Abstract

Wallenhorst and Saad's contribution rereads the figure of the "wise woman" in "Fate and Character" far more ambivalently than as a simple charlatan who reproduces the judgments of the dominant order. While Benjamin casts her divinations as complicit with a naturalized regime of fate, Wallenhorst and Saad argue that her "simple technique" can also unsettle fatalism and issue "momentarily anti-dialectical" imperatives in a manner that opens up spaces of collective agency and the pleasure of avengement. Reframing her through associations with midwifery, militancy, and rupture, they propose that the wise woman's destructive judgments may catalyze fatelessness—transforming guilt into rage and enabling moments of political or psychic breaks with an order which is not to be accepted as given.