Awakening: a politico-existential understanding of messianism

On Walter Benjamin’s project for a new mankind

Javier Toscano, PhD
APRA Foundation, Berlin

The Benjaminian notion of awakening (Erwachen) attracted the attention of a number of

scholars for some time (e.g. Buck-Morss 1999, Weidman 2000), until it faded away as an
inconsistent and vague category of his later work. To be sure, the notion remains an
underdetermined concept, with its own specific tensions. Nevertheless, it also charts the
horizon of Benjamin’s later thought, filling it with motifs that the author cultivated from his
early writings. In this sense, the idea that Benjamin sketched in his Passagenwerk not only
synthetizes the works of Freud (the dream/awakening dialectic) and Marx (the notions of
history and memory critically informing a given present), but also develops a politically-
charged existential strategy. A central element of this strategy has been widely commented,
since it implies a tactical use of the notion of temporality (the Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit) and
articulates it with a messianic assertion (e.g. the well-known claim that “our coming was
expected on earth”, from the Thesis of History). But without the connection to the notion of
awakening, an expectant, messianic temporality remains tied to another set of ideological
traditions of which Benjamin was wary. For awakening to happen –even more with a
political purpose– mankind must leave the world of myth behind. But since his Zur Kritik
der Gewalt, Benjamin knows the difficulties this implies. Therefore, he draws on Nietzsche
and his allusion to a different sort of humankind. In different sections of his Nachlaß,
Benjamin sketches what this might demand, in a form that shapes awakening into an
individual force that could stir collective waves of hope and revolutionary
transformation.

Panel 2: Utopia and Messianism

Panel 6: Re-reading
Panel 3: Interventionist Thinking