Thinking the disruption

by Michael Ramminger

[This article posted on 10/30/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.neuewege.ch/die-unterbrechung-denken.]

The present is marked by crises and catastrophes. Progress cannot fix it. Does messianic-apocalyptic thinking help? An examination of the Jewish thinkers Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, kindred spirits of Margarete Susman.

The climate catastrophe, the farewell to the idea of a world without wars, and now already hundreds of warlike conflicts over raw materials - from oil to rare earths to water - darken the future. The "Weiterso" is not really questioned. Can reflections by the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) provide us with an answer to the obsessive and seemingly hopeless capitalist principles that lead to disaster?

In his 1921 fragment Capitalism as Religion,1 Walter Benjamin wrote of a movement of "endurance to the end" inherent in capitalism. Hannah Arendt had described it as "progress striding into ruin" and quoted Walter Benjamin's fragment: "The angel of history [...] has turned its face toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe that ceaselessly heaps rubble upon rubble and hurls it at his feet." Benjamin contrasts the "single catastrophe, rubble upon rubble" with the "apocalyptic leap into conversion, atonement, purification, repentance."

Messianic and apocalyptic thinking?

Even if the interrupting, the apocalyptic and the messianic seem strange to us at first and do not seem to show us a way out of the actually existing catastrophes, the question remains to what extent these figures can contribute to a necessary interruption of the conditions. In my view, it makes sense to fall back on the Jewish notion of the Messianic and apocalyptic, even if the mere mention of the term "apocalyptic" may arouse suspicions of conspiracy theory and abstruse notions of history. Such an association only points to the spell we are under: the spell of a timeless time that knows no end, whose end we dare not think. Of course, we are not relying here on the myth of progress that Benjamin criticized and that seems to have disavowed itself in the face of the ecological crisis. But then, what do we actually dare to think and believe?

The Jewish philosopher of religion Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) insisted in his essay On Understanding the Messianic Idea in Judaism2 that messianism was and is part of Jewish self-understanding - even beyond the catastrophe of the destruction of the Temple. The messianic idea in Judaism is also inextricably linked to the notion that redemption takes place in the arena of history and in the medium of community. He distinguishes between a restorative messianism, that is, a recourse to the restoration of a past (even if it never existed in that way), and a utopian messianism, which hopes for something entirely new: "The entirely new has elements of the entirely old, but even this old itself is not at all the realiter past, but something transfigured and transformed by dream, on which the ray of utopia has fallen" (p. 13). And - Scholem writes - the messianic actually always goes along with the apocalyptic. It is not always unambiguous: it includes the idea of a catastrophic end in the face of the catastrophic of the world. It certainly also includes the idea of two eons, this world and the world to come, that is, the idea of transitionlessness as well as the idea of the Last Judgment and the catastrophicity of redemption.

The horror and the consolation

I would like to note three elements of messianism:

1. in messianism there is the notion of the revolutionary, subversive moment in the transition to the messianic future. Apocalyptic thinking always contains a moment of horror and consolation: the horrors of real historical conditions and their end in the end of war, exploitation and destruction.

2) The transitionlessness of history and redemption is always emphasized: The Bible knows no progress in history towards redemption. Redemption is not the result of inner-worldly developments, such as in modern Western reinterpretations of messianism since the Enlightenment. Redemption is the irruption of transcendence into history, "an irruption in which history itself perishes" (p. 25). 3.

3 Of course, this conviction carries the danger of pessimistic world-conviction. Scholem writes in this regard: There can be no messianic activism. To the question whether man can master his own future, the answer of the apocalypticist is: No! (p. 33).

But there is another moment of apocalypticism that reopens the door to history: "There is in the nature of messianic utopia an anarchic element, the dissolution of old bonds that lose their meaning in the new context of messianic freedom. The wholly new thing that utopia hopes for thus enters into momentous tension with the world of bonds and law, which is the world of halakha [and all laws, M. R.]" (p. 42).

The apocalyptic vision of historical horrors, which is connected with the messianic utopia, leads at the same time to an antinomism, to a critical attitude towards laws and ordinances, which certainly leads to the "Pauline freedom" of revolutionary, anarchic existence, but it always carries with it the reservation of "unredeemedness". It is the anarchic vision of liberation from the limitations of an unsaved worldview. This antinomianism is, of course, always exposed to the suspicion of anti-Judaism in Christianity. On the other hand, it should be noted that it has been a specific moment of Jewish mysticism. Scholem himself suspects here an inner-Jewish conflict between rabbinic and mystical Judaism. Christianity, especially in its idea that the Messiah had already come, had to fall back on the First Testament in its revolutionary perspectives. For it was above all here that the conviction was preeminent in the texts that liberation and redemption must take place "on the scene of history" (Scholem).

Ruling conditions in ruins

I return to Walter Benjamin. In two other small fragments written ten years after Capitalism as Religion, I think such apocalyptic motifs reappear and reinforce the moment of the antinomian, anarchic for a view of history. I see these motifs as building blocks of a necessary hermeneutic that might free us from the myth of eternal, doomed progress.

In his text Experience and Poverty3 Benjamin writes of the fact that in this period, that is, the early 1940s, all experience was given the lie, "the strategic by the war of position, the economic by inflation, the physical by hunger, the moral by those in power" (p. 219). He wants to set against this poverty of experience as a kind of barbarism (as "barbarians" are understood those to whom neither culture nor experience counts for anything) a "new" barbarism, which he connotes positively. He tries to turn the poverty of experience positively, because it leads to "starting from scratch; beginning anew; making do with little; constructing from little, looking neither right nor left" (p. 216). This "new" barbarism is characterized by "[g]iven illusionlessness about the age" that is nevertheless marked by a "wholehearted commitment to it." Surprisingly for me, Benjamin thus stands on the one hand quite in the tradition of apocalyptic images of freedom from the established - ideas, laws and paradigms - which is based on illusionlessness about history. But doesn't he here at the same time still bet on a new, on modernity, on the avant-garde, the future as a historical movement, which is otherwise quite untypical for him? Benjamin has no illusions about the coming economic crisis and war: "In the door stands the economic crisis, behind it a shadow, the coming war" (p. 219). For this very reason, he calls for a new barbarism that breaks with the old and does not allow itself to be captured by it.

In the text Der destruktive Charakter (The Destructive Character), which appeared almost at the same time,4 Benjamin describes a way of dealing with and in the world that also contains that antinomian moment typical of apocalypticism and therefore probably taken from it: the tidying up with and in the world that not only rejects its plausibilities, its culture, thus also its rules and its logic, but wants to put them aside. Benjamin formulates this as follows: "The destructive character knows only one slogan: make room; only one activity: clear. Its need for fresh air and free space is stronger than any hatred" (p. 396). The destructive character that Benjamin proposes here as a hermeneutic has nothing creative, nothing creative, nor does it want to be understood. Just like "positive barbarism," the destructive character is a counter-image against the supposedly constructive characters, who, after all, want nothing more than the preservation of the eternally same, the comfortable, the eternally same course of events. Benjamin calls them the "etui people," whereby for him the etui is the epitome of comfort.

This is not just "cultural criticism." Walter Benjamin rather connects here to his view of history and his critique of empty progress, of enduring to the end, of capitalism that does not turn back. For the man of the destructive character is deeply inscribed the "indomitable distrust in the course of things", he is the man who is aware of history as catastrophe and therefore the actual historical man. His basic effect is the permanent suspicion "that everything can go wrong" (p. 398).

I mean that this destructive character is closely related to apocalyptic thinking: He has the awareness that history piles up rubble upon rubble, and at the same time the awareness that the prevailing conditions can and must be laid in ruins. The apocalyptic knows that the ruling rules, orders and speeches about the course of the world conceal the catastrophes behind them and cannot stand before the hope of redemption, and that the liberation from them must therefore follow a messianic ray: "No moment can know what the next will bring. The existing he (the destructive character) lays in ruins, not for the sake of the ruins, but for the sake of the path that runs through them" (p. 396).

The subversive gaze of apocalypticism.

I would like to recall here that this subversive gaze of apocalyptic and its significance for our perception of history has also found its way into the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz: "The apocalyptic texts speak of the end of time and of history, bring the interruption close. [...] In the subversive gaze of apocalyptic, time itself is full of danger. It is not simply that evolutionarily stretched, empty and surprise-free infinity into which we project our progress without resistance. [...] God is not seen as the beyond of time, but as its urgent end, its limitation, its saving interruption. For in the gaze of apocalyptic, time appears above all as time of suffering. "5

Messianic thinking in the theological sense, in anticipation of the unavailable judgment, the new world and the resurrection (the resurrection from the dead), is always also a form of insurrection, of revolt. It does not submit to the dominant forms of politics, but redefines social practice. Messianic-apocalyptic thinking alienates itself from this world, it rejects its relations and its logic. In contrast, it places hope in a world that embraces all. This gives rise to a different model of globalization that does not resign itself to the fact that it cannot be otherwise. It is a globalization that does not stop at the borders of the self and also invalidates the real borders and social cleavages - between poverty and wealth, between racism, ethnicity and human rights.

But such an antinomistic thinking and living is only possible if one takes the limitedness of time seriously and considers a "beyond" possible. Then, however, messianic, apocalyptic thinking develops a tremendously creative ideology- and society-critical potential, which neither in its fantasy nor in its practice allows itself to be regimented by the given constraints and claimed final states, but releases the creative power of human possibilities. Such an antinomism also reveals the proposal of a refusal of dominant discursive and symbolic practices (feasibility constraints, efficiency criteria, quality definitions, body concepts and ideals), which in the anarchic essence do not have to be refuted in order to be refused. They are simply seen as devalued, and a practice of constructing and reconstructing one's own discourses is set against them. It is a matter of laying the existing in ruins in order to clear the way underneath.

In capitalism, the messianic appears not as the reconciliation of creation through the break with the old, but as "occidental eschatology": as the delusion of progress, as the eternal spiral. This spiral, however, no longer possesses enthusiasm; ironically, it presents itself as nihilism, as the will to naked survival. For capitalism knows no real transcendence. It is not able to think of a beyond that just takes the world seriously. In capitalism, everyone hopes for salvation as "preservation of naked life", not as liberation and overcoming of the conditions. In any case, we have little left of messianic freedom, which is constituted under its own, non-prescribed rules. The god of capitalism will not save us, the world, or humanity.●

Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion. In: Collected Writings. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1977, vol. VI, pp. 100 ff. Published also in: Neue Wege 9.21, p. 27 f.

Gershom Scholem: On the Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism. In: Judaica I, Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 7-74.

Walter Benjamin: Experience and Poverty. In: Collected Writings. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1977, vol. VI, pp. 213-219.

Walter Benjamin: The Destructive Character. In: Collected Writings. Ed. by Tillman Rexroth, Frankfurt am Main 1980, vol. IV-1, pp. 396-398.

Johann Baptist Metz: God in Time. In: Collected Works. Freiburg/Basel/Vienna 2017, vol. IV, p. 95.

Michael Ramminger,

*1960, is a Catholic theologian and co-founder of the Institute for Theology and Politics (ITP) in Münster.