Ethan Gettes

This article reads Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history alongside the concept of totality. Well-known for its evocative imagery and esotericism, Benjamin’s outlook on history is generally understood to be firmly anti-Hegelian and implicitly non-Marxist. Here, these readings are challenged by focusing on Benjamin’s ambivalent receptions of Hegel and Lukács. By critiquing readings of Benjamin that position his philosophy of history as primarily theological and thus apolitical, this article argues that Benjamin’s eventual departure from Hegel and other classical philosophies of history occurs from within, not outside of, a commitment to universal history. This keeps Benjamin’s philosophy of history within a post-Kantian lineage, albeit in a critical fashion. While the narrow focus here is on Benjamin’s conceptual uptake of totality and universal history, there exists a broader motivation to more substantively analyze Benjamin’s relation to Hegelian-Marxism in his notion of history.