What Walter Benjamin uncovers in his theses ‘On the Concept of History’ is the temporal structure of the political affect. Historical time is founded upon political time directed towards happiness. Any theory of history – of historical cognition and of historical action – therefore will have to take this time of the affect as its starting point. The fact that pathemata, affects, passions were already to a large extent discredited within political theory during Benjamin's times must have been attributed by him to the disappearance of their genuine political dimension. Within prevailing historiography the political impulse was replaced by the rational calculation of an abstract cognition of the object. Thus, in order to clarify the force of political affects, it had to be shown that such affects are also decisive for objective cognition. This occurs in Benjamin's second thesis ‘On the Concept of History’. The thesis demonstrates that cognitive acts, determined by the micro-structure of the affective time, are political operations. The cognition at stake here, however, is the cognition of happiness. Happiness never is experienced in a present without this present relating to that which has been (Gewesenes). It is not, however, experienced on a past reality, but on the irrealis of its non-actualised possibility. ‘The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us’ – this is how Benjamin begins his argument, making envy the seal of authenticity in which happiness manifests itself – ‘the kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us is only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us’. The kind of happiness that alone can prove itself – and according to Benjamin's portrayal can only prove itself through envy – is not past happiness, it is the happiness that was possible in the past but was missed. Happiness is the festum post festum amissum. It does not reside in an event that could become the subject of objective cognition, but rather in a possibility, which proves to be a possibility only in the miss and which only by virtue of this miss preserves itself as a possibility for the future.