Walter Benjamins Konzept des Eingedenkens
[Walter Benjamin's Concept of Eingedenken]

With his concept of Eingedenken, Walter Benjamin developed a multifaceted figure of thought. Its importance for his later works has long been recognized and can hardly be underestimated. Starting from the earliest uses of the concept (particularly by Ernst Bloch), this volume marks the first attempt to genetically and systematically explore its appropriation and comprehensive “repurposing” by Benjamin.

From this perspective, Eingedenken—already determined by Bloch as an involuntary memory of that future which lies dormant in the past—not only enables the “Copernican turn of historiography” in the Arcades Project, it also fulfills a key role in Benjamin’s literary-critical works since around 1927. In its conceptual-ideal examination of the mémoire involontaire, the awakening, the quote, or the act of studying, the Eingedenken facilitates exciting and fruitful constellations. Finally, in Benjamin’s last notes, it is implemented as an “angel” of the small messianic portal: It grants access to the present by realizing a concealed potentiality of (past) experience.