The present essay concerns Walter Benjamin?s thought regarding history and temporality as he articulated it in his last work that was only published posthumously: ?U?ber den Begriff der Geschichte?. The purpose is to analyze Benjamin?s construction of historical materialism and to suggest a reading of it as directed towards an opening of history. For Walter Benjamin, every moment presents itself as a possibility of radical otherness: a possibility for things to be different.

The present essay concerns Walter Benjamin´s engagement with the concept of critique in four of his early writings from 1916-1928. It revolves around three main themes, or objects of interest: the critique of language [Sprache], the critique of the work [das Werk] and the critique of history [Geschichte]. The main objective of this study is to show how we can understand Benjamin?s conception of critique and how he develops it in regard to language, the work and history. The essay argues that this is a vital part to understand his philosophy in general as well as his later philosophy of history in particular.

The first aim of this study is to discuss and try to understand the relationship between the holy andethics, and more specifically how it can be understood, which is the critical question that I haveformulated, in Giorgio Agamben?s and Emmanuel Levinas? philosophies. The second, moreconstructive aim is to discuss whether the holy can be understood as something good or problematicin relation to the society.Rooted in philosophy of religion and ethics, I have first tried to discuss how the holy has beenunderstood in the philosophy of phenomenology and in the texts of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade andEspen Dahl. The holy has in the history been understood as something central in religions, and hasalso not been connected to the idea of ethics. Recently it has also been critized ? by Dahl ? for notbeing so pure as first thought of.In Levinas texts the holy has been understood as something differentiated through his distiction,in the Talmudic reading ?Desacralization and Disenchantment?, between the holy, which can beseen as something pure, and the sacred which can been seen as something impure and a form ofdegenerated holiness.