Unlearning Pauline Messianism: Prophetic Study and Historical Injustice in Walter Benjamin and Hermann Cohen

ABSTRACT This article argues against Giorgio Agamben’s use of Paul’s Epistles to align Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence with antinomian theology and anarcholibertarian politics. It focuses specifically on Benjamin’s critical inheritance of Hermann Cohen’s concepts of unintentional sin and atonement to show that he reactivates a prophetic register of education in Jewish religious ethics. The article contends that these normative and narrative elements of Talmud Torah refute a reductive view of Jewish legalism in confronting the cultural afterlives of historical violence. This argument not only uncouples the reception of Benjamin’s theopolitics from contemporary continental philosophy’s revivals of Pauline messianism, but also contributes to a plural field of political theology emerging beyond the scope of secularized concepts of governance derived from a spurious universalism. This article proposes that the nonidentity between human law and divine justice can orient necessary resistance to justifications for and acts of state violence committed in a community’s name.