On Redemptive Critique: The Metaphysics of Destruction and Experience in Walter Benjamin

Throughout his philosophical, literary, and critical works in various fields, Walter Benjamin repeatedly ties his practice of critique to the thought of redemption. In this chapter, I provide a unifying interpretation of Benjamin’s “redemptive critique.” Redemptive critique names the critical operation to restore essential content to and, thereby, redeem the possibility of experience. In this, I show Benjamin’s redemptive critique emerges from an effort to combat the destruction of experience—a fundamental metaphysical problem that grounds Benjamin’s works throughout his career. In addition, I show that Benjamin’s redemptive critique is necessarily tied to his metaphysical theory of the ideas (or constellations), especially in relationship to the idea of happiness. Redemptive critique takes on a uniquely ethical import in relation to the idea of happiness, because, there, it assumes the responsibility of the “weak messianic” power of the present.