Benjamin on fate, character, and law

For Benjamin, "fate" signifies what befalls man beyond the commandment of religion (thus as irreligious) when he has submitted himself to the law of the state. This submission entails that man renounces his life as a man and assume the complex relationship to legal determination which only considers him in terms of his bare life, his actions as a legal subject. Thus Benjamin says,

It is not therefore really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable... it is never man but only the life in him that it [fate] strikes.
-"Fate and Character" in Selected Writings, Volume 1

The subject of fate then is actually void. This does not mean he is free in a Sartre-like way, however. The subject of fate is complex and always already guilty or unfree, because he must always assume this voided legal subjectivity and annul his rich and complex bond as a man to the religious. To put it another way, the annulment of man by the assumption of law invests the subject with bonds to comport himself towards law in a legal way--this is why he is complex and not free (in a Sartre-like way) in his being void. When the subject does comport (or submit) himself this way, most notably when the law bears upon him, fate strikes on the subject.
"Character" takes up this void subject of fate and law and "gives this mystical enslavement... the answer of genius." In other words character takes up the void subject and develops him into an irreducible comic (that is, playful, supplemental) signifier. The bond to the religious, beyond the law, is thus restored. But this does not occur by any retrieval of the man that originally held a bond to the religious and not to the law: this man is not a reserve of plenitude outside of the law which can always be reinstated, for instance, through religious worship. Rather, character reinstates a bond to the religious, beyond the law, by creating a new bond to religion as this void subject of the law, as a subject that has transgressed religion: we see how Benjamin thinks dialectically about this. However, this is not a positive dialectic of determinate negation: the point is to arrest and interrupt the development of the legal subjectivity, not conserve it, in the assumption of character (cf. "Derridian dialectic," and "Benjamin, German Idealism, and dialectic" below). All this means that the character is not a plenitude but a void which resists the void: in short, he is a performative subject, "an individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead of by his person on the stage, we would call a scoundrel," because he went beyond the "authentic" and infinitely empty legal subjectivity. Then, as Benjamin says, "complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom."
The relationship to religion also changes: as much as the man before he voided his subjectivity and became mere life under the law, religion is not a plenitude to be returned to by this development of character. Religion too must be void, that is, must be messianic and waited for indefinitely. It is only in this way that it could be present to a subject that has renounced it: one must wait for divine recompense for the transgression that was submitting to the law instead of holding fast to the commandments (this is the meaning of the messianic that we find in the "Critique of Violence" and, modified, in "Theses on the Concept of History").