On the Metapolitics of Decay: Walter Benjamin's Will to Happiness

This dissertation analyzes the early work of Walter Benjamin (ca. 1916 – 1926). The period under consideration falls between Benjamin’s break from the German Youth Movement (which also coincides with the beginning of the Great War) and his turn to Marxism. Benjamin’s life and work during this period is characterized by, on the one hand, an intensified interest in theological concepts and, on the other hand, the apparent refusal of concrete political engagement. It is the claim of the dissertation that what Benjamin elaborates – in the absence of a concrete political program and with the aid of theological concepts – is a metaphysical conception of politics: what I call a metapolitics of decay. This metapolitics is informed by a certain theological understanding of transience: the decay that attends to a creation which has “fallen” from its original condition. While Benjamin’s metapolitics is oriented towards redemption – to the lossless consummation of historical life – it pursues this goal, not by circumventing transience, but by concentrating on the decay of nature – and by extension, of history. The metapolitical limit upon concrete politics, however, does not foreclose the possibility of the latter. In 1919, in a text posthumously named the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” Benjamin does in fact spell out what I call a politics of transience. One of the major historical and conceptual trajectories that the dissertation traces, therefore, is the movement from the metapolitics of decay to the politics of transience. The political significance of transience and decay reveals itself in the profane and melancholic fixation upon the decay of nature and of history. And yet it is only with the concept of happiness that both the metapolitical and the political dimensions of Benjamin’s work become most clear. Happiness (Glück), which is manifestly not the bliss (Seligkeit) of the prelapsarian condition, is no escape from the melancholy situation of historical life. It remains definitively profane and capable of taking an “elegiac” form. But it is precisely by way of its profanity and its melancholy that happiness comes to signify the idea of redemption. The will to happiness, for Benjamin, is a (weak) messianic force.

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