de Certeau’s analysis of the city presents itself as both an extension of Foucault’s critique of totalizing enclosure and as its immanent critique

Marx actually admired capitalism in some ways, which means that he might have been right about a few things; meanwhile, his trenchant criticisms of it will be treated as the quaintly perceptive observations of an awkward crank

the toys are recognizably like commodities, expropriated from the one who makes them and sent out to travel a long (but never infinite) chain of transactions before they can be allowed to resume their unremarkable existence as objects of use or enjoyment

Note that the German word for “debt” and “guilt” is the same: die Schuld. Not only Nietzsche but also Benjamin probed this polysemy on several occasions.

To assemble a full definition of debt, one would need to address philosophies of morality and justice and anthropologies of sacrifice and potlatch

debt names something basic to the experience of social being as a dimension of historicity, even in its most eschatological form

the most absolute kind of debt, original sin, appears as the most foolproof way to give meaning, proleptically, to one’s death, an act that thus becomes a way to ensure that one’s debts will never be paid except by the God who granted them

Whatever the polemical virtues of this account—and it sounds as true as anything Baudrillard ever said about the simulations of the capitalist code—it remains firmly within Hegelian coordinates.

In the meantime people deal with history as a compound mixture of exigencies, obligations, and potentialities that have to be worked through in practice, on their own terms, collectively and immanently.

In his notes on the philosophy of history, Benjamin repeatedly opposes the spectacle of progress and catastrophe to the aporetic thought that the history of the oppressed is marked by discontinuity.