Giovanni Bombelli

The distinction between “symbol” and “allegory” allows to emphasize the critical and rebellious aspect of Walter Benjamin’s thought: debating radically the constituted meanings, it opens to the thinkability of rebellion. By means of an “against-method”, Benjamin polemizes with the concepts of “system” and “doctrine” (as “sedimentated knowledges”) and he finds out the ambivalent structure of knowledge in the allegoric analogy. Circularly connected with the philosophy of language, it means to understand the linguistic manifestation of “being”, although between world and language there is only an “analogic community” theologically based. The impossibility of reading definitively the “datum” opens, then, to the rebellious thinking but, at the same time, makes it constitutively precarious: the problematic transition from the “rebellion of thinking” to “thinking of the rebellion” starts here. In fact, the revolution finds completion only in the eschaton of redemption condensed in the Jetz-Zeit and, ultimately, in the apocalypse as messianic sense of history and, hence, revelation of the “secret” operated by the Angel. In this sense, Benjamin’s esotericism opens to “other” linguistic-speculative dimensions and it synthesizes the enigmaticity of the rebellious perspective, at the same time possible and impossible.