Deuber-Mankowsky, The Image of Happiness We Harbor The Messianic Benjamin, Cohen and Paul

The Image of Happiness We Harbor: The Messianic Power of Weakness in Cohen, Benjamin, and
Paul
Author(s): Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Catharine Diehl
Source: New German Critique, No. 105, Political Theology (Fall, 2008), pp. 57-69
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Image of Happiness We Harbor:
The Messianic Power of Weakness
in Cohen, Benjamin, and Paul
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
"Tragedy," writes Hermann Cohen in his 1904 Ethics of Pure Will, "gener
ates the individual in the hero, in the demi-god; and it generates and trans
figures his guilt through his heroic suffering. Religion, on the other hand,
generates the individual in the human soul and in its sins. But itbrings redemp
tion in the recognition of human weakness; weakness becomes the attribute
of human morality:'1 In these three sentences, Cohen develops in nuce the
concept of amessianism that draws its power from the recognition of human
weakness. Redemption means in this context not redemption from weakness
but transformation of weakness into strength. Human strength based on human
weakness relies on the possibility of self-transformation and self-renewal lim
ited only by death.
Cohen's interpretation of human weakness not only represents an alter
native but, inmany respects, a counterposition to the famous passage in 2 Cor
inthians inwhich Paul boasts of his weakness instead of fighting against Satan,
so that the power of Christ will descend on him: "Then I am content with
weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am
weak, then I am strong" (12:9-10; RSV). Unlike in Cohen, no transformation
1.Hermann Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, vol. 7 of Werke (Hildesheim: Olms, 1981), 366.
Hereafter cited as Ethik.
New German Critique 105, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2008

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2008-013 ? 2008 by New German Critique, Inc.
57
58 The Image of Happiness We Harbor
of weakness takes place in Paul. Rather, the acceptance of suffering is in the

service of the acceleration of redemption through God's son. Cohen's interpre
tation of weakness as messianic power is not very well known. This is due to
many reasons I cannot go into here; this has the consequence among others
that the historical significance of this thought, like the effect of Cohen's exten
sive philosophical work as a whole, has been, up through the present, underes
timated. Along with Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin belonged to those
readers of Cohen who were intensively engaged with his texts. Much speaks
for the view that Benjamin was one of the few readers of Cohen who recog
nized the political meaning and the meaning for the philosophy of history of
the concept of weakness as messianic strength and made this concept fruitful
for his own work. He explicitly cited various passages from Cohen and implic
itly alluded to many others. Sometimes approvingly, often critically, never
neutrally.
In his book The Time That RemainsGiorgio Agamben points out the
strategic function
of quotation for Benjamin. Agamben repeats in his book
on Paul not only the gesture and style of Jacob Taubes's well-known lec
tures on the Epistle to the Romans?Taubes delivered them shortly before
his death and was already seriously ill, in a proverbial race against time from
February 23 to February 27 in the research quarters of the evangelical studies
community in Heidelberg?but also his central theses.2 The passage referring
to Benjamin's strategic quotation occurs in the final section of The Time That
Remains. In this short, concluding chapter, Agamben?once again following
a thesis of Taubes3?presents his "discovery" that the famous hunchbacked
dwarf from the first thesis on the philosophy of history, who is supposed to
control the puppet of "historical materialism," is none other than Paul.4 The
point of departure is the Benjaminian formulation from the second thesis on
the philosophy of history: "Then, like every generation that preceded us, we
have been endowed with a weak messianic power."5 Agamben takes Benja
min's having written the adjective weak in cursive letters as a clue that the
2. Jacob Taubes and Aleida Assmann, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
3. In the lecture "Nihilism asWorld Politics and Aestheticized Messianism: Walter Benjamin and
Theodor W. Adorno," Taubes advanced the thesis that the concept of nihilism, which Benjamin
develops in "Theological Political Fragment," stems from the letters to the Romans and Corinthians.
4. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans.
Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 141.
5. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, 4 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996-2003), 4:390. Hereafter cited
asSW.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky 59
sentenceshould be read as strategic quotation. But which text is quoted here?

Agamben answers this question with the confession that no other text is
known to him that, in a similar way as Benjamin, explicitly associates messi
anic power with weakness other than the passage from 2 Corinthians, which
I have already cited. And he concludes from this that the formulation is an
undeclared citation from Paul.
Agamben is evidently not a reader of Cohen. In the following, I present
Cohen's messianism and his generation of the concept of the individual out of
the recognition of human weakness and then return to the question of whether
Benjamin's formulation in fact refers to 2 Corinthians or whether there are
no good reasons to assume that Benjamin is closer to Cohen's thought of the
messianic power of weakness than to Paul's heroic suffering.
As already emerges from the title Religion of Reason out of the Sources
of Judaism, Cohen takes as the starting point for his late work Kant's concept
of a "natural" or "general" religion, or simply of a "religion of reason."6 Unlike
Kant, who viewed the requirements for a universal religion as fulfilled only in
Christianity, Cohen seeks to show that a religion of reason should be created
out of the sources of Judaism. Cohen's extraction and adoption of Kantian
concepts appear even more radical when one considers that in the Religion
within the Boundaries ofMere Reason (1793) Kant had denied the Jewish faith
not only reason and morality but also the status of a religion. As a "collection
of merely statutory laws on which a state's constitution was founded," Judaism,
"strictly speaking, is not a religion at all but simply the union of a number of
people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, established themselves
into a community under purely political laws, hence not into a church."7
For Kant, religion is, according to a famous definition, "(subjectively
considered) the recognition of all our duties as divine commands."8 In other
words, religion derives its legitimacy from the weakness of human beings,
who cannot fulfill the demands of morality to act well out of rational insight
alone. If human beings were purely rational entities, they would need no reli
gion. Since, however, they are also sensory beings, universal religion allows
them to perceive and obey their duties. From the perspective of a philosophical
enlightenment thus understood, religion appears as a tribute to the sensibility
6. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan,
2nd ed. (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995). Hereafter cited as RR.
7. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and Other Writings, ed.
and trans. Allen W. Wood, George Di Giovanni, and Robert Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1998), 130. Translation modified.
8. Ibid., 153.
of human beings. To the enlightened gaze of a judicious philosopher, however,

it is revealed as a partly necessary, useful, or perhaps harmful misrecognition.
Cohen refuses both the Kantian foundation of morals through a rational
will and the division of the human being into not only a rational being but
a sensory being {Sinnenwesen). Unlike Kant, Cohen does not start out from the
ideal of a purely rational being in whom freedom and reason are united. He
criticizes this concept for negatively determining the being of humans (Mensch
sein), leading to the consequence that human beings must do everything to
free themselves from their humanity (Menschsein), to elevate themselves to
the state of purely rational beings, to overcome their humanity (Menschsein),
and to become angels.
In fact, human beings, according to Kant, can become "good" only
when they overcome the "subjective ground" that separates them from purely
rational beings or angels. The subjective ground is the human will. The most
perfect being from human beings by the fact that subjective
is distinguished
and objective grounds are united
in the pure will. As objective ground, the
law is a duty for human beings; however, the subjective ground of the use of
freedom can be expressed only as an act of lawless caprice, thereby reveal
ing the evil nature of human beings. In other words, Kant interprets the sub
jective ground as both amanifestation of human nature and an expression of
the depravity of the nature of human beings. Moral perfection distinguishes
itself for Kant insofar as the difference between will and law is abolished. In
light of this, the addition and thus difference distinguishing the human being
from the rational being?and not only the nature of humans but human nature
itself?proves to be pure privation. Human nature becomes the expression of

human imperfection.
If, as Cohen urges against Kant, humans and not purely rational beings
are to be the subjects of ethics, then ethics must concern itself with the prob
lem of human mortality. Now, it is peculiar to Cohen's concept of human free
dom that he does not measure it against of a perfect being but
the freedom
develops it by recognizing and acknowledging the weakness and fallibility
of human action. Freedom does not mean unity of will and law but is realized
in self-transformation. Transformation can be thought of only under the cat
egory of time?Cohen's concept of freedom is, to borrow Benjamin's phrase,
"thoroughly colored by time."
Freedom is, according to Cohen, not only compatible with the contin
gency of human existence; rather, this contingency is also the condition and
expression of human freedom. Now the required acknowledgment of finitude
is, as Cohen admits, at once themost difficult fact and the cause of the greatest
burden: "That is the most natural question of the human being, his most natu
ral suffering, that his existence has an end. It is the strongest witness against
his freedom" (Ethik, 305).
Cohen sets forth in a demonstratio
per negationem why freedom?
precisely because
death appears as its strongest counterwitness?can, how
ever, prove itself solely in the acknowledgment of mortality. He shows, in
other words, that attempts to realize freedom by negating finitude end in non
freedom. Cohen demonstrates his reasoning through the examples of the Chris
tian doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of redemption, both of which go
back to Paul and play a decisive role in Kant's treatise on radical evil. Cohen
establishes that they are founded on the disavowal of human existence. While
the doctrine of original sin declares humanity essentially depraved or declares
the depravity of humanity its essence, the doctrine of redemption is based on
a concept of human existence that is determined through suffering. Redemp
tion requires sin "and in fact original sin, which excludes freedom" (Ethik,
287). He pointedly summarizes: "The Christian doctrine of God is in its spe
cific ground the doctrine of redemption. The concept of the human means for
it the concept of sin" (Ethik, 287).9
Now, the doctrine of redemption, like the doctrine of original sin,
opposes the thought of freedom. And this is not only because, according to
Cohen, redemption comes to humanity from without in the sacrifice of the
son of God and is therefore not achieved by an act of autonomy. The second
objection Cohen provides is farther-reaching: namely, that with the redemp

tion from original sin, from guilt and suffering and weakness, and therefore
from mortality, human beings are at the same time redeemed from them
selves: "In the striving for deification, for redemption from guilt and suffer
ing, it is at bottom nothing other than the redemption from the human itself
9. The Christiandoctrine of original sin dates back to Augustine and was canonized in the
Council of Carthage in 418. Already Augustine was confronted with the contradiction mentioned
.. .
by Cohen, as Christoph Schulte points out: "Regarded juridically Augustine falls into a contra
diction. For the accountability of each individual sin before God, he needs in principle human
freedom of will. Simultaneously, however, he asserts
the real experience of the insufficiency of the
will before the divine command against the claim,
supported by the Pelagians, that, with the actu
ally existing freedom of the will, the self-improvement of humanity is always possible: the non posse
non peccare. Man cannot not sin. And, on the other hand, one should be held accountable for sin"
(Radikale B?se: Die Karriere des B?sen von Kant bis Nietzsche [Munich: Fink, 1991], 94). The "real
experience of the insufficiency of the will" derives from the Pauline doctrine that human beings are
in need of redemption. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin is in an immediate relation with the
Pauline doctrine of redemption: "Against the Pelagian assumption of a possible self-improvement
of the single human being out of her own power, the peccatum origine must be radicalized in the
interest of Augustine's Pauline Christology" (94).
that forms the goal. Deification is only an expression for this goal which
appears positive" (Ethik, 307).
When the human is redeemed from
itself, the question of freedom is
idle. From this he draws the conclusion that with the negation of finitude, the
possibility of freedom is also negated. Freedom presupposes the existence of
the human but, with it, the acceptance and the acknowledgment of the falli
bility and weakness of human beings. It is incompatible both with the dis
avowal of human weakness and with the interpretation of finitude as the
origin of evil.
Freedom is for Cohen essentially self-responsibility (Ethik, 380). If
one combines the concept of self-responsibility with the thesis that freedom
is coupled with the acknowledgment of fallibility, then freedom means the
acceptance of one's own fallibility, of one's mortality, and of the weakness of
human nature. "Thus sin," the Ethics of Pure Will states, in contrast to the
doctrine of original sin, "is recognized and declared to be human weakness"
(Ethik, 366).
We owe the concept of the individual, according to Cohen, to the proph
ets. With the unveiling of the futural, they made the future take place. They
called for ethical action, condemned the worship of idols, and threatened a
terrible end. In effect, they thereby generated the concept of history, fellow
man, and the idea of humanity. More than twenty years ago, in his lecture
"Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy," Jacques Derrida
pointed out that the apocalypse must by no means be necessarily associ
ated with the idea of a catastrophic end of the world. He instead reminds us
that the Greek word apokalypsis is a translation from the Hebrew gala, which
means to uncover, make known, but also to open someone's
expose, eyes
or ears.10
Like gala in Hebrew, apokalypsis means in Greek "discovery," the

uncovering of the thing behind the veil (AT, 27). Basing his discussion on the
theses of the biblical scholar Andr? Chouraqui, Derrida explains that nei
ther gala nor its Greek counterpart in the Hebrew Bible has the meaning for
which "apocalypse" stands today: a fearsome catastrophe announcing the
end of the world.11
10. Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy" (hereafter cited
as AT), trans. John Leavey, in Derrida and Negative (Albany: State University of New
Theology
York Press, 1992), 25.
11. Andr? Chouraqui's writings on this theme are available in German in Reflexionen ?ber
Problematik und Methode der ?bersetzung von Bibel und Koran, ed. Luise Abramowski (T?bin
gen: Mohr, 1994).
Chouraqui suggests the concept of contemplation as a suitable transla

tion for the concept of the apocalypse. The apocalypse becomes in his trans
lation the "disclosure of YHWH"?the apocalypse of John becomes the
"disclosure of Y?shoua" (AT, 27). According to Chouraqui, the link between
apocalypse and messianism can be gathered from the linguistic usage of the
Hebrew Bible itself. Cohen's renewal of prophetic messianism through its
connection with the Hebrew
meaning of apocalypse as uncovering in the
sense of themaking-present of the future follows precisely this way of reading
(Ethik, 399). In this sense, Derrida also interprets apokalypsis as the uncov
ering and opening up of the futural when he develops revealed temporality

through the forms of address, adonai, my Lord, my God: "The Ad?n, named
as the aleph and the tav, the alpha and the omega, is the one who has been,
who is, and who comes, not who shall be, but who comes, which is the pres
ent of a to-come" (AT, 54). He captures the paradoxical dialectic between the
end of the world and futurity in the laconic sentence: "The end approaches,
but the apocalypse is long-lived" (AT, 59). Cohen's suggestion is to regard mes
sianism as a "substitute for eschatology" (RR, 290).
If it is the merit of the prophets to generate the future in the opening of
the futural, then it is Ezekiel who first severed the unholy power of the past.
For Ezekiel was the first to put forth the idea of a single individual in his or
her singularity. The "I" that relates to itself and thereby acts autonomously
is, according to Cohen, not derivable from the social relation to other human
beings and therefore not derivable from the relation to the "thou." Social
"thou"?constitutes, of course, as Cohen admits, "the neces
morality?the
sary precondition, but not the adequate creative force, which latter must
come from the I itself, and from still different problems which the I contains,
in order that the Imight be successfully generated in a positive form" (RR,
178). Thus the other human would herself be the precondition of the human
being from which the other human being was drawn; exactly this presuppo
sition is silently made so that the presupposed human being hovers constantly
in the darkness of the background.
As Emmanuel L?vinas would later, Cohen founds social relations on
an experience no longer graspable in sociological categories. While L?vinas
uses the expression "radical alterity," Cohen describes the experience that
silently presupposes the relation between "I" and "Thou" as the correlation of
the human being and God. Cohen defines it as an experience?and he thereby
differentiates himself from L?vinas's interpretation of monotheism?that is
characterized neither by obviousness (Evidenz) nor by immediacy. Religious
experience for Cohen is not bound to the sense of sight but to recognition
and therefore not to the recognition of God but to the recognition of sin,
which, according to Cohen, is linked with the opening of the possibility
of an individual reconciliation with God. Thus the recognition of sin repre
sents the existential experience in which the individual constitutes himself
as an "I," in which the individual addresses himself as "I." To this individual
addressing himself as "I" comes "autonomy" as the capacity to change one
self. The central concept linking the recognition of sin with the possibility of
self-determination is therefore a "reversal." As the expression of the correla
tion between the single individual and God, the recognition of sin, individual
confession, reconciliation, and change replace, according to Cohen, the mythi
cal context of guilt and impersonal fate through a principle of personal respon
sibility. Cohen cites Ezekiel 18:2-4 (RSV) and his condemnation of blood
guilt as witness to this transformation:
The word of the Lord came to me again: "What do you mean by repeating
this proverb concerning the land of Israel, 'The fathers have eaten sour
grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge'? As I live, says the Lord
God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls
are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the
soul that sins shall die."
Sons are no longer to suffer for the guilt of their fathers, according to Eze
kiel, for it is the individual soul that sins. For Cohen, it is not only the break
with the punishment of kin, the faith in fate, or the principle of revenge that
is expressed. Ezekiel's disavowal of original sin at the same time marks for
him the historical moment in which the individual that addresses itself as
"I" emerges. It originates, according to Cohen, with the recognition that sin
derives not from the father's guilt but from personal misdeeds. Thus the son
shall no longer die for the guilt of his father but shall live. Moreover, the bad
father has, as Cohen emphasizes in interpreting Ezekiel, "not only a good
son but also a happy one." The human being experiences freedom for Cohen,
unlike Kant, not through a transformation into a necessarily good and at
once thereby rationally acting entity but in the ability and possibility of self
transformation: "This possibility of self-transformation . . .makes the indi
"
vidual into an T (RR, 192). In the experience Cohen describes, an "I" emerges
possessing a freedom that, unlike Kantian freedom, presupposes changeabil
ity, variability, and thus temporality.
Cohen first explicates the concept of an individual generated by the
human soul and redeemed by the recognition of its weakness in Religion of
Reason. The reason is simple: ethics can establish only the foundations that
condition its possibility. Itmust presuppose the concept of the individual and
cannot generate it. For ethics, Cohen summarizes, the human being is always
only a "point to which it relates its problems, as for science also he is only
a particular case of its general laws. In relation to the laws, however, only
the particular man originates, and indeed as nothing other than a case" (RR,
168). Now, the individual, who addresses himself as an "I," ismore than a
single being and not the case of the law. The case, according to Cohen, only
corresponds to the law. In the case, there is no freedom and hence no failure
and no suffering because of failure. The individual, however, thinks of him
self as "isolated and absolute" (RR, 192). And precisely because of this abso
luteness, the concept of the individual can be generated only from religion.
Religion represents the field that lets both the limit of the sciences and the
limits of national jurisprudence emerge clearly. The individual "that addresses
himself as I" refers back to an experience that does not allow itself to be
grasped through representatives.
The question of why Ezekiel, like all of the prophets, condemned the
worship of idols but did not abolish sacrifice ultimately leads Cohen to discuss
the relation between state and community or state and religion. He focuses
the question on sacrifice and law or, in other words, on the relation of sacrifice
and cultism. Of course, sacrifice is trapped in itsmythical imprisonment to
fate and therefore to lack of freedom and to injustice. It thus awaits its abol
ishment, but the question arises, as Cohen suggests, whether it is not itself
capable of transformation and whether it possesses in its transformed state a
historical right to exist. Marcel Mauss described the historical background of
this transformation of sacrifice in his famous study, The Gift. Mauss explains
that the transformation of sacrifice is accompanied historically by its ties to the
concept of justice and with turning away from the gods and turning toward
humanity. The transformation of sacrifice into alms implies, according to
Mauss, the constitution of a community that defines itself by its perception of
social responsibility for the poor.
Alms are the fruits of a moral notion of the gift and of fortune on the one
hand, and of a notion of sacrifice, on the other. Generosity is an obligation,

because Nemesis avenges the poor and the gods for the superabundance
of happiness and wealth of certain people who should rid themselves of
it. This is the ancient morality of the gift, which has become a principle of
justice. The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happi
ness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in use
less sacrifices should serve the poor and children. In recounting this we are
recounting the history of the moral ideas of the Semites. The Arab sadaka
originally meant exclusively justice, as did the Hebrew zedaqa: it has come
to mean alms. We can even date from the Mischnaic era, from the victory
of the "Poor" in Jerusalem, the time when the doctrine of charity and alms
was born, which, with Christianity and Islam, spread around the world. It
was at this time that the word zedaqa changed its meaning, because in the
Bible it did not mean alms.12
The historical connection Mauss draws among sacrifice, justice, and alms
finds its correspondence in the meaning that Cohen gives to the discovery by
the prophets of the poor as others and therefore as other human beings. It
is crucial for Cohen that poverty is neither imputed to the poor as guilt nor
accepted as fate. Consequently, a society should be considered enlightened
when it accepts social responsibility and makes the abolition of poverty into
a common goal. A reflex of this understanding of enlightenment is found in
Benjamin's laconic sentence, quoted by Theodor W. Adorno inNegative Dia
lectics: "As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth."13
The counterpart to this is found in the passage in Religion of Reason
where Cohen writes:
There are several terms for the poor man, for the needy man, who is oppressed;
Saalsch?tz, however, well observed that there is no expression in the Hebrew
language for "beggar"; thus, the word for "alms" is lacking too. Moreover, it
is significant that in the linguistic usage of Judaism until now the word for
charity is expressed through the term zedakah, which originally meant jus
tice and later piety in general. This identity is proven even more through the
distinction that Judaism makes between charity through almsgiving and
charitable deeds of loving kindness in general, the latter being designated by
a separate word. Aiding the poor ismerely called (RR, 150-52)
justice.
Now, social morality has individual morality as its presupposition, since,

as Cohen explains, social morality remains an abstraction without individual
morality from which it is not freed even through its relationship with a state.
He repeatedly draws attention to the "lack" of the sociological standpoint,
which, as Cohen remarks, runs through the entire history of culture. This lack
consists in the fact that while the sociological standpoint of course locates
...
"advisedly and with justice the ground of moral wrong in the contradic
12.Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), 18.
13. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 400. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialec
tics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 203.
tions and frictions (RR, 180), it cannot answer the ques

of social conditions"
tion of the individual or of the freedom of the will. Thus Cohen defines free
dom, unlike Kant, not as a rational will but as the capacity of the human will
to reach "a choice for evil as well as for good" (RR, 181).
In what follows, Cohen explains that the state cannot be held account
able for generating the individual. Instead, the judicial state presupposes the
existence of individuals responsible for themselves. Here Cohen states why
Ezekiel rightly abolishes the worship of idols but does not abolish sacrifice.
Instead of abolishing ritual sacrifice, Ezekiel and his followers transform
sacrifice?which can be brought only into the temple in Jerusalem?into a
form of worship in which the priest "represents symbolically the purifica
tion, which the individual has to accomplish in himself by a penance which
has its peak in confession" (RR, 200). Cohen reads this displacement from the
political state onto the religious community against the backdrop of a gene
alogy of the legal state as well as of the separation of state and church. Polit
ical relations formed the historical background for Ezekiel's reform: the state
had perished and could not be reestablished under Babylonian rule.
Cohen emphasizes that Ezekiel and his followers allowed the state
"to fall without qualms" to establish instead a form of construction of a com
munity not bound to a single state. Ezekiel thereby transformed ritual sacri
fice into an "institutionof the congregation" and therefore into an "important
means for the origin of the I in its religious meaning," which is realized "in
the correlation of man and God" (RR, 200). The public cult into which ritual
sacrifice is converted, transformed into a publicly communicated reconcilia
tion with God, is Yom Kippur.
If, against the backdrop of Cohen's depiction of religious experience
as the reconciliation of human beings with the single God, one recalls Kant's
definition of Judaism as a "collection of merely statutory laws on which a
state's constitution was founded," then the difference separating Cohen's Reli
gion of Reason from Kant's universal religion and its presentation of Jew
ish sources becomes legible. At the same time, Cohen's interpretation of the
prophets, particularly Ezekiel, as the source of a religion of reason in which
sacrifice was transformed in accordance with the transformation of the indi
vidual, and even of God from a punishing to a loving God, was more than
an answer to Kant's defamation of Judaism. The interpretation of Judaism
as political theology was rather in Kant's time already a firm part of the
canon of theories of the state, extending back through Benedict de Spinoza's
Theological-Political Treatise to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and through

the present day it forms a firm part of the political discourse of modernity.
Cohen's rereading of the sources of Judaism against this background proves

to be a protest against a historically powerful religious discourse that has
become common property.
If one now asks what in Cohen's Religion of Reason is owed to Jew
ish sources, Cohen would himself probably point to the concept of recon
ciliation and add to this the hint that reconciling with God is directed toward
reconciling with oneself. He would be able to add that reconciling with God
transforms not only the human being but also God himself from a punishing
into a loving God, who derives pleasure from "the turning away of the sinner
from his ways" and thus does not take "pleasure in his death, but rather in his
life" (RR, 193). Cohen drew from this the consequence that the death penalty
is subject to a ban, which is entirely similar to a taboo. For death destroys with
life the possibility of an unexcludable self-transformation of the one pun
ishable. Because Religion of Reason opposes to the concept of the Christian
sacrifice to God the concept of Yom Kippur and interprets this as the recon
ciliation of humans with themselves and their contingency as the possibility
of change, it proves itself a particular and independent form of the "philoso
phy of life."
If we now at the end return to the question of whether Benjamin's for
mulation in the second thesis on the philosophy of history?"Then, like
every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak mes
sianic power"?refers in fact to 2 Corinthians or whether it is closer not to
Paul's heroic suffering but to Cohen's thought of the messianic power of weak
ness that manifests itself in human freedom as self-responsibility and in the
realization of the idea of humanity: the point of departure for Paul's discov
ery of divine grace is the temptation by Satan. Thus Paul writes in 2 Corin
thians 7-9: "And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of rev
elations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, amessenger of Satan, to harass me,
to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this,
that it should leave me; but he said tome, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for
"
my power ismade perfect in weakness.'
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin already designated
Satan's temptation, which is the point of departure for Paul's devotion to
weakness, as the spawn of a "speculation foreign to life."14 Thus it is not the
temptation that leads Benjamin to the idea of the "weak messianic power"
but the observation that "the image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly
colored by time" (SW, 4:389). The occasion for the observation is the remark
14.Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1998), 203. Translation modified.
of the philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze that "it is one of the most note
worthy peculiarities of the human heart. . . that so much selfishness in indi
viduals coexists with the general lack of envy which every present day feels
toward its future" (quoted in SW, 4:389). Benjamin links this with the obser
vation that the representation of happiness is bound to our "own being." For
"there is happiness?such as could arouse envy in us?only in the air we have
breathed"?that is, in the present.
In the next step, Benjamin concludes from the link between happiness
and temporality that in the representation of both happiness and the past?
which, as he literally writes, "is the concern of history" (SW, 4:389)?the rep
resentation of redemption resonates. Benjamin links messianism with the idea
of humanity and, like Cohen, with the concept of history.
In contrast to Cohen, who could conceive of history exclusively as the
generation of the future and as an infinite approach to the idea of humanity,
Benjamin realigns the representation of redemption from the future toward
the past. This leads him finally to the famous formulation according to which
the representation of redemption should be understood as the "secret agree
ment between past generations and the present one" (SW, 4:400). The "weak
messianic power" is represented by Benjamin not as Paul's heroic suffering
from powerlessness, mistreatment, or cares but, to the
hardships, persecutions,
contrary, as the summons to self-responsibility. For if there is a secret agree

ment between and the present one, "then our accord
past generations coming,"
ing to Benjamin, "was expected on earth" (SW, 4:400). That means nothing
other than that it is we, or rather it is every new generation, from whom sal
vation is expected.
"Weak messianic power" is a power that does not, as in Paul, come to
"rest upon me" but is "endowed" to us. It is a power "on which the past has a
claim" (SW, 4:400). The hope is, as Benjamin wrote at the end of his text on
Elective Affinities in explicit distance from Paul's interpretation of hope for
redemption as the hope for life after death, given solely for those who no lon
ger have any hope: the dead. It is "the sole justification of the faith in immor
tality, which must never be kindled from one's own existence" (SW, 1:355).
Weak messianic power is, in other words, linked with a claim that the
past has on us: to redeem it, and that means to place it in the horizon of his
tory. The claim that the past places on us is, as Benjamin emphasizes, "not
settled cheaply" (SW, 4:400). One who knows this is, according to Benjamin,
the historical materialist. Benjamin's messianism opens onto the future. It is
not eschatological but, in Cohen's words, a substitute for eschatology.
Translated by Catharine Diehl

Deuber-Mankowsky, The Image of Happiness We Harbor The Messianic Benjamin, Cohen and Paul

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The Image of Happiness We Harbor: The Messianic Power of Weakness in Cohen, Benjamin, and

New German Critique 105, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2008

of weakness takes place in Paul. Rather, the acceptance of suffering is in the

sentenceshould be read as strategic quotation. But which text is quoted here?

of human beings. To the enlightened gaze of a judicious philosopher, however,

itself?proves to be pure privation. Human nature becomes the expression of

objection Cohen provides is farther-reaching: namely, that with the redemp

Like gala in Hebrew, apokalypsis means in Greek "discovery," the

Chouraqui suggests the concept of contemplation as a suitable transla

ering and opening up of the futural when he develops revealed temporality

hand, and of a notion of sacrifice, on the other. Generosity is an obligation,

Saalsch?tz, however, well observed that there is no expression in the Hebrew

Now, social morality has individual morality as its presupposition, since,

tions and frictions (RR, 180), it cannot answer the ques

Theological-Political Treatise to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and through

Cohen's rereading of the sources of Judaism against this background proves

contrary, as the summons to self-responsibility. For if there is a secret agree

Translated by Catharine Diehl

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