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This essay considers Walter Benjamin’s model of messianic time alongside the powers of horror in the Gothic tradition. This configuration illustrates a messianic nihilism; a profane relation in which teleological meaning is eternally derailed.
In this thesis, I analyse a selection of photographs and essays from the journal Documents (1929-1930), alongside the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille. Through this configuration, I propose a theory of messianic nihilism.
This essay considers Walter Benjamin's model of messianic time alongside the powers of horror in the Gothic tradition, here represented by Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' (1818) and Edgar Allan Poe's...
This essay considers Walter Benjamin’s model of messianic time alongside the powers of horror in the Gothic tradition. This configuration illustrates a messianic nihilism; a profane relation in which teleological meaning is eternally derailed.
In the Gothic, the messianic takes form in the dialectical image of horror; an image that at once contains and subverts history, thus emerging as unnameable. In Frankenstein, the monster embodies and enacts a messianic rhythm as a symptom of his alienation.
Walter Benjamin s best-known comment regarding nihilism - »to strive for such a passing away [for nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away] [. . .] is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism« (SW III, 306) - occurs at the conclusion of his »Theological-Political Fragment« (1920-1921).1 In this ...
This article discusses Walter Benjamin’s thought-figure of the messianic. Reading his enigmatic “Theological-Political Fragment” (ca. 1921), I argue that the messianic is an inaccessible relation, an unmediated non-relation “in between” the historical and the messianic.
Key takeaway: 'Gothic horror, influenced by Walter Benjamin's messianic time model, promotes annihilation as a means to the infinite possibilities of the new, transforming history into an unnameable image.'