In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger turns to the overcoming of Platonism. He quotes Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols to summarize 'the form of Platonism that is achieved by the Kantian philosophy'. For the new German-Judaic thinkers, a more serious concern was the fact that neo-Kantian philosophy insufficiently apprehended its relationship with the absolute; as Rosenzweig argued, neo-Kantianism had 'found itself at a point where no further advance remained to it'. For Benjamin, the question of the subject's freedom begins to rework the base notion of experience: the concept of freedom stands in a peculiar correlation to the mechanical concept of experience, and was accordingly further developed in neo-Kantianism. Benjamin also rejected the neo-Kantianism that aimed at a science of history, in particular the methodological separation of 'singularity and repetition'. Benjamin and Rosenzweig both critique Kant's impoverished notion of experience with its 'inattention to language and inattention to religion'.

In October 1913, the radical educator Gustav Wyneken addressed a major gathering of the youth movement, or Wandervogel, at Rohe Meissner mountain. In his wide-ranging speech he argued that 'world history had only just begun' and that 'the younger generation had to help in changing the world permanently.' Benjamin argued that the desire among the young for self-responsibility was always being negated by the notion of experience; in other words, adults always claim to have a superior knowledge based upon not just their experiences, but their realization that youthful inexperienced idealism is naive. 'Rausch', as a pharmakon, is responsible paradoxically for complex narrative production and the replacement of language with images through a form of humour that is both a denial of the 'reality principle' and the intoxication of will to power.

Repetition in Surrealist objective chance reveals not just a fore-life but also an after-life of the experience; in other words, the time of Surrealist repetition is 'differential'. Benjamin's position within the network of German-Jewish 'new thinkers' is one which resists being neatly explained by or slotted into any number of coherent narratives that otherwise account for the emergence of new modes of Messianism. For Benjamin, contemporary philosophical research reveals that the basic unresolved questions are 'closely bound up with the current social crisis'. Writing on the failure of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), Benjamin re-introduces Messianic, redemptive thought into Marxism as a last or final hope to counter the 'final solution' of such a state. Benjamin's final text liberates history from the empty homogeneous schema of progression and unleashes the counter-destructive energies of historical materialism.

A shadow fell across Europe during Walter Benjamin's lifetime (1892-1940). That shadow can be called, variously, National Socialism, the Nazi Party, Fascism, the Holocaust or the Shoah. There are other names, but these are among the most significant. 'Shoah' can be translated as 'destruction' or 'catastrophe': it is the word often used to refer to the Nazis' 'Final Solution' of 1941-45. Walter Benjamin took his own life in the year in which the Nazi euthanasia programme was being rigorously implemented by medical staff and others. This book explores Benjamin's work - first in relation to some elements of German and Judaic culture, and second in relation to modern aesthetics. It explores, first, a historical-theoretical approach to Benjamin situating him as a 'contrapuntal thinker' in Pieper's sense, and second, the question of form in Benjamin applied to examples in the visual arts and literary criticism.

Questions of narrative order and processes of de-formation are central concerns of the modernist aesthetics that Benjamin had long explored to produce not only an unsettling critical practice, but also one which elucidates and implicates the role of the reader, consumer or collector of a text. This chapter focuses on B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates and Benjamin's The Arcades Project, theorized as acts of 'Entstaltung' which both create a related 'principle of textual openness' or radically new approaches to a text's binding. Johnson's The Unfortunates and Benjamin's The Arcades Project problematize notions of textual order and affirm the playful nature of signification divided between content and form. Benjamin had worked with theoretical and textual forms resistant to immediate or hasty interpretation: the fragment and the aphorism are not only major components of his critical armoury, but they also problematize attempted segregation of apparently literary or narrative works from philosophical concerns.

Bio-critical accounts of Benjamin rarely begin with Oswald Spengler. Stress is placed upon intellectual life-phases, such as Benjamin's shift from Messianic to Marxist thought, or stress may be placed upon the connectivity of these phases, which are explored and explained in their interrelatedness. Stirk argues that The Decline of the West 'was above all a refutation of the idea of progress, and the climax of that wave of Kulturpessimismus" which dominated Europe after the Great War.' There are other modes of Kulturpessimismus that intersect with Benjamin's work

Significant episodes in Benjamin's life - such as the withdrawal of his Habilitation thesis - have led many commentators to note how the role of 'outsider' dominated his fortunes and writings. One such episode concerns Benjamin's critique of the Stefan George circle, with the publication of his essay on Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). In view of the fact that Benjamin was a follower of the charismatic leader of youth Gustav Wyneken, he violently critiques and rejects an analogous set of followers of an even more influential charismatic leader, in other words, the circle of thinkers or disciples known as the Georgekreis. Benjamin's Elective Affinities essay is often read either purely as a major piece of Goethe criticism, or as an example of his method of immanent critique; we need to retain the concept of the critical constellation to comprehend why Goethe is central in Benjamin's criticism of the Georgekreis.

Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, examines two aspects: the eternal return as cosmological and physical doctrine; and the eternal return as ethical and selective thought. Benjamin's last work - 'On the Concept of History' not only appears to offer a potential synthesis of Messianic and materialist thought, but also most emphatically and repeatedly rejects the notion of history as progress. Two conceptual journeys taken by Benjamin - through Surrealism and Marxism - could quite reasonably be assumed to reduce the centrality of Messianic thought in his work. Poetry, for the Surrealists, is to be 'exploded from within';61 the explosive energies released or unleashed function not just in space (marks, writing, language), but in time, for example the experiments with automatic writing are as much to do with temporality as with graphic production. The circuit between knower and known was interlaced anew after Surrealism to create what Benjamin calls profane illumination.

As the catastrophe of the twentieth century developed with the rise to power of the Third Reich, the arts became evidently a battleground: of revolution, totalitarianism and Fascism. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin refers to the fact that the technological shift into photography is not a simple progression, owing to the retrograde nature of the technologies that immediately prefaced it: 'It is characteristic that the beginnings of the technologizing of the portrait set back the art of the portrait qualitatively as much as photography later advanced it. The demolition of House appears to contradict the saying 'Life is short, art is long'. As caesura-seizure, the work in question removes the contradiction: House functioned as a memorial. The phrase 'memorial aesthetics' has been used by J. M. Bernstein in The Fate of Art, where he argues that the Kantian complex of pleasure and pain in the beautiful is also a memorial.

Once one begins to investigate the intrigue aroused by the lack of feminist concerns in Daly’s manuscript, other intrigues quickly arise. Why did she write this text in the first place? Why did her publisher reject it? Why did she abandon it? Facing these intersecting intrigues, this essay develops the hypothesis that Daly’s central intellectual project – preventing and healing the “splitting” of the Church into polarized factions – mirrored a moment of splitting within her own identity, one that led to her exit from the Church. Moreover, the essay suggests that while the tensions that caused Daly’s theological splitting involved factors such as the women’s movement, Humanae Vitae, a speculative theological method, and a patriarchal church, it was actually the death of her mother that legitimated Daly’s abandonment of this manuscript and release from the sorts of theological and ecclesial engagements it contains.