"Quivers before it dies completely". Walter Benjamin and a verse from Dante

The French autotranslation of über den Begriff der Geschichte (Thèses sur le concept d’histoire) – Walter Benjamin’s very last work – contains an incomplete citation with reference to a verse by Dante. The present contribution proposes a new identification for the context of the reference, different from those considered up to now by the critics, regarding Benjamin’s reflections on the appearance and the vanishing of the mental images in Purgatorio XVII. Not only is this passage more appropriate to the context, it is also helps elucidate the very idea of dialektisches Bild, or of Dialektik im Stillstand, central to the thought of Benjamin.