The politics of Benjamin’s laughter at melancholy

Abstract

Following Agamben’s distinction between Adorno’s melancholy science and Benjamin’s Pauline Messianism, the present study aims to shed light on Benjamin’s project through scrutinizing his recourse to Brecht which was regarded by Adorno as ‘crude thinking’. Benjamin’s encounter with Brecht helps him to formulate laughter as ‘a trigger for thinking’ that retains, through a ‘spectral materialism’, its dialectical struggles with the surplus enjoyment of melancholy. This materialism moves from melancholic passivity toward revolutionary politics by causing in the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ of the conquerors’ unrelenting interruptions that are the ‘strait gate’ through which the undead ghosts of the past are de-animated for the Messiah to enter.