic snapshot. If one looks for further key works beyond the early monograph and those theses, which were no doubt written in the face of the ultimate danger, the “Critique of Violence,” in which the polarity of myth and reconciliation emerges so powerfully, would be the most likely candidate. In the dissociation into what is without form and subject on the one hand and justice, which is separate from all natural order, on the other, everything that as dynamics, development, and freedom usually makes up the intermediate world of the human disintegrates in Benjamin. By virtue of this dissociation Benjamin’s philosophy is in fact inhuman: the human being is its locus and arena rather than something existing in and for itself. The horror one feels at this aspect of Benjamin’s texts probably defines their innermost difficulty. Seldom do intellectual difficulties stem from mere lack of intelligibility; they are usually the result of a shock. The person who does not want to surrender to ideas in which he senses mortal danger to his familiar self-consciousness will recoil from Benjamin. Reading Benjamin can be fruitful and felicitous only for someone who looks this danger in the eye without immediately taking the obstinate stance that one wants nothing to do with this kind of denaturing of existence. With Benjamin the saving quality does indeed emerge only where there is danger.
The internal composition of Benjamin’s prose is also discomfiting in the way the ideas are linked, and nowhere is it more necessary than here to clear away false expectations if one does not want to go astray. For the Benjaminian idea in its strict form excludes not only fundamental motifs but also their development and elaboration, the whole mechanism of premise, assertion, and proof, of thesis and result. Just as in its most uncompromising representatives modern music no longer tolerates any elaboration, any distinction between theme and development, but instead every musical idea, even every note, stands equally near the center, so too Benjamin’s philosophy is “athematic.” It is dialectics at a standstill in another sense as well, in that it allots no time to internal development but instead receives its form from the constellation formed by the individual statements. Hence its affinity with the aphorism. At the same time, however, the theoretical element in Benjamin always requires farther-ranging linkages of ideas. Benjamin compared his form to a weaving, and its thoroughly self-contained character is determined by that: the individual motifs are attuned to one another and intertwined with one another without regard to whether the sequence produces a picture of a train of thought, or “communicates” something, or convinces the reader: “Überzeugen ist unfruchtbar” [“Convincing”—literally, excess generation—“is unfruitful”]. One who looks in Benjamin’s philosophy for what emerges from it will necessarily be disappointed; it satisfies only the person who broods over it until he finds what is inherent in it: “Then one evening the work becomes alive,” as in Stefan George’s Tapestry of Life. In later years, under the influence of injections of materialism, Benjamin tried to eliminate the uncommunicative element, which in his earlier writings knows no mercy and which found its most compelling expression in the highly significant work “The Task of the Translator”; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” not only describes the historico-philosophical context that dissolves that element but also contains a secret program for Benjamin’s own writing, which the monograph “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and the theses “On the Concept of History” then try to follow. What Benjamin envisioned was the communication of the incommunicable through lapidary expression. A certain simplification in the use of language is unmistakable. But, as is often the case in the history of philosophy, the simplicity is deceptive; nothing in Benjamin’s intellectual optics has changed, and the fact that the most alien insights are expressed as though they were pure common sense only heightens their strangeness: nothing could be more Benjaminian than the response he once gave to a request for an example of sound common sense: “The later the evening, the more beautiful the guests.” His linguistic gesture once again takes on an authoritative tone, as it had in his youth; it now has something of the quality of a fictitious proverb, perhaps out of the will to balance his kind of intellectual experience with a broader communication. What drew Benjamin to dialectical materialism was no doubt less its theoretical content than the hope for an empowered, collectively legitimated form of discourse. Without sacrificing the idea of doctrine, he no longer believed, as he had in his youth, that he could draw on mythical theology; here too the motif of rescuing theology by sacrificing it, by secularizing it mercilessly, is expressed. The configuration of the incompatible, which is at the same time implacable in its opposition to what he had always rejected, gives Benjamin’s late philosophy its painfully fragile depth.
The need for authority in the sense of collective legitimacy was, furthermore, by no means so foreign to Benjamin as one might suppose from his intellectual makeup, which kept its distance from any kind of complicity. Rather, the incommensurable aspect of his thought, which was individuated to the point of the most painful isolation, had from the first sought for externalization in attempts, however ill-fated, to be assimilated into orders and communities. Certainly Benjamin was one of the first among those practicing philosophy to note the tension in the fact that the bourgeois individual, the thinking subject, has become questionable in his very core, without the substantive presence of any supra-individual aspect of existence in which the individual could be sublated intellectually without being oppressed; Benjamin expressed this situation when he defined himself as a person who had left his class without belonging to another one. His role in the youth movement, which at that time was completely different from its later manifestations—he was among the chief collaborators on its journal, Der Anfang, and was friendly with Gustav Wyneken until the latter went over to the apologists for the First World War—perhaps even his liking for theocratic notions is cut from the same cloth as his form of Marxism, which he wanted to take over in orthodox form, as doctrine, without any inkling of the kind of productive misunderstanding he thereby set in motion. It is not difficult to see through the futility of all such attempts to break out, the impotent attempt to make oneself resemble the powers in ascendancy, powers from which no one must have recoiled in more horror than Benjamin: “It was as though I did not want to form an alliance under any circumstances, even with my own mother,” he wrote as late as the Berlin Childhood. He was aware of the impossibility of his assimilation, and yet did not deny his yearning for it. Such a contradiction, however, by no means points merely to the weakness of the isolate; rather, there is a truth in it: an insight into the inadequacy of private reflection when it is separated from objective tendencies and from praxis. Even one who makes himself a seismography of current tendencies, as Benjamin did to an extraordinary degree, suffers from this inadequacy. Benjamin, who at one point expressed his agreement with the characterization of him as thinking in fragments, did not shy away from the most extreme step: he took a deadly foreign element into himself and renounced even the form of harmonious coherence that was open to him: that of the windowless monad that still nevertheless “signifies” the universe. For he knew that no appeal to a preestablished harmony was valid any longer, if indeed it had ever been. One can learn as much from the tour de force to which he committed himself, without many illusions about the possibility of success, as from the masterful work he brought to completion. When he entitled an essay “Wider ein Meisterwerk” [“Against a Masterpiece”], he was writing against himself as well, and the capacity to do so cannot be separated from his productive force.
The basis of Benjamin’s melancholy, his “character” in the sense he himself gave the word, must be sought in this kind of contradiction. Sorrow—not the state of being sad—was the defining characteristic of his nature, in the form of a Jewish awareness of the permanence of threat and catastrophe as much as in the antiquarian inclination that cast a spell even on the contemporary and turned it into something long past. Benjamin, inexhaustibly insightful, full of ideas, productive, in control of spirit every waking moment of his life and completely governed by spirit, was yet anything but what the cliché considers spontaneous; just as what he said came out ready for print, so his wonderful phrase about the aging Goethe as the official in charge of his own interior8 holds for Benjamin himself. The predominance of spirit in him had alienated him from his physical and even his psychological existence to an extreme degree. Something Schönberg said of Webern, whose handwriting reminds one of Benjamin’s, was true of Benjamin as well: he had imposed a taboo on animal warmth; a friend was hardly permitted even to put a hand on his shoulder, and even his death may be linked to the fact that on the last night in Port Bou the group with which he had fled gave him a single room for the sake of modesty, with the result that he was able to ingest unobserved the morphine he had in reserve for the utmost emergency. In spite of this, however, his aura was warm, not cold. He had a capacity to make others happy that far surpassed any such spontaneous capacity: that of unrestrained gift-giving. The virtue Zarathustra praises as the highest, the gift-giving virtue, was Benjamin’s to such a degree that everything else was overshadowed by it: “Uncommon is the highest virtue and not useless; it is gleaming and gentle in its splendor.” And when he called his chosen emblem—Klee’s Angelus Novus—the angel that does not give but takes,9 that too redeems one of Nietzsche’s ideas: “Such a gift-giving love must approach all values as a robber,” for “the earth shall yet become a site of recovery. And even now a new fragrance surrounds it, bringing salvation—and a new hope.”* Benjamin’s words, his silent, incorporeal, fairy-tale smile, and his silence all bear witness to this hope. Every time one was with him something otherwise irrevocably lost was restored—celebration. In his proximity one was like the child at the moment when the door to the room where the Christmas presents lie waiting opens a crack and the abundance of light overwhelms the eyes to the point of tears, more moving and more assured than any brightness that greets the child when he is invited to enter the room. All the power of thought gathered in Benjamin to create such moments, and into them alone has passed what the doctrines of theology once promised.