Guilt Historicism: Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion,” Aura, and the Case of Chaucer’s Pardoner

ABSTRACT This article takes up Walter Benjamin’s allusive 1921 sketch “Capitalism as Religion” in order to think about the place of debt and guilt in our relation, as members (or perhaps apostates) of what Benjamin describes as the “purely cultic religion” of capitalism, to the Middle Ages. My focus here is on two aspects of Benjamin’s sketch. One is its evocation, diametrically opposed to that found in Benjamin’s celebrated essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, of aura as a force of liberating distractedness, rather than politically suspect absorption. The other is the rejoinder “Capitalism as Religion” provides to Benjamin’s sweeping claim, made in another fragmentary sketch, that guilt is “the highest category of world history.” Taking up the disciplinary implications of that claim, the essay reads Chaucer’s Pardoner as a test case for a possible practice of guilt historicism.