Geschichte zwischen Mythos und Messianischem: Walter Benjamins Jetztzeit und die Zeit der Toten als humane Zeit

In Walter Benjamin's oeuvre history is grasped in a triangular relation to myth and messianism. The vulnerability of the dead is the key idea, which opens up a passage between myth and messianism and allows to think history in its humane dimension. Starting from Benjamin's early essay Critique of Violence (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) and considering the enormous influence of the latter on current thought in Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Sigrid Weigel, Benjamin's concept of history is being unfold in this book. The potential of a "weak messianism" (schwacher Messianismus), which points to the nucleus of Benjamin's thought, lies in the fact that it allows for the recognition of the dead as subject of history as well as it provides a critique of sovereign power, images and society.