ABSTRACT
This section of Walter Benjamin’s early notes ‘Capitalism as Religion’ is quoted
by Werner Hamacher, in his essay ‘Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch ‘‘Capital-
ism as Religion’’’ (2002) pp. 100-101.1 The hypothesis is that religion is emptied
out of its redemptive potential, in its figuration as capitalism. It is this redemp-
tive potential which Benjamin rescues by inverting theology. This releases the
concepts of redemptive time from their consolidation within religious forms and
permits Benjamin to think the weak messianic force of an interruption of the
various histories of tyranny and persecution. This of course presents the temp-
tation to construe an antinomy between Derrida and Benjamin, as thinking
contradictory theses, concerning theology without religion and religion without
theology.2 I shall show how the encounter between them is a great deal more
violent than any such antinomial thinking would permit. This suggests that
antinomy and paradox belong to a domain in which conceptual analysis and
membership of faith communities are still compatible, whereas for both Derrida
and Benjamin, the aporetics of European history and the corresponding apore-
tics of thinking an arrival of time in history, and the arrival of history in time,
disjoin conceptual analysis and the condition of such membership, while leaving
their traces the one on the other. The hypothesis that in capitalism, Christian
theology realises itself must be left to one side.3 In his remarkable analyses,
Hamacher hypothesises that the taxis, or positing of time, in the Anaximander
Fragment displaces and subordinates the time of human history, which is con-
strued as merely a duration of awaiting the arrival of a last judgment:
The time of history, ethical time is thus interpreted in Anaximander’s sen-
tence as a normative time of inculpation and expiation. Whatever enters
this taxis of time is thereby already guilty and can only become excused by
perishing.
