Introduction

THE TASK OF ACTUALIZING Walter Benjamin's political thought confronts us with a problem: many of the positions that he himself, writing in the 1920s and 1930s, regarded as necessary and critical must seem to us, reading him in the twenty-first century, to have become outdated and unacceptable. What are we to think, for example, of his admiration for the revolution's law-destroying violence, his eulogy of the sacrifice, and his attack on parliamentary democracy? And, more fundamentally, what are we to think of his defense of Communism, and his plea for a political messianism? Even some of Benjamin's most generous readers have had difficulties in coming to terms with these positions. They have applied various reading strategies to save Benjamin from himself, arguing, for example, that his Communism was merely a period phenomenon, not affecting his more original, critical positions, and that his messianism should not be taken literally. In the end, however, such readings have remained unsatisfying, for they have tended either to historicize Benjamin's notion of politics, making it irrelevant to the present, or to correct it, thus downplaying aspects of it that he himself considered important.

I believe there is another, more promising, way to engage with Benjamin's political thought. It takes as its point of departure not a historicization or a correction of his illusions but rather an experience of disillusion. At the end of his life Benjamin became disillusioned with some of his deepest political convictions, most notably, his “belief” in Communism. I want to argue that this experience of disillusion is precisely what makes his political thought still valuable and relevant for us today, for it led him, among other things, to formulate a critique of totalitarian ideologies that, to this date, has remained unsurpassed in philosophical depth and rigor. Its tenor was that the totalitarian ideologies were entangled in a cycle of violence, caused by their tendency to forget — or to mythologize — the past for the sake of creating a supposedly perfect society. In an attempt to counter these totalitarian ideologies, Benjamin set out to design a radically different kind of politics that, instead of instrumentalizing the past for present purposes, understood itself to be in the service of preceding generations. It was based not only on the pragmatic view that a present politics would remain self-critical as long as it reflected on mistakes made in the past but also on a deeper, theological conviction: the task of a present politics was to “save” or redeem the past from oblivion.