@holdengraber @Samantharhill #OnThisDay in 1940, Walter Benjamin took his life while fleeing fascism. He left us one of our epoch's most singular, radical claims: that historical transformation and ultimate meaning secure fulfillment where revolutionary politics and messianic hope coincide as simultaneity.
![3/ Adorno rightly defined Benjamin as a thinker ‘standing apart from all tendencies’. Scholem held him as an almost canonical source, noting to Arendt, “just how far [his work] distances itself from every traditional conception of philosophy.” Why was he utterly ‘unclassifiable’?
“In the idea of the messianic kingdom one finds the greatest image of history, on which infinitely profound relationships between religion and ethics are built. Walter said once: The messianic kingdom is always there. This insight contains the greatest truth – but only in a sphere which, to my knowledge, no one since the prophets has attained to.” - G. Scholem, Über Metaphysik, Logik und einige nicht dazu gehörende Gehiete phänomenologischer Besinnung. Mir gewidmet. 5, Oktober 1917–30. Dezember 1917, unpublished (61 pp.), p. 27](/media/1971663930570559876-G1zB5BBagAAO1Fa.jpg)
Image description
Original X alt text
3/ Adorno rightly defined Benjamin as a thinker ‘standing apart from all tendencies’. Scholem held him as an almost canonical source, noting to Arendt, “just how far [his work] distances itself from every traditional conception of philosophy.” Why was he utterly ‘unclassifiable’? “In the idea of the messianic kingdom one finds the greatest image of history, on which infinitely profound relationships between religion and ethics are built. Walter said once: The messianic kingdom is always there. This insight contains the greatest truth – but only in a sphere which, to my knowledge, no one since the prophets has attained to.” - G. Scholem, Über Metaphysik, Logik und einige nicht dazu gehörende Gehiete phänomenologischer Besinnung. Mir gewidmet. 5, Oktober 1917–30. Dezember 1917, unpublished (61 pp.), p. 27
@trippfuller 2/ Scholem, too, was no beer pong lightweight. The first professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he founded the modern academic study of Kabbalah. Benjamin's lifelong friend and collaborator, his "The Messianic Idea in Judaism" also shapes The Shift.
Image description
Original X alt text
Shortened copy of tweet here: The Angel of History flew with its own wings. Shortly before his doomed flight, Benjamin entrusted the Klee print - his most treasured possession, he claimed - to Georges Bataille. Then, it found its way to Theodor Adorno and, later, to Benjamin's dear friend, Gershom Scholem. "For the rebirth of messianic thinking out of the catastrophe of Christian humanism in WWI, we are indebted to #martinbuber, #ernstbloch; #franzrosenweig, #walterbenjamin; #theodoradorno, #gershomscholem; #margaretesusman, and after WWII... #karllowith; #jacobtaubes." 1/ "Out of the ruins of historical rationality they rescued hope as a theological category. Without their messianic thinking, eschatology today is literally unthinkable." - The Rebirth of Messianic Thinking in Judaism, 'The Coming of God', Christian Eschatology. #juergenmoltmann 2/2 Call it the Planetary Christ laying the smack down but…