Karl Barth, Walter Benjamin, and Historical Mediation

A Metaphysical Aporia in Dialectical Theology and Messianic Politics

Abstract

Following Jacob Taubes, this essay seeks to make a comparison of the work of Karl Barth and Walter Benjamin. I argue, with the assistance of Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose, that Barth and Benjamin, for differing reasons, refuse the mediation of the transcendence qua history and the created world. For Barth, this may be traced to his critique of natural theology and his rejection of the analogia entis, and his apparently inability to conceptualize how materiality and historicity may constitute a “fitting” mediation for divine self-disclosure, intimating a nascent voluntarism in his theology. For Benjamin, this failure to approximate mediation may be linked to the conceptual diastasis between metaphysics and law, which leads him to adopt the idea of divine violence of law-breaking, as opposed to the mythical violence of law-making, as a way of resolving the disjunction. However, following Rose, I argue that this leads to a pathological conception of the relation of immanence to transcendence and a messianic politics that avoids the labour of mourning and the constraints of the middle.