Between Creation and Last Judgement, the Creaturely and the Holy: Benjamin and Secularization

Abstract

This article analyses how Benjamin takes Kraus's reference to the creaturely (Kreatur) as a symptom of an ahistorical attitude which projects the state of genesis, i.e. the world of God's creatures, into history. It reads the essay on Karl Kraus as a main site for Benjamin's dialectical approach to secularization, which is characterized by the distance both from genesis and redemption. The awareness of the fundamental difference which separates human concepts from biblical ideas or words which may be observed in many of Benjamin's texts (such as the book on the Baroque Trauerspiel and the essays on language, on Goethe's Elective Affinities, and on Kafka) forms a kind of leitmotif of his work. It is only from this radical separation that he is able to deal with the echo realm of the sacred in modernity.