The Destructive Character: A Cover

Robert Pogue Harrison offers a recasting of Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay for our own time.

By Walter Benjamin, Robert Pogue HarrisonMarch 29, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1931, the German thinker and literary critic Walter Benjamin published an article called “The Destructive Character” in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Like most of Benjamin’s writing, it is gnomic, elusive, and sibylline in tone. Since the destructive character is of capital importance in the psychopolitics of our time, here is a cover, as it were, of Benjamin’s article. I’ve introduced variations and emendations into Benjamin’s text, yet its basic lineaments remain largely intact. “The Destructive Character” was published, in Edmund Jephcott’s English translation, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1986).

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It could occur to someone looking back over the debris of history that many of the calamities befalling peoples and nations originated in persons who had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character of his own time.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His delight in tearing down is stronger than any hatred of what others have built up. All that stands for him is straw.

The destructive character gives his senescence a youthful and cheerful demeanor. Destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition. What contributes most of all to the destroyer’s Apollonian image is the realization of how the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruction. The clarity that comes from demolition is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony. From that spectacle comes his love of the stage and the exuberant leap of his musketeer.

The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise, she will take over the destruction herself.

No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space where the offices of the res publica stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without its being filled.

The destructive character does his work on scorecards. The only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.

The destructive character is a signal. As a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to rumor. To protect him from it would be pointless.

The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. Misunderstanding and chaos are his native element. When others flail, he thrives. He scoffs where others judge.

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the ornamental case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.

Not Athena but Maga Circe is his goddess—she of the magic potions who reduces her offenders to animals and sycophants.

The destructive character stands in the front line of the traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The destructive character loathes the world for the fact that he is a latecomer to it. Since its story unfolded without him, only in its unmaking does it become great again.

The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotions are an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. Yet for this very reason, he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble—not for the sake of rubble but for the way leading through it.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

The destructive character is essentially incredulous. He cannot believe his good fortune. What he cannot understand, and the question he takes with him to the grave, is why God seems to love him.

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Featured image: Katsushika Hokusai. Kintoki and Demon, from the series One Hundred Comic Poems (Fûryû odoke hyakku), ca. 1811. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, 1911, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (11.20401). CC0, mfa.org. Accessed March 26, 2025. Image has been cropped.