Such “perilous critical moments” are both immanent to the temporality of modernity, at a structural level (the temporality of crisis), and, in each particular case, contingent and conjuncturally specific. In them, the past is understood “to bring the present into a critical state”. However, this critical state is not a crisis of the status quo, but rather of its destruction: the critical moment is that in which “the status quo threatens to be preserved” (AP, [N10, 2], 474). Dialectical images counter the threat of preservation (tradition) by virtue of the interruptive force they are understood to impart to experience as a consequence of the instantaneous temporality of the now, or what Benjamin famously called now-time [Jetztzeit]: “The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash” (AP, [N9, 7], 473). It is this image of the image as a ‘flash’ [ein aufblitzendes] and the corresponding image of historical experience as the discharge of an explosive force—the explosive force of now-time, blasting open ‘the continuum of history’—for which Benjamin is probably best known. The philosophy of historical time which these images sum up was elaborated by him in two main contexts: the development of a new conception of cultural history and a political diagnosis of the historical crisis of Europe at the outset of the Second World War. 