The infinite unleashed: Benjamin revisited in the context of the mechanical philosophy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s politico-theological conception of time (the messianic time) against the background of the mechanical philosophy which the Copernican turn brought about. My argument is that the messianic time which intervenes in the mechanical, ‘homogenous, empty time’ shares the formal logic of the divine which intervenes in the Newtonian mathematical space–time via the differential as the non-all (not universal). Newton formulated the mathematical space as ontologically closed by ‘the dominion of One’. But, as George Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s differential shows, the differential comes to reveal the non-all in it. The divine in fact cannot be ontologically closed, leaving the universe divided into the merely mechanical (secular science) and the infinite (the divine as the non-all which does not fit the mechanical). Quentin Meillassoux formulates the mathematical space–time as simultaneously All and non-all too, but with no theological project for interpretation. By contrast, Benjamin’s use of the term the differential shows that he conceives the non-all left from the mechanical as a differential point within the mathematical space–time which enables manifold translations of the divine as the All beyond the mechanical space–time.