Allegory –
A central concept in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Unlike the symbol, which suggests unity between image and meaning, allegory expresses fragmentation, decay, and the ruins of meaning. For Benjamin, allegory reveals the historical truth of loss — the world as a ruin open to interpretation, not redemption.
The image in “On the Concept of History” inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. The angel looks upon the wreckage of history blown forward by the storm of progress. Benjamin’s most enduring symbol of the tension between catastrophe and redemption.
Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus — a montage of quotations, notes, and reflections on nineteenth-century Parisian arcades. It is both an archaeological and a philosophical project: the material “dreamworld” of capitalism seen as a constellation of social, aesthetic, and political forms.
Aura –
The unique presence or authenticity of an artwork, bound to its ritual and tradition. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility (1936), Benjamin argues that modern technologies (especially film and photography) destroy the aura — democratizing art but also risking its politicization.
Baroque –
For Benjamin, the seventeenth-century Baroque world epitomizes Trauerspiel (mourning play): an allegorical, fragmented worldview obsessed with death, ruins, and authority. The Baroque expresses the tragic historical consciousness preceding modernity.
Commodity Fetishism / Phantasmagoria –
Adopted from Marx, these terms describe how capitalist society turns social relations into fetishized things. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin analyzes commodities (fashion, architecture, advertising) as dream-images that both conceal and reveal history.
Constellation –
A key methodological metaphor. Truth does not emerge from linear argument but from the constellation — the configuration of fragments, images, or ideas that illuminate one another across time. History itself appears as constellations between past and present.
Critique (Kritik) –
For Benjamin, critique is not judgment but revelation. Drawing from German Romanticism, he conceives it as the uncovering of the truth content within a work, distinct from its material content (Form- and Sachgehalt). True critique participates in the work’s own striving for truth.
Dialectical Image –
A flash-like moment where a fragment of the past becomes legible in the present. Central to The Arcades Project and Theses on History, it embodies Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit (now-time): a revolutionary recognition of historical truth in an instant of awakening.
Experience (Erfahrung) and Lived Experience (Erlebnis) –
Benjamin distinguishes Erfahrung (deep, cumulative experience, shared through narrative) from Erlebnis (isolated, modern, subjective impressions). Modernity, he argues, replaces Erfahrung with fragmented Erlebnisse, producing the alienation explored in “The Storyteller.”
Flâneur –
The detached observer of urban life in nineteenth-century Paris, immortalized in his studies of Baudelaire. The flâneur strolls through the crowd, reading the city as a text — an emblem of modern consciousness and the first theorist of everyday life.
Historicism / Historical Materialism –
In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin opposes historicism (which views history as progress) to historical materialism (which redeems the silenced, defeated past). The task of the materialist historian is to “brush history against the grain.”
Image (Bild) –
Not a picture but a configuration of meaning — the meeting point between past and present, idea and matter. The dialectical image is Benjamin’s answer to how thought can capture history without reducing it to narrative.
Language as Such / Pure Language –
From the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” All beings “speak” by communicating their essence; language is the medium of creation. Pure language is the divine totality toward which translation and expression strive.
Loss and Redemption –
Benjamin’s entire thought oscillates between loss (the fragmentation of meaning in modernity) and redemption (the sudden possibility of recovering meaning through art, memory, or revolutionary insight). Redemption is secular, historical, and momentary — not theological salvation.
A concept uniting theology and revolution. History’s “empty, homogeneous time” is interrupted by Jetztzeit — moments charged with messianic potential when the past erupts into the present. These are revolutionary instants of recognition.
Mimesis –
The human capacity to perceive and reproduce patterns in the world. For Benjamin, mimetic faculty is both pre-linguistic (children’s play, gesture) and historical (art, representation). In modernity, it becomes abstracted but still underlies all communication.
Montage / Fragment –
A structural principle of Benjamin’s writing. Instead of continuous argument, he juxtaposes fragments — citations, aphorisms, reflections — to let meaning emerge through tension. Montage enacts his idea of truth as constellation.
Myth / Divine Violence –
In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin contrasts mythic violence (founding law through force) with divine violence (pure, law-destroying justice). The latter is a messianic interruption that breaks cycles of domination.
Origin (Ursprung) –
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, origin is not a chronological beginning but a process of becoming — the moment where ideas crystallize out of historical life. It is dialectical: both emergence and ruin.
Reproducibility –
Modern technology’s power to copy and distribute art, dissolving aura but democratizing perception. This new reproducibility transforms the relation between art, politics, and mass consciousness.
Shock (Schock) –
Aesthetic and psychological experience of modernity, especially in the metropolis. In his Baudelaire studies, Benjamin links shock to the overstimulation of the senses and the fragmentation of attention in industrial life.
Storytelling (Erzählen) –
From “The Storyteller.” An ancient form of shared wisdom based on lived experience (Erfahrung), now lost in modernity. The storyteller’s disappearance marks the decline of communal meaning and the rise of isolated subjectivity.
Surrealism –
Benjamin saw Surrealism as the last attempt of European intellectuals to awaken from bourgeois slumber through the dream-world. It revealed revolutionary potential in the unconscious and in everyday objects.
Technology / Technique (Technik) –
For Benjamin, technology is not merely a tool but a transformative medium of perception. The camera and film, by penetrating reality differently from the eye, reconfigure the human sensorium and open art to politics.
A philosophical act, not a linguistic one. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin argues that translation aims not at communication but at the revelation of pure language — the eternal kinship among tongues.
Truth-Content (Wahrheitsgehalt) vs. Material-Content (Sachgehalt) –
Distinction in Benjamin’s aesthetics: material content is a work’s historical, social, and linguistic dimension; truth-content is its metaphysical or redemptive essence. The critic’s task is to extract the latter from the former.
Utopia / Awakening –
The Arcades Project presents history as a dream from which humanity must awaken. Awakening is the revolutionary consciousness that recognizes itself as historical — the secular counterpart of messianic redemption.
Back to: Introduction to Walter Benjamin
