Furthermore, this interpretative key, the experience of shock, is itself understood through a series of theoretical correspondences within Benjamin’s own present; primarily, that between Proust’s ‘involuntary memory’ and Freud’s theory of consciousness. This theoretical correspondence is read in the light of the ‘shell shock’ first diagnosed during the First World War, about which Benjamin had previously written in his reflections on Ernst Junger in his 1930 review essay, ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (SW 2, 312–321). The connection of the modern to fascism does not appear solely through the thematic of the false restoration of the aura, but also within the process of its disintegration by shock. (Structurally, the shock of the crowd is ‘like’ shell shock.) Baudelaire is thus not merely the privileged writer for the advent of the theory of the modern, but the one in whose work the nineteenth century appears most clearly as the fore-life of the present. However, if it was through Baudelaire that Benjamin grasped the structure of the temporality of the ‘modern’, it was through Nietzsche and Blanqui that he explored its ambiguous historical meaning, via the way in which their philosophies reflect the transformation of the new by the commodity into the ‘ever selfsame’. “Just as in the seventeenth century it is allegory that becomes the canon of dialectical images, in the nineteenth century it is novelty” (AP, 11):  “The commodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode of apprehension.” (SW 4, 188)  