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This thesis starts from the philosophy of the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) to develop ideas about the messianic experience, the possibility that truth be revealed within history and the difference between genuine encounters of transcendence and illusionary ones. Borrowing insights and beliefs, concepts and intuitions from sources as diverse as Jewish messianism and historical materialism, German Romanticism and surrealism, Goethe and Brecht, Benjamin's writings form a meeting point of widely diverging strands of thought, deriving their continuity most often from an ongoing attempt to bring together what is otherwise kept strictly apart. In a formula borrowed from his own philosophy of history, Benjamin's thinking can be characterized as 'neither a-theological, nor immediately theological' in order to thus substantiate the claim that his Jewish messianic beliefs and his historical materialist convictions are not as irreconcilable as both schools of thought (personified, for Benjamin, in his friends Gershom Scholem and Bertolt Brecht) so often take them to be. The place where Benjamin's Jewish messianic beliefs and his historical materialist ideas meet, however, is strictly speaking not a philosophical position but the urgent moral feeling that it is necessary to side with the weak. It is this topic that is brought under research in the first chapter, focusing on Benjamin's philosophy of history. From the standpoint of Benjamin's historical materialism, the weak party is, of course, the proletariat. If the revolution should be proclaimed - and this, in Benjamin's opinion, is not even an issue - it is in the name of the economically deprived, the politically powerless and the socially oppressed. It is their material conditions that need to be radically improved and it is, most obviously, the dream of a classless society which should continue to inspire our social goals and political action. However, the weak whose side Benjamin has so clearly chosen do not just wear the mask of a specific class. For Benjamin, that is to say, weakness remains, first and foremost, messianic: if it deserves our continuous attention and unceasing support, it is not only because it reveals the discontents that mark modernity or the aberrations that characterize industrial capitalism but, in the first instance, because it is in its features that comes to expression the lack of fulfillment of history in toto. If Benjamin's philosophy is indeed an attempt to think through a concept of hope for fulfillment, it is developed from the perspective of those who most obviously lack it because they have lost the direct view on the truly transcendent or divine. The second chapter, therefore, discusses the various ways in which, in Benjamin's work, the lack of fulfillment of history as such manifests itself. Most crucial in this respect is a fundamental inaccessibility of doctrine [Lehre] and the idea that truth, though present within the world, has become distorted and therefore cannot be immediately recognized by human beings. This lack of immediate truth-revelation is a feature of history as such but it is experienced in historically variable ways. For this reason, the second chapter discusses the inherent connection between Benjamin's messianic beliefs, i.e. his analysis of the lack of redemption of history in general, and his neo-Marxist critique of modernity, i.e. his historically specific determination of the alienation that lies in the scope of industrial capitalism. The third chapter develops this idea further by discussing Benjamin's epistemological insights. In his view, in an unredeemed world the representation of truth is inevitably tinged with a certain absence, thus denoting that the messianic experience renders just as much the restoration of an original truth than the understanding that this process of restoration has not yet been fully completed. Benjamin thus makes the claim, not only that weakness is messianic (i.e. a token for the lack of redemption of history as such) but also that the messianic is essentially weak: human beings can encounter fragments of truth within the phenomena that surround them but these fragments retain an irreducible fragility since their immanence never gives way to a perfect presentation of transcendent truth. Even during those moments and in those places when and where a remnant of truth becomes visible, it never expresses itself in a complete or immediate manner. For Benjamin, however, the lack of fulfillment of history does not only manifest itself as the loss of something original, i.e. as the absence of a direct relation between man and God, but also as the advent of something new, i.e. as the installment of a supposedly 'guilty life' within man which is believed to surrender him to the dark and enigmatic force of myth. The fourth chapter retraces this nexus between guilt and myth, analyzing the various ways in which it reveals itself (most significantly through law and fate) and the power that ultimately brings about its suspension (character, godly violence). This brings us to the difficult problem of determining the task of politics within a messianic framework: if no human being can be thought to render the force to truly redeem the lack of fulfillment of our world, what, then, can political action be expected to achieve? Benjamin's own solution to these problems moved between the alternatives of, on the one hand, a 'politics of waiting', i.e. a plea for a society that builds itself on the non-violent, pure means of a 'culture of the heart' and, on the other, the violence of a nihilist anarchism that seeks to overthrow all legal systems and state-oriented politics. The fifth and last chapter elaborates further on Benjamin's notion of the mythic. The mythic is first analyzed as an illusionary experience of transcendence. With the notion of semblance [Schein], however, Benjamin makes the claim that it is ultimately impossible in an unfulfilled universe to make an a priori distinction between illusionary forms of transcendence and true ones. For this reason, the mythic is not to be reduced to a force of alienation since it can deliver a genuine nucleus of truth. It is from the perspective of this a priori inseparability between truth and illusion, at the core of Benjamin's views on myth, that the last part of the fifth chapter will discuss his unfinished study on nineteenth century Paris, The Arcades Project.