Continuity as Catastrophe: Origins of a Thesis in Walter Benjamin

The reflections on history and catastrophe punctuating Benjamin’s late, unpublished writings are among his most famous work. Included in these reflections, written during the last years of his life, is a thesis that appears to address itself to our own historical moment with a special urgency: the proposition that continuity—the simple fact that “things ‘go on like this’” (daß es “so weiter” geht)—is the catastrophe.¹ Benjamin introduces this thesis in a passage where it is connected with two distinct but related projects: the need to recast the concept of progress (Fortschritt) as well as the idea that would play a crucial role in this endeavor, that of catastrophe (Katastrophe). Just as the progression of history, its Fortschreiten, needs to be understood not as an improvement but as a continuation, a weitergehen, so the idea of catastrophe needs to be conceived anew, stripped from its reference to a singular event that is yet to happen and, instead, shown to reside in the world as it is already given. The catastrophe—Benjamin emphatically uses the singular—is not to be understood as a sudden event that brings this world to an end but is to be recognized in the persistent continuity of the “given” (das Gegebene). Both the uneventful catastrophes interwoven with everyday life and the catastrophic events looming on the horizon point to a single catastrophe that repeats itself on a daily basis: the brutal but steadily withdrawing fact that the historical process that produces these catastrophes continues to take its course uninterrupted.² The history that Benjamin, elsewhere in the same manuscripts, describes as “continuous catastrophe” (die kontinuierlichen Katastrophe) never ceases to evoke another catastrophe—the catastrophe of continuity itself (GS, 1:683; SW, 4:184–85).

Although the concept of history as a catastrophic progression tends to be associated with Benjamin’s work from the late 1930s, it can be shown to already play a key role in his writings from the previous decade.³ A first iteration of the thesis articulated in Central Park can already be found in the manuscript “Thoughts toward an Analysis of the State of Central Europe,” which Benjamin began writing in early 1923 during a journey through Germany when it was in the grip of hyperinflation (GS, 4:928–35, 916–28). Central to this manuscript, which was later reworked into One-Way Street, is a reflection on history organized around a commentary on a stock phrase that evokes the catastrophe of continuity ex negativo: the colloquial expression, uttered in the face of impending catastrophe, that things surely cannot “go on like this” (indem es ja “nicht mehr so weitergehen” könne) (GS, 4:928). Against a view of history that treats catastrophic decline as a “state of exception that automatically restores itself,” Benjamin mobilizes the experience of those social strata for whom “stabilized relations are stabilized misery” (GS, 4:928–29). History, from this point of view, is not the incremental advancement toward an ideal state but a progressively unfolding catastrophe in which nothing secures humankind even against the threat of its own annihilation. The historical task, so Benjamin proposes here for the first time, is to be understood neither as a contribution to its progression nor as a revolutionary completion of its development; the task is to be grasped not as an aufheben but as an aufhalten, a bringing to a halt of catastrophic history—or what is described here as the “limitation” (befristen) of its duration (GS, 4:928).

In this essay I will offer a detailed examination of Benjamin’s earlier articulation of the “continuity as catastrophe” thesis in his 1923 manuscript on the German hyperinflation. Through a close reading of the various drafts of the manuscript, I aim to offer a reconstruction of the view of a history presented here and trace its close relation to Benjamin’s emerging political thought of the early 1920s. To set the stage for this reading, I will first attend to a text that may be considered one of the key points of reference for Benjamin’s engagement with the nexus of history, catastrophe, and politics: Erich Unger’s 1921 Politics and Metaphysics—a text that is now little read but was described by Benjamin in the same year as “the most significant text on politics of these times.”⁴ As I will show, the prefatory remarks presented at the outset of this treatise, where Unger treats history as an “eternal catastrophe” and conceives of the task of an “uncatastrophic politics” as the preparation of an exit from this history, may have played a decisive role in shaping Benjamin’s own conception of history as a catastrophic progression. After laying out the key points of Unger’s reflections in the first part of this essay, I will turn to the reflections on catastrophe and history in Benjamin’s manuscript of 1923. In reconstructing the image of history Benjamin presents here, this second part of the essay will home in on the two concepts around which these reflections are organized: those of “stability” (Stabilität) and “downfall” (Untergang). In the third section of the essay, I will examine the place of the image of history as “stabilized misery” outlined here in Benjamin’s emerging political thought. The brief reflection on the “idea of revolution” included in the first drafts of the manuscript serves as the focal point of this section. As I will demonstrate, the description of this idea in the 1923 manuscript anticipates what Benjamin, in another fragment from the late 1930s included in Central Park, will describe as the will “to interrupt the world in its course” (den Weltlauf zu unterbrechen) (GS, 1:667). The political task is conceived here not as a furthering or completion of world history but as its end: stripped to a bare minimum, without the means to aim at the positive realization of a better world, the task of politics is to put an end to the world as it is given.⁵

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In the first weeks of 1921, while living in Berlin, Benjamin attended two lectures by the German Jewish philosopher Erich Unger.⁶ In these lectures Unger presented the main line of argument of his first book, which was published in the same month under the title Politics and Metaphysics.⁷ This book, which has to date enjoyed little reception, was Unger’s attempt to lay the ground for a new conception of politics that was to break decisively with the Western tradition and what he understood to be its inherent catastrophic tendencies. Drawing on the studies of ancient Jewish religious experience by his friend and teacher Oskar Goldberg, Unger developed the argument that the conditio sine qua non for this new politics would be a “metaphysical atmosphere” that required a radical reconsideration of the categories of possibility and actuality, spirit and matter, as well the concept central to his understanding of the coming political community: that of a “metaphysical people.”⁸ As in the other book he published a year later, The Stateless Formation of a Jewish People, ancient Judaism was to furnish the elements for a political philosophy that would provide an alternative to the modern European political tradition and what Unger understood to be its inability to overcome the forms of the nation-state and capitalist society.⁹

Unger’s lectures appear to have left a deep impression on Benjamin. His praise of Politics and Metaphysics appears in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem from January 1921, where he reports of these lectures: “Just now I have gained familiarity with a book which is, insofar as I can judge it on the basis of the reading the author gave on two evenings that I both attended, the most significant text on politics of these times.”¹⁰ Benjamin’s “most vital interest” (höchst lebhaften Interesse) in Unger’s political thought—a phrase he uses in the same letter—coincides with his own intensive engagement with political-philosophical questions in a series of texts that he wrote in the early 1920s.¹¹ Despite Benjamin’s hyperbolic praise for Politics and Metaphysics, his political writings of these years only rarely refer explicitly to the book. In Toward the Critique of Violence, which was written around the time of his encounter with Unger, Benjamin refers to Unger’s critique of law and cites a passage on the concept of compromise; also the important unpublished fragment “Capitalism as Religion” contains a reference to a passage in Unger’s book on the overcoming of capitalism through “migration” (Wanderung) (GS, 2:191; SW, 1:244, and GS, 6:102; SW, 1:290).¹² In his letter to Scholem of January 1920, Benjamin moreover emphasizes the affinity of Unger’s treatment of the “psycho-physical problem” with his own reflections on the subject, which condensed in another unpublished fragment from the same period.¹³ But beyond the specific motifs in Politics and Metaphysics that these passages refer to, a part of the book that might have been of particular importance to Benjamin, despite never being explicitly cited, are Unger’s prefatory remarks on the nexus of politics and historical experience. The starting point of these remarks, which offer a striking example of the “points of contact” Benjamin identified between Unger’s political thought and his own, is a presentation of the project of the book organized around the concept of catastrophe.

The politico-philosophical problem to which Politics and Metaphysics is dedicated is, as Unger writes in the first paragraph of the book, nothing less than the historical task to conceive of an “uncatastrophic politics” (unkatastrophale Politik) (PM, 3). Such a politics, Unger details in the same paragraph, would be concerned with the “establishment and maintenance of uncatastrophic orders of human relations [unkatastrophalen Menschen-Ordnungen]” (PM, 22). The relation between the coming politics and catastrophe is thus defined negatively: the task of politics is to bring about a decisive break with the catastrophic orders of human relations. The orders of human coexistence that politics is to establish is, as Unger writes later in the text, “without catastrophe” (katastrophenlos) (PM, 3). These formulations already imply a damning indictment of all existing “orders of human relations” and the politics concerned with them. Whereas the realization of “uncatastrophic orders of human relations” are posited as a task, the catastrophic character of all existing orders are taken to be a positive given—the brute fact with which the yet-to-be-articulated politics is confronted (PM, 44). This assertion does not only apply to the present in which Unger is writing, which is shaped by the experience of the Great War; later in the text Unger will speak of the jahrtausendalte Katastrophe, the “millennia-long catastrophe” accompanying human history, which is as old as it is constant—Unger also calls it the “incessant catastrophe in the existence of human peoples” (PM, 20). Politics is, for Unger, implicated in this catastrophe: the “catastrophic orders of human relations” that appear ex negativo in the first sentences of the book are bound up with a politics that has actively sustained them or, at best, has failed to call an end to them. The exit from the age-old, incessant catastrophe that haunts human history thus also requires an exit from the “politics of catastrophe” (Katastrophenpolitik) that has rendered it possible (PM, 55). To articulate this politics—which would, consequently, have to break away from a tradition of political thought as old as the catastrophes with which it is connected—is defined as the aim of Unger’s book.

Unger’s formulation of the task of political thought—which is, as will become clear, closely related to Benjamin’s work from the same period—already implies a specific view of history animated by the tension between the world as it is given and the demand for a yet-to-be-realized world. This view of history is addressed in the following paragraphs of Unger’s prefatory remarks, which are concerned with the specific “disposition” (Einstellung) that is required to adequately confront the task of articulating the coming politics. The possibility of an “uncatastrophic politics,” Unger posits here, depends on the adoption of a specific standpoint toward history—a disposition toward all the forms of human coexistence underpinning the catastrophic history evoked in the previous paragraph. When defining this disposition toward history, Unger introduces a formula that has a remarkable affinity with Benjamin’s work of the same period, that of a “maximum of hopelessness [ein Maximum an Hoffnungslosigkeit]: a hopelessness, that is, to see an ethically satisfactory order of human coexistence ever emerge out of all the elements and factors of the present or past political experience—without, however, giving up the claim to this or (what is the same thing) to adjourn it to a distant future” (PM, 4). “Hopelessness” has a specific meaning in this passage, which introduces a polemical inversion of the concept of hope associated with conceptions of history based on progress. The object of this hopelessness is a world-historical condition: it concerns what is described here as an “ethically satisfactory order of human coexistence.” Unger does not call for an abandonment of all hope for this condition; the “maximum” of hopelessness implies that the coming politics would not be thinkable without another, “minimal” hope. This reduction of hope to a minimal condition already informs Unger’s description of its object: politics is—at least for now—directed not toward the realization of an “ideal” state but toward one that may be called “ethically satisfactory.” A politics emerging out of a “maximum of hopelessness” would, therefore, not abandon the minimal claim to this uncatastrophic order; it would only give up the hope that such an order could emerge out of this world and its history. Not only is political thought forced to give up the hope that an “ethically satisfactory order” can and will arise within the confines of already existing political forms; it must also come to terms with the fact that a politics capable of bringing about an exit from this world does not yet exist, nor can one hope that it will emerge from the “elements and factors of the present or past political experience.” Any politics that does not mark a radical discontinuity with a yet to be determined structure of the world as it exists is destined to perpetuate an “age-old catastrophe”; without this yet to be articulated politics, Unger will recall again and again, this old catastrophe “must remain eternal” (PM, 52).

If the possibility of a coming politics depends on this disposition of a “maximum of hopelessness,” this is, Unger suggests, because it enables a grasp of the problem confronted by political thought in its radical, uncompromising dimension. Only a view of history that has withdrawn its hopes from the world as it is given allows us, as Unger writes, “to perceive the conflict inherent in this dilemma in its almost unthinkable crassness and to detect the problem in its actual tension [ihre wirkliche Gespanntheit]” (PM, 4). This tension, which appears here as the dynamic impulse that could drive the emergence of a future politics, involves a recasting of the narratives of history as a triumphant progression. The positive, factual truth from which political thought must begin is the recognition that empirical history is marked by a consistent failure. “The following train of thought,” Unger writes, is addressed in the first place to “those who, in the political facts of this age of human history, can find no more ethically productive forces than in previous ages, and for whom ‘history’ only has the meaning ‘history of failed attempts’ [Geschichte des Fehlschlagens].” “History,” he adds, “as that which stands out from the ethical norm, is a course whose stigma is failure [dessen Stigma Mißlingen ist].” The view suffused with a “maximum of hopelessness” thus corresponds to an image of history whose stigma—the mark of shame—is the consistent failure of humankind to realize its historical task. “History,” which Unger places between quotation marks because it is limited to empirical history, the inventory of “past and present political experience,” not only consistently stands out from the “ethical norm”—it has also failed to approach it over the course of time.

To pose the historico-political problem in its “actual tension,” however, requires not only a recognition that empirical history bears the stamp of failure; it also means that the ethico-political demand against which this failure is measured—the task of bringing about an “uncatastrophic order of human coexistence”—is understood in its uncompromising force. The polemic against conceptions of history based on progress that was still implicit in the previous passage is made explicit in the second part of Unger’s prefatory remarks, which are organized around a critique of the concept of “approximation” (Annäherung). Although never mentioned by name, it is clear that Unger’s attack on this concept is directed against the representation of history that is prevalent not only in the neo-Kantian philosophical discourse dominating German academia in the early twentieth century but also in the rhetoric of social-democratic political parties and movements. “The fundamental presupposition” of the book announced here, Unger writes, is “to see through every apparent ‘approximation’ of a somehow ‘ideal state,’ to recognize it as a walking-in-place and to reject every maneuver that aims toward such approximation” (PM, 4).¹⁴

This passage already points to the two moments of Unger’s critique of the understanding of history as the gradual approach to an ideal state. The first objection he makes is that the concept of approximation is a reaction to the prior demand for an uncatastrophic order of human coexistence, which is more radical in its temporal structure. “‘Approximation’ is the objection that every generation can take recourse to against the request to realize an idea or an ethically demanded content without remainder in their lifetime” (PM, 4). The politico-historical demand is for Unger, at its core, one which is “instantaneous.” He credits communism with grasping this temporal structure. “Communism,” he writes, “sees the ethically demanded state, in its entirety, and not just a little piece of it, as an instantaneous demand [augenblickliche Forderung].” (PM, 5). To conceive history in terms of approximation means to betray this instantaneous character; by deferring this “demand” to an infinitely remote future, it removes the force with which this demand makes a claim on the present. Unger takes one step further by interweaving this historico-temporal argument with another, teleological one. To understand the historical and temporal coordinates of politics in terms of approximation also means to compromise the end of politics itself. The end that politics aims at—which through the lens of gradual “approximation” must appear as a temporally remote “ideal state”—is displaced to the “little piece” of the ethically satisfactory order that can be realized in a generation’s lifetime. The politics of approximation, Unger points out, “already builds a possible break [Ruhepause] in reaching this end into its programme, in advance,” thereby satisfying itself with a “fraction,” a “small coin” (Scherflein) contributing to a good cause. That this happens “in advance” is, for Unger, based on a crucial spatiotemporal confusion: the image of the gradual approximation of a state that is mentally “posited ahead” (Vorgesetzt) of the human being is the result of the “retrospective view of a line that leads to a point that has been reached.” But although the line, from this viewpoint, can be divided into segments of gradual approximation, the “intention” cannot already take these into account if it does not want to corrupt itself and displace its ultimate end from the ethically demanded state to a mere “intermediary point” (Zwischenpunkt) (PM, 5).

The politics of approximation, then, compromises its own end insofar as it is destined to lose itself in the attainment of the “intermediary point,” the “small contribution” that it holds to be achievable in a lifetime. But since it must embed this contribution in a continuous progress, it also makes another, fundamental mistake in its attitude toward the given world in its positive factuality. The view of history as an approximation does not merely involve a concession to what Unger calls “contending matter” (widerstrebende Materie), the material reality resisting the ethical demand; it effectively enters into a pact with empirical history and treats it as if it contains the positive tendency toward the “ethically satisfactory order.” By having to posit a progressive view of history, the recourse to “approximation” ends up adopting a view toward existing political reality that is the inverse of the one required for an “uncatastrophic politics.” As such, it turns out to be not just a weakening but an inversion of the task of a politics that could call an end to a history of self-perpetuating catastrophe. The “only task” of such a politics, Unger writes, “is to negate the resistances of contending matter, a negation for which reason has the task of finding the specific mode” (PM, 5). The political task of realizing an “uncatastrophic order of human relations” would thus have to be understood not as a contribution to the course of empirical history but as the task of its interruption. In responding to this task, thought would have to identify the mode and possibility of such interruption in the face of persistent continuity and resistance to transformation.

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When the concept of catastrophe surfaces in Benjamin’s work of the early 1920s, it does so at a key place: in the important but initially unpublished manuscript that Benjamin began working on under the title “Thoughts toward an Analysis of the State of Mitteleuropa.”¹⁵ The starting point of this text, which takes the German hyperinflation as the occasion for a reflection on a more broadly conceived moment of crisis, is a dense one-page fragment that may be understood as the first articulation of Benjamin’s reflections on history and catastrophe of the late 1930s. Organized around a stock phrase that appears as the counterpart to the one prompting his later thoughts on the catastrophe of continuity, the expression that “things surely ‘cannot go on like this’” (indem es ja “nicht mehr so weiter” gehen könne) (GS, 4:926),¹⁶ this fragment introduces both an early version of the later image of catastrophic history and a first attempt to outline a politics whose aim is conceived in terms of an interruption of the course of history. Although the manuscript was only published in 1927, when it appeared in a Dutch translation under the title “Analytical Description of Germany’s Downfall,” followed by the publication of a more compressed German version in One-Way Street, now with the title “Imperial Panorama,” Benjamin had completed a first draft as early as 1923 (GS, 4:94–101).¹⁷ Two versions of the manuscript were drafted in that year: a longer, unordered draft that includes a broad range of reflections on contemporary phenomena of decline, and a trimmed-down, edited version, which Benjamin sent to Scholem in September that same year and is virtually the same as the published “Analytical Description” of 1927.¹⁸ Benjamin’s correspondence suggests that the first drafts of the text may have been written during travels he undertook through Germany in the first months of the year—a trip of which he wrote to his friend Florens Christian Rang, in terms recalling those of Unger, that its last days “have driven me once again to a verge of hopelessness [einen Rand von Hoffnungslosigkeit].”¹⁹ As this phrase already suggests, the manuscript may indeed be understood as one of Benjamin’s key engagements with the constellation of concepts and motifs he had encountered two years earlier in Unger’s Politics and Metaphysics—in particular the reflections on hope, history, catastrophe, and politics presented in its first paragraphs.

In the first fragment of Benjamin’s “Analytical Description,” the concept of catastrophe is introduced in the context of a reflection on history and politics organized around two concepts: those of stability and downfall (Untergang)—a term that will appear in the title of the first published version of the text.²⁰ Even if this reflection begins from the analysis of a concrete historical conjuncture, captured by Benjamin in the keywords “inflation and poison-gas warfare,” it moves toward a more general attempt to articulate a view of history that could animate what Unger had called an “uncatastrophic politics.”²¹ These thoughts on history and politics are, in this first fragment, developed out of the commentary on one of the stock phrases circulating in the moment of crisis in which Benjamin is writing. In a passage that anticipates the later identification of the idea of catastrophe and historical continuity—das es “so weiter geht,” ist die Katastrophe—Benjamin turns to a phrase that, ex negativo, introduces the thematic of stability and inertia, downfall and the apprehension of an approaching end:

Not only the phrase that Benjamin attends to, the expression that things surely “cannot go on like this,” but also his description of its referent—the bevorstehende Katastrophe—directly mirror Benjamin’s later thesis. In this earlier fragment, Benjamin’s reflections on catastrophe are, however, developed out of a critique of the experience of history implied in the phrase under consideration. Benjamin attributes this experience to a viewpoint characterized by “stupidity” and “cowardice”—an inability to think and a failure to act—that “betrays itself,” comes to light unintentionally and unwittingly, in the everyday phrases used by the German Bürger, the amalgam of bourgeois and citizen introduced here as the contemporary representative of the “stabilized relations” evoked at the end of the passage. How “stupidity” and “cowardice” present themselves in this particular phrase is, however, as Benjamin notes, particularly “worthy of reflection” (besonders denkwürdig), for this general failure manifests itself precisely with reference to an experience that, more than others, demands thought and action: the experience of catastrophe. The catastrophe appears from the standpoint critiqued here as bevorstehend: it is treated as an “impending” event, one that “confronts” or, literally, “stands before” the speaker. The catastrophe evoked in this phrase is, in other words, one that is both separated from the speaker, who treats the catastrophe as an object facing a subject, and consigned to the future. The catastrophe that announces itself in this phrase poses a threat, the object of an apprehension, at the same time as it is warded off; it presses in on the speaker at the same time as it is displaced to the future. The phrase in which Benjamin recognizes this double movement—indem es ja ‘nicht mehr so weitergehen’ könne—links this experience of catastrophe to a judgement on the course of history. If things were to go like this, this speaker induces, a catastrophe is imminent; but precisely this certainty of catastrophe is taken as a premise to conclude that history surely cannot continue to take this course. If this phrase is “particularly worthy of reflection,” this is because it betrays a budding awareness that this catastrophe is not an interruption of the course of history but the consequence of its continuation, its weitergehen; but it is precisely this connection between history and catastrophe that it resolutely denies. The worry and indignation over the course of history is expressed in the statement of an impossibility: that the course of events is catastrophic in the sense that it would, from the point of view of this speaker, lead to a catastrophe if it were to continue, is taken to guarantee the fact that things cannot possibly go on like this.

In the 1923 manuscript and first published version of the text, Benjamin adds a passage that makes explicit the view of history implied in the first part of the passage. The view of history that “betrays” itself in the phrase under consideration, Benjamin adds in these versions, “takes the decline [Verfall] of a society or nation to be a state of exception that automatically restores itself [einen automatisch sich restaurierenden Ausnahmezustand], although history clearly demonstrates the opposite” (GS, 4:926, 928–29). This remark not only renders explicit the view of history that undergirds the firm belief that things “cannot go on like this”—the view that takes Verfall, decline or decay, as an exception measured against a normal, “upward” course of history—but also suggests its connection to Benjamin’s political thought of the early 1920s, particularly his critique of the state.²³ In the first sentences of the fragment, this link is only implied in the terms Benjamin employs to describe the subject that is taken to represent this view of history: the Bürger, the bourgeois citizen, who benefited from the “stabilities” characteristic of the prewar years and is still under the spell of the “notions of security and property” (Sicherheits- und Besitzvorstellungen) of a bygone era that it cannot relinquish. Although this “average human being” (Durchschnittsmensch)—a description that embeds this Bürger in Benjamin’s critique of parliamentary democracy of the period—is now suddenly dispossessed and exposed to precarity, it still clings to the representations of security and property of the past; measured against these Vorstellungen, the passage suggests, the direction taken by the course of history in the present can appear only as unstable (GS, 4:926). That Benjamin is not concerned here with an accidental subjective attitude, but understands these representations of security and property to be fundamentally connected with the modern state, is suggested by his following characterization of this view as one that takes Verfall—a term that evokes both a downward course of history and an expiry of the current order—as a “state of exception” that “automatically restores itself” (GS, 4:926).

The exact nature of the “automaton” that is supposed to guarantee this course of history is suggested by the important section from Benjamin’s Habilitation thesis on sovereignty and history, which is constructed around the same concepts as the first fragment of the 1923 manuscript: those of “stability” and “catastrophe.” At the origin of the modern state, Benjamin argues here, lies the idea of a “complete stabilization” (einer völligen Stabilisierung), the historical ideal of a perfect continuity of the social order; and it is as antithesis to this ideal that the early modern period introduces the “idea of catastrophe.”²⁴ The sovereign appears as the figure whose function is precisely to guarantee the stability of the social order, to ward off the threats posed by war and revolt. His task is, as Benjamin writes here, to “exclude . . . the state of exception” ([den] Ausnahmezustand auszuschließen)—that is to say, to maintain it as an exception opposed to a stable norm. The sovereign here represents a dictatorial power to which the state is, in the last instance, destined to take recourse. “Whoever governs,” Benjamin writes, “is already in advance determined to become the holder of dictatorial power in the state of exception, if war, revolt or other catastrophes should bring it about” (GS, 1:246). If the early modern period, whose exemplary form Benjamin recognizes in the baroque Trauerspiel, maintained an insight into the origins and fate of the modern state, his “Analytical Description” of Europe’s downfall evokes a view in which the contingency harbored by the figure of the sovereign is thought to be substituted by a trust in the state as an “automatic” mechanism of stabilization. Just as the baroque treated the eruptions of a force threatening to overturn the order as emerging from a natural world, a “cataract” pushing against the established order from the outside (GS, 1:246), so Benjamin’s “Analytical Description” of his own present evokes a status quo threatened by economic forces that manifest themselves as forces of nature that merely need to be brought under control. The view held by the deutsche Bürger and their belief that “things cannot go on like this” appear here as a contemporary iteration of the “world-despotic” ideal of complete stabilization—but one that has come to understand catastrophe and the threat it poses to this stability as an exception that “automatically restores itself,” a norm supposedly guaranteed by the rationality of the state and the market.

Benjamin contrasts this view of history, which helplessly clings to now collapsing notions of “security and property,” to another, in which the relation between stability and catastrophe are completely inverted. “Stable conditions,” he writes in the last sentence of the cited passage, “need by no means be pleasant conditions, and even before the war there were strata for whom stabilized conditions amounted to stabilized misery [stabilisierte Elend]” (GS, 4:926). From this point of view, which is associated in the 1923 manuscript with that of the “oppressed,” catastrophe is no longer treated as a singular event, located in the future; it is perceived to already be taking its course in the present.²⁵ Catastrophe is neither “imminent” nor bevorstehend in the sense that it “confronts” the speaker as an object opposed to a subject; it is not the overturning of what Benjamin describes here as “stabilized relations” but consists precisely in the stabilization of these relations viewed as relations of oppression. What appeared from the first point of view as “stabilities of an entirely new kind” is, from the second point of view, only the further expansion and intensification of immiseration, precarity, and dispossession. Also, this view of history perceives an immanent catastrophe; this future event is not an overturning of the course of history but what Benjamin, in the early versions of the text, describes as a Vollzug des Untergangs (GS, 4:929)—an expression that may be taken to evoke both the “completion” of a process of downfall already taking its course, and the execution of an order, the carrying out of a law already governing the historical process.²⁶ In the following passage, which is included in both earlier and later drafts of the text, Benjamin further specifies this view of history:

A sober account of empirical history, a Rechnung that makes up the balance sheet of modernity leading all the way up to the “present condition,” must, so Benjamin argues, arrive at a simple conclusion: the only ratio of this history, the only reason that this “facing of the facts” is destined to find, is Untergang, downfall. If thought is inseparable from astonishment, this cannot be the “weakening astonishment” (erschlaffende Staunen) of the newspaper reader who is, each day again, surprised by what merely repeats itself. Thought instead has to be concerned with the preparations for what would be truly astonishing—a “rescue” from the catastrophic downfall from which there seems to be no escape.²⁷ There is, from the standpoint of this account of history, nothing astonishing about the continuation and intensification of conditions of “stabilized misery”; it is the exit from these conditions that “almost borders”—but never quite reaches—the domain of the “miraculous and incomprehensible.” Such a view, Benjamin notes later in the fragment, “hardly expects” rescue from these conditions. It must count on the fact that this catastrophic history will continue to take its course without, however, completely giving up on a possibility of salvation that must, in light of the sober account of history, appear as außerordentlich, lying outside the normal course of events. This view of history has not only shed the hope that this world steadily approaches an ideal state; it has also given up the belief that there is anything in this world that would keep it from pursuing its downward course until the end. “The expectation that things cannot go on like this [die Erwartung, daß es nicht so weitergehen könne],” Benjamin adds, “will have been taught one day that, for the suffering of individuals and communities there is only one limit beyond which things cannot go on: annihilation [die Vernichtung]” (GS, 4:929).

The experience of history Benjamin sketches out here may be understood as a reconfiguration of the “disposition” in which Unger’s Politics and Metaphysics had recognized the dynamic impulse of the coming politics. Like Unger, Benjamin characterizes this view of history by recasting the notion of a bevorstehende Katastrophe, grasping it not as a threat confronting this world but as one emanating from it, not as a future event but as one identified with the continuous course of history. Contrary to Unger, the conception of catastrophe emerging from Benjamin’s fragment is not one that may be described as “eternal.” The significance that Benjamin attributes to the concept of Untergang, which indicates both the downward course of history and the end it tends toward, lies precisely in the introduction of an irreducible finitude to the historical experience articulated here. In Benjamin, the catastrophe recognized in the course of history is not one that is destined to perpetuate itself as long as it is not stopped; the “stability” of the world only guarantees that it remains on track to its own end. This view of history may be understood as a reinterpretation of the “instantaneity” that Unger had called for in his 1921 treatise. But where Unger attempted to locate the instantaneous character of the historical task in a positive possibility—the belief, grounded in a new metaphysics, that an uncatastrophic order of human coexistence is possible in this generation—Benjamin locates it in the finitude of this world. The starting point for the reflections on politics developed in the remainder of the fragment will be a radicalization of Unger’s stipulation of a “maximum of hopelessness”: the minimal hope that is to drive the coming politics is directed not toward the positive realization of another world but to the stopping of a world on course to its own annihilation. The conception of politics developed out of this view of history will thus be organized around a play of different ends: the end already inscribed in history and another, “rescuing” end that could prevent this from being realized.

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Toward the end of Politics and Metaphysics, Unger captures the exit from the history characterized as an “eternal catastrophe” in the form of a figure: that of Wanderung, the migration of an entire people or social stratum. That Benjamin had a special interest in this passage is suggested by the fact that he referred precisely to this passage in one of his other important unpublished fragments from the early 1920s, “Capitalism as Religion,” which refers to Unger’s notion of “the overcoming of capitalism through migration” (GS, 6:102).²⁸ As in the case of the other key concepts in Unger’s text, his reflections on migration are an attempt to develop the elements of the coming politics out of a reinterpretation of religious motifs that have long “disappeared from the horizon of world political considerations” (PM, 47). Since there is no hope for an “uncatastrophic politics” to emerge out of the social and political formations, and since any attempt to develop a new politics within the framework of these formations is destined to fail, the conditions for the emergence of an “ethically satisfactory order of human coexistence” must be imagined as an escape operation. “The rush against the ‘capitalist system’ must eternally remain futile at the place where it is in force,” Unger contends. “To achieve anything against capitalism, it is above all indispensable to move out of the domain in which it is effective, for within this it is able to absorb every reaction” (PM, 48).²⁹ The escape operation Unger calls for aims neither to found a new state nor to establish a new people, at least not in any given sense of the word. As is made emphatically clear in his other major work from the same period, the anarcho-Judaic treatise The Stateless Formation of a Jewish People, the political community that could emerge out of this Wanderung would both break away from capitalism and leave behind the form of the state.³⁰

The idea of an exit from catastrophic history also plays a crucial role in Benjamin’s political thought of the early 1920s. In the concluding paragraph of his 1921 “On the Critique of Violence,” Benjamin famously confronts the fateful history of violence with the “idea of its exit” (die Idee ihres Ausgangs) (GS, 2:202). The same concept—Ausgang—also occurs at several points in his 1923 manuscript on Germany during the hyperflation. Whenever the term appears, Benjamin plays on its distinct meanings: Ausgang, above all, in the sense of both exit and end—but also as starting point. In his engagement with the problem of an exit from catastrophic history, Benjamin unmistakably enters into a dialogue with Unger. Although the concept of Wanderung is not mentioned explicitly, the manuscript is punctuated by reflections on escaping, ways out, travel, freedom of movement and freedom of domicile (Freizügigkeit) (GS, 4:934). Whenever these motifs appear, however, Benjamin consistently treats them in negative terms: as evoking a possibility that is denied and appears to be lost irrevocably. There are references to the lack of the “will to find an exit at every cost”; to the loss of the “obscure drive . . . to escape from the approaching danger” ascribed to animals; and to the disappearance of the freedom of domicile and travel, presented as images of an old, now lost idea of freedom (GS, 4:931, 929, 934).³¹ The apparent impossibility of a way out—and the complication of the exit through a Wanderung evoked by Unger—is also central to an image introduced toward the end of the fragment on catastrophe at the start of the manuscript.

Benjamin evokes the image of a city—a polis—besieged by a mute and invisible force. This city is “completely encircled” (rings umzingelt); there appears to be no way out of the predicament it finds itself in, no available exit from the ever-worsening conditions within the city’s walls. The inhabitants of this city, so it is pointed out, barely have the means to sustain their life—Lebensmittel—or to fight against the powers confronting them. In the given situation, there is no ground to hope that this mute power may be overcome by means of force, nor is there a possibility to reach compromise through negotiation. But although the surrounding armed force may, at first, appear to confront the city from the outside as an opposing power, Benjamin points out that the “mute, invisible power” that continues to assault this city in fact stands in close contact with it. “We stand in mysterious contact with the forces that besiege us [mit den uns belagernden Gewalten],” Benjamin writes in the following sentences, suggesting that the apparently external forces, the misery and violence to which the city appears to be doomed by forces from the outside, may, in fact, be engendered by the polis itself (GS, 4:929). There may be something in this polis, so it is suggested, that continues to produce the force that not only subjects its inhabitants to perpetual misery but also denies them the possibility of escaping from this condition. The problem, then, is to find out how to understand this secret pact between the besieged city and the catastrophic effect apparently caused by an external force. In contrast to Unger’s proposition of an exodus, Benjamin emphasizes the forces that keep the inhabitants from escaping this doomed city. The “idea of an exit” that Benjamin, like Unger, calls for in his political writings of the early 1920s must also be an Ausgang in the other sense of the word: an end—if only momentarily—to the process by which this city keeps on denying its inhabitants the possibility of escape.³²

Benjamin’s manuscript of 1923 does not stop at diagnosing this predicament; the key first fragment on catastrophe and history also includes an important early reflection on political transformation. In the initial drafts of the fragment and the “Analytical Description” published in 1927, the unfolding commentary on the phrase that things “surely cannot go on like this” is punctuated by a reflection on the “idea of revolution.”³³ After criticizing the widespread response to impending catastrophe, marked by a reliance on the automatic return to a historical norm understood in terms of continuous progress, and after contrasting this to a view of history from the standpoint of those for whom “stable relations” are “stabilized misery,” Benjamin writes: “Insofar as an authentic representation of liberation [eine echte Befreiungsvorstellung] forms itself in those who are oppressed in this way, this could . . . limit the duration of such stabilization in an idea of revolution [die Dauer solcher Stabilisierung in einer Revolutionsidee befristen]” (GS, 4:928–29). The idea of revolution is presented here not as a completion of history, a culmination of its development; it is conceived as its end. Revolution is understood not in terms of an aufheben, a movement of negation, preservation, and sublation, but as an aufhalten, the movement by which history is stopped in its tracks. The latter term had appeared elsewhere in the fragment, where the idea of revolution was outlined ex negativo, in the passage where we have seen Benjamin refer to the viewpoint from which the possibility of “stopping the habitual execution of the downfall” (den eingewöhnten Vollzug des Unterganges aufzuhalten) does not even “come to mind”—a viewpoint for which this idea of revolution does not even occur as a possibility (GS, 4:929). The idea of revolution conceived in terms is not the moment in which a new world is posited: it is the purely negative moment in which the existing world comes to an end. Benjamin now describes this arrest as a Befristung, a term that designates the setting of a Frist, a time limit, a deadline. How Benjamin determines the object of this “delimitation” is important to note: the idea of revolution does not find its completion in the end of the course of history itself but, properly speaking, in the delimitation of its “stabilization”—that is to say, the process guaranteeing the stable course of this history. The way out of catastrophic history, then, cannot simply consist of a movement to a readily available outside. Contra Unger, every “authentic representation of liberation” requires the interruption of the mechanisms that stabilize this history by keeping the human being locked within the confines of the given.

Elsewhere in the same manuscript, Benjamin introduces a striking counterpart to this passing remark on the idea of revolution. Commenting once again on a contemporary phenomenon, in this case the disintegration of the “freedom of conversation” under the pressure of all speech and thought to turn to the conditions of immiseration, Benjamin writes: “It is as if one is trapped in a theater and must follow the bad play on the stage whether one wants to or not, as if one must, ever again, make it into the subject of one’s thought and speech, whether one wants to or not” (GS, 4:917). The “idea of revolution” introduced in the fragment on history and catastrophe is here juxtaposed to a scene that upsets and inverts the traditional association of historical development and the theatrical stage. History is not, as in Hegel, likened to a stage where the spirit progressively unfolds itself, nor is the progressive movement of history, as in Kant, founded on the spectator’s sympathetic participation in the events encountered in the world-historical theater. The spectators of Benjamin’s theater are confronted with a “bad play” (dem schlechten Stück); they are neither free nor active participants but spectators “captured” in a theater forced to “follow” the terrible sequence of events presented to them. The temporality is not one of progression but of the ever-same repetition that Benjamin associated with mythical representations of hell, a compulsion to watch this play “again and again” (immer wieder), without the expectation of change or relief. Rather than participating in the play, its actors and its possible course, the spectators in Benjamin’s theater come to want only one thing: “to find a way out at any cost” (den Ausgang um jeden Preis gewinnen zu wollen) (GS, 4:917). That this way out does not present itself yet but would be the result of a difficult effort is suggested by the term Benjamin uses here, gewinnen; the problem is how, in this condition of captivity, an exit may be “won.”

The image of a theater where the bad play of history repeats itself “again and again” and the description of the idea of revolution as a “delimitation” of historical duration both anticipate a formula that Benjamin introduces toward the end of the 1930s in conjunction with the “continuity as catastrophe” thesis. In one of the other fragments gathered in Central Park, Benjamin refers to a “will” that may be understood as a counterpart to the insight that “things ‘go on like this’ is the catastrophe”: the will to “interrupt the world in its course” (die Wille . . . den Weltlauf zu unterbrechen) (GS, 1:667).³⁴ Like this formulation, Benjamin’s earlier reflections on history and the idea of revolution imply a radical reconsideration of the intentionality of political activity. The task of politics is not described as the positive realization of “another world”; its willful activity is directed only toward the possibility of bringing this world—that is to say, the world in its given historical course—to an end. The conception of politics implied here is in itself marked by a strict delimitation: the “idea” in which it finds its completion is, at least in the foreseeable future, limited to the will to bring the course of history to an end, if only momentarily. The nexus of politics and history is constructed around two competing ends: those of a catastrophic history dominated by a logic of “downfall” whose only limit is “annihilation” and, on the other hand, a politics that aims to bring this history to an end other than the one inscribed in it.

The gloomy reflections on catastrophe, history, and politics that Benjamin offers in his 1923 manuscript, written “on the verge of hopelessness,” may, then, be understood as an attempt to follow through the stipulation that Unger had presented at the start of his Politics and Metaphysics: that the coming politics could emerge only out of a view of history marked by a “maximum of hopelessness.” If this stipulation informs Benjamin’s manuscript, it does so not as a call to a resigned pessimism but as a reminder that any politics that invests its hope in this world and its history has already excluded the viewpoint from which every continuation of this history can appear only as an “eternal catastrophe.” Politics cannot presuppose a subject that has the grounds to expect that a better world can and will be realized; it must be able to start from an experience for which such grounds are not—or at least, not yet—given. The “maximum of hopelessness” does not, however, point to the absence of hope but to a politics that has to be developed out of a condition verging on hopelessness. The minima politica emerging from Benjamin’s 1923 manuscript is organized around a reduction of the political task. Politics is here directed not to the realization of an ideal state; the sole idea that it must work toward is the end of the conditions that obstruct the possibility that such a state could be realized or even imagined as a concrete reality. The task that orients such a politics does not spring from an already constituted, autonomous subject; it appears, instead, as the desire to find a way out of a condition characterized as an ensnarement in the course of history. If this minimal politics is still informed by a hope, this must have a purely negative character: the claim to which it would hold fast is that “another end of the world is possible.”

Notes

References