L'ospite inquietante. Nihilismo, materialismo e messianeismo in Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin defines capitalism as a “religious cult”. The cornerstone of Benjamin’s reasoning is the equivalence between moral guilt (Schuld) and economic debt (Schulden), terms that, in German, are condensed in the same word. This equivalence derives, in fact, from a reading of Nietzsche who dedicates an entire section of Genealogy of Morality to this subject, claiming that debt can never be extinguished. Benjamin quotes Marx as another significant source for his philosophical thought regarding the relationship between moral guilt and economic debt. The “brief century” has left us the ruins of different conceptions of history that have turned out to be problematic and disastrous: one is that of Communism, whose messianic waiting went completely unfulfilled, and the other is that of Nietzschean nihilism, which has generated a series of other nihilisms, completely different to one another in their outcomes, but equally catastrophic. Benjamin builds a “secret agreement” between these two systems of thought, by extrapolating some elements from them and then discarding them as empty husks. Benjamin tried to define very clearly the threshold between "critical" and “mythical” thought. The Nietzschean matrix of his philosophy consists not only in the "destructive character" of modern and in the "negative theology", but above all on his "analogical" thinking that does not include any "synthesis".

Nel breve frammento intitolato Capitalismo come religione, Walter Benjamin definisce il capitalismo, appunto, una “religione cultuale”. Egli sottolinea fin dalle prime righe il carattere “estremista” del capitalismo, che non ammette repliche né critiche e che non accetta che si metta in discussione la libertà di impresa né la autoregolamentazione del mercato. Il cardine del ragionamento benjaminiano è l’equivalenza tra “colpa” morale (Schuld) e “debito” economico (Schulden), che nella lingua tedesca è data dalla parola stessa. L’equivalenza tra colpa e debito deriva da una lettura di Nietzsche che, nella Genealogia della morale, dedica un’intera sezione all’argomento, sostenendo che la colpa-debito non è mai estinguibile.