THEOLOGY AS AN INVISIBLE ORGANON. THE USE OF THEOLOGY AS A GRAMMAR OF BENJAMINIAN TIME

FRANCISCO NAISHTAT

OXFORD

Conferencia; Walter Benjamin and Method: Re-thinking the Legacy of the Frankfurt School/Walter Benjamins Methoden: Das Vermächtnis der Frankfurter Schule im heutigen Kontext; 2017

International Walter Benjamin Society

INTERNATIONAL WALTER BENJAMIN CONFERENCE 2017Proposal for Section V FRANCISCO NAISHTAT ABSTRACTTHEOLOGY AS AN INVISIBLE ORGANON. THE USE OF THEOLOGY AS A GRAMMAR OF BENJAMINIAN TIMEThere is in Benjamin a productive use of theological images which deviates from the conventional context of the history of religion, but which injects theology into his thinking as an antidote to the conformist and « bourgeois » (GS-II.1, 150) worldview of his time and to its respective academic canon. From a thematic point of view, his theology is invisible (GS-VI-1, 588) and it makes no sense to seek to reconstruct, against the background of Benjamin?s fragmentary thinking, a systematic theological core that may provide an ultimate interpretation or foundation one cannot find explicitly in his philosophy. Invisible, but at the same time impregnating and fruitful; deprived of any reference to doctrine or ultimate truth, theology seems to be in Benjamin a grammar of thought, simultaneously located in the place of philosophical use and of methodological cunning or Metis, across the various levels of the corpus: a metaphysics of experience, literary criticism, philosophy of language, theory of history and Marxism. Accepting that criticism (Kritik) is the visible organon and the object of Benjaminian philosophy, is not theology, then, its invisible organon? What seems to be particular to Benjamin, however is the agonistic but nevertheless heuristic way in which he intends to use theology in order to shake, disarray and deconstruct the established philosophy, and specially its dominant trends in the field of the theory of history: historicism, positivism and the evolutionary Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history (GS-I.2, 693). In this presentation we try to settle how this theological perspective is applied to a benjaminian grammar of time. We conclude agonistically comparing the resulting Benjaminian notion of historical past both against a text of young Heiddeger (Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft, 1915) and against a fragment of Max Horkheimer (GS, V, I, 589).