The Day the Sun Stood Still: Benjamin's Theses, Trauma, and the Eichmann Trial

[H]ope finally wrests itself from it [the semblance of reconciliation: Versöhnung]; and like a trembling question, there echoes at the end of the book that "How beautiful" in the ears of the dead, who, we hope, awaken, if ever, not to a beautiful world but to a blessed one.

—Walter Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities"

Der entscheidende Augenblick der menschlichen Entwicklung ist immerwährend.

—Kafka, Aphorismen

Even the most sensitive and persuasive readings of Benjamin's much discussed final text, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (Über den Begriff der Geschichte), fail to focus sufficiently on a number of its key stylistic traits and its status within the body of his work as yet another in a series of meditations on the genre of "the last will and testament." Perhaps the most definitive reading of Benjamin's "Theses" to date, Werner Hamacher's essay "'Now': Benjamin on Historical Time," focuses on the second thesis as the key to its understanding of time and the ways Benjamin brings together theological and materialist approaches in his notion of "a weak Messianic power."¹

While agreeing in many respects with Hamacher's reading, my own paper begins with two seemingly minor stylistic aspects of the second thesis not addressed by him: the first has to do with Benjamin's use of the prefix "mit-" in three pivotal terms; the second concerns a shift from the present perfect tense to the subjunctive. The passage in question is all the more interesting given the fact that an earlier version of it had already been drafted as part of The Arcades Project. There Benjamin writes, "Happiness for us is thinkable only in the air that we have breathed, among the people who have lived with us" (Das Glück ist uns nur vorstellbar in der Luft, die wir geatmet, unter den Menschen, die mit uns gelebt haben).² When returning to this meditation on happiness in the "Theses," a meditation occasioned in both cases by a passage from Rudolf Hermann Lotze's Mikrokosmos, Benjamin speaks again of a certain atmosphere. Yet the air in the later text is somehow thicker and the breathing more labored. In place of the respiratory rhythm of the present perfect tense, a temporal continuum in which the present reaches back into a past that in turn extends forward into the present, Benjamin shifts to the subjunctive.

Here then is the passage appearing in the second thesis cited in my own pointedly literal translation:

There is happiness—such as could arouse envy in us—only in the air we have breathed [nur in der Luft, die wir geatmet haben], among people we could have talked to [mit Menschen, zu denen wir hätten reden], among women who could have given themselves to us [mit Frauen, die sich uns hätten geben können]. In other words, there hangs inalienably suspended in the idea of happiness that of redemption [Es schwingt, mit anderen Worten, in der Vorstellung des Glücks unveräußerlich die der Erlösung mit]. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index [führt einen heimlichen Index mit] by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn't a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear isn't there an echo of now silent ones? Don't the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If this is so, then there is a secret appointment [eine geheime Verabredung] between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.³

Not only does the passage shift from the present perfect to the subjunctive, moving from the "air we have breathed" to "people with whom we could have spoken, women who might have given themselves to us"—from the verbs...