“The tragedy of messianic politics”: Gustav Landauer’s hidden legacy in Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin

Pisano, Libera

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel13020165

“The tragedy of messianic politics”: Gustav Landauer’s hidden legacy in Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin

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Pisano L. “The tragedy of messianic politics”: Gustav Landauer’s hidden legacy in Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin. Religions. 2022 Feb;13(2):165. DOI 10.3390/rel13020165

Abstract

Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) was a German-Jewish anarchist and radical thinker who was brutally murdered in the Munich Soviet Republic. Paul Mendes-Flohr has contributed enormously to the rediscovery of this long-neglected figure, who nonetheless played a crucial role in the intellectual debates of his time. Mendes-Flohr emphasizes the impact that Landauer’s death had on Martin Buber’s conception of politics at a time when Jewish revolutionaries were attempting to combine messianism and activism. In this essay, as a complement to Mendes-Flohr’s insightful work, I will attempt to show how Landauer’s legacy can be traced in two other German-Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin, albeit with important differences. In particular, I want to illustrate how Landauer’s idea of an anarchic diaspora, as well as his idea of revolution as interruption, both based on a unique conception of time, can be seen as two powerful theologico-political devices that he used in order to dismantle a too narrow and too technical idea of politics. I will, therefore, examine how the anarchic diaspora finds its echo in Rosenzweig’s thought, and how the idea of interruption and inversion can be found in Benjamin’s conception of revolution.