Nietzsche's Nihilism in Walter Benjamin

This is a review of the volume Nietzsche’s Nihilism in Walter Benjamin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) by Mauro Ponzi. The review shows that Walter Benjamin emerges from Mauro Ponzi’s book as a thinker of history, and thus as a thinker struggling with the problem of reconstructing the past. From this perspective, the review focuses on the centrality of the image in Ponzi's presentation of Benjamin. Inseparable from its own simultaneity with the past, always twinned with memory, the image first takes center stage when Benjamin studies Baudelaire and later ushers in the problem of the reparative task of the critic. Ponzi sheds light on the dialectical image or allegory, which always encapsulates dynamic unrest, and shows how Benjamin's observer’s awakening gaze perceives the phantasmagoria of forms as a continuous surface of contemporary ruins, pasted over the city like a second facade whose strange effect teases thought and remains not wholly describable.