Although there is widespread consensus today that some kind of continuity exists between Benjamin's early "metaphysical" works and his "materialist" writing from the mid-1920s onwards, it is not clear how this continuity ought to be specified.¹ We cannot specify it in terms of theoretical content. Benjamin's programmatic pursuit of paradox with regard to those postulates of self-reference that underlie the early work makes it impossible to describe that work adequately by the extraction of a consistent set of central ideas. The early work fails systematically to provide a consistent theory of its apparent object domains, such as language and literature. (In contrast, it may successfully express the impossibility of a consistent first-level theory wherever a dominant desire for sanctification is involved.) This means that at least the earlier of the two poles between which the problematic continuity of Benjamin's œuvre unfolds cannot be defined in terms of theoretical content. And since the more penetrating reconstructions of his "materialism" in the literature invariably seem to imply an understanding of "materialism" that rests on, or is in agreement with, magical, idealistic or religious assumptions,² the same is likely to hold for the second pole, too.