"Can we pursue religious intentions without holding religious beliefs? Margaret Kohlenbach argues that the attempt to do so is central to Walter Benjamin's work. She analyses the structure of self-reference as an expression of Benjamin's sceptical religiosity in the context of the Romantic tradition, the conservative critique of culture and the spiritual currents of the German Youth Movement. Religious decisionism informs Benjamin's writing throughout his authorship.

It explains his paradoxical engagements with language and thought, literature, art and the cinema, as well as history, politics and technology. Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity proposes a reconstruction of the performative continuity in Benjamin's work that questions the relevance of both positive religion and the notion of secularisation."--BOOK JACKET.