In his work as a historian, Walter Benjamin set out to make visible the structural affinity between the phenomena of a given period, as variations of the same invariant pattern. To do so, he sought on the surface of each period the privileged phenomenon that expresses in a concentrated form the same law that governs the rest of empirical manifestations. This phenomenon, at the same time a particular case and a key to the totalization of phenomena, is what Benjamin called the “original phenomenon” or simply the “origin” of each period.