Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion"Author(s): Werner Hamacher and Kirk WettersSource: Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Ethics (Autumn - Winter, 2002), pp. 81-106Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566446Accessed: 01/04/2010 15:47

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GUILT HISTORY

BENJAMIN'S SKETCH "CAPITALISM AS RELIGION"

WERNER HAMACHER

History as Exchange Economy

Since history cannot be conceived as a chain of events produced by mechanical causation, it must be thought of as a connection between occurrences that meets at least two conditions: first that it admit indeterminacy and thus freedom, and second that it nonetheless be demonstrable in determinate occurrences and in the distinct form of their coherence. Relations can thus be called historical and can be recognized as historical only if they are determined by neither necessity nor chance, and if their causality is of a different order than the mechanical. The temporal structure of history can therefore be characterized on the one hand by the distinct connection of its elements-and on the other hand by the dissolution of all connections that do not assist these elements in

achieving their independence. A temporal nexus that clearly does not satisfy these conflicting requirements has

been characterized in one of the oldest texts of occidental philosophy as the time of guilt. According to the sentence of Anaximander (from about 500 BC), handed down by Simplicius in his commentary (530 AD) on Aristotle's Physics, the origin and end of all

things is subordinated to the law of necessity (kata to kreon). "They must pay penance and be judged for their injustice, according to the order of time (kata ten tou chronou tdxin)"-so the fragment reads in the translation offered by Nietzsche in his treatise "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks." According to Anaximander, the sequence of time orders the rise and fall of all things and orders them in accordance with the law of guilt and punishment so that becoming (genesis) is a guilt (adikia) that must be expiated in perishing. Time and more precisely its taxis, the positing of time, is thought in Anaximander's sentence as an order of guilt and retribution, debt and payback. It is a time of economy in the sense that it is the time of law-and precisely a law that is valid for all beings, a tdxis, a decree, an ordinance and an ordering-in which the unavoidable incurring of guilt is atoned in an equivalent penance that is just as unavoidable. The strict coherence of guilt and penance is ascertained by the principle of their equivalence. Time is therefore conceived here as a double process of coming into being and perishing,

Translator's note: This essay was originally published in a slightly longer version, as "Schuldgeschichte: Benjamins Skizze 'Capitalismus als Religion,'" in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2003), 77-120. The most important terminological difficulty of this translation concerns the German word Schuld and related terms. Schuld means, to put it simply, both "guilt" and "debt," as well as, in other senses andforms, "to blame," "to be atfault, " and "to owe." The original text of the essay typically has several of these senses in mind at once, and at certain points in the argument it may be useful to keep this in mind. Generally, I have translated according to the context, but, in the interest of terminological consistency, I have also tried to opt for the English word "guilt" whenever possible.

diacritics / fall-winter 2002 diacritics 32.3-4: 81-106 81

a process that occurs in such a way that the genesis is erased in its passing away-so that time is thus erased by time itself.

In Anaximander's sentence, however, time is not only the double-process of coming into being and passing away, it is-as a tdxis-the common and constantly enduring medium of the exchange of the contrary but equivalent motions of coming into being and perishing. It is the time of the quid pro quo of everything that is generated and passes away within time. Its measure is a justice that represents itself as a tdxis and thereby as the positing and the law of all becoming and vanishing, the law ofphysis and its demise as an onto-economic law. This taxiological order of time places every realm of the natural and human world under a law of substitution without exception; this also allows ethical, juridical, and economic concepts to substitute for one another within this order. The ethical dimension ofjustice, thus circumscribed by the order of time, is reduced to the juridical dimension of the decree, and both now define themselves according to the calculus of "an exchange economy in an eternally unchanging household of nature."' It can only, however, be a matter of an ethics of time to the extent that this ethics, already juridified and economized, is subordinated to the schema of exchange, trade, and the equivalence of guilt and retribution. The time of history, ethical time, is thus interpreted in Anaximander's sentence as a normative time of inculpation and expiation. Whatever enters this tdxis of time is thereby already guilty and can only become ex- cused by its perishing.

According to the thesis of Anaximander, time is the schema of guilt and retribution: The injustice committed by the progress of time occurs, however, like its remediation, unfreely. This time is therefore that of a guilt- and debt-continuum, continually advancing without a gap in its eternal recurrences. But it is not the time of history.

History, Etiology

It is unknown whether Walter Benjamin was familiar with this sentence of Anaximander. Hermann Cohen, in many regards Benjamin's teacher, cites a fragment of the pre-Socratic saying, fleetingly and without reference, in his 1918 Religion of Reasonfrom the Sources of Judaism, in the chapter on "The Idea of the Messiah and Humanity": "The world must pay in punishment (diken did6nai) for its existence." From this and the earlier works of Cohen, Benjamin may have been familiar with the early Greek equation of time and guilt. In one of his fragmentary notes on the concept of history, perhaps to be dated at the end of the 1910s, Benjamin takes up the connection and declares guilt to be a category of "world history." He seeks to strictly differentiate this history of the world (it may be understood as the history that offers itself in the aspect of its worldliness) from divine history. The critical accent of his exposition is unmistakable: "Guilt is the highest category of world history for guaranteeing the uni-directionality (Einsinnigkeit) of what occurs" [GS 6: 92].2 Only by the category of guilt can the unambiguousness of

1. This is how Heidegger describes it in his "Spruch des Anaximander" [304]. Hisformulation is used to characterize the commonplace but to his mind materially unjustified understanding of Anaximander's fragment. According to this misunderstanding, the situation is such that "moral and juridical concepts [. . .] mix themselves up with the image of nature" [304]. It would be possible to show that, despite his intention to be more true to the matter ofAnaximander's sentence itself Heidegger's understanding shares decisive traits of this "misunderstanding."

2. Translator's note: Citations from Benjamin are given here in my own translations. This is also the case for all other citations, since the close analysis of the passages cited would otherwise seem implausible. English editions of the central texts of the essay are noted in the bibliography. The page references given in the body of the essay refer exclusively to the German editions. The

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what occurs be guaranteed, its linear orientation, its sense of direction, and the unity of its sense, because only this category refers occurrences in a nonmechanical way to an origin and to further consequences in other occurrences. The Greek aition means "provenance" as well as "guilt": guilt is a category of descent. It indicates that whatever is prior has had something taken from it by that which follows; or whatever is prior has withheld something from that which follows it. Every "having" is thus declared as a having from something else that previously had it-as in the debere, the de habere of debt. If guilt is a genealogical category, it is "the highest category of world history" insofar as it is the category of genesis itself and the only category that can account for occurrences in a homogenous sequence. Whatever happens, it happens from an other and toward yet another and is therefore indebted to these other occurrences. It is, however, also indebted in the sense that whatever happens in the line of descent occurs as a theft in which something is torn away, leaving a lack in the place of its origin. Guilt accordingly designates the reason of an absence, a failure, a deficit.

Everything that happens is guilt. This is why guilt is "the highest category" of history. Benjamin continues in his note: "Every world-historical moment is indebted and indebting. Cause and effect can never be decisive categories for the structure of world history, because they cannot determine any totality. Logic has to prove the principle that no totality as such can be either cause or effect. It is a mistake of the rationalistic conception of history to view any historical totality (that is, a state of the world) as cause or effect. A state of the world is however always guilty with regard to some other later one" [GS 6: 92]. If Benjamin here makes "totality" the criterion for whether something is "guilt" rather than "cause," then this is presumably for the reason that a cause as such is completely exhausted in its being the cause of something other than itself and therefore cannot be a totality in itself. Guilt is indeed, like causation, a category of relation to an other-Benjamin defines it in exactly this sense: "A state of the world is only guilty with regard to some other later state"-and unlike the category of cause, guilt is not only a category of provenance but also a category of moral and more precisely legal relations, that not only permits but rather requires that the one who is guilty is a self and thus a totality-very much according to Cohen's presentation in the Ethics of Pure Will [ErW 370]. A moral connection, a relation out of freedom (even if it be a minimum of freedom) can never be causally grounded. And therefore the cause-effect relation cannot be valid as a category of history, but only the related yet markedly distinct relationship of guilt. Guilt is not a mechanical causation; it is, however, as a making or letting happen, as giving occasion, release, and production, a causa in the sense of the Greek aition.

The word aition names not only a causation of something through something prior to it, but it designates at the same time the moral guilt that a condition or occurrence carries "with regard to some later one." Only an ait-ical occurrence is an ethical occurrence: in the etiological structure of time and history that Benjamin has in mind here, every state of the world is guilty to the extent that it releases another deficient state of the world and bears the guilt for it. Every state of the world is therefore an incomplete one, a morally or legally lacking condition. Guilt is "the highest category" of history, because it is the category of the causation of deficiencies. Thus it must follow that history is guilt, and that it is guilty: it is history only to the extent that it is guilt history, a history out of guilt and a history of guilt. Guilt can only exist where there is history, and every history is a phenomenon of deficiency. And, conversely, there can only be history if a condition or an occurrence severs itself from another one without, however,

primary textual base is in any case quite small, comprised as it is by Benjamin's three-page fragment, "Capitalism as Religion, " which has been published in English as a part of Selected Writings, Vol. 1 [288-91].

diacritics / fall-winter 2002 83

completely losing all relation to it. Guilt is thus a deficitary relation, a relation to that which is lacking or missing. All history is therefore the history of guilt in the sense that the form-and only therefore also the content-of history is determined by guilt. There is no history that is not about guilt, none that would not have been made guilty by another and none that for its own part would not bear guilt toward yet another-an other that, for its part, can only be history and guilt in turn. History, in short, is the process by which guilt is incurred-since in its every production the no-longer-being of something else is effected. Guilt is the cause of a not. History, therefore, including the study of it, is etiology: the study of occurrences as causations of defects.

In another note that is not only chronologically close to the one under discussion, Benjamin characterizes the time of guilt, the time of world history, as the time of fate (Schicksal): "The time of fate is the time that at all times can be made simultaneous (not present). It stands under the order of guilt, which determines its coherence. It is a time that is not independent; there is neither present, nor past, nor future within it" [GS 6: 91]. The decisive formulation of this note became part of a passage from the treatise on "Fate and Character" from September 1919. There it states, more precisely, "that this time may at any time be made simultaneous (not present) with any other time" [GS 2.1.176]. A time with this kind of synchronicity, barred from the differentiation of past, present, and future, can only be called "a completely improper temporality," because it precludes the separation, distance, and freedom that first make 'proper time'-as the time of morally meaningful action-possible, along with its divisions into various dimensions of time and experience. The dense coherence that obstructs temporal differentiation is called the guilt-nexus; fate, thus conceived by Benjamin, is "the guilt- nexus of the living" [GS 2.1.175]. This fate, being essentially guilt and more precisely the generative process by which guilt is incurred, blocks history and properly historical time. It categorically excludes the possibility of leaving the chain of events connecting everything that is and occurs without at once continuing its sequence and thus reconsolidating its order even in breaking it. Hermann Cohen's Ethics of Pure Will, which clearly provides the-sometimes critical-orientation for the relevant issues in

Benjamin, states in the same sense: "It is [...] always in a fall from fate that fate fulfills and proves itself. The concept that forms the proper kernel of fate may be recognized in the concept of guilt. The Ate extends itself over a people, over a privileged people, upon whom the fate of humans makes itself apparent. This is the reign that fate extends in the subjection of the individuals of this people. [...] [Myth] still sees no difference between the individual and his people, just as little as Zeus ceases to be an individual god because he is subject to thefatum. The evil is guilt. And guilt is fate" [ErW 361]. As long as the "natural coherence" of a people defines the human as a merely natural being, man remains defined by the unity of his natural genus and by his generation under the category of guilt. The sentence, therefore, pronounced earlier, "everything that happens is guilt," can be made more precise: everything that happens by the coherence of nature and generation is guilt-and this is precisely the reason why guilt, as the ultimate category of fate, is indeed the ultimate category of world history, but because the ethical dimension can only show itself within this history in its negation, as evil, guilt cannot be the decisive category for human history, nor for historical time in general. The time of guilt, the time of the Ate and the aition that can only be improperly called "time," is the time of causation in the sense of the incursion of guilt, valid for the-principally unforeseeable-duration of natural man toto genere and therefore valid not for a time or for some time but for all time, not for some individual human in his or her singular time, and never for the human as an ethical being, but for the "bare life" in him, which is incapable of any temporal determination, much less a historical one-and which therefore can only provide the

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ahistorical and atemporal fundus out of which another order can emerge through individuation, an order that would now be historical in a stricter sense.

Both Benjamin and Cohen view "the perpetual concatenation of guilt and atonement" as "heathen" and therefore as prereligious and protoethical [GS 2.1.175], because it leaves no room for the individual's capacity of freedom, nor for any relation to an other that would not stand exclusively under the category of guilt. Both Benjamin's and Cohen's conceptions of ethics as well as of religion are defined in opposition to the guilt mechanics of the fate systems of antiquity-and especially against those of the Greeks-as well as

against their later and modem variants. Everything belonging to the realm of ethics (that is of self-determination out of freedom) qualifies itself to this realm by its rigorous separation from all of the elements of myth-from genealogically enforced guilt, from succession, from sequence, results and their causation, from familial and chronological lines of provenance. Only by the resolute cessation of commerce between guilt and retribution does the human emerge into the realm of his freedom. Acting in the guilt- nexus means following an obligation to act, dictated in advance by another-and is therefore only a form of not acting. Anyone who is bound by guilt and obligation does not do what he does, but instead executes a preordained program and falls fatally, lethally for action itself, into the predestination of an inheritance from whose succession he is not free to abstain.

As ethics first takes hold, like strict monotheistic religion-the Judaism of the

prophets-where the category of guilt falls away, time as historical time can only begin where it no longer assumes the form of a guilt nexus, but rather of an initiative ex nihilo where every coherence based on indebting-its every bond and chain-falls away. In "Fate and Character" Benjamin opposes "the dogma of the natural guilt of human life, of original guilt" with "the vision of the natural innocence of man" [GS 2.1.178] and

points in the direction of a realm that-beyond the merely "natural" innocence-might be called moral and historical innocence. The pagan teaching insists however, to the

contrary, on the "principle indissolubility" of original guilt, the peccata originale, from which, as Benjamin emphasizes, the pagan "cult" can offer only "a temporary solution." What he understands by the word "pagan" (also according to Cohen's sense of it) is not

only Greek polytheism, but also-and not a bit less-the Christianity that raised the doctrine of original sin to the status of a dogma and extended this logic into the furthest reaches of its systems of faith, thought, and behavior.

Capital Guilt History, Methodological

If the task of a critique of history can only be satisfied by a critique of guilt history, then the privileged object of this critique must be Christianity as the religion of guilt economy, and capitalism as the system of a deterministic debt religion. By specifying these objects, some indication is given as to the place and the weight of Benjamin's fragment "Capitalism as Religion" within the vast project of his theory of history and politics.

The point of the diagnosis given in the formula "Capitalism as Religion" can be

highlighted in contrast with Max Weber's works on the sociology of religion- particularly, as might be supposed, with the works collected under the title The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Benjamin writes: "In capitalism a religion may be discerned-that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same worries, torments and restlessness to which the so-called religions used to provide answers. The proof of the religious structure of capitalism-not only, as Weber believes, as a formation conditioned by religion, but as an essentially religious phenomenon-would still lead us, even today, astray into an immeasurable universal polemic" [GS 6: 100]. Weber

diacritics / fall-winter 2002 85

performed his studies according to the methodological principle of causality, and thus he characterized the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism as the precondition for the modern-capitalist-business ethos of occidental societies: "The conditioning of the genesis of a 'business mentality' [. . .] by the content of certain religious beliefs represents," as he says, "a causal relation" [DpE 21]. And thus capitalism's genesis follows, though Weber does not say it, precisely the same kind of rationality-a logic of provenance and guilt-that supposedly first acquires its privileged modern status in the rise of the "business mentality" that Weber describes. The methodological apparatus applied to the spirit of capitalism is that of rational causality itself-and is thus structurally capitalistic in its inspiration. This method cannot therefore provide any means of liberation from capitalism and its structures. The fact that Weber incorporates a supplemental reverse causality in his analysis (turning Protestant Christianity into a result of the capitalist economic form) changes nothing in the specific form of his derivation.3 No matter where the series of causation starts-and no matter how it is additionally legitimated-it secures the economic form on the one side and the religious form on the other as fixed positions within a system of dependencies. Weber thus insists upon the derivation of economy and religion from one another, but does not take into account the possibility that both might refer themselves to a third sphere that does not represent their condition-as aition or causa-but rather presents the space of their articulation. Benjamin avoids this methodological aporia and the theoretical as well as political futility of Weber's interpretation by defining both capitalism and Protestant religiosity in the same terms. Both are relatively independent structures of relation with an identical function: namely that of providing an answer to "worries, torments and restlessness." In this characterization, Benjamin is careful to speak of "the religious structure" and of "an essentially religious phenomenon," without basing this structure on anything other than the conventional concept of religion, that of the "so-called" religions. It is not his own concept of religion (a rigorous one undoubtedly relying on Cohen and the tradition of Judaism) that underlies the notion of capitalism as an "essentially religious phenomenon." "Fate and Character" is unambiguous on this: "An order, however, whose constitutive concepts are misfortune and guilt, and within which there is no thinkable course of liberation [...] such an order cannot be religious" [GS 2.1.174]. The "capitalist religion" is therefore not a religion, but rather a "cult-religion," a structure of belief and behavior, of law and economy, pursuing, like every other cult within the context of myth, the sole aim of organizing "the guilt- and debt-nexus of the living."

As religious, cultic, and cultural structures had done previously, the rules of conduct under capitalism give an answer to what Benjamin calls "worries, torments and restlessness"-they systematize a deficit without permitting any escape from it. The function of capitalism consists in structuring the lack by explaining its provenance and by giving instructions for its remediation. Capitalism is thus essentially etiology, the attribution of provenance and guilt. And more precisely, it is the positing of guilt, aetiotaxy. Like all "so-called religions," capitalism follows a logic that Benjamin has made explicit in a sentence from "Fate and Character." Though this sentence speaks of law and of legal decrees, it is valid (since law for Benjamin is an institution of myth) for all of the components of myth and its corresponding rites: "The law does not sentence to punishment but to guilt" [GS 2.1.175]. Thus it may correspondingly be said of all ritual and cultic practices, and particularly of capitalism as a cult religion: they condemn to guilt by positing guilt as the reason for a lack-for the "worries, torments and restlessness"

3. Cf. in this regard Weber's claim on the same page, where he speaks of "both causal relationships." Also where he indicates [190] that both a "materialist" and a "spiritualist causal interpretation of culture and history" are "equally possible."

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of natural life-and condemn to punishment in order to make good on this debt and simultaneously perpetuate it. Capitalism is a system for the attribution of guilt as well as debt, just as all pagan cult religions that precede it, and just as Christianity that goes along and identifies with it.

The religious function of capitalism, of the positing and maintaining of reasons, of the attribution of guilt and cause-of aetiotaxy-is not contradicted by the fact that the development of capitalism mostly relied upon another religious system for its form. Benjamin notes: "Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the occidental countries (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches as well), until it reached a point where the history of Christianity became essentially that of its parasite-that is to say, of capitalism" [GS 6: 102]. Christianity would not have been able to transform itself into capitalism if capitalism had not been essentially Christian-"essentially religious," and, as "cult religion" and guilt religion, intent on filling up a lack. That which is Christian in capitalism, and that which is capitalist in Christianity, is its parasitic relation to guilt. Thus Benjamin's summation: "The Christianity of the Reformation did not favor the growth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism" [GS 6: 102]. This transformation of Christianity into capitalism, from religious form into economic form, can only have come about in such a way that the form of the one remained preserved in the form of the other. For both are "essentially religious" forms, aetiotaxies, guilt forms positing the cause of a deficit.

Capital Guilt History, Structural

That which is "already recognizable in the present in the religious structure of capitalism" is shown by Benjamin in three features-and a fourth that lies in the unrecognizability of its God.

The first feature of capitalism is that it is a pure cult religion, "perhaps the most extreme that has ever existed," in which everything, though without any special dogmas or theology, "only has meaning with immediate reference to the cult." The capital- religious structure guarantees an immediacy of meaning, of value and its source, an immediate relation to its God, which assigns a rating in the salvation economy to every stance taken and every action undertaken and permits no one to leave the nexus of value and meaning installed by its rituals. The obsessive attribution of an economic index to every detail of conduct-according to the scales of capital and salvation-turns this structure into a cult of meaning that is "extreme" in terms of both its universality and intensity. It is a cult of the "immediate" significance of everyday activities, a cult in which every individual is not only the means but is also, as means, already an end, a purpose, a value, and a meaning. Benjamin describes this immediate relation to the God Capital as "the concretion" of the cult [GS 6: 100]. Means and ends, action and meaning, money and God, are "grown together" in this "concretion" to constitute a closed complex of semantic transaction. Everything that has meaning is immediately identical with what it means; the sign is immediately the signified and its referent. Since the realm of means has been thus deleted and substituted with that of immediate ends, this rite without transcendence permits only the pure presence of what it inscribes. Temporal distances are just as excluded as semiotic differences between the elements of this cult of meaning. The immediate presence, however, that is in concreto actualized with every move in this cult is that of a lack-of a debt and of guilt.

Benjamin emphasizes, as the second feature of the capitalist rite, its "permanent duration." Since every relation between secular act and salvation-historical significance

diacritics / fall-winter 2002 87

has been contracted into the single point of their immediate copresence, the rites of the salvation business offer an image of the undifferentiated duration of the present. "Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans treve et sans merci. There is no 'weekday, no day that would not be a holiday in the terrifying sense of the unfolding of all of its sacral pomp, of the most extreme tension of the worshipper" [GS 6: 100].4

At this point a short excursus recommends itself to consider another text from the same time, a text that was likewise mainly inspired by Max Weber and which likewise radicalizes his connecting of capitalism and Christianity: Ernst Bloch's Thomas Munzer as Theologian of the Revolution. Benjamin had entered into an amicable but critical relationship with Bloch even before the publication of The Spirit of Utopia in 1919, and Bloch's third book, Thomas Minzer, provoked in 1921 some scathing remarks from Benjamin, who read its typescript. Bloch writes in Thomas Minzer, in the chapter entitled "On Calvin and the Ideology of Money": "It is ultimately just the record-keeping that keeps company with God, in order to give flourish and figuration to His majesty-in such a way that even Calvin's original sentiment of God as 'the Lord' of Handel's majestic music quickly let itself be reduced to the paradoxical relaxation of a dead Sunday" [TM 142]. Bloch's formulation here-in combination with his commentary on the "social- religious homogeneity of life," "the elimination of the tension toward the beyond," and "the tension between the state of sin and the state of origin"-makes it likely that Benjamin already knew "Miinzer" (or at least this chapter) when he wrote in "Capitalism as Religion" that under the conditions of the capital religion "there would be no day that would not be a holiday in the terrifying sense [. . .] of the most extreme tension of the worshippers." But it is not only this observation that might be an echo of Bloch's formulations: an even more important one binds the two together, namely, the one at the end of his chapter on Calvin, where Bloch writes that the Reformation "inaugurated in the end not merely the misuse of Christianity, but rather its complete desertion and even elements of a new 'religion': of capitalism as religion and the true church of Satan."5 The identity, however, of the decisive formulation "capitalism as religion" in the texts of Bloch and Benjamin can easily draw attention away from the differences in their overall tendencies. Though Bloch identifies capitalism as a religion (and indeed as a "so-called religion," as Benjamin also calls it), and despite the severity of his formulation, his judgment is nevertheless a moderate one: for the capitalism in question does not represent for Bloch, as it does for Benjamin, the metamorphosis of Christianity into its true form, but rather the "complete desertion" from it. For Bloch, the diagnosis "capitalism as religion" is a blatant metaphor of the Calvinistic apostasy to the satanic cult of the profit rates of life. It therefore represents a regression to the merely pseudo-Christian schema of guilt, from which the Reformation-and that of Munzer above all-was meant to be the liberation. For Benjamin, on the other hand, "capitalism as religion" is

4. Uwe Steiner has plausibly suggested [156-57] that, instead of "sans reve et sans merci" (as the editors of the collected works have read it), the text should read "sans treve et sans merci": without rest and without mercy.

5. In the revised version that has been in print since 1960, the final words read instead: "introduced elements of a new 'religion': that of capitalism as religion and the church of Mammon " [TM 143]. A third point of agreement between Benjamin and Bloch lies in their suggestion that capitalism transforms theology into codes of conduct and dogmas into the laws of the work ethic. Bloch writes: "The content, however, (of divine commandments)-the only thing which understanding can take reference to in this case-is not a statutized church-dogma, but is instead precisely the God-ordained work ethic as the sole purpose of the justification. And nothing that is beyond reason wishes to appear amidst such a skewed Kantianism; only the pre-rational will to cultivate the world seeks to appear to set value, to determine truth or to use the instrument of the mind" [TM 141-42; cf: context].

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the diagnostic formula by which the essence of capitalism as well as of Christianity is defined.6

Bloch's sentence, however, on the "paradoxical relaxation of a dead Sunday," expresses the particular character that time assumes in the capitalist religion, and it does so more forcefully-especially in light of Hegel's "Sunday of life" in which history has come to its end-than Benjamin does when he says that there would be no "weekday" under Capital Christianity, "no day that would not be a holiday." In Bloch's religion of capitalism, time has retired into its Sabbath, the day when God rests from his works and finds them good, and in which the meaning and the goal of human work have become one with the work itself-so that money-making is God. But this Sunday of Capital is- and herein lies the paradox of its relaxation-dead, because in it the motion of production and self-production not only come to rest, but are eternally put to rest in the expectation of ever the same product, the same Sunday as the ever-unchanging final day, in which all time contracts itself and simultaneously strives for its return and for the further intensification of its production. The permanent holiday of capitalism consists in the ritual efforts to celebrate this holiday always once again and at the same time ever more festively. Capitalism's ever-lasting Sunday is the perennial workday of surplus value and surplus labor. The time of capital, thus characterized, extends the end of history into the dead eternity of surplus time. In the time of capital, there is no "now" that might not be simultaneous with any other "now"; there is no "now" that would not be intent upon its return in another, none that would not itself stand under the law of returns and appear as the mere revenant of another "now." This means, however, that the time of capital is the time of the dead "now" as its own second coming as revenue and surplus, as re-now and over-now. It is the automatic time of a homogenous continuum, of which Benjamin says in "Fate and Character" it is "improperly temporal." Every "now" owes itself another "now" and owes itself to another "now." And it itself is meanwhile only a deficient "now," replicating itself in yet another "now" that is equally deficient. This formula of a "now" owing to another "now" characterizes not only capital time and the time of the Capital Christian epoch, but the philosophical conception of time in the epoch from

6. If Benjamin took the formula "capitalism as religion "from Bloch (a possibility that strongly suggests itself here), then the fragment, whose terminus ad quem is given by the editors as "the middle of 1921" [GS 6: 690], can only be dated at the end of 1921 at the earliest. In a letterfrom November 27, 1921, Benjamin writes to Scholem: "Contact with Bloch has been, very carefully, re-established. Machiavellistically naturally. The complete proofs of Miinzer were recently handed over to me, on his first visit, and I have started reading" [Gesammelte Briefe 212-13]. There had also however been very intense conversations between Benjamin and Bloch long before 1921, especially in Switzerland, and thus the supposition would not be inadmissible that at that time Benjamin had already launched this formula, which was then only later taken over by Bloch in his Munzer.

The material connections, however, between Bloch's texts and Benjamin's-including the ambivalent relationship between their authors and the related question of the dating of Benjamin 's sketch-should not be addressed here without further opening the question of whether this has to do with a historical problem in the emphatic sense-or whether it is not, as the present context suggests, a matter of blame and indebtedness, a question of who owes what to whom, whether it be Bloch to Benjamin or Benjamin to Bloch-or maybe that neither owes the otherfor an insight. There are sufficient sound arguments for all three suppositions, and therefore the question cannot be decided. And it is precisely this undecidability and the consequent necessity of suspending the judgment, which isolates the two texts from one another, releasing them from the guilt relationship and turning them in their independence (even if it is merely a possible one) into historical phenomena. The texts, like all others, do not acquire their genuinely historical pregnancy (which is something completely different than the truth content of their diagnoses) out of the history of their origination, but rather from the force (or the weakness) by which they release themselves from this history and come to standfor themselves.

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Aristotle to Hegel and beyond: it describes the negativity of the "now" that is now already past and passed on into another. And just as the time of this epoch is "improperly temporal," its history is improperly historical, frozen in the reproduction of the ever- unchanging schema of debt and debt-increasing compensations, consisting in the "paradoxical relaxation of a dead Sunday."

Capitalism is not only a cult and a permanent cult of immediacy; it is both of these, both cult and permanent, only because it functions by accruing guilt. This is the third and the decisive trait, emphasized by Benjamin in the essentially religious structure of this economic form and life form. He writes: "Capitalism is probably the first case of a cult that produces guilt rather than atonement. In this respect, its religious system exists in the downfall of a monstrous movement. A monstrous consciousness of guilt, unable to find atonement, reaches for the cult not to find atonement, but rather to make the guilt universal-to hammer it into the conscious mind and finally and above all to include God Himself in this guilt, so as to finally interest Him in atonement" [GS 6: 100-01]. With this trait of the religion of capital, that it produces, accumulates, and universalizes guilt, the fusion now emerges with greater clarity, of its economic, juridical-and to this extent moral-and psychological aspects. Benjamin himself points to fusion as an aspect existing within the concept of Schuld itself, at the point when he speaks of the "demonic ambiguity of this concept" [GS 6: 102]. It is the ambiguity, namely, by which financial debts (Schulden) always serve as an index of legal, moral, and affective guilt (Schuld)- and by which every guilt manifests itself in debts, and every debt in guilt. This ambiguity is demonic, like all ambiguity for Benjamin, because it offers the vague sign of something undecided or undifferentiated, with respect to which man has not yet secured his freedom-freedom lying in decision alone-and in which he therefore leaves himself at the mercy of the forces of provenance and succession, the domination of etio-economic descendancy. In the "demonic ambiguity" of Schuld and Verschuldung, the concept of guilt itself attests to the guilt that it should designate, and thus continually begets itself.

Under the conditions of the capital- and guilt religion, there is no liberation. And thus it is all the more decisive for Benjamin's analysis that the extent and the logic of this fusion be determined: the logic that provides for the turbulences around the hollow center of this religion.

"Monstrous consciousness of guilt," Predestination, "the utter guilt of God"

For Benjamin the starting point for the universal dominance of guilt in recent Christianity is the disenchantment of the world; this is indicated by his reference to Weber's treatises (presumably above all "The Work-Ethic of Ascetic Protestantism"). "Demystification" was introduced by Calvinism's methodical exclusion of sacramental magic as a means of salvation, as well as by the silent elimination of the sacrament of penitence in the form of private confession. Calvinism thereby withheld, according to Weber, all

possibility of relief from the sinful conscience: "The means of a periodic 'working off' (Abreagieren) of an affectively charged consciousness of guilt were done away with" [DpE 124]. So Weber writes, and Benjamin, in turn: "A monstrous consciousness of guilt, unable to find atonement, reaches for the cult [.. .] in order to make it universal [...]." The guilt becomes universal because every means of influencing it-whether by the devout, through sacraments, through the church, by God Himself-have been withdrawn. The terrifying point of the doctrine of predestination-which is in fact nothing but a doctrine of fate-lies precisely in the fact that its God died exclusively for the elect "to whom He had resolved in all eternity to contribute His sacrificial death" [DpE 123], but that not one of the elect can reach certainty about his state of grace, and therefore

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must remain perpetually incarcerated in the consciousness of guilt. Weber's curt sentence-"No one could help him" [DpE 122]-characterizes the world of predestination as one of ultimate mercilessness. This guilty consciousness is denied all relief, whether in confession, or in the ostentation of financial freedom from debts, or even in the most zealous efforts at "sanctity by good works" [DpE 133]. Such a consciousness cannot even find liberation in God: for God, no matter how much He may have sacrificed Himself for the guilt of the world, still remains indebted-and therefore guilty-with respect to His own will and His decision. He essentially defines Himself as the one who does nothing but sacrifice Himself to Himself in all eternity. The doctrine of predestination states as its final consequence (one that is seldom stated) that God is not at liberty to reverse or suspend a decision that He once made. The doctrine thus claims that He owes it to Himself to carry out His decision-that He relates to Himself as to a causa sui, and that He is thus made guilty by His original resolve, guilty toward Himself and for Himself as His own determining cause. A God who must inalterablyfollow His own decision is subject to a relation within Himself that is one of cause and result-therefore a relationship of guilt and indebtedness. Predestination is predestination through God, because it is essentially predestination within God. A God who exists purely in His decision must behave with absolute indifference toward everything temporal He created, and He therefore cannot even come under consideration as the redeemer of this creation and must remain guilty, not as much with respect to everything over which He decided, but first and above all regarding His own decision. Under whatever guise one wishes to consider the God of predestination-that is, the God of self- and world foundation in will-He is a God who stands in a relation of guilt toward Himself. Since He is nothing but His relation to Himself, this God is sheer guilt in the sense of aftion, of causa, ratio andfundamentum as well as in the sense of debitum and of culpa. "Capitalism as religion" supposes "God as guilt."

The climax of the guilt consciousness characteristic of Capital Christianity is thus reached in the conviction that God Himself is guilty, that He owes Himself to Himself and is thereby guilty of the guilt of His followers-of those who are indebted to Him. God's guilt, as well as the resulting irremediability and unredeemability of the world and the universal guilt consciousness of His faithful, is no longer just a gloomy theologoumenon, nor is it a merely affective state that determines the entire emotional structure of the society of the capital religion, condemning the history of Christianity and all of its practices to be a history of guilt, of the laying of blame, of retribution and restitution. Moreover, the process by which God becomes guilty-and indebted-is at the same time an economic fact, one, however, that has not been technically conceptualized by Weber (who in any case uses the concept of guilt with conspicuous rarity) but rather by Marx. In the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh section of Capital, entitled "The So-Called Original Accumulation," Marx comments on "the system of public credit, i.e. of state debts": "The public debt becomes one of the most energetic levers of original accumulation. As if by the wave of a magic wand, debt endows unproductive money with generative power and thus transforms it into capital [...]" [K 782]. The public debt turns money into capital, which is to say: into money that realizes itself and multiplies itself, always turning itself into more money-and thus into more money than it actually is. But, in the case of capital, something that is more than it is is first of all the bare, though utterly effective, semblance of capital; and second, it is the thoroughly productive and over-productive capital debt, since, in the measure in which it is more than itself, it is also less than itself. "Hence," according to Marx, "the modern doctrine is perfectly consequent, that a people becomes all the richer, the deeper it goes into debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital [.. .]" [K 782]. Following this

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formula of the metamorphosis from secular economic credit into the sacramental credo and its implicit diagnosis that capitalism becomes structurally religious in the phase of its "original" accumulation, Marx continues by suggesting a further contraction of

economy and religion: "And with the rise of national debts, infidelity against the national debt takes the place of the sin against the Holy Spirit, for which there is no forgiveness." What appears here as a sacramental process of an indebting that endows capital with

productivity appears in the transformation of money into capital as a generative process within God Himself: "Instead of representing the relations of commodities, value now enters, so to speak, into a private relationship with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as added value, just as God the Father from Himself as God the Son, even though both are of the same age and in fact form only a single person. Only from the surplus value of ?10 does an advance of ?100 become capital-and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been produced by the father, and through the son, the father as well, their difference vanishes again and they become one, ?110" [K 169].7 The mechanics of debt-of "advanced" or "credited" money-compose the process by which value transforms itself into surplus value-which is what defines value as value to begin with. This transformation is the process of a god's genesis out of something that is not-a theogeny out of self-incurred debts. And more precisely, it is a theogeny out of credit, a credit that is itself drawn from unpaid labor, exploitation, colonization, theft, and murder, legalized under the laws of the privileged. The general formula of value "money-commodity-more money," that is abbreviated in "the lapidary style" of interest-bearing capital as "money-more money"; "money that is instantly more

money, value that is greater than itself' is the production formula of the "automatic

subject," the formula of the generation of God out of nothing. Thus for Marx the "credo of capital" is not the tradesman's faith in capital. It is instead, as value's "private relationship with itself," capital's faith in capital itself, a credo quia absurdum that can be confessed only in the absence of what is believed in. It is a credo in which capital- God the Father in unity with His son-confesses its own debit: I owe myself myself.

Money, preeminently in the form of capital, is not only a god that makes guilty but also a guilty god. This is something that is underscored in a more or less analytic-but always polemical-fashion in all of the works that Benjamin makes note of in his

fragment. Georges Sorel writes in his Reflexions sur la violence from 1908: "the right of debt-relations rules every advanced capitalism" [207]. Adam Miller in his Twelve

Speeches on Eloquence from 1816: "economic misery [...] from now on-since every deed and every action has become expressed in money-pours itself over posterity in

heavy and always heavier masses of debt" [68]. And Gustav Landauer in his Call to Socialism from 1911 and 1919, referring to an etymological suggestion of Fritz Mauthner: "The only thing ever cast in a mould [der einzige Gegossene], the only idol [der einzige Gotze], the only god [der einzige Gott], which humans ever brought into bodily existence is money [Geld]. Money is artificial and alive; it begets money and money and money; it has all of the powers of the world. [... .] We are beggars and simpletons and fools, because money has become God, because money has become cannibal" [144-45].8 And finally Nietzsche, but not his Zarathustra, to which Benjamin alludes in the fragment with the concept of the Ubermensch, but in the 1887 Genealogy of Morals, in particular its treatise on "'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and Related Matters." Here Nietzsche speaks of a moralization, of a backwards turn and reversal in the concept of guilt, so that it turns "against the 'creditor' [Gliubiger]"-which is to say, against God: "In this process,

7. I have corrected the peculiar misprint (thus also rectifying the credit reduction imposed) in the text of the edition cited, where the capital sum is named as ?101.

8. Uwe Steiner also makes reference to this passage in his essay [see footnote 5].

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N

I I,

one would think simultaneously of the causa prima of man, of the beginning of the human race, of his progenitor [. . .]-of existence itself, which remains left over as valuelessness in itself (as the nihilistic turning away from existence, as yearning toward nothingness .. .) [. . .] until we stand at once before that paradoxical and horrifying result [. . .], Christianity's stroke of genius: God sacrificing Himself for the guilt of humans, God paying Himself off to Himself [... .]-the creditor sacrificing Himself to his debtor out of love (can one believe it?), out of love to his debtor! . . ." [N 2: 832- 33].9 The divine creditor sacrifices himself not only for his debtor, but actually owes him this sacrifice. If this thought is combined with the suspicion that this "creditor" may also be "existence itself," then the conclusion is unavoidable: that Existence itself, and particularly the ultimate Being, the summum ens, is nothing other than maxima culpa, a debitum maximum that cannot be restituted-because there is no further, much less any higher, instance of debt resolution.

Prima causa, prima culpa-this is Nietzsche's diagnosis, and it makes him evaluate Christianity as an "executioner's metaphysics" and a "backdoor into nothingness" [N 2: 977], as rationalization of asceticism and as nihilism. According to Marx, the formula of politico-economic theology reads: God produces Himself out of His own credit (never to be covered); according to Nietzsche, the formula of moral-economic theology reads: God not only owes something to someone, but He also owes Himself to Himself-and this is the only way that He can "be" out of His "non-being."

Even if the concepts of "capital" and "capitalism" are missing in Nietzsche's analysis, there is little doubt-just as little as in Marx's christological credit formula or in the inheritance of debt observed by Adam Muller or Landauer's polemical etymology- that the causal relation described by Weber is insufficient in its determination of the terms "Christianity" and "capitalism." Like the formulas offered by Bloch and Benjamin, Nietzsche suggests an understanding of capitalism as a religion-and moreover as a religion of guilt-and an understanding of religion-more precisely the Christian religion-as capitalism.

Dead End History

Out of the material and the arguments thus prepared by these authors, Benjamin draws the consequence that "God Himself' is being included in this guilt, "in order to finally interest Him in atonement. This atonement thus cannot be expected from within the cult itself, nor in the reformation of this religion, which would need to be able to hold onto something solid within the religion itself, nor in its renunciation" [GS 6: 101]. In this sentence the overall tendency of Benjamin's reflections is indicated by the refusal of three conceivable alternatives.

First, an atonement of the system of guilt that has assumed world-historical proportions in the religion of capital is-despite the promise of redemption that this system never ceases to make-not possible within this religion, since God, the highest instance who alone would be able to offer the atonement, is subject to guilt. Neither is any liberation to be expected from the merely immanent motions within the system of guilt, as long as the constitutive principle of this system exhausts itself in being at fault and owing, and therefore unfree.

9. Beyond Good and Evil is also cataloged (assigned with the number 722) in Benjamin's list of books he had read; Nietzsche's text appears in the vicinity of three of the other texts that are cited in "Capitalism as Religion " [GS 7.1.477]. Also, since The Genealogy of Morals is introduced as "the supplement and clarification" to Beyond Good and Evil, it is plausible to assume that both of these texts were known to Benjamin.

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Atonement is, secondly, not to be expected from a reformation of this religion, because every reformation-which would necessarily amount to a reformation of the Protestant Reformation-and all reformatory efforts as they were undertaken, especially in Benjamin's time, by social-democratic and socialist politics would have to find a

starting point in an element of the capital cult and its economic and psychosocial structures that would be free of guilt-or which might at least have some prospect for the liberation from guilt. But there is no such element. Even the Marxist variant of socialism represents, in Benjamin's estimation (which is closely related to that of Gustav Landauer), a social and economic form resulting from the dynamic progression of debts in capitalism. "Capital-socialism" Landauer titles it in his Call to Socialism, referring to the socialism prognosticated by Marx: "One is stunned by such exemplary nonsense, but it is unquestionably Karl Marx's real opinion: that Capitalism develops socialism out of itself, completely and totally. The socialist mode of production 'blooms' out of capitalism [.. .]." And in order to clarify the theological connotation of this metaphor of 'blooming,' Landauer continues: "Marxism-the absence of all spirit, the paper blossom on the beloved thorn-bush of capitalism" [41-42]. Socialism is supposed to produce itself out of the automatism of capitalism's own motion, and thus the burning thor-bush, the bitter emblem of the theophany of capital, is for Landauer the only place where the socialism projected by Marx can blossom. Benjamin uses the same argument, placing the accent on the structure of indebting that grants the continuity between capitalism and socialism. He interprets the historical process that transforms the one mode of production into the other as a debt progression according to the metaphors of interest and compound interest, and thereby interprets history in the age of capital religion as debt history. The socialism projected by Marx can only become a more advanced state in the debt history of capital, since, as Benjamin writes, "the capitalism that does not turn back will become socialism by way of the simple and compound interest that are the functions of debt" [GS 6: 101-02].

If an end to the history of guilt accumulation is possible neither out of its own internal structure nor by its reform, then the only further possibility of a liberation from this history seems to lie in its renunciation. Such a notion depends on the idea that it would be possible to utter the renunciation from a position external to the guilt structure- or else that the renunciation would be able to introduce a division within the structure. Renunciation as well, however, must fail to accomplish the atonement, because no renunciation could avoid having the cult as its cause and speaking the language of the cult, which is precisely that of accusation and indictment. And therefore even the renunciation would remain guilty before this religion and indebted to it. Renunciation remains an ambiguous relationship (demonically ambiguous, as Benjamin might say), one that still participates in myth while declaring its independence from it. As long as the renunciation of guilt retains the slightest bit of dependence-guilt is dependence par excellence-the renunciation will only intensify the guilt and will fail to allow any liberation from it.

If these three alternatives to the guilt relation only perpetuate this relation, then a liberation is not to be expected from within its system, nor from outside of it. Neither inside nor outside of it would a history be possible that is not guilt history. The formula of this double exclusion-"neither within nor without"-contains a hint, however, as to where this sought-after liberation may nevertheless be possible. If it is possible neither within the guilt relations of the capital religion nor without them, then it is possible in a place-and only here-where these relations have reached an extreme that belongs neither to these relations themselves nor to their outside. The possibility of liberation from guilt can thus only be located at the very extreme of guilt. This extreme would be the outer- and innermost limit upon which guilt is no longer itself and yet is nothing other than itself: where it is-as guilt-freed of itself.

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Ruination of Being

Benjamin's remarks move through a description of the aporias of guilt in order to reach the most extreme aporia, in which the process of guilt accumulation collapses upon itself, collapsing in such a way that the system that had maintained this process is itself included in its ruin. Having dismissed every way out of the bind of history, reformist as well as renunciatory solutions, Benjamin writes: "It lies in the nature of the religious movement called capitalism, to hold out until the very end, until God has finally become utterly guilty-to the point where a condition of the world is achieved that is total despair, something which is precisely hoped for. This is the historically unprecedented, the unheard-of character of capitalism, that religion is not the reform of being but its ruination: the expansion of despair to the religious condition of the world-a state from which salvation is to be expected. God's transcendence has fallen. But he is not dead; he has been included in the destiny of man" [GS 6: 101]. The point at which "God has finally become utterly guilty and utterly indebted" corresponds to the place of exposed credit in Marx's structural analysis of capital, God being in both instances capital: God is the uncovered credit from which capital takes its start-and the uncovered surplus value that it never ceases to produce in every cycle of the circulation of goods, without ever being able to tie this value to any actual value-equivalent. Absolute surplus value, absolute capital, is nothing but credit, and God nothing but debts. This same "complete indebting of God" also corresponds, in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, to God's taking over the debts of His faithful, to the godforsakenness of God in His "eli, eli, lama sabachtani," and to the godlessness of God in the world history of His credit. The process by which God is "made utterly indebted" is not restricted to a process internal to Him as a transcendent being or a transcendental idea: it makes transcendence itself guilty and brings about the ruin of all transcendentalia in the process of God's despair, and it is at the same time the "expansion," the universalization of this despair until it becomes "the state of the world." This state determines every detail of every "human destiny," including every force and institution in which humans take part, determining them all as guilt, as

despair and as loneliness. The system of capitalist religion is pantheistic to the exact point that it is schizo-theistic: the world and every human in it is God in His despair, i. e. in His split from Himself. It is for this reason that Benjamin can speak, in a pathos- laden astrological metaphor, of the "passage of the planet of man through the house of

despair in the absolute loneliness of his course" [GS 6: 101], referring thereby to Nietzsche's Ubermensch and his astrological images. This loneliness and despair may well be understood with reference to the relevant descriptions in Weber of the emotional devastation imposed by Calvinism, to the self-torments of conscience under ascetic ideals as described by Nietzsche, and to Kierkegaard's characterization of despair as a mental illness unto death.10 Both solitude and despair, however, are the structural consequences from the universalized system of debt and therefore of guilt in relation to the causa prima-that is, guilt in itself-and emerge both from a history whose "ultimate

category" is guilt, and out of a political-economic theology that culminates in "the utter guilt of God." If God himself becomes guilty-along with everything in economy and society, history, language, and morality that is structured according to this highest instance-then indeed His "transcendence" has "fallen," and deeper than Adam, whose fall was still ordained and caught by a God. God Himself has fallen from Himself in an

10. In the treatise by the same title, Kierkegaard defines "sickness unto death" as despair Benjamin speaks of "worries" in his sketch as "the mental illness belonging to the epoch of capitalism" [GS 6: 102]. Though Kierkegaard remains unnamed in Benjamin's fragment, he leaves traces throughout: in the references to despair, fear, and loneliness, no less than in the passages about guilt and fate, as well as in the "demonic ambiguity."

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auto-apostasy without compare, driving Him to division and despair, severing Him from His own community, isolating Him even from Himself. Despair would not be able to become "the state of the world" at the end of history, if this despair were not also the

despair of God in everything that defines itself through Him. The isolation within this

"everything" must also be God's isolation, the isolation of a God who no longer has anything in common with Himself and who has lost even the minimal company with Himself. That He is not dead, this God of fallen and split transcendence, does not save Him, since He "has been included in the destiny of man"-and thereby collapsed into a network of guilt that is worse than death.

What, then, does it mean for God to "finally become utterly guilty"-die endliche vollige Verschuldung Gottes? It cannot mean that He is the prime mover and cause of a deficient creation. In this case, He would be capable of other more ideal creations and would thus become guilty of not corresponding with His own ideal. The accusation against a God who does not live up to His abilities is an accusation made against a God who is guilty only in part-and in part innocent or at least capable of innocence. This charge thus does not address an "utterly" guilty God. "For God to become utterly guilty" can only mean that He is guilt in and of Himself, that He is guilt in itself as a guilt that has not yet been and never can be resolved; that He is guilty, responsible and liable for Himself as the one who is not only incomplete, unsuccessful, or mistaken-but who is utterly lacking. If being guilty means being the cause of a nonbeing, then "the becoming utterly guilty of God" means that He is the cause of His own nonbeing. He can be this cause not by withholding being from Himself merely arbitrarily or from time to time, but rather only if he cannot but withhold it, not having it at His disposal and thus not being his being. God's guilt must lie, if it is to determine Him in His entirety, in His being His own nonbeing-and thus in not being. Only out of this highly paradoxical reason, a reason that annihilates itself, is Benjamin able to reach the most fully expounded and the strictest conclusion of his sketch: that "the historical unprecedentedness of capitalism" lies in its being a "religion that is no longer the reform of being but its ruination." Religious capitalism is the structure of thought, experience and action that demonstrates that being, set up as a capital value, is infinitely more-and therefore infinitely less-than it is; that being is something toto coelo other than itself; that it is a ruined being, a being split off from itself and splitting, ruining itself, and that it is the event of the devastation of being, its annihilation.

This devastation of being in capitalism, in Capital Christianity and in all of the structures, institutions, discourses, and nondiscursive experiences affected by it, is, as Benjamin emphasizes, "historically unprecedented and unheard of" (das historisch Unerhorte). It is not only a singular event without precedent, but it is a literally unheard of and unheard event, one that resists hearing and every other distinct sensory experience and every concept. Only by being "historically unheard of' can capitalism at its zenith turn into a historical, a singular event, and be called historical in the emphatic sense of that which escapes sense and the senses, perceived by no one, inaccessible and unheard even to itself-an occurrence in which experience confronts something inexperienceable. The ruination of being brought about by the Capital Christian cult of guilt, the ruination of the value of all values, the self-annihilation of the summum ens-reaches the extreme point in the mythical nexus of guilt, which can only be called "improperly historical," and ruptures its network: the devastation of being is the opening of history.

Unheard of as the ontological ruin is, since no being can be attributed to it, it can offer itself neither as an empirical nor as an ideal object of knowledge. The splitting in God, the ruination of being, is "inaddressable" and "a secret," because an entity that has been exploded into discontinuous pieces can have no access to itself and bars all external access. Therefore Benjamin, after indicating the three traits of "the religious structure

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of capitalism" that are recognizable in the present, needs to add the fourth trait of capitalism, the unrecognizability of its God. "Its fourth trait is that [capitalism's] God must be kept secret. Only in the zenith of His guilt may He first be addressed. The cult is celebrated before an unripe divinity, every representation and thought of it damages the secret of its fruition" [GS 6: 101]. Until its maturity is achieved-which may mean the state of its separation from "natural" connections and above all from "itself'-the divinity of the cult of guilt must be kept secret in order to preserve the "mystery" of the ripening process. This "secret" can be none other than the secret of His guilt, of His deficitary being and His nonbeing. A structural secret, which must carry its own forgetting or "repression" along with it, it belongs for Benjamin not only to the realm of ontological, theological, and political-economic thinking, but also to the most advanced "psychological" theory that he was aware of: to that of psychoanalysis.II Like Marx, Nietzsche, presumably Kierkegaard, and Weber, Freud too is counted among those who sanction the religion of guilt in their theories-instead of recognizing in its course the elements of its demise. The "Freudian theory" therefore falls under Benjamin's verdict that it is "completely capitalistically conceived" and belongs "to the ruling priesthood of the cult." Benjamin declares: "The repressed, the sinful imagination, is, by a most profound analogy that remains to be illuminated, capital itself, and the hell of the unconscious draws interest on it" [GS 6: 101]. If this comment is combined with the mythological note on "Pluto," the god of the underworld-of hell, the unconscious- who is also "the god of wealth," then it suggests that God is unconscious. He is a sinful imagination and even the most sinful one, the first and most deeply repressed idea consisting in nothing but guilt and failure, in nothing but absence and nothing but nothingness-and would therefore offer no possible object for consciousness. Benjamin's assessment could indeed find support in the Freudian theorem of originary repression, as well as in the ethno-psychological myth of the murder of the primal father, a murder which, repressed, leads to an unconscious sense of guilt that motivates subsequent cultural accomplishments. But just as in the case of Marx and of Nietzsche, Benjamin finds in Freudian psychoanalysis the structure of the capital divinity indicated-and simultaneously disavowed. In the Freudian diagnosis-at least as Benjamin would have it-the concept of guilt and the process of its accumulation are consolidated as the indissoluble fundament of all social and religious relations. Such a conception does not, however, allow for the possibility that this guilt may become eliminable as soon as it is made absolute in God, in capital and its religion.

Ruination of Being, Reversal

Benjamin maintains that it corresponds to the essence of capitalism as religion to "hold out to the very end, until God has finally become utterly guilty, to the point where a condition of the world's total despair is achieved, something which is still being hoped

11. Gershom Scholem notes, very dryly, in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship: "Benjamin sat (1917/1918) in a seminar on Freud taught by Hdberlin. At that time Freud's theory of drives was Benjamin's topic for an extensively elaborated research-presentation. The judgment passed in Benjamin's presentation was a dismissive one" [75]. The presentation that Scholem refers to has been lost, and only from it would it be possible to say how Benjamin actually "passed judgment" on Freud's theory of drives. Scholem's apodictic claim of the "dismissive judgment" does indeed correspond with the sharp tone of Benjamin's characterizations elsewhere, but Scholem 's assessment would be unfair to the acknowledged historical importance of psychoanalysis for Benjamin. He recognized in the Freudian "unconscious " (as in Nietzsche's Ubermensch) one of the signatures of the era of the zenith of guilt.

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for" [GS 6: 101]. What is hoped for, therefore, is the "achieved condition of despair"- achieved here and now, in Benjamin's time, in the historical instant of his analysis of the

capital-Christian cult of guilt-in a moment that is simultaneously the one in which "God has become utterly guilty" at "the end" of the cult. But if this end were thus

already reached, then the "hope" that Benjamin speaks of would have no object and would be unable to "still" direct itself-"precisely" now-toward this end. Since this

hope, however, directs itself in the end toward "despair," this despair must "still" continue to displace the end from its end, splitting the "now" of the historical moment, rupturing the state of the world and the God who has merged with it. This division, the despair of God in His "final utter guilt," leads therefore in the end to the "turn-around" or reversal

(Umkehr) named three times in Benjamin's sketch. It is a reversal that is not metanoia or penitence, but rather a turning away from guilt that emerges out of guilt's own immanent motion. Umkehr is guilt's "own" turning against itself. Benjamin does not comment further on this motion of despair's reversal, but from the logic developed already (of the "complete guilt of God" and of the "zenith of His guilt" and the "ruination of being"), the formal shape of this motion can be sketched:

God is guilt in itself; He is guilty of Himself. Which is to say: He owes Himself Himself, He is still lacking, is not yet God, and can only be God so long as He actually is not God. He is, therefore, guiltily, His own "not" and nonbeing. As this "nonbeing" however, He is also the "nonguilt."

If God is nothing but guilt, then He is the cause of a "nothing" (of a lack, a defect, a deficiency, a mistake), but, as such a cause, which is itself a "nothing" (a lack, a

mistake), He is therefore the "null cause of a void," "the vain and inane reason of a

'nothing"' (nichtiger Grund eines Nichts)-and thus neither cause nor guilt.'2 To be the cause of a "nothing" and nothing but this cause, God must be just as much

the cause as no cause at all. He must be guilty without guilt, being without being, nothing without nothing-and even a nothing without the "without" of a nothing. He is life-

12. Heidegger's definition from Being and Time [?? 58, 62], which states that guilt is "the null cause of a void" (nichtiger Grund eines Nichts), is not cited here just for the sake of its accuracy. This definition also attests to a proximity to the issue that concerns Benjamin in the text in question. Heidegger's definition, punctual though it may be, cannot be belittled in light of its material differences with these unfinished thoughts of Benjamin. And Heidegger's definition cannot be ignored here, considering the importance of the problem of guilt for both authors. In the present analysis, however, Heidegger's formula is not used within the limits of its own context, and this for reasons pertaining to the material itself. Among these reasons (which cannot be presented here in anything approaching their full extent), one shall be named without further argumentation: existential guiltiness (Schuldigsein) as the constitution of being (Dasein) cannot be distinguished by a "nothing " in a way that would maintain terminological precision and at the same time be differentiable from other modes of privation, lack, or absence (assuming that these modes were those of a world condition or of a god). The one who is despairing orfearful may be his own "not," but this does not in any way exclude the possibility that he also experiences his being as privation, lack, or rapture. It would need to be tested, whether the implicit positivization of the "nothing" (which is to be achieved in the distinction between existential nothingness and the nothingness of simple absence) hinders Heidegger in Being and Time from even considering the thought of an ex-cusation (Ent-schuldung). This thought, a completely sober thought, is led neither by 'faith" nor by any kind of confessional sentiment. Benjamin would presumably not have hesitated for a second to count Heidegger-like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud-among the "ruling priesthood of the cult" of guilt. The specific conclusions drawn by way of Benjamin in the present essay would at any rate have been quite distant to the Heidegger of Being and Time. The situation is different, however, in Heidegger's reflections bearing the title "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?," a text that speaks of the temporal structure of revenge and the possibility of redemption [cf. Vortrage und Aufsitze 102-03].

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but no natural one, and He is God-but before and beyond every causa prima and causa sui.

God, thought of in the extreme of His despair at "the zenith" of the cult of capital, is a God who owes Himself to Himself as the one who is at fault for Himself. He is thereby His own "nothing"-and in this nothing also His own not-guilt: if He is guilty of Himself, then as His own cause; and if this guilt is His own "nothing," then as the ongoing absence of this cause, as the uncause and as the anetiological fact of freedom- a freedom this side of guilt and one that first opens up the possibility to be guilty and allows for a freedom in which guilt is no longer subject to restitution but to forgiveness.

And likewise capital: it is advance, surplus value beyond the value by which it would be able to represent invested labor and raw materials; it is inequivalence and credit-debt. It is mere debit, so that the creditor becomes the total debtor in his most naked poverty, unable to cover himself with a banknote or bill-and which is thus neither credit nor debit.

The logic of this reversal-of "the capitalism that turns around" [GS 6: 101], also evoked in the metaphor of the "zenith" of the accumulation of guilt-clearly cannot follow any prescriptive morality that would seek to hold the "turn around" to some kind of ideal of behavior. Such a morality is of the kind that lies at the base of Christianity in its capitalist mode, and, as such, as an ethics of absolute owing in the form of obligations to be fulfilled, it would be a system of absolute guilt-but never its absolute restitution. The reversal must instead emerge from guilt itself, and it can do so only at the pinnacle where it separates from itself and turns against itself. At this point, world history strikes against a "nothing" upon which guilt, this history's "ultimate category," gives out- along with this history itself. Guilt history is thus a motion in nihilo-into the nothingness of guilt and its divinity-just as it emerges ex nihilo, out of the nothingness of God and the "nothing" of guilt.

The Logic of the Recoil

Already as early as 1918, Benjamin must have been familiar with Hermann Cohen's Logic of Pure Knowledge. Cohen's text had brought the ex nihilo to new esteem by using an operational 'nothing' as the starting point in what he called "the logic of origin": "On the detour of the 'nothing,' judgment represents the origin of the 'something"' [LrE 84]. In the logic of the indefinite (of the aoriston), in the ontology of the infinite (of the dpeiron and the anhypotheton [LrE 86-88]), and in the mathematics of the infinitesimal [LrE 89-90], it is the in- that serves (like the alpha privativum and the me in Greek) as the index for a "nothing" in which the "something" of being can first find its determination. In this context, Cohen rehabilitates the "infinite judgment" in order to make it pure logic's original means of knowledge. Without reference to empirical data, this judgment defines a "something" by the negation (or even annihilation) of something that (it) is not. This negation does not refer to some particular "something" that precedes it, but rather to a "nothing"-it is an original negation that remains independent from any position. In the infinite judgment, A = non-B always means above all: A = non-nihil. The infinite judgment consists in the annihilation of a "nothing," in the repulsion of a privation. Only by this immemorial annihilation of a "nothing" can the "something" of being be achieved. Thus the infinite judgment (which places a "not" against nothingness) contains the preontological origin of being. "So it is," writes Cohen, "that the so-called (but by no means thus understood) 'nothing' becomes the operative means by which each and every 'something' in question is brought into its origin, and thereby for the first time actually brought into production and determination" [LrE 89].

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If God has, as Benjamin says, "finally become utterly guilty" by a guilt that brings about the emptying and the nothingness of God, then it also brings about, in its extreme, the annihilation of His guilt and His nothingness: It operates and effectuates, according to the logic of Cohen's infinite judgment, the annihilation of an infinite privation and opens the origin ex nihilo of a God who is other than the God of guilt; it inaugurates a history that is something other than guilt history. The "ruination of being" at the end of the cult of capital can be understood as the ruination of a privative being in guilt. It is a destructio destructionis, the infinite judgment in its theo-economic form, by which a "nothing" annihilates itself in order to open the possibility of a "something" that is as yet without positive determination. Just as in the Trauerspielbuch, where he transforms Cohen's purely logical category of origin into a historical one, Benjamin, already in the early sketch on "Capitalism as Religion," turns Cohen's operational "nothing" of logical knowledge into a historical "nothing" in which capitalism and Christianity turn back into their historical origin. Their retrograde motion happens no longer as a logical self- annihilation, but rather as an economic self-annihilation of the guilt system-as its historical reduction to its origin in the differential of the "not-guilt" and the "not-nothing." Benjamin's studies on Kant as well as his work on the art theory of the early Romantics made him familiar with speculations on the creatio ex nihilo, with theories of annihilation and their connections to the mathematics of the infinitesimal and differential calculus. (Benjamin's friend Gerhard Scholem was at that time pursuing a specialization in calculus as a part of his study of mathematics.) Meanwhile, Benjamin was also learning the doctrine of the self-emptying of God in the Zimzum; he also learned, a short time later, through the presentation on Maimonides in Salomon Maimon's Life History, about the theory of the negative attributes of God and His existence without existence. In just this sense Benjamin argues, in his theorem of the "Theological-Political Fragment" (from about the same time as "Capitalism as Religion") that the contradictory tendencies of profane and messianic history make up a "world politics," "whose method must be called nihilism" [GS 2: 204]. This methodical nihilism is the political complement of the operational, methodical "nothing" of Cohen's theory of judgment. The turn-around projected by "Capitalism as Religion" is a repetition of the origin.13

Time as a Storm of Forgiveness

The "utter guilt" of capital's divinity is thus the ultimate moment of a jump back to its origin where it becomes the "not" of a "nothing," the "not" of guilt. At the origin, the law of retribution does not rule, but that of guilt's annihilation. Out of the Christianity of capital, in its self-devastation, emerges the Messianism of forgiveness. If, however, the annihilation of guilt is the infinite judgment that the capital cult carries out upon itself- and if this judgment has always belonged to the structure of guilt-then the forgiveness practiced here must have been always operative, even within the system of guilt and retribution itself. This forgiveness must extend through all of guilt history, thus transforming it into a double history, a history of guilt and guilt's deletion. Neither of these can be reduced to the other, but they must nevertheless both relate to each other. The decisive relation between them can once again only lie in a "nothing": if the guilt history is precisely a history of annihilation-as "the devastation of being"-then it is at the same time the history of the annihilation of history. This immanent recoil

13. A more extensive treatment (also with different emphases) of this complex of the infinite, the infinitesimal and the intensive between Kant, Cohen, and Benjamin can be found in my study "Intensive Sprachen."

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accomplishes itself and becomes history in a sense that is contrary to that of "guilt history": It comes about not as reform or reformation, but as the true revolution eliminating at every moment the traces of the guilt system. The nothing of this counterhistory is time itself as the time to come.

Under the domination of the category of guilt there can be no experience of time, because in it all times are synchronized according to the schema of ever-identical causation of ever-identical guilt. Guilt knows no time and no history. Benjamin clarifies this in a fragment that depicts the institution of law in its relation to time. Out of their interest in retribution, the forces of law demand that even misdeeds of the distant past should be judged and prosecuted, "reaching into the succession of distant generations. Retribution is basically indifferent to time" [GS 6: 97]. To the institutions of law, which insist on retribution, time is only an impediment, a burdensome delay in the execution of their intentions. For Benjamin this delay in carrying out the punishment has the dignity of an independent ethical phenomenon. For him the time of delay between misdeed and retribution-and especially if this retribution is expected of the Last Judgment-is not an "empty tarrying." It does not belong to the world of law, ruled by retribution indifferent to time, but rather to the moral world of "forgiveness." Time, to the extent that it intervenes as delay within the order of retribution, is forgiveness. It is not a function of law, but rather a figure of justice. When Benjamin writes that the moral world of forgiveness finds "its most powerful figuration in time" [GS 6: 98], he thereby says nothing less than that time itself is moral, that it is justice itself, that it is the forgiveness of guilt and in this forgiveness the annihilation of a history that takes guilt as its "ultimate category." Cohen had written, in his Ethics of the Pure Will: "The basic concept forming the proper kernel of fate may be recognized in the concept of guilt. The Ate extends itself across a generation . . ." [ErW 363]. In his sketch, Benjamin leaves the Ate to a vain struggle against time, since for him, time is the forgiveness of guilt: "The time in which the Ate pursues the criminal is [. . .] the thunderously loud oncoming storm of forgiveness before the ever-approaching court-against which it can do nothing" [GS 6: 98]. The time of deferral-and more precisely, time as deferral-is not only the irreducible distance between guilt and retribution. It is also the distance, likewise irreducible, between the judgment and its implementation, between the moral predication and its actual completion, between the constative utterance of a judgment and its execution.

The cessation or suspension in judgment (and indeed of divine Judgment most of all) is the theme of a 1919 essay by Gerhard Scholem, the friend of Benjamin's youth. The essay was entitled "On Jonah and the Concept of Justice," whose earlier version, called "Notes on Justice," Scholem had already shared with Benjamin in October of 1918.14 The considerations of this text made a powerful impression on Benjamin; in it Scholem wrote: "For justice in its deepest sense means this and nothing else: that, though it is indeed permissible to judge, the execution of a judgment remains as something entirely different. The unambiguous relation of judgment to its executive function (as the actual legal order) is suspended in the delay of execution. This is what God does with Nineveh" [T 526; also 336]. Because the delay in the execution of the sentence also affects God's Judgment, Scholem is able to draw the following consequences: "Justice is the idea of the historical annihilation of the divine judgment [ . .]. Justice is the indifference of the Final Judgment: This means that justice unfolds from within itself the sphere in which the coming of the Last Judgment is infinitely postponed" [T 527; also 336]. This idea of justice-as "the carrying out of a not carrying out" [T 341] of God's Judgment-lies at the bottom of Benjamin's characterization of historical and ethical time. Time is nothing but the delay of the Judgment Day whose coming would

14. Cf. Gershom Scholem, Diaries, 1917-23 [T 401].

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annihilate the Nineveh of the Creation. This delay saves the Creation-only herein lies its justice-by annihilating annihilation in a way that exactly follows the "logic of origin" in the infinite judgment as Cohen outlined it: as the annihilating repulsion of a "nothing."

Time is the span-virtually infinite-between the sentence, condemning to punishment, and its execution, turning the sentence into deed. Time, and thereby the medium of everything that lives, is thus not the act (which was required even for the constitution of time as Kant conceived it through the auto-affection of the spirit), just as little as it is a performative act by which consciousness operates (whether it does so immediately or with some hesitation). Instead, time is the noncarrying out, the aperformative, afformative15 cessation in the execution-and therein also the annihilation of the judgment itself in its illocutionary demand. Time as delay is the suspension of the sentence. It is not an act (whether it be of human or divine will), and what happens within it is not bound by the principle of action to pass through a chain of effectuations in order achieve a preset purpose. This is because every legal order, whether implicitly or explicitly, presupposes precisely this principle: that everything that happens can be traced back to intentions that would lend the occurrence the status of an action. And, since law to this extent propounds the schema of causality and the causality of the will, its order defines itself (in principle as well as in its particular forms) as the instance that is the most deeply struck by time as the suspension of action, by the delay of execution and the epoche in performance. Precisely this fundamental structure of law and its logic of retribution is what is meant to be unhinged-the hinges being those of the concept of action-in Scholem's and Benjamin's reflections on the justice of time.16 For Benjamin and Scholem, time is the deactivation of the carrying out of sentence and therefore the suspension of the strict connection between sentence and execution-and therefore the disenabling of the sentence itself, and finally, the disassembly of the entire nexus of action defining law-making and judicial power. Time, once conceived in its strict ethical significance, is the coming about of justice, which, extending through every legal order, would disenable all of them. The order of execution, whether linguistic or actual, has always founded the legal order by the causality of violence. This is the order that is deactivated by time's irreducible delay, which is valid for all acts.

As nonexecution and nonaction-this is how Benjamin elsewhere characterizes the revolutionary strike [GS 2:1:184]-and as nonactivity, time is the "nothing" that separates the sentence from its performance and erases both. Time is the a-thetic happening, to which both are exposed and in which both are suspended. The "now" of this time of nonexecution is the an-etiological and an-archic suspension of every time sequence, linear as well as circular. It is the breaking off of succession between cause and effect. It is the ongoing crisis of the exchange of equivalent goods. It is the deletion not only of the sentence but also of the guilt. This is because it is not only the not

15. The afformative, in the sense developed in the essay "Afformative, Strike," is a preperformative event that is not the act of a linguistic subject within the horizon of a convention or consensus concerning speech acts, but is rather a literal parapraxis in the strict sense that it offers the very possibility of such a horizon, while at once breaking this horizon and shifting it. The afformative event is, in both senses of the word, the ex-position of the horizon of the "act" as it has been classically-and thoroughly ontologically-conceived. The afformative is the act's unconditional prerequisite and at the same time the deactivation of the act, insofar as an "act" is considered to be a result of the positing of a constituting, egological subject, individual or collective.

16. This suspension is misrecognized ifjustice is characterized as an "absolute performative" or as a "pure performative act," which is what occurs in one of the most significant of recent Benjamin studies, Jacques Derrida's "Force of Law" [78-79]. Dealing with the same complex of problems, but independentfrom Derrida's reading, see also my study "Afformative, Strike," and, specifically referring to Derrida, "Lingua amissa."

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carrying out of the sentence: as the breaking off of every consequence, it is also the deletion of the guilt by which the misdeed pursues its doer. Time is the "storm of forgiveness," and "this storm is not only the voice that drowns out the criminal's scream of terror, it is also the hand that expunges the traces of his misdeed-though the earth be laid to waste thereby" [GS 6: 98]. This storm of time cannot restrain guilt, the Ate, in its persecution of the wrongdoer, but, blowing from the future, it can erase the traces of the deed and obscure the course of his flight. This time does not stretch itself from a point of origin in the past, over a succession of points on a line, through the present and into the future: It is not the time of genealogical descendency, not that of guilt and resulting punishment and not the time of progress, of striving toward an ideal in the future. It is the other way around, the time that comes from the "ever-approaching" future and moves into its past-and only thus can it be "the thunderously loud oncoming storm of forgiveness before the ever-approaching court" [GS 6: 98].

Ethical time does not flow in futurum, but rather comes ex futuro. This reversed time, this countertime, moving against the linear time of development and against guilt time's indifference to time, is able to restrain the cause-effect sequence-breaking its nexus of guilt and punishment and even expunging the traces of the misdeed-only because it is not a thetic, positing, or giving time. It is rather aforgiving, an annulling, annihilating, coming time. As future it is not already taken; it is uncertain and undeterminable by programs and prognoses; it is a "nothing" for knowledge as for the intentions and actions that devolve from it. As a "nothing" that holds back annihilation- a counter-"nothing" and re-"nothing," over-"nothing" and alter-"nothing"-this time from the future would be the infinite judgment of the origin of temporal movement itself-while every execution of judgment and even every judgment itself is suspended by it. The time to come is the time of origin-not because time must emerge from it before it can pass, but because its coming out of the future opposes the time that moves into the future and gives pause to its movement of annihilation. The time of delay is historical time. It is not logical and mechanical time, but instead the ethical time of history. Its method may, as Benjamin demands in his "Theological-Political Fragment," be called nihilism, but its result is the counternihilism of the always renewed beginning.

"The Meaning of Time in the Economy of the Moral World": this is the title of Benjamin's sketch, and the "meaning" can thus be found in time's suspension of the principle of guilt-economy (that of the quid pro quo and the exchange of equivalents) in such a way that only the "quid" is saved. The dike of Anaximander founded the order of a time that requited genesis with demise, permanently accruing guilt and punishment in self-persecution and self-execution, in the incessant pursuit of the business of "the devastation of being." Justice, however, as Benjamin and Scholem tried to conceive it, is the justice not of a time that comes into being and then passes away, but rather one that restrains and gives pause to everything that it comes into contact with. It springs free of the mere course of time and, just as the river is separate from its flowing, thus it isolates the individual phenomena by endowing each of them with an impulse against itself: thus justice is the "eddy" in the flow of time. This is also how Benjamin characterizes the origin (the category of the work's title) in the "Epistemo-Critical Preface" to his Origin of the German Trauerspiel. This frequently cited passage cannot be understood without taking into account its relation to Cohen's concept of origin: "Origin, though certainly an entirely historical category, has nothing to do with something's genesis. In origin what is meant is not the becoming of that which is originated, but rather and moreover: it means that which emerges out of something's becoming and passing away. The origin stands in the stream of becoming as the eddy, and it tugs the material of genesis into itself with its rhythmic pulsation" [GS 1: 226]. Historical time is nothing but the delay, impediment, and ultimately the prevention of

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consequences, successions, and descendancies in the moral world; it is the liberation of ethical singularity as well as the epoche of economy and all of its branches-within natural science, natural law, and natural economy. If the order of the "moral world" is imagined as an order of acts and methodical operations, then historical time, as Benjamin represents it, is not an operational "nothing" as conceived by Cohen, but rather the "nothing" of nonoperationality. It is the omission and the epoche' within every execution, and only thus does it interrupt the guilt economy without continuing it.

Time excuses and is nothing but the very motion ex causa. The principle of reason, of causa and aition, the etiological principle par excellence-ceases in the "nothing" of this pardon. Anyone who seeks to think history has to think this pause and this ex- position of temporal succession in the countertime to come-and must therefore think history without ground and reason, sine culpa et causa.

Translated by Kirk Wetters

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