Benjamin’s theoretical elaboration proceeds by startling imagistic reconfigurations of pre-existing elements within the philosophical tradition. He offers a number of possibilities for thinking such Ideas in the Prologue, taken from the realm not only of philosophy but of aesthetics, theology and science. The first is the Platonic Idea, here divorced from its association with the scientific ascent to some purely rational, objective knowledge (such as appears in the account of dialectic in the Republic) and instead linked to the discussion of beautiful semblance in the Symposium (OGT, 6). The second is that of the Adamic Name, as developed in his earlier theory of language. In this context, he comments that the Early German Romantics were frustrated in their attempt to renew the theory of Ideas because truth took on the character of reflective consciousness for them, rather than that intentionless, linguistic character in which things were subsumed under essential Names by Adam’s primal-interrogation [urvernehmen] (OGT, 15). Naming is the primal history [Urgeschicte] of signifying, indicating a thing-like disinterest which contrasts with the directed, unifying intentionality of Husserlian phenomenology (OGT, 14). The third is the Goethean Ideal, which is recalled here in the context of the Faustian “Mothers” and which implicitly gestures towards his earlier discussions of Goethe (OGT, 11). Finally, and most famously, Benjamin compares the virtual objectivity of the Idea represented through the reconfiguring of actual phenomena to an astrological constellation, which simultaneously groups together and is revealed by the cluster of individual stars (OGT, 11). Truth is said to be “actualized in the round dance of presented Ideas [vergegenwärtigt im Reigen der dargestellen Ideen]” (OGT, 4). This concept of the constellation is taken up directly in Adorno’s inaugural lecture ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, where he speaks of ‘the manipulation of conceptual material by philosophy…of grouping and trial arrangement, of constellation and construction’ (Adorno 1931, 131). It comes to inform Benjamin’s philosophical practice in his major writings from this point onwards, from One-Way Street (1928), via the methodological demand for the construction of history and the attendant theory of the dialectical image in his work related to the “Arcades Project” in the 1930s, through to the concept of history presented in his celebrated late essay, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). 