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The article intends to retrace, from a historical-philological point of view, the main steps of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished research and works, conducted during his later years, dedicated to Charles Baudelaire. Setting Benjamin’s translation of the Ta-bleaux parisiens as the first result of his interest for the poet, the text delves into the composition process of The Arcades Project, from which the idea of a book on Baudelaire then takes shape. The article examines the crucial stages of this second project’s development through the correspondence between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer especially: from the 1935 exposé for The Arcades Project to The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, to the 1939 essay On some Motifs in Baudelaire. The focus is set, in particular, on the dialectical-constructive method that guides Benjamin in the composition both of the Passagen-Werk as of the Baudelaire-Buch and the essays. Finally, the article looks back over the transmission history of the project on Baudelaire, intimately bound to the one of the Passagenarbeit: the vicissitudes and findings of various manuscripts, of which the complete restitution of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe is soon expected. Therefore, the peculiar relationship between philology and philosophy of Benjamin’s experimental method is then examined further in depth; the configuration of the research object’s monadic structure according to a historical perspective, albeit in the context of a work that remained unfinished.

We present here for the first time an italian translation of Rang’s Vom Weg messianischer Deutung (On the Way of Messianic Interpretation): the introductory essay on the work on Shakespeare’s sonnets. This work remained unfinished and was only partially published posthumously by Rang’s son, Bernhard, in 1954, with the title Shakespeare der Christ. Eine Deutung der Sonette (Shakespeare the Christ. An Interpretation of sonnets). The translation is accompanied by a comment essay on Rang’s text. This comment essay firstly aims to contextualize both the work on Shakespeare and the very complex and still little researched figure of Florens Christian Rang; secondly, it addresses the most important conceptual issues that the essay presents. With a strongly programmatic nature and, at the same time, with an expressionistic style, which is as obscure as it is visionary, Vom Weg messianischer Deutung presents the method of messianic interpretation in contrast with the classical-romantic one of the pneumatic interpretation. What is at stake is a perspective that challenges the autonomy of art in order to place the Kunstwerk in the series of all the works of divine creation to transform it in faith work (Glaubenswerk). It is the point of view of the Last Judgment that leads the way. The messianic critique of art reveals to be only a particular case of messianic world critique (messianischen Weltkritik), literally a critique of the world (Welt-Kritik), which redirects itself to the world. It is the movement of conversion (Umkehr) which breaks with the false dualism of Romanticism, according to which the spirit (pneuma) is divided in two: on the one hand, there are the experience, the world, the science, on the other hand, there is the art as pure mirroring of forms. Through the messianic interpretation, the spirit returns to be body, flesh. It follows the permanent movement of creation, namely the continuous conversion from God to the world and from the world to God. In this sense, according to Rang, Shakespeare’s sonnets exemplify the faith work: their poetic word names the messianic unity of body and spirit. They are crystals within which all creatural life, the great stages of the divine creation, are concentrated.

The following essay aims to analyze the problem of repetition in the reflection of Walter Benjamin. Showing first of all how this concept, singularly neglected by critics, is the unexpected centre towards which the philosopher’s entire reflection converges, thus offering a new reading of his entire production. All the vast domains of Benjamin’s speculation are thoroughly rethought starting from this idea, revealing how what is at stake is a more articulated movement of the eternal recurrence of the same, which characterizes mythical temporality. A movement that has to do with the constitution of the human and which indeed exhibits an intimate link between repetition and innovation, repetition and the constructive principle. Another intention of this text is therefore to carry out an in depth analysis of this connection, to question the nature of such a gesture, both repetitive and differential, and its relationship with the recurrence of the ever self-same, therefore with the possible way out of the myth.