The author's proposal is to show how an apparently marginal text by Walter Benjamin, "The Destructive Character", can be taken as a hermeneutic model for understand ing the connection of Benjarnin's with history and tradition and
for characterizing bis thought as philosophy of thresho ld. lt is the author 's intention to show how the destructive character, on the threshold between destruction and construction, succeeds in remaining in that trans ition area that announces a change, showing its creative and conservative features; thus it appears as a figure of coexistence between stillness and movement, passage and interruption, and past and future. What the author wants to point out is tbat, in the description of this figure, Benjamin is driven by a cognitive demand, which tends to focalize the process of destruction itself rather than the result of the destruction process. The space in which the destructive character is acting is the space of the possihility of change and emancipation, and the space where it is possible to keep together past and future, and memrny and redemption. Starting from these reflections, an important question
arises about the problem of the relation between history and tradition, and culture and its memory: Nei ther the destruct ion of memory by a culture nor its canonization is meaningful. The concept of destructive character then represents a preferential point of observation for ana lyzi ng the articulations of Benjamin's thought. From th is
perspective, a decisi ve point of Benjamin's reflection seems to emerge on one side, strengthened in the permeation of Hebraic ancestors between destruction and sa lvation; on the other side, some of the concepts and images of the Berliner philosopher seem to show up in a new light.